“For the last couple of months, Senator Rumson has suggested that being president of this country was to a certain extent about character. And although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I’ve been here three years and three days. And I can tell you, without hesitation, being president of this country is entirely about character.”
In 1995 the late Rob Reiner— who, along with his wife Michele Singer Reiner, lost his life yesterday— directed The American President, written by Aaron Sorkin. In the film, President Andrew Shepherd, a widower, is facing a challenge from Republican presidential hopeful Senator Bob Rumson, who attacks Shepherd by focusing on the activist past of the woman he is dating, lawyer and lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade.
The final scene of the film is a speech by the president rejecting the pretended patriotism of his partisan attacker, who is cynically manipulating voters to gain power. It is a meditation on what it means to be the president of the United States.
“For the record, yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” Shepherd says to reporters at a press conference, “but the more important question is, why aren’t you, Bob? Now, this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question, why would a senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman, and a candidate for president choose to reject upholding the Constitution?”
“America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad, ‘cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say: You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as a land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now, show me that. Defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”
“I’ve known Bob Rumson for years, and I’ve been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn’t get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only, making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.
“That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”
“We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people. And if you want to talk about character, Bob, you better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card.… This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your 15 minutes are up.”
a rare condition in which the body itself produces alcohol, leading to drunkenness
While President Donald J. Trump was gloating over the horrific murders of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, the U.S. military yesterday struck three small boats in the eastern Pacific, killing eight people. U.S. Southern Command announced the strikes on social media, saying they were conducted “at the direction of [Secretary of] War Pete Hegseth.” It claimed that intelligence had confirmed that the vessels were “engaged in narco-trafficking.”
This brings the number of people killed in the U.S. strikes to at least 95.
As Piper Hudspeth Blackburn of CNN reports, the administration maintains the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” against drug cartels. But legal experts dismiss this claim and say the U.S. has no legal basis for the deadly attacks on the small boats. Notably, as Bill Kristol of The Bulwark pointed out on December 11, the government has gotten legal justification for its actions when it can: before the U.S. seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela last week, the government apparently secured a warrant for the seizure from a federal judge because the Treasury Department had sanctioned the ship in 2022 for illegal activities related to smuggling Iranian oil.
In the case of the strikes on the small boats, though, the administration has not provided evidence of its claims either to the public or to Congress, whose permission to continue the strikes is required by the 1973 War Powers Act if indeed the country is engaged in an armed conflict.
Today, Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed the House and the Senate on the strikes but continued to refuse to show the lawmakers an unedited version of the video of a strike of September 2 that killed two survivors of a previous strike, an event that legal analysts suggest is a war crime or murder. After he left the briefing, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said “that the administration had no legal justification for these strikes and had no national security justification for these strikes.” He noted that the officers admitted that the drugs going through Venezuela were not fentanyl, as the administration has suggested, but rather primarily cocaine headed for Europe.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) called the briefing “a joke.… There was not a single piece of intelligence that was shared that even rises to the level of any other briefing that we’ve seen on Ukraine, China, anything…. This was not a serious intelligence briefing; this was a communication of an opinion.”
Hegseth later told reporters that members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees will be able to see the unedited video tomorrow, adding: “Of course, we’re not going to release a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public.”
Ashley Murray of News from the States quoted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who said after the meeting: “The administration came to this briefing empty handed. If they can’t be transparent on this, how can you trust their transparency on all the other issues swirling about in the Caribbean? Every senator is entitled to see it.” Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) said: “It is hard to square the widespread, routine, prompt posting of detailed videos of every strike, with a concern that posting a portion of the video of the first strike would violate a variety of classification concerns.”
The Department of Justice today argued in court that Trump’s ballroom project must go forward for reasons of national security despite the lawsuit filed on Friday. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop the project from going forward without legally required reviews and public input. Secret Service deputy director Matthew Quinn told the court that when Trump tore down the East Wing in October, he destroyed the security infrastructure under the building. Now, he said, “any pause in construction, even temporarily, would…hamper the Secret Service’s ability to meet its statutory obligations and protective mission.”
But while Trump focuses on his architectural projects, the administration seems unable to meet other obligations.
Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel is facing criticism for announcing on social media that the FBI had detained a person of interest in Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, that killed two and injured nine others. That individual was released hours later. This is not the first time Patel has rushed to make an announcement that later turned out to be incorrect.
When asked why the FBI is having trouble locating the suspect, Trump tried to blame the university. “You’d really have to ask the school a little bit more about that because this was a school problem,” he said. “They had their own guards. They had their own police. They had their own everything, but you’d have to ask that question really to the school, not to the FBI. We came in after the fact, and the FBI will do a good job, but they came in after the fact.”
An interview with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles published in Vanity Fair today reinforces the impression that the administration is chaotic. In eleven interviews with Wiles over the course of Trump’s second term so far, journalist Chris Whipple examined the administration’s handling of major issues: the destruction of USAID, deportations of immigrants, Trump’s tariff war, the deployment of National Guard troops in Democratic-dominated cities, Trump’s “revenge” against those he perceives as enemies, the destruction of Gaza, and the administration’s attack on small boats from Venezuela.
Wiles told Whipple that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” suggesting he cannot imagine limits on his behavior, and quoted him as judging people “by their genes”; that Vice President J.D. Vance converted from being a Never Trumper to a major MAGA booster for political reasons; that director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, is “a right-wing absolute zealot”; that Musk’s reposting of a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao was a reflection of his drug use; and that Trump is, indeed, embarked on a project to use the power of the government to hurt people he hates.
After the article appeared, Wiles issued a statement that did not say Whipple had misquoted her, but called the article “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.” She continued: “Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
Apparently to demonstrate unanimity, the White House got senior officials to put out on social media statements supporting Wiles.
One of the things Wiles discussed with Whipple was the administration’s strikes against the small boats from Venezuela. Wiles suggested that, for all his talk about drug dealers, Trump is primarily interested in regime change. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles told Whipple. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
This afternoon, Trump announced he would address the nation tomorrow night.
Then, at 6:46 this evening, he posted on social media: “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) noted that the “threatened military action directly contradicts what Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth told my Senate colleagues and I today about the mission and goals of their operations in the Caribbean. This is a dangerous escalation, and this administration must come before Congress for public hearings and explain to the American people why they are risking pulling us into another forever war.”
Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.
Markets will not be moved, or brigades redeployed, or history shifted, because Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death on Sunday in their home in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son Nick.
But this is an appalling human tragedy and a terrible national loss. Reiner’s movies, including “Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally…,” are landmarks in the inner lives of millions of people; I can still quote by heart dialogue and song lyrics from his 1984 classic, “This Is Spinal Tap.” Until last week, he and Michele remained creative forces as well as one of Hollywood’s great real-life love stories. Their liberal politics, though mostly not my own, were honorable and sincere.
To which our ogre in chief had this to say on social media:
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
I quote Trump’s post in full not only because it must be read to be believed, but also because it captures the combination of preposterous grandiosity, obsessive self-regard and gratuitous spite that “deranged” the Reiners and so many other Americans trying to hold on to a sense of national decency. Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds.
That is where history will record that the deepest damage by the Trump presidency was done. There is, as Adam Smith said, “a great deal of ruin in a nation,” by which he meant that there are things in almost any country that are going badly wrong but can still be mended. Foolishly imposed tariffs can be repealed. Hastily cut funding can be restored. Ill-thought-out national security strategies can be rewritten. Shaken trust can be rebuilt between Washington and our allies.
But the damage that cuts deepest is never financial, legal or institutional. As one of Smith’s greatest contemporaries, Edmund Burke, knew, it lies in something softer and less tangible but also more important: manners. “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us,” Burke wrote. It is, he warned, through manners that laws are either made or unmade, upheld or corrupted.
Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires paying him court (in the literal senses of both “pay” and “court”); in every visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized.
I wonder if we are ever getting them back — and if so, what will it take. As Trump was unloading on Reiner, James Woods, probably the most outspoken Trump supporter in Hollywood, lovingly remembered Reiner as a “godsend in my life” who saved his acting career when it was at a low point 30 years ago.
“I think Rob Reiner is a great patriot,” Woods said Monday on Fox News. “Do I agree with some of, or many of, his ideas on how that patriotism should be enacted, to celebrate the America that we both love? No. But he doesn’t agree with me either, but he also respects my patriotism.” Woods is right, but how that spirit of mutual respect and good faith can be revived under a man like Trump is a question he and the rest of the president’s supporters might helpfully ask of themselves.
The Reiner murders took place on the same weekend that an assailant, still at large, murdered two students at Brown University, and when an antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, gave every Jew in America a pit-of-our-stomachs sense that something like it may soon happen here again, as it did in Pittsburgh seven years ago. It’s been only three months since Charlie Kirk was shot in cold blood in Utah, and barely a year since the health care executive Brian Thompson was murdered in Manhattan by an alleged assailant who is now a folk hero to the deranged reaches of the left.
This is not a country on the cusp of its “Golden Age,” to quote the president, except in the sense that gold futures are near a record high as a hedge against inflation. It’s a country that feels like a train coming off the rails, led by a driver whose own derangement was again laid bare in that contemptible assault on the Reiners, may their memories be for a blessing.
Happy Hanukkah, I guess.
This morning, four vulnerable Republicans signed onto the discharge petition all House Democrats have signed to force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring a bill to extend the premium tax credits for purchasing healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) markets to the floor for a vote. The proposal extends the credits for three years.
Republicans who recognize that the American people overwhelmingly want the extensions have been fighting their colleagues who want to get rid of the ACA and slash government spending in general. Instead of extending the credits, House leadership is proposing a package of policies popular among their conference; the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that it will drop about 100,000 people a year off health insurance through 2035 but will save the government $35.6 billion.
Without the extension of the premium tax credits, which Republicans permitted to lapse at the end of the year when they passed their July budget reconciliation bill that they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the 24 million Americans who buy insurance on the ACA marketplace will see their insurance premiums skyrocket, and millions will lose their health insurance altogether. And yet, Republicans oppose the extensions, which will cost the government about $350 billion over the next ten years. The Republicans’ extension of the 2017 tax cuts in that same bill will cost about $4 trillion over the same period.
Yesterday, Johnson dismissed the members of his conference who wanted to vote on the extension, saying that “many of them did want a vote on this Obamacare covid-era subsidy the Democrats created. We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve, and it just was not to be.” Representative Mike Lawler (R-NY) told reporters: “This is absolute bullsh*t.”
When the Republican-controlled House Rules Committee struck down all the Republican attempts to amend the Republican bill by extending the tax credits, four Republicans signed the Democrats’ discharge petition. The four Republicans who signed are Lawler and Brian Fitzpatrick, Rob Bresnahan, and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania. David G. Valadao of California told Marianna Sotomayor, Kadia Goba, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post that he would have signed, too.
This evening, the House passed the Republican healthcare measure, which is expected to die in the Senate. The House will vote on extending the premium tax credits in January.
Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported today on a court filing by lawyers for the government that claims it is legal for the administration to distribute federal money only to Republican-dominated states, withholding it from Democratic-dominated states. The government admitted that it withheld grants from the Department of Energy according to “whether a grantee’s address was located in a State that tends to elect and/or has recently elected Democratic candidates in state and national elections (so-called ‘Blue States’).” Without evidence, the government claimed that such discrimination “is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”
Kornfield and Natanson note that this is a “remarkably candid admission” that “echoes…Trump’s frequent vows to punish cities and states that he sees as his enemies, from withholding disaster relief for Southern California to targeting blue cities with National Guard troops.”
Joey Garrison of USA Today reported yesterday that a senior White House official told him the Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Since 1960, NCAR scientists have studied Earth’s atmosphere, meteorology, climate science, the Sun, and the impacts of weather and climate on the environment and society. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote that “[d]ismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.”
Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought told Garrison that the center is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and that the government will break it up, moving what he called “any vital activities such as weather research” to “another entity or location.” Earlier that day, Garrison notes, the administration cancelled $109 million in grants to Colorado.
Colorado governor Jared Polis said he had not heard the news about NCAR but that “if true, public safety is at risk and science is being attacked. Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families. If these cuts move forward, we will lose our competitive advantage against foreign powers and adversaries in the pursuit of scientific discovery.”
Trump has repeatedly attacked Polis, a Democrat, since his refusal to pardon former Colorado election official Tina Peters, convicted by a jury for state crimes in facilitating a data breach in her quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Peters is serving a nine-year prison sentence. On December 11, Trump granted Peters a “full pardon,” but since presidents cannot issue pardons for state crimes, that means little unless Polis also pardons her.
Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket reported yesterday on escalating calls for violence to free Peters coming from prominent right-wing figures. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted after the threat to close NCAR that he was “[h]earing this is payback for Colorado not honoring Trump/Peters ‘pardon.’”
Former special counsel Jack Smith testified today behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. According to Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News, who obtained portions of Smith’s opening statement, Smith told the committee that he and his team found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump engaged in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed Smith earlier this month, rejecting Smith’s offer to testify in public. Jordan was among those claiming to be outraged at the news that Smith had obtained the call records of nine congressional Republicans related to the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election. Those records listed who was called and the time, date, and length of the call, without information about the content of it.
In 2022 the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed that Trump and Jordan had a ten-minute phone call on the morning of January 6. That afternoon, Jordan objected to the counting of the votes that would certify Democrat Joe Biden as president. Jordan refused to cooperate with the committee when it asked for more information.
Smith told the committee that the phone records “were lawfully subpoenaed and were relevant to complete a comprehensive” investigation. He continued: “January 6 was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 100 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police officers that day. Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election.”
“I didn’t choose those Members,” Smith said, “President Trump did.”
Republicans were hoping to undermine Smith and to portray him as part of a Department of Justice weaponized under the Biden administration. “Jack Smith should be in jail—if not prison,” Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney of Politico. “He’s a crook. Jack Smith is a crook, and he needs to be held accountable for all his games that he played.”
After Smith testified, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Jordan “made an excellent decision in not allowing Jack Smith to testify publicly, because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities of January 6.”
Today, news broke that Trump has added plaques to the hall of portraits of former presidents hanging in the White House. A plaque under the photo of President Barack Obama says he “was one of the most divisive political figures in American History,” who “passed the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act.”
Under a photograph of an autopen, with which Trump replaced the portrait of Biden, the plaque begins: “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History. Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States, Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction….”
The Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, admitted at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that there had been a political “sea change” and he no longer viewed the FCC as an independent agency. Commissioners, he says, serve at the pleasure of the president.
In his case, that president is Donald Trump, whose face Carr wears as a lapel pin, whose agenda he loudly embraces, and who often publicly demands that Carr censor his critics, including revoking their broadcast licenses.
Soon after Carr’s about-face, the agency quietly scrubbed references to its independence from its website.
Perhaps Carr believes in the unitary executive theory, under which agency heads essentially function like cabinet members. That’s fine. We’re not here to argue with him about administrative law. But he can’t have it both ways. You’re either an umpire calling balls and strikes or a political hack – you can’t be both.
If Carr believes the FCC is subservient to the president, then he is the last person who should be claiming the power to regulate journalists’ editorial decisions under the FCC’s “public interest” standard. By his own admission, he has every incentive to define the “public interest” in whatever manner pleases his boss.
The evidence bears this out. Data from Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Press Freedom Tracker shows that every single investigation or social media tirade Carr has launched against licensees’ speech – be it 60 Minutes’ editing of its Kamala Harris interview, Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks about Charlie Kirk’s death, or Comcast’s accurate reporting that contradicted Trump’s lies about the Kilmar Abrego García’s immigration case – has involved content that upset Trump.
The Republican senator and Trump ally Ted Cruz sees the problem. At the hearing, the Senate commerce chair called for the repeal of the public interest standard and its “wretched offspring” like the news distortion rule. It’s not because he’s a Kimmel fan, but because he recognizes that if the FCC successfully weaponizes these rules as amorphous censorship powers, there is no turning back, no matter who is in office.
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At least 20 people who have received clemency from Trump so far this year — cutting their sentence short, restoring their civil rights after imprisonment or allowing them to avoid prison altogether — were also forgiven of financial penalties totaling tens of millions of dollars. Some of these offenders owed money to real-life victims of fraud. Marian Morgan, for example, was sentenced in 2013 to nearly 34 years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme and was ordered to pay $17.5 million to dozens of investors, most of which remains unpaid. In 2021, she filed a statement in court saying, “I want to pay restitution to my victims so they know I am truly sorry for the damage I caused.” But in May, Trump commuted her sentence “to time served with no further fines, restitution, probation or other conditions.”
In other cases where Trump granted clemency, the federal government was the main victim. Paul Walczak, a health care executive and convicted tax cheat, was sentenced in April to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay over $4 million to the Internal Revenue Service. Walczak had pleaded guilty to tax crimes and agreed to pay restitution to the IRS, according to court filings. His pardon came through just 12 days after his sentencing, relieving him of his financial obligations and sparing him from going to prison.
“I don’t think that people are fully appreciating the way these pardons are working or whether they are paying attention to the financial interests of crime victims,” said Elizabeth Oyer, who served as U.S. pardon attorney for three years until she was fired two months into Trump’s second term. “It’s having a detrimental effect on victims and taxpayers, and it’s a windfall to the people who committed crimes.”
This past week feels like the final, chaotic days of a political era.
Last weekend was marred by horrific incidents of violence that drew attention even in a nation sadly accustomed to violence: a mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday that killed two people and wounded nine more; a mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, during a Hanukkah celebration that killed 15 people and wounded 40 others; and then on Sunday the news that beloved filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their home from knife wounds.
The Reiners’ deaths were immediately associated with a family member who struggles with addiction and mental health issues, but on Monday morning, President Donald Trump greeted the news with a social media post suggesting that their deaths were a result of Reiner’s political opposition to Trump.
The backlash to Trump’s statement was immediate and bipartisan, but Trump rejected calls to delete the post. Instead, before reporters, he doubled down on his criticism of the filmmaker who gave us This is Spinal Tap, A Few Good Men, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and so on, and who portrayed Michael “Meathead” Stivic on All in the Family during its nine-year run from 1971 to 1979.
On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published two articles based on eleven interviews journalist Chris Whipple conducted with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, revealing key members of the administration as a dysfunctional group of radical zealots making decisions haphazardly without any sense of public duty. The world Whipple portrayed looked so chaotic that Wiles promptly claimed she had been misrepresented, only to have Whipple note that everything he had quoted was on tape. The White House then appeared to pressure key members of the administration to reinforce the idea they were unified by posting on social media statements supporting Wiles.
On Wednesday, four Republicans in the House of Representatives joined all of the Democrats to force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to hold a vote on extending the premium tax credits for purchasing healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act markets. Their willingness to force a vote on yet another issue Johnson was trying to avoid—the others were the Epstein Files Transparency Act and a measure to restore union rights to government employees—indicated both that Johnson’s power is shaky and that Republican lawmakers are feeling the heat over public concerns about the economy.
Also on Wednesday, former special counsel Jack Smith testified before the House Judiciary Committee, telling it that he and his team found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump engaged in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Smith had asked to testify in public, an offer Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) rejected. A New York Times article by Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim, recounting a phone call Trump made in late 2020 pressing David Ralston, then speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, to hold a special session to overturn Trump’s loss in the election, reinforced Smith’s testimony.
Then, Wednesday night, Trump spoke to the nation in what was supposed to be a speech about the economy as Americans are giving him poor marks on his handling of it. The speech was shorter than his usual, coming in at just under twenty minutes. Trump shouted his way through a rushed speech so full of lies that economist Paul Krugman said he couldn’t “find a single factual assertion Trump made that was true.” What Tom Nichols of The Atlantic saw was “an unnerving display of fear.”
As Nichols wrote, “Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job.” But there was more to it than just an indication of the president’s weakening poll numbers or declining mental acuity. It seemed to mark an end for the Reagan Revolution whose ideology Trump has pushed to its brutish conclusion.
When Trump yelled that he had “inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” and slammed “Radical Left Democrats,” Somali Americans, immigrants, and transgender Americans while claiming he “fights for the law-abiding, hardworking people of our country…who make this nation run, who make this nation work,” he was amping Republican rhetoric since the 1980s into caricature.
In the 1980s, Republicans told Americans that the modern government that had regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, protected civil rights, and stabilized the international order since World War II was “socialism.” Undeserving Americans like President Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens,” who were coded to be Black Americans from inner cities, or talk radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh’s “feminazis”—women who demanded equal rights—were cheating the system to take tax money from hardworking white taxpayers.
Cutting business regulations and taxes would usher in extraordinary economic growth that would boost the prosperity of hardworking Americans, they insisted, leaving behind those unwilling to work.
Except it didn’t. A February 2025 report from RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, written by Carter C. Price found that if the system in place before 1975 had stayed in place, the bottom 90% of Americans would have had almost $80 trillion more in 2023 than they did. When Democratic president Joe Biden took office in 2021, he set out to restore the economic system in place before 1981, protecting workers, boosting infrastructure investment, breaking up monopolies, and protecting consumers.
It worked. Far from being the economic “disaster” Trump claimed, the economy he inherited was, according to The Economist, “the envy of the world.” “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust,” Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr wrote. If Trump had left that system in place, he would have gotten credit for a booming economy as the investments made under Biden took hold.
Instead, he undermined that government with dramatic layoffs and undermined that economy with tariffs, continued deregulation, and additional tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while cutting the tax credits that supported the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance markets. On Wednesday, he was reduced to promising payments of $1776 to military personnel, implying that money would come from tariffs. But fact checkers noted immediately that any such payments would come from money Congress appropriated to subsidize housing allowances for service members.
Trump’s false claims that Biden had left the U.S. to be “invaded by an army of 25 million people, many who came from prisons and jails, mental institutions and insane asylums,” and that under Biden we had “transgender for everybody, [and] crime at record levels” exaggerated the rhetoric of “welfare queens” into open dehumanization.
Trump also echoed longstanding Republican claims that Democrats can win elections only by offering handouts to their voters or by cheating through voter fraud committed by undocumented immigrants, a charge that never had a shred of evidence. Trump took to its logical conclusion the idea that only Republicans could legitimately win elections on January 6, 2021, when his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the legitimate results of a presidential election.
Trump ’s panicked shouting at the American people seemed to recognize that Americans have turned against not just his economic policies, but also the ideology that underpinned them.
As it has lost the support of the people, the administration appears to be acting without regard to the law. On Thursday, Ellen Nakashima, Alex Horton, and Dan Lamothe reported in the Washington Post that the administration’s attacks on small boats coming from Venezuela were a redirection of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s determination to strike cartels in Mexico. Miller wanted to strike in Mexico to give the administration a quick win by stopping immigrants from coming across the border. But when the Mexican government slowed the activities of the cartels, the administration turned to attacking the boats from Venezuela.
“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” a government official told the Washington Post journalists. The official said Miller was behind the directive Trump signed in July authorizing lethal force against two dozen foreign criminal groups the administration called “designated terrorist organizations.” That directive accused those organizations of deliberately killing Americans with drugs, making them enemy combatants, a construction legal analysts say has no basis in the law.
Miller’s goals dovetailed with those of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who wants to force Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, eager to demonstrate his competence after revealing classified information on a Signal chat, also got on board.
Now the administration’s goal is apparently Venezuela’s oil. On Wednesday, Miller posted on social media: “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.” Last week, Trump told reporters: “We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water. And now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening.”
Also on Thursday, the administration reported that the “highly respected” board of the Kennedy Center, for the most part hand-picked by Trump, had voted “unanimously” to rename the performing arts center the “Trump-Kennedy Center” “because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.” Immediately, board member Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH) said there was nothing “unanimous” about it: she had been muted on the call and prevented from voting. Others noted that this name change is illegal: it is Congress that established the name of the Kennedy Center, and Congress must approve any name change.
On Friday, workers added Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center. Cable news host Chris Hayes noted that anyone removing the new letters could be arrested and charged with a crime, although that act “would be no more unlawful than what they’re doing right now.”
Meanwhile, House speaker Johnson sent congressional representatives home for the holidays, presumably to quiet the fights over extending the premium tax credits and to make sure his members weren’t there to comment about the release of the Epstein files, required by law on Friday.
On Friday—today—former special counsel Jack Smith asked the House Judiciary Committee to release his testimony about Trump’s participation in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election to the public. He says the American people should hear the facts of the criminal cases against Trump.
Today was also the deadline by which Congress, through the Epstein Files Transparency Act, required the administration to release all of the files compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a searchable format. Lawmakers forced that bill through the House thanks to a discharge petition, and then the Senate passed it overwhelmingly.
But the Department of Justice did not meet the requirements of the law. It announced midday it would release only some of the files. And then, when it did release some of them, they were so heavily redacted they clearly thwarted the intention of the law. Nashville, Tennessee, investigative reporter Phil Williams noted that the files were redacted in such a way that they would hide Trump and highlight Democrats: a search of the word “Clinton” delivered 109 hits while a search of the word “Trump” produced only two. This, despite a recent New York Times article about how they were best friends who bonded over their pursuit of women.
News outlets reported that the Department of Justice had redacted not just the names and identifying information of victims, but also of “politically exposed individuals and government officials.” The Epstein grand jury documents are simply 119 blacked-out pages. Republican representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, said the document release “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”
The second Trump administration has exposed the lie of Reaganomics, as well as the rot at the heart of an administration dedicated to the idea that some people are better than others. It has also shown the ridiculous cultlike behavior of those who adhere to that idea.
Former senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), who as the 2012 Republican presidential nominee talked to supporters about “makers” and “takers” in an embrace of the economic ideology of the Reagan years, published an op-ed in the New York Times today that appeared to acknowledge the political ideology of the past forty-five years has failed. He called for addressing the economic inequalities in the United States by placing higher taxes on the rich, people like him.
In a sign of which way the wind is blowing, Republican senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming announced today she would not run for reelection in 2026. So did Elise Stefanik (R-NY), elected to office as a moderate who then switched her allegiance to Trump to rise briefly to Republican leadership in the House. She is abandoning not just her run to become New York governor, but also any attempt at reelection to the House of Representatives.
This evening, the U.S. launched a massive attack on more than 70 suspected Islamic State targets in central Syria, in retaliation for the deaths of two U.S. Army soldiers and an interpreter last Saturday. “This is not the beginning of a war—it is a declaration of vengeance,” Defense Secretary Hegseth posted on social media. “The United States of America, under President Trump’s leadership, will never hesitate and never relent to defend our people. Today, we hunted and we killed our enemies. Lots of them. And we will continue.”
