The Bad News and the Good News
Wise Words from Heather Cox Richardson
Dr. Richardson is a prominent historian and professor at Boston College.
I think the whole video is worth watching, even if you are generally aware of what’s going on in this country. Some of the relevant points:
First Minute: HCR puts some of Trump’s outrageousness in historical context, in light of a Republican intellectual triumphalism—“We’re right and, guess what, you’re wrong!” We saw a lot of that beginning with Reagan’s election. I remember it well.
Third Minute: She doesn’t use the phrase, but others rightly call it “herrenvolk democracy”: any Democratic victory is inherently illegitimate.
Sixth Minute: A concerted effort to destroy rules-based order.
Eighth Minute: He thinks only people like himself should be in power.
Ninth Minute: He’s no compos mentis. It appears they’re giving him psychiatric drugs. It’s a behind-the-scenes effort to control him.
Eleventh Minute: No, J.D. Vance would not be worse.
Twelfth Minute: It’s extremely difficult to tell what’s happening in this Administration.
Fourteenth Minute: What appears to have just happened in Venezuela.
End of Seventeenth Minute: A work of genius by the Venezuelan regime and its allies.
As historians know, invasion of your country greatly helps to unify your people.
Nineteenth Minute: Trump’s oil fantasy.
Twenty-first Minute: Shrinkage from a global power to a regional power. Jettisoning the benefits of the rules-based international order.
Twenty-third Minute: Greenland.
Twenty-fourth Minute: A fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of American power.
Twenty-sixth Minute: Russia gets Ukraine, we get Venezuela. Sort of like the eve of World War I, but this time with nuclear weapons.
Twenty-seventh Minute: Oil is the technology of the past. The future lies in semi-conductors. We’re giving Xi permission to take over Taiwan—which makes 60% of the world’s semi-conductors. And Trump doesn’t understand this.
Twenty-eighth Minute: Destruction of the rules-based international order. A demented president, no longer operating in reality. Magical thinking is a hallmark of this moment.
Twenty-ninth Minute: Don’t follow grandpa down this road. Time to speak up.
Facing the New Year. Facing MAGA. David Brooks is Good. Michelle Goldberg is Better.
Michelle Goldberg (N.Y. Times), Trump Is Getting Weaker, and the Resistance Is Getting Stronger:
It has been a gruesome year for those who see Donald Trump’s kakistocracy clearly. He returned to office newly emboldened, surrounded by obsequious tech barons, seemingly in command of not just the country but also the zeitgeist. Since then, it’s been a parade of nightmares — armed men in balaclavas on the streets, migrants sent to a torture prison in El Salvador, corruption on a scale undreamed of by even the gaudiest third-world dictators and the shocking capitulation by many leaders in business, law, media and academia. Trying to wrap one’s mind around the scale of civic destruction wrought in just 11 months stretches the limits of the imagination, like conceptualizing light-years or black holes.
And yet, as 2025 limps toward its end, there are reasons to be hopeful.
That’s because of millions of people throughout the country who have refused to surrender to this administration’s bullying. When Trump began his second term, conventional wisdom held that the resistance was moribund. If that was ever true, it’s certainly not anymore. This year has seen some of the largest street protests in American history. Amanda Litman, a founder of Run for Something, a group that trains young progressives to seek local office, told me that since the 2024 election, it has seen more sign-ups than in all of Trump’s first four years. Just this month, the Republican-dominated legislature in Indiana, urged on by voters, rebelled against MAGA efforts to intimidate them and refused to redraw their congressional maps to eliminate Democratic-leaning districts.
While Trump “has been able to do extraordinary damage that will have generational effects, he has not successfully consolidated power,” said Leah Greenberg, a founder of the resistance group Indivisible. “That has been staved off, and it has been staved off not, frankly, due to the efforts of pretty much anyone in elite institutions or political leadership but due to the efforts of regular people declining to go along with fascism.”
In retrospect, it’s possible to see several pivot points. One of the first was a Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April. Elon Musk, then still running rampant at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, declared the contest critical and poured more than $20 million into the race. Voters turned out in droves, and the Musk-backed conservative candidate lost by more than 10 points. Humiliated, Musk began to withdraw from electoral politics, at one point breaking with Trump. The tight bond between the world’s richest man and the most powerful one was eroded.
In June, Trump’s military parade, meant as a display of dominance, was a flop, and simultaneous No Kings protests all over the country were huge and energetic. A few months later, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a tragedy that the administration sought to exploit to silence its opponents. When the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a distasteful comment on ABC that seemed to blame the right for Kirk’s killing, Disney, the network’s parent company, gave in to pressure to take Kimmel off the air. It was a perilous moment for free speech; suddenly America was becoming the kind of country in which regime critics are forced off television. But then came a wave of cancellations of Disney+ and the Disney-owned Hulu service, as well as a celebrity boycott, and Disney gave Kimmel his show back.
Trump has thoroughly corrupted the Justice Department, but its selective prosecutions of his foes have been thwarted by judges and, more strikingly, by grand juries. Two grand juries refused to indict Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, whom the administration has accused of mortgage fraud, with no credible evidence. After Sean Dunn, a Justice Department paralegal, tossed a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer during a protest in Washington, the administration sent a team of agents in riot gear to arrest him. But grand jurors refused to indict him on a felony charge. Dunn was eventually charged with a misdemeanor, only to be acquitted by a jury. Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News personality whom Trump made U.S. attorney in Washington, tried three times to secure a federal indictment for assault against a protester who struggled while being pushed against a wall by an immigration agent. Three times, grand juries refused.
Granted, all these grand juries were in liberal jurisdictions, but their rejections of prosecutors’ claims are still striking, since indictments are usually notoriously easy to secure. “I think you’re seeing reinvigorated grand jury processes,” said Ian Bassin, a founder of the legal and advocacy group Protect Democracy. “Nobody actually knows what’s going on in those grand juries, but the outcome of them seems to suggest that people are actually holding the government’s feet to the fire and being unwilling to simply be a rubber stamp.”
Trump ends the year weak and unpopular, his coalition dispirited and riven by infighting. Democrats dominated in the November elections. During Joe Biden’s administration, far-right victories in school board races were an early indication of the cultural backlash that would carry Trump to office. Now, however, Democrats are flipping school board seats nationwide.
Much of the credit for the reinvigoration of the resistance belongs to Trump himself. Had he focused his deportation campaign on criminals or refrained from injuring the economy with haphazard tariffs while mocking concerns about affordability, he would probably have remained a more formidable figure. He’s still a supremely dangerous one, especially as he comes to feel increasingly cornered and aggrieved. After all, by the time you read this, we could well be at war with Venezuela, though no one in the administration has bothered to articulate a plausible rationale for the escalating conflict.
But it’s become, over the past year, easier to imagine the moment when his mystique finally evaporates, when few want to defend him anymore or admit that they ever did. “I think it’s going to be a rocky period, but I no longer think that Trump is going to pull an Orban and fundamentally consolidate authoritarian control of this country the way that it looked like he was going to do in March or April,” said Bassin, referring to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. If Bassin is right, it will be because a critical mass of Americans refused to be either cowed or complicit.
Rep. Crow Explains the Difference between Committing Treason and Starting a Conversation
And Amna Nawaz Asks Some Good Questions
Illegal Orders and the Nuremberg Defense—Wargaming it out, So to Speak
The Democratic officials who put out the video on illegal orders were clearly implying that
- Trump had already issued illegal orders or that he was about to issue illegal orders or that there was a clear risk that he would issue illegal orders, and that
- anyone in the military or intelligence services who obeyed such illegal orders could suffer the same fate as the German officials who, famously and unsuccessfully, relied on the “Nuremberg defense”—“I was only following orders.”
But the officials did not explicitly say what orders they considered illegal—obviously a conscious and considered omission.
One could plausibly argue that this omission was cowardly. More to the point, one could plausibly argue that the failure to specify exactly what illegal orders they were talking about could create confusion in the minds of military personnel. Indeed, some have made plausible arguments along these lines, and the controversy will continue to grow.
However, our President, Mango Mussolini
- lacks the mental capacity to construct a plausible argument,
- would not recognize the Nuremberg defense if it bit him in the ass,
- has no sense at all of the difference between a strong legal position and a weak legal position—he just thinks all legal argument is bullshit, and the winner is the guy who shouts his bullshit the loudest, and
- literally does not know right from wrong.
Afflicted by these mental lacunae, Mango Mussolini cannont begin to devise a workable plan to make the Democratic officials pay for their failure to identify the illegal orders of which they spoke. Instead, he can only bluster and threaten—in this case, threaten to order his minions (1) to arrest the Democratic officials for the crime of referring to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and then (2) to procure their execution following trial in the federal criminal justice system.
But Here’s the Thing About Threats
First of all, pretty much everyone who plays in the arena of politics or business knows that it’s a bad idea to take the hostage if you are not prepared to kill the hostage. That’s because your extreme threat, followed by supine inaction, makes you look like a blustering fool.
And, by the way, the reason why you look like a blustering fool is that you are in fact a blustering fool.
On the other hand, what if the Justice Department does arrest Senator Slotkin, get Lindsey Halligan to indict her for treason, and put her on trial in a United States district court? Well, guess what? It isn’t illegal, let alone treasonous, for someone to make a general reference to a provision of law—here, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Title 10 of the United States Code, Section 892, and the related case law.
Conclusion? Either course of action—blustering followed by inaction, or blustering followed by a ridiculous prosecution in federal court—leads inexorably to failure by Trump.
The logical next step would be for Trump to tell the Proud Boys to get our their guns and go after Senator Slotkin and the rest of the crew.
Hang ‘Em High!
President Donald Trump accused a group of Democratic lawmakers on Thursday of “seditious behavior” and called for their arrest for appearing in a video in which they reminded members of the U.S. military and intelligence community that they are obligated to refuse illegal orders.
“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand.”
The video released Tuesday features a group of six Democrats who served in the military and intelligence community. Addressing active service members, they caution active-duty military members that “threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.”
“Our laws are clear,” Sen. Mark Kelly (Arizona), a Navy veteran, says in the video. “You can refuse illegal orders.”
“You must refuse illegal orders,” adds Rep. Chris Deluzio (Pennsylvania), who also served in the Navy.
The video does not specify particular orders that might be unlawful. But some of the lawmakers have relayed this week that they are hearing concerns from service members about the legality of strikes that have targeted people the Trump administration alleges are trafficking narcotics by sea.
The Pentagon did not respond Thursday morning to questions about the Pentagon’s post. Traditionally, the U.S. military adheres to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which holds that service members must obey lawful orders, whether they agree with them or not. They are obligated to not follow “manifestly unlawful orders,” but such situations are rare and legally fraught. Members of the military take an oath to the Constitution, not the president.
The video, organized by Sen. Elissa Slotkin (Michigan) — who previously worked as a CIA analyst, also features Reps. Maggie Goodlander (New Hampshire), a former Navy reservist; Chrissy Houlahan (Pennsylvania), a former Air Force officer; and Jason Crow (Colorado), a former Army Ranger.
On his social media platform Thursday, Trump echoed other Republicans who have called for the Democrats to be removed from office, dishonorably discharged from the military and charged with treason — a crime punishable by death.
The stark punishment was not lost on Trump, who wrote in another post on Thursday: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
He also reposted a post from a Truth Social user proclaiming: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”
The White House declined to comment on the record.
Democrats sharply criticized Trump’s threats.
“The administration should never try to force our servicemembers to carry out an illegal order,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) said on social media. “Calling for the execution of senators and Congressmembers for reminding our troops of that is chilling behavior. Every one of my Republican colleagues needs to swiftly condemn this.”
Trump has repeatedly accused different groups and individuals of treason going back to his first presidential term, but has never followed through with prosecution, lobbing attacks on Black Lives Matter, the news media, former FBI director James B. Comey and former president Barack Obama with the claim.
Trump campaigned on prosecuting his political opponents and dispensing with the 50-year custom of insulating federal law enforcement from political influence. This year he has grown increasingly explicit in demanding specific investigations against people who have criticized him, leading directly to action by his appointees at the Justice Department.
In September, Trump pushed out a federal prosecutor in Virginia who declined to bring charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and replaced him with his own personal lawyer, Lindsey Halligan. Halligan then indicted James as well as Comey, whom Trump fired in 2017. On Wednesday, prosecutors acknowledged in court that a grand jury did not review the final indictment, a defect that Comey’s lawyers argued should cause the judge to dismiss the case.
The U.S. attorney in Miami is pursuing a broad probe against Obama administration officials, including former CIA director John Brennan and former director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. related to the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump officials have also initiated investigations at the president’s urging against Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), who led the first impeachment inquiry against Trump in 2019, and Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor he has sought to remove.
And on Friday, Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate prominent Democrats’ ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy sex offender who killed himself in jail in 2019. Bondi said she would proceed with that case, four months after saying the department’s review of the case found no information to pursue additional charges.
The Justice Department, Pentagon and the offices for Democratic lawmakers in the video did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Quiet, Piggy!
Jesus of Nazareth and the Catholic Bishops Have Some Thoughts for You This Morning
Socialists
The Shutdown Deal
Ezra Klein (N.Y. Times), What Were Democrats Thinking?
As far as I can tell, the headline is intended to be read in a straightforward way—“WHAT were Democrats thinking?”—not in a sarcastic tone of voice—“What were Democrats THINKING?”
In any event, as per usual, Ezra Klein has a dozen or so really interesting things to say—some of which might not have occurred to you and me—and it’s best to let him speak for himself.
But as a preamble, two brief comments from me. First, some of the eight senators who joined the Republicans are political heavyweights, and people not known for an inclination to wimp out. So, before your knee jerks and you hurl criticism at them for wimping out, please think twice.
Second, among the really interesting things one might say about this putrid mess, the most interesting, IMHO, is that Republicans are now set up to cast spectacularly unpopular votes to screw a large portion of the public on the health insurance costs.
Ezra Klein writes,
Back in September, when I was reporting an article on whether Democrats should shut down the government, I kept hearing the same warning from veterans of past shutdown fights: The president controls the bully pulpit. He controls, to some degree, which parts of the government stay open and which parts close. It is very, very hard for the opposition party to win a shutdown.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that Democrats were winning this one. Polls showed that most voters blamed Republicans, not Democrats, for the current shutdown — perhaps because President Trump was bulldozing the East Wing of the White House rather than negotiating to reopen the government. Trump’s approval rating has been falling — in CNN’s tracking poll, it dipped into the 30s for the first time since he took office again. And last week, Democrats wrecked Republicans in the elections and Trump blamed his party’s losses in part on the shutdown. Democrats were riding higher than they have been in months.
Then, over the weekend, a group of Senate Democrats broke ranks and negotiated a deal to end the shutdown in return for — if we’re being honest — very little.
The guts of the deal are this: Food assistance — both SNAP and WIC, I was told — will get a bit more funding, and there are a few other modest concessions on spending levels elsewhere in the government. Laid-off federal workers will be rehired and furloughed federal workers given back pay. Most of the government is funded only until the end of January. (So get ready: We could be doing this again in a few months.) Most gallingly, the deal does nothing to extend the expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits over which Democrats ostensibly shut down the government in the first place. All it offers is a promise from Republicans to hold a vote on the tax credits in the future. Of the dozen or so House and Senate Democrats I spoke to over the past 24 hours, every one expected that vote to fail.
To understand why the shutdown ended with such a whimper, you need to understand the strange role the A.C.A. subsidies played in it. Democrats said the shutdown was about the subsidies, but for most of them, it wasn’t. It was about Trump’s authoritarianism. It was about showing their base — and themselves — that they could fight back. It was about treating an abnormal political moment abnormally.
T he A.C.A. subsidies emerged as the shutdown demand because they could keep the caucus sufficiently united. They put Democrats on the right side of public opinion — even self-identified MAGA voters wanted the subsidies extended — and held the quivering Senate coalition together. You shut the government down with the Democratic caucus you have, not with the Democratic caucus you want.
The shutdown was built on a cracked foundation. There were Senate Democrats who didn’t want a shutdown at all. There were Senate Democrats who did want a shutdown but thought it strange to make their demand so narrow: Was winning on health care premiums really winning the right fight? Should Democrats really vote to fund a government turning toward authoritarianism so long as health insurance subsidies were preserved?
And what if winning on the health care fight was actually a political gift to Donald Trump? Absent a fix, the average health insurance premium for 20 million Americans will more than double. The premium shock will hit red states particularly hard. Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s longtime pollster, had released a survey of competitive House districts showing that letting the tax credits expire might be lethal to Republican efforts to hold the House. Why were Democrats fighting so hard to neutralize their best issue in 2026?
The political logic of the shutdown fight was inverted: If Democrats got the tax credits extended — if they “won” — they would be solving a huge electoral problem for Republicans. If Republicans successfully allowed the tax credits to expire — if they “won” — they would be handing Democrats a cudgel with which to beat them in the elections.
This is why Senator Chuck Schumer’s compromise, which offered to reopen the government if Republicans extended the tax credits for a year, struck many Democrats as misguided. Morally, it might be worth sacrificing an electoral edge to lower health insurance premiums. But a one-year extension solved the Republicans’ electoral problem without solving the policy problem. Why on earth would they do that?
In any case, Republicans were not interested in Schumer’s offer. Trump himself has shown no interest in a deal. Rather than negotiating over health care spending, Trump has been ratcheting up the pain the shutdown is causing. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been furloughed or fired. The administration has been withholding food assistance from Americans who desperately need it. Airports are tipping into chaos as air traffic controllers go without pay.
More than anything else, this is what led some Senate Democrats to cut a deal: Trump’s willingness to hurt people exceeds their willingness to see people get hurt. I want to give them their due on this: They are hearing from their constituents and seeing the mounting problems and they are trying to do what they see as the responsible, moral thing. They do not believe that holding out will lead to Trump restoring the subsidies. They fear that their Republican colleagues would, under mounting pressure, do as Trump had demanded and abolish the filibuster. (Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is a subject for another column.) This, in the end, is the calculation the defecting Senate Democrats are making: They don’t think a longer shutdown will cause Trump to cave. They just think it will cause more damage.
If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for this compromise. Shutdowns are an opportunity to make an argument, and the country was just starting to pay attention. If Trump wanted to cancel flights over Thanksgiving rather than keep health care costs down, I don’t see why Democrats should save him from making his priorities so exquisitely clear. And I worry that Democrats have just taught Trump that they will fold under pressure. That’s the kind of lesson he remembers.
But it’s worth keeping this is perspective: The shutdown was a skirmish, not the real battle. Both sides were fighting for position, and Democrats, if you look at the polls, are ending up in a better one than they were when they started. They elevated their best issue — health care — and set the stage for voters to connect higher premiums with Republican rule. It’s not a win, but given how badly shutdowns often go for the opposition party, it’s better than a loss.
Facing MAGA 