Yesterday the House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This measure gives the Department of Justice 30 days to release the files the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected when investigating the late sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The vote was 427 to 1, with Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA) casting the only nay vote. After the vote, Epstein survivors in the galleries cheered.
The strong vote in favor came after President Donald J. Trump, who had tried to kill the release of the Epstein files for months, on Sunday night suddenly reversed course. After failing to stop dozens of House Republicans from giving their support to the measure, he said he didn’t care if it passed, starting a stampede of Republicans eager to be on the popular side of the issue.
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) evidently went along with this strategy because he expected Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) to stall the measure with amendments. If it finally passed nonetheless, the House would have to take it up again and could delay it further. After the House passed the bill, Johnson told reporters he would “insist upon” amendments.
But Thune was not inclined to play along. Johnson has been openly doing Trump’s bidding and jamming the Senate to force it to comply, and Thune appears to have had enough. Before the measure went to the Senate, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer asked for unanimous consent to pass the measure when it arrived. The Senate agreed, and thus the bill passed the Senate automatically by a unanimous vote in favor.
On social media, Just Jack posted: “Anytime you’re feeling embarrassed, remember that Clay Higgins woke up this morning to the realization he was the only one in the whole *ss Congress who voted to defend pedophiles.”
Mike Johnson did not take the news of the Senate passage particularly well, telling MS NOW congressional reporter Mychael Schnell: “I am deeply disappointed in this outcome…. It needed amendments. I just spoke to the president about that. We’ll see what happens.” Johnson said both he and the president “have concerns” about the bill.
Trump seemed to sense last night that the jig was up. “I don’t care when the Senate passes the House Bill,” he wrote in the early evening. “Whether tonight, or at some other time in the near future, I just don’t want Republicans to take their eyes off all the Victories that we’ve had….” He went on to record his usual list of exaggerations and fantasy successes, but the message seemed as if he was acknowledging defeat. Tonight, in the midst of another long rant on social media, Trump announced: “I HAVE JUST SIGNED THE BILL TO RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES!”
Meanwhile, those combing through the files from Epstein’s estate released by the House Oversight Committee last week are turning up more disturbing information. Just a week before his arrest in 2019, Epstein wrote to Trump ally Steve Bannon: “Now you can understand why trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”
Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the horrors around Epstein will not be made easier by news reported yesterday by Robert Faturechi and Avi Asher-Schapiro of ProPublica that the Trump White House intervened to make Customs and Border Protection return the electronic devices they seized from accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan when they arrived in Florida earlier this year. The two have been accused of sex trafficking in Romania and the U.K.
Today Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Department of Justice would release the files within 30 days as the law requires, but suggested the administration might try to bottle up the files because, at Trump’s demand, she opened an investigation into the Democrats named in them. She told reporters that she couldn’t comment on that investigation because “it is a pending investigation.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday showed Trump’s job approval rating has fallen another two percentage points since a similar poll in early November. A Marist poll released today shows that registered voters prefer Democrats to Republicans on a generic ballot for the 2026 midterms by an astonishing 14%. In November 2024, voters’ preference was divided evenly: 48% to 48%.
Trump’s hope of rigging the 2026 midterm elections took another hit yesterday when a panel of three federal judges said Texas could not use the new, mid-decade district map Trump demanded to shift five Democratic-dominated districts to Republican domination. In the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, the Supreme Court said that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering, and so the Texas Republicans who redrew the districts insisted their gerrymandering was strictly about partisanship.
But two judges disagreed. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote that “[s]ubstantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.” Texas House minority leader Gene Wu, who led the Democratic lawmakers’ August walkout to prevent the redistricting, said the decision stopped “one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen.”
Texas immediately appealed to the Supreme Court.
This afternoon the third judge, 79-year-old Reagan appointee Jerry Smith, released a scathing dissent, attacking Judge Brown personally and writing that “[t]he main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are [Open Society Foundations founder] George Soros and [Democratic California governor] Gavin Newsom.”
The administration faced not just a loss but embarrassment in the Justice Department’s indictment of former FBI director James Comey. Trump holds a grudge against Comey, who in 2017 refused to drop an investigation into Trump’s then-national security advisor Mike Flynn’s contacts with a Russian operative shortly before Trump took office.
In September of this year, then–U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Maryland Erik Seibert, a career prosecutor, said there was insufficient evidence for an indictment against Comey. Under pressure from Trump, Siebert resigned on September 19. The next day, the president posted on social media a message to Bondi that he apparently intended to be a private message, demanding the Justice Department indict Comey and others. That night, Trump appointed Lindsay Halligan, a White House aide who had no experience as a prosecutor, to replace Seibert; the legality of her appointment is being challenged in court.
Days later, Halligan returned a grand jury indictment against Comey for obstruction of justice and making false statements to Congress. Comey pleaded not guilty, his lawyers arguing that the charges were an act of vindictive prosecution by the president.
As Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, in the process of working through some of the disagreements between the parties before trial in front of Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick, it emerged that the government had ignored rules for gathering evidence and also that Halligan appeared to have misled the grand jury, suggesting the grand jurors could “be assured the government has more evidence, perhaps better evidence,” than it had shown them. Vance called this “staggeringly wrong.” It also appeared that Halligan may have misled the jury by suggesting that Comey had to prove he was not guilty, when the actual requirement in a criminal case is that the government has to prove a defendant’s guilt.
Fitzpatrick also noted irregularities in the grand jury proceedings. As David French explained in the New York Times, Halligan initially tried to get an indictment on three counts, but the jury refused one of the charges. Somehow, Halligan signed two different indictments. The first “indicated that the grand jury failed to find probable cause as to any count,” and the second had two, rather than three, charges.
Today, in a hearing to consider whether Trump was prosecuting Comey vindictively, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Nachmanoff questioned Halligan herself, who admitted she had shown the final Comey indictment not to the whole grand jury but to only two of the grand jurors. Then one of the lawyers working with Halligan told the judge that the prosecutors who had handled the case before Halligan had drafted a memo explaining why they would not prosecute Comey. He noted that someone in the deputy attorney general’s office told him not to admit that information in court.
Comey’s lawyer, Michael Dreeben, is a national expert on criminal law who, in his time at the solicitor general’s office, represented the United States before the Supreme Court more than a hundred times. Dreeben urged the judge to throw out the case and strike a blow at Trump’s use of the criminal justice system to attack his perceived enemies.
Dreeben told the judge: “This has to stop.”
Trump spent this morning calling a group of military veterans in Congress traitors and saying they “should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” Their crime, in Trump’s eyes, was their release Tuesday of a video reminding military and intelligence officers that they must refuse illegal orders.
The video features Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), and Representatives Chris Deluzio (D-PA), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), and Jason Crow (D-CO). Slotkin is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. Kelly was a captain in the U.S. Navy. Deluzio served in the U.S. Navy. Goodlander is a former intelligence officer. Houlahan served in the Air Force. Crow is a former paratrooper and Army Ranger.
Speaking in turns in the video, the lawmakers say: “We want to speak directly to members of the military and the intelligence community who take risks each day to keep Americans safe. We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military, but that trust is at risk. 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. Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders; you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you’re serving in the CIA, the Army, our Navy, the Air Force, your vigilance is critical.”
“Know that we have your back, because now, more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans.
They end with the famous line delivered by Captain James Lawrence, who commanded USS Chesapeake in 1813 when it engaged in a naval battle with HMS Shannon during the War of 1812. In the battle, Lawrence was mortally wounded. As his men carried him below, he ordered:
“Don’t give up the ship.”
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller promptly posted on social media, “Democrat lawmakers are now openly calling for insurrection,” but Trump did not appear to notice the video yesterday when he was entertaining Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, known as MBS, at the White House. But something had called his attention to it by last night—perhaps Crow’s appearance on Martha MacCallum’s Fox News Channel show last night in which his advocacy for the military appeared to throw her off balance.
Trump reposted comments from a Washington Examiner article about the video that called for the lawmakers to be arrested, “thrown out of their offices,” “frog marched out of their homes at 3:00 AM with FOX News cameras filming the whole thing,” and “charged with sedition.” He reposted “Insurrection. TREASON!” and a message from a user who wrote: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”
At 9:08 this morning, Trump posted, “It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand—We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET. President DJT”
At 9:17 he reposted the Washington Examiner article with the note: “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT”
At 10:21 he posted: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
And so an American president called for the arrest and execution of elected lawmakers.
Restating the law is not sedition, and Fox News Channel legal analyst Andy McCarthy promptly wrote: “There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required. That is all.”
Professor of the early American republic Joanne Freeman wrote that she was “[n]ot going to repost DJT’s howling threats against Democratic lawmakers. I’ll just say: 1. We still have free speech here. 2. People can still oppose the president. 3. No—George Washington wouldn’t have hanged the lawmakers because HE WAS VERY CAREFUL TO STAY STRICTLY WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF HIS OFFICE AS PRESIDENT. He didn’t want to be a king or dictator. Plus, he was in his right mind.”
By noon, the White House was doing cleanup. At 1:58, CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe reported from Reuters: “TRUMP DOES NOT WANT TO EXECUTE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS, WHITE HOUSE SAYS,” an astonishing sentence to see coming from the government of the United States of America.
Hours later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to defuse the crisis of the president calling for the execution of members of Congress by claiming the Democratic lawmakers were the ones encouraging violence. When asked about it, Leavitt said, “They are literally saying to 1.3 million active duty service members to defy the chain of command, not to follow lawful orders.” A reporter interrupted: “Actually, they said…illegal orders.” Leavitt claimed, “They’re suggesting…that the president has given illegal orders, which he has not. Every single order that has given [sic] to this United States military by this commander-in-chief and through this chain of command through the secretary of war is lawful.”
In fact, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce of NBC News reported yesterday that the senior judge advocate general, or JAG, at U.S. Southern Command in Miami, the command that oversees the U.S. strikes on the small boats near Venezuela, expressed concern that the 82 deaths from the strikes were extrajudicial killings. If so, they would expose service members participating in the operations to legal repercussions.
According to the reporters, the opinion of a command’s top JAG on the legality of a military operation typically would determine whether the operation went forward. It is possible for higher officials to overrule their findings, but their concerns are typically addressed before the operation begins. In this case, though, the reporters write, officials at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department and other senior government officials overruled him.
This new information adds fuel to the concerns of lawyers and lawmakers of both parties about the legality of the boat strikes just as lawmakers are pushing back on the administration’s refusal to honor the 1973 War Powers Act that requires the president to get Congress’s permission to continue strikes for more than 60 days. That deadline passed on November 2, and now the administration appears to be considering a broader assault on Venezuela.
On Tuesday, November 18, Representatives Gregory Meeks (D-NY), top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Adam Smith (D-WA), top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee; Jim Himes (D-CT), top Democrat of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; Bennie Thompson (D-MS), top Democrat of the House Homeland Security Committee; Jason Crow (D-CO), top Democrat of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations; and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced a War Powers Resolution to stop the administration, as they said, “from continuing to use U.S. Armed Forces to conduct strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, operations the administration has carried out for more than 60 days without congressional authorization.”
In the last week, Trump’s iron grip on congressional Republicans has appeared to be slipping. All but one member of Congress voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and then enough Republicans crossed the aisle to sign a second discharge petition to force a House vote on a bipartisan bill to repeal Trump’s executive order stripping union protections from federal workers. If there is anything but a demand for absolute power behind his insistence that Democrats are traitors, it might be a hope of winning wavering Republicans away from budding bipartisanship and back to his MAGA standard.
Some Trump loyalists did indeed jump to the president’s defense. More stayed silent.
After Trump’s threats, the six lawmakers who made the video—Slotkin, Kelly, Deluzi0, Goodlander, Houlahan, and Crow—issued a statement:
“We are veterans and national security professionals who love this country and swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. No threat, intimidation, or call for violence will deter us from that sacred obligation.
“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty.
“But this isn’t about any one of us. This isn’t about politics. This is about who we are as Americans. Every American must unite and condemn the President’s calls for our murder and political violence. This is a time for moral clarity.
“In these moments, fear is contagious, but so is courage. We will continue to lead and will not be intimidated.
“Don’t Give Up the Ship!”
Quote:Trump spent this morning calling a group of military veterans in Congress traitors and saying they “should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” Their crime, in Trump’s eyes, was their release Tuesday of a video reminding military and intelligence officers that they must refuse illegal orders.
“Don’t Give Up the Ship!”
Considering all this...and the fact that Trump called a reporter "piggy"...I think the charitable thing to do is for someone to explain to Trump what the expression "pot calling the kettle black" means.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Ukrainian people today. The current moment, he said, is “one of the most difficult” for the country. “Ukraine may soon face an extremely difficult choice. Either the loss of dignity or the risk of losing a key partner. Either 28 complicated points or the hardest winter yet—and the risks that follow,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky’s use of the word “dignity” recalled Ukraine’s 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Russian-aligned president Viktor Yanukovych and turned the country toward Europe.
Zelensky was responding to a 28-point “peace” plan President Donald J. Trump is pressuring him to sign before Thanksgiving, November 27. The plan appears to have been leaked to Barak Ravid of Axios by Kirill Dmitriev, a top ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and reports say it was worked out by Dmitriev and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff. Ukrainian representatives and representatives from Europe were not included. Laura Kelly of The Hill reported on Wednesday that Congress was blindsided by the proposal, which Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet of The Hill suggest Russia may be pushing now to take advantage of a corruption scandal roiling Ukraine’s government.
Luke Harding of The Guardian noted that the plan appears to have been translated from Russian, as many of the phrases in the text read naturally in that language but are awkward and clunky in English.
The plan is a Russian wish list. It begins by confirming Ukraine’s sovereignty, a promise Russia gave Ukraine in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons but then broke when it invaded Ukraine in 2014.
The plan gives Crimea and most of the territory in Ukraine’s four eastern oblasts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk to Russia, and it limits the size of the Ukrainian military.
It erases any and all accountability for the Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, including well-documented rape, torture, and murder. It says: “All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.”
It calls for $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to be invested in rebuilding and developing Ukraine. Since the regions that need reconstruction are the ones Russia would be taking, this means that Russian assets would go back to Russia. The deal says that Europe, which was not consulted, will unfreeze Russian assets and itself add another $100 billion to the reconstruction fund. The plan says the U.S. “will receive 50 percent of the profits from this venture,” which appears to mean that Europe will foot the bill for the reconstruction of Ukraine—Russia, if the plan goes through—and the U.S. and Russia will split the proceeds.
The plan asserts that “Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy,” with sanctions lifted and an invitation to rejoin the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of countries with advanced economies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the European Union—that meets every year to discuss global issues. Russia was excluded from the group after it invaded Ukraine in 2014, and Putin has wanted back in.
According to the plan, Russia and “[t]he US will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”
The plan requires Ukraine to amend its constitution to reject membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It says “[a] dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the US, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.”
Not only does this agreement sell out Ukraine and Europe for the benefit of Russia—which attacked Ukraine—it explicitly separates the U.S. from NATO, a long-time goal of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
NATO grew out of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. Months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. They agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.
The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, communism backed by the Soviet Union began to push west into Europe. In 1949, France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a military and economic alliance, the Western Union, to work together, but nations understood that resisting Soviet aggression, preventing the revival of European militarism, and guaranteeing international cooperation would require a transatlantic security agreement.
In 1949 the countries of the Western Union joined with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”
They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”
They did so in the face of Russian aggression.
Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 after Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych, earning economic sanctions and expulsion from what was then the G8. But Crimea wasn’t enough: he wanted Ukraine’s eastern oblasts, the country’s industrial heartland. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the U.S. presidency against Donald Trump in 2016, would never stand for that land grab. But Trump was a different story.
According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in summer 2016, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort discussed with his business partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, “a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, the plan was for Trump to say he wanted peace in Ukraine and for him to appoint Manafort to be a “special representative” to manage the process. With the cooperation of Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian officials, Manafort would help create
“an autonomous republic” in Ukraine’s industrialized eastern region and would work to have Russian-backed Yanukovych, for whom Manafort had worked previously, “elected to head that republic.”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018. Putin has been determined to control that land ever since. And now it appears Russia is pushing Trump to deliver it.
This plan, complete with its suggestion that the U.S. is no longer truly a part of NATO but can broker between NATO and Russia, would replace the post–World War II rules-based international order with a new version of an older order. In the world before NATO and the other international institutions that were created after World War II, powerful countries dominated smaller countries, which had to do as their powerful neighbors demanded in order to survive.
The prominent linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky called it a “most valuable experience” to have maintained “regular contact” with Jeffrey Epstein, who by then had long been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, according to emails released earlier in November this month by US lawmakers.
Such comments from Chomsky, or attributed to him, suggest his association with Epstein – who officials concluded killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges – went deeper than the occasional political and academic discussions the former had previously claimed to have with the latter.
Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages, though the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor has insisted not “one penny” came directly from the infamous financier.
On Tuesday, six Democratic lawmakers, themselves veterans of the U.S. military or intelligence services, released a video telling service members that they would stand behind them as they refused to obey unlawful orders.
On Thursday, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media that the message in the video was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand—We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.” He followed that post with another saying: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He has continued to attack the lawmakers over the past two days.
For the president of the United States of America to call elected lawmakers traitors and demand they be arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for making statements he perceives as threats to his policies is bizarre, outrageous, and anti-American. But it is not unprecedented.
In 1866, President Andrew Johnson accused Republicans of trying to overthrow the government, called congressmen traitors, and called for them to be hanged.
A former tailor from Tennessee, Johnson considered himself the representative of poor white men who he believed had been crushed before the Civil War by the elite southern enslavers who dominated the economy. Johnson opposed their rising oligarchy, but that did not mean he had any interest in protecting the rights—or even the lives—of formerly enslaved Black Americans.
Johnson was a southern Democrat who hated the congressional Republicans who wanted to protect Black rights and rebuild the nation on the basis of free labor. He thought they were expanding the federal government mostly to keep their party in power permanently, while the taxes their new bureaucracy required to protect Black Americans would destroy poor whites by raising taxes.
Elevated to the White House by the death of President Abraham Lincoln, Johnson intended to “restore” the Union much as it had been before the war except for the abolition of enslavement, an abolition he strongly supported because he believed slavery was what had enabled elite southern planters to amass their fortunes. Because Congress had adjourned in March and was not scheduled to reconvene until the following December, Johnson had free rein for eight months to rebuild the nation as he wished.
In summer 1865 he told the governors of the former Confederate states to organize new constitutional conventions and then he required those conventions to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, ending human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for crime, nullify the ordinance of secession, and repudiate the Confederate war debts, essentially defaulting on loans so that future rebels would find it hard to raise money to fund their rebellion.
They did so—more or less—but then went on to pass “Black Codes,” laws that differed from state to state but that generally pushed Black Americans back into subservience to their white neighbors. The codes bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working for white men, prohibited them from owning guns or gathering in groups, demanded submissive behavior, and permitted corporal punishment for those failing to obey the codes.
Black Americans had no right to vote to challenge these laws, and no right to sit on juries or to testify in court. So they were at the mercy of any white man who cheated them or any gang that raped, assaulted, or murdered freedpeople.
When southern states held elections to send representatives to Congress in fall 1865, voters reelected old leaders who had led the South out of the Union in 1861, including Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the former vice president of the Confederacy. In late November 1865, these southern leaders traveled to Washington, D.C., to take their seats in Congress.
On December 4, Johnson greeted the new Congress by congratulating it that Reconstruction was over. While congress members had been out of session, he explained, he had reorganized the former Confederate states. All that was left to do to restore the government was for Congress to seat the South’s representatives. They were already in Washington, D.C., marveling at the changes the war had wrought in what was, just four years before, a sleepy southern town.
Republicans were appalled by Johnson’s “restoration,” recognizing that it delivered Black Americans who had fought for the United States into the hands of those men who had fought to destroy it. Johnson was permitting southerners who had lost the war to win the peace. The Chicago Tribune declared: “The men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog-pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.”
Congress rejected Johnson’s solution to reconstruct the nation. There was no way northern lawmakers were going to rebuild southern society on the old, pre–Civil War blueprint, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states even more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it.
Congress refused to seat the southern delegates. Then, to come up with their own plan for reconstruction, congressmen appointed a committee of thirteen lawmakers as the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. After months of hearings and deliberation, the committee proposed to reconstruct the nation on an entirely new basis. At the end of April 1866, it called for amending the Constitution for the fourteenth time.
They wrote an amendment that began by reiterating the Constitution had provided that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This was an explicit rejection of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that denied Black Americans could be U.S. citizens.
Then it said: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This outlawed the discriminatory laws put in place in southern states under the Black Codes and said the federal government would guarantee that states could not pass legislation that gave some citizens more rights than others.
The new amendment gave Congress the power to “enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provision of this article.”
Congress required southern states to ratify the amendment before being readmitted to the Union.
Johnson hated the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. He hated its broad definition of citizenship; he hated its protection of equal rights within the states; he hated its assertion of the power of the federal government to protect that equality.
So Johnson told southern politicians to ignore Congress’s order to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. He assured them that Democrats would win the 1866 midterm elections and that once back in power, Democrats could repudiate Republican “radicalism” and allow Johnson’s plan for reconstruction of the Union to proceed.
Johnson’s position energized ex-Confederates, who made the summer of 1866 a bloody one. In July, when a Unionist convention in New Orleans called for taking the vote away from former Confederates and giving it to loyal Black Americans, white mobs attacked the building where the convention was in session. The ensuing riots killed thirty-seven Black delegates and three white delegates to the convention.
Rather than condemning the violence in the South, Johnson egged it on. After denouncing Congress as an illegal body—because it had not seated southern representatives— and saying Republican lawmakers were trying to undermine the Constitution, he decided to rally voters to his side before the 1866 midterm elections with a speaking campaign. In August 1866 he set out on a “Swing Around the Circle,” speaking at rallies on a circuit from Washington to New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and back through the Ohio River valley to the capital.
In February, shortly after congressional Republicans had rejected his plan for reconstruction, Johnson had suggested that those Republicans were trying to overthrow the government and were no better than the Confederates. But on September 4, 1866, he went further. In Cleveland, Ohio, facing a crowd heckling him for his stand against Congress, Johnson called those who opposed his plan for reconstruction “traitors” and suggested they should be hanged.
It was a stunning moment. Just a year after the end of the devastating civil war, a president had called for hanging members of Congress because they did not support his policies.
Americans wanted no part of it. Johnson’s extremism and his supporters’ violence created a backlash. Northerners were not willing to hand control of the country to the former Confederates rioting in the South and a president who called for the hanging of congressmen. Rather than rebuking the Republicans in the midterm elections as Johnson had predicted, voters repudiated Johnson. They stood behind the principles in the Fourteenth Amendment and gave Republicans a two-thirds majority of Congress.
Now firmly in control of rebuilding the South, the Republicans worked to make the Fourteenth Amendment a reality. But in every southern state other than Tennessee (where locals so hated their native son Johnson that they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment just to spite him), white men had ignored Congress’s plan for reconstruction.
So, on March 2, 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten unreconstructed southern states into five military districts and, as Johnson’s plan had done, required new constitutional conventions to rewrite the state constitutions. Unlike his plan, though, the new law permitted Black men to vote for delegates to the conventions. It also required the states to guarantee Black male suffrage in their new constitutions and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.
With the Military Reconstruction Act, Republicans asserted that all men, poor and underprivileged as well as rich and educated, should have a say in American government. Leading Republican politician James G. Blaine later reflected that the Military Reconstruction Act was of “transcendent importance and…unprecedented character. It was the most vigorous and determined action ever taken by Congress in time of peace. The effect produced by the measure was far-reaching and radical. It changed the political history of the United States. But it is well to remember that it could never have been accomplished except for the conduct of the Southern leaders.”
On July 9, 1868, the final state ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, making it part of the Constitution of the United States of America.
“Do I understand correctly that there is now a dispute within the administration about whether this ‘peace plan’ was written by Russians or Americans?” foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum asked last night on social media.
Applebaum was referring to confusion over a 28-point plan for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine reported by Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios last week. After the plan was leaked, apparently to Ravid by Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who is under U.S. sanctions, Vice President J.D. Vance came out strongly in support of it.
But as scholar of strategic studies Phillips P. OBrien noted in Phillips’s Newsletter, once it became widely known that the plan was written by the Russians, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to back away from it, posting on social media on Wednesday that “[e]nding a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas. And achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict.”
And yet, by Friday, Trump said he expected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to sign onto the plan by Thanksgiving: next Thursday, November 27. Former senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool. Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests.”
Yesterday a group of senators, foreign affairs specialists gathered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the Halifax International Security Forum, told reporters they had spoken to Rubio about the plan. Senator Angus King (I-ME) said Rubio had told them that the document “was not the administration’s position” but rather “a wish list of the Russians.” Senator Mike Rounds (R-SC) said: “This administration was not responsible for this release in its current form.” He added: “I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” Rounds said. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan.”
But then a spokesperson for the State Department, Tommy Pigott, called the senators’ account of the origins of the plan “blatantly false,” and Rubio abruptly switched course, posting on social media that in fact the U.S. had written the plan.
Anton La Guardia, diplomatic editor at The Economist, posted: “State Department is backpedalling on Rubio’s backpedal. If for a moment you thought the grown-ups were back in charge, think again. We’re still in the circus. ‘Unbelievable,’ mutters one [of the] disbelieving senators.”
Later that day, Erin Banco and Gram Slattery of Reuters reported that the proposal had come out of a meeting in Miami between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Dmitriev, who leads one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds. They reported that senior officials in the State Department and on the National Security Council were not briefed about the plan.
This morning, Bill Kristol of The Bulwark reported rumors that Vice President J.D. Vance was “key to US embrace of Russia plan on Ukraine, Rubio (and even Trump) out of the loop.” He posted that relations between Vance and Rubio are “awful” and that Rubio did, in fact, tell the senators what they said he did.
Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, posted: “Foreign nations now have to deal with rival factions of the U.S. government who keep major policy initiatives secret from each other and some of which work with foreign powers as the succession battle for 2028 begins, is how one diplomat put it.”
The elections of 2026 and 2028 are clearly on Republicans’ minds as polls show Trump’s policies to be increasingly unpopular.
On Friday, Trump met at the White House with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Although Trump had previously called Mamdani a “communist lunatic” and a “stupid person” and had threatened to withhold federal funding from New York City if Mamdani won, the meeting was friendly. Trump, who has seemed warm and affable since snarling “Quiet, Piggy!” to a reporter on Air Force One on November 14, praised the mayor-elect and said he’d “feel very comfortable” living in New York City after Mamdani takes the reins.
Trump’s friendly banter with Mamdani appeared a way to acknowledge voters’ frustration with the economy. During his campaign, Mamdani promised to address those economic frustrations. Trump told reporters: “We agree on a lot more than I thought. I want him to do a great job, and we’ll help him do a great job.” This embrace of a politician MAGA Republicans had attacked as a communist left Trump’s supporters unsure how to respond.
On Friday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced she is resigning from Congress. Her last day will be January 5, 2026, days after she secures her congressional pension. In her four-page announcement, she maintained she was frustrated that those like her, who she said represent “the common American people,” cannot get their measures passed because “the Political Industrial Complex of both Political Parties” ignores them in favor of “[c]orporate and global interests.”
She blamed Trump for forcing her out of Congress, saying: “I have too much self respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms. And in turn, be expected to defend the President against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me.”
Greene appears to be shifting to fit into a post-Trump future. “When the common American people finally realize and understand that the Political Industrial Complex of both parties is ripping this country apart, that not one elected leader like me is able to stop Washington’s machine from gradually destroying our country, and instead the reality is that they, common Americans, The People, possess the real power over Washington,” she wrote, “then I’ll be here by their side to rebuild it.”
Another scandal coming from the Cabinet will not help the administration dig out from its cratering popularity.
Just after midnight Friday night, the former fiancé of the journalist who had a romantic relationship with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped another installment of his version of the saga. It included a graphic pornographic poem that would have ended a cabinet member’s career in any normal administration. The ex-fiancé said other poems he had found were even more explicit.
This revelation came the day after Kennedy acknowledged that he had personally told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change information on the CDC website to say the claim that vaccines do not cause autism is not “evidence-based.” As Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times notes, Kennedy admits that studies have shown no link between vaccines and autism, but he wanted the change because there are still other studies to be done. As Stolberg wrote, “He said he is not saying vaccines cause autism; he is simply saying there is no proof that they don’t.”
Kennedy is neither a doctor nor a scholar of public health, and Stolberg notes that “it is highly unusual for a health secretary to personally order a change to scientific guidance.”
In order to get support for his cabinet nomination, Kennedy promised Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, that he would not remove from the CDC website a statement saying that vaccines do not cause autism. That statement is still at the top of the “Autism and Vaccines” page of the CDC website, but now it has an asterisk keyed to a footnote saying it had not been removed because of Kennedy’s promise to Cassidy, and the text of the page says that “studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
Today, CNN’s Jake Tapper said to Cassidy: “He lied to you.” Cassidy answered: “Well, first let me say, what is most important to the American people, speaking as a physician, vaccines are safe. As has been pointed out, it’s actually not disputed. It’s actually quite well proven that vaccines are not associated with autism. There’s a fringe out there that thinks so, but they’re quite a fringe. President Trump agrees that vaccines are safe.”
Cassidy tried to suggest that focusing on Kennedy’s lie was “titillating” but that Americans needed to move on. Tapper answered: “This isn’t about titillation. This is about the fact that you are the chairman of the health committee and you voted to confirm somebody that by all accounts from the medical and scientific community and his own family…is actually making America less healthy.”
While President Trump certainly has supporters who adore him and feel no need to justify that, he survives — and too often prospers — with the crucial help of voters who basically regard him as the lesser of evils.
They tell themselves something like this: Trump has shortcomings, but those are merely mirrors of the corruption and craziness on the other side. Almost any accusation leveled at him is lodged as easily — and often more righteously — against his opponents. In a government of bad apples, he’s no mealier than the rest.
But those claims insist on a symmetry that doesn’t exist. They’re equivalences not merely false but fantastical. They ignore the severity, the prevalence, the consequences of the misconduct in question. Imagine defending a suitor who’s a serial arsonist because the other guy has a jaywalking citation; both bachelors are lawbreakers, after all. That’s the perverse moral arithmetic of more than a few Trump apologists.
I find two of their rationalizations especially preposterous, starting with this:
Trump is merely using his Justice Department as President Joe Biden used his and persecuting opponents in the fashion that Biden did.
That isn’t some random, cherry-picked absurdity. That’s practically every hour of Fox News. Trump’s supposed mimicry of Biden when it comes to politically motivated investigations and prosecutions is more than an article of faith on the right. It’s the dogma that washes Trump’s authoritarianism clean.
And it’s bunk. I don’t recall evidence that Biden ordered the prosecutors who filed charges against Trump to do so. In contrast, Trump’s commandments that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her unctuous underlings go after James Comey, Letitia James and others are a matter of Truth Social record.
Show me where, during Biden’s presidency, you find anything analogous to Trump’s purge of Justice Department lawyers who have failed or might fail to quench his thirst for vengeance. Anything like the series of events by which Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was pushed out of his job in September after he hadn’t produced the indictments against Comey and James that Trump so fervently desired.
Trump installed, in Siebert’s place, one of his personal lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, who had zero experience as a prosecutor. She raced to indict Comey before the statute of limitations ran out. That heedless sprint entailed an embarrassment of errors and a mockery of jurisprudence that my Times Opinion colleague David French detailed in a flabbergasting newsletter last week. Try to locate Halligan’s doppelgänger in the Biden administration. Best of luck.
Trump’s launderers insist that partisanship, not wrongdoing, motivated the legal cases against him. To accept that magical thinking, you must erase the photographs of classified documents keeping company with a commode at Mar-a-Lago. You must delete the recording of Trump telling Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, to figure out some way to reverse Biden’s victory there in 2020. And you must persuade yourself that Trump’s emphatic proclamations that the 2020 election was being stolen, his haranguing of former Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results and his support of Big Lie conspiracy theorists were just politics as usual. That’s a sequence of moral calisthenics so arduous they burn more calories than an hour at CrossFit.
They’re good training for the other juicy rationalization that most infuriates me: Trump’s grifting merely echoes the graft of his predecessor, who was not only a senator, vice president and then president but also the don of the “Biden crime family,” in the cracked MAGA parlance.
It’s true that several of Biden’s relatives prospered in ways that surely traded on his name; that Hunter Biden was an unmitigated ethical calamity; and that his father at best turned a blind eye to much of that and at worst abetted it. But it’s a lie to say that Trump is simply doing likewise — that the main difference between him and other wealth-greasing, self-dealing politicians is the zeal with which Trump haters scrutinize and vilify him.
No, the main difference is how relentless, boundless and unabashed Trump’s monetization and merchandising of his political station are. In an article in The New Yorker in August, David D. Kirkpatrick estimated that Trump’s businesses, business associates and projects tied to him or his family members had pulled in some $3.4 billion during his time in the White House. But even that dollar figure doesn’t do justice to the crass details and to the ancillary ugliness.
Just a few months after his inauguration in January, Trump proudly announced that he’d hold a black-tie dinner at one of his golf clubs for 220 of the biggest spenders on his $TRUMP memecoin; the fat cats who ended up attending the event spent a combined $148 million on the cryptocurrency. He blithely accepted a $400 million luxury plane from the government of Qatar, which of course tendered the gift out of the goodness of Qatari officials’ hearts. Trump and his kin are all over the Middle East all the time, immersed in high-ticket real-estate projects and not so much ignorant of the conflicts of interest as intent on them. Only chumps let such niceties impede them. Champs realize when they’ve been given the key to a gilded till and hasten to rob it.
Some Trump supporters undoubtedly grasp his greed but deem it a small price to pay for a less porous border, for less punishing regulations, for a stand against progressive excess. Others just aren’t paying attention. We political analysts never adjust sufficiently for the percentage of voters who are so busy, so distracted or so disinterested that they have little idea what politicians are really up to — the good, the bad, the blundering, the plundering.
But then there are the voters who respond to Trump’s antics and outrages — whether those involve executive overreach, defiance of Congress, brazen pardons, suppression of dissent — as familiar transgressions in festive new attire. Hardly. They’re more and worse than that. But cynicism and tribal loyalty have a way of replacing discernment with delusion.
