October 31, 2025 (Friday)

Yesterday a reporter asked Representative Joe Neguse, a Democrat of Colorado, about the administration’s withholding of reserve funds Congress intended would fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “If we come to November first, and these contingency funds haven’t been released, if nothing has been accomplished in restoring SNAP benefits, will you call on your Democratic colleagues to reopen the government and deal with these shutdown crises immediately?”

Neguse called out the dynamic in which observers refuse to hold President Donald J. Trump and MAGA Republicans to account and instead demand Democrats step in to fix whatever crisis is at hand. “The basis for your question is, and maybe the better way to state it would be, if the Trump administration continues to violate the law, if the Trump administration unlawfully refuses to release funds so that families in Colorado don’t go hungry, if the Trump administration refuses to follow the law, as they have for the better course of the last nine months, violating statute after statute, if in that scenario these actions unfold, then how will Democrats respond?” Neguse answered.

“That my view would be a more fair characterization of the question that you’ve posed,” Neguse continued, “because it does feel a little bit like we’re in the Twilight Zone here with an administration that is lawless, violates the law with impunity, is now doing so with respect to the release of funds for families that may go hungry.”

Neguse noted that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has kept the House of Representatives from conducting business since mid-September, sending members back to their home districts. “We’re here in Washington,” Neguse told the reporter. “You’re here in Washington. House Republicans are gone. Six weeks and counting. Gone. Literally, gone. Won’t show up in Washington, won’t do town halls back in their respective districts. And somehow the question is posed to the House Democrats as to how we will respond.”

Neguse had a solution. He said: “The Trump administration needs to follow the law…. ou’ve heard all my colleagues repeatedly suggest we would like to negotiate an agreement in good faith with our Republican colleagues. That is why we’re here in our nation’s capital. The question should be posed to Republicans. When will they get serious about working with us in good faith, so that we can reach an agreement?”

Neguse noted that he was frustrated “with the fact that Republicans could just simply abandon their post for six weeks, that the Trump administration could just violate the law without consequence. It should offend everyone,” he said. “It certainly offends me.”

Johnson announced today that the House would not conduct business again next week. The House has not held a vote since September 19.

Also today, two federal judges found that the Trump administration’s suspension of SNAP benefits during the ongoing government shutdown is indeed likely illegal. The administration claims that it cannot use a reserve fund established by Congress for emergencies to distribute benefits scheduled to be cut off on November 1. That claim has drawn lawsuits to try to get food into the hands of the 42 million Americans—one out of eight U.S. residents—who use SNAP, receiving an average of $186 a month.

At a hearing in the lawsuit of Democratic attorneys general and governors against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Office of Management and Budget, and their respective leaders Brooke Rollins and Russell Vought, Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts noted: “Congress has put money in an emergency fund, and it is hard for me to understand how this is not an emergency.” She gave the administration until Monday to decide whether to pay SNAP benefits from that fund.

In a lawsuit brought by several cities, a major labor union, and a group of Rhode Island nonprofits, U.S. District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island ordered the USDA to use those emergency funds to provide SNAP benefits. McConnell ordered the administration to provide an update by noon on Monday, November 3.

“There is no doubt that the six billion dollars in contingency funds are appropriated funds that are without a doubt necessary to carry out the program’s operation,” McConnell said. “The shutdown of the government through funding doesn’t do away with SNAP. It just does away with the funding of it. There could be no greater necessity than the prohibition across the board of funds for the program’s operations.”

After returning from a trip to Asia yesterday, Trump left this morning for his thirteenth visit to the Trump Organization’s Florida property Mar-a-Lago. S.V. Date of HuffPost notes this $3.4 million trip brings to $60.7 million the amount taxpayers have spent on the president’s 76 golf outings in his second term.

From Air Force One, Trump posted: “I renovated the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House. It was renovated in the 1940s in an art deco green tile style, which was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era. I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble. This was very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”

Accompanying the post were a series of twenty-four photographs of the newly renovated bathroom in white marble veined with black, accented with gleaming gold fixtures.

At a time when federal employees are working without pay, furloughed workers are taking out bank loans to pay their bills, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and SNAP is at risk, Trump’s celebration of his marble bathroom was so tone deaf it seems likely to make the history books as a symbol of this administration.

Trump also posted about his current remodel of the Kennedy Center, where, according to Travis M. Andrews, Jeremy B. Merrill, and Shelly Tan of the Washington Post, ticket sales have plummeted, leaving tens of thousands of seats empty. “I just inspected the construction on The Kennedy Center,” he wrote. “It is really looking good! The exterior columns, which were in serious danger of corrosion if something weren’t done, are completed, and look magnificent in White Enamel— Like a different place! Marble is being done, stages are being renovated, new seats, new chairs, and new fabrics will soon be installed, and magnificent high end carpeting throughout the building. It is happening faster than anticipated, one of my trademarks. My people are doing a really great job! We are bringing this building back to life. It was dead as a doornail, but it will soon be beautiful again!”

When he arrived in Florida, a reporter asked Trump about the shutdown and whether he would meet with Democrats despite the fact he has, until now, refused to, and has ordered congressional Republicans not to meet with Democrats either. “I’m always going to meet,” he said. “All they have to do is open up the country. Let them open up the country, and we’ll meet. We’ll meet very quickly. But they have to open up the country. It’s their fault, everything is their fault.”

Thanks for posting these HCR Letters.

November 1, 2025 (Saturday)

Yesterday I wrote that President Donald J. Trump’s celebration of his new marble bathroom in the White House was so tone deaf at a time when federal employees are working without pay, furloughed workers are taking out bank loans to pay their bills, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are at risk, that it seemed likely to make the history books as a symbol of this administration.

But that image got overtaken just hours later by pictures from a Great Gatsby–themed party Trump threw at Mar-a-Lago last night hours before SNAP benefits ended. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby skewered the immoral and meaningless lives of the very wealthy during the Jazz Age who spent their time throwing extravagant parties and laying waste to the lives of the people around them.

Although two federal judges yesterday found that the administration’s refusal to use reserves Congress provided to fund SNAP in an emergency was likely illegal and one ordered the government to use that money, the administration did not immediately do as the judge ordered.

Trump posted on social media that “ur Government lawyers do not think we have the legal authority to pay SNAP,” so he has “instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible.” Blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, Trump added that “even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out.” His post provided the phone number for Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s office, telling people: “If you use SNAP benefits, call the Senate Democrats, and tell them to reopen the Government, NOW!”

“They were careless people,” Fitzgerald wrote, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

This afternoon, Ellen Nakashima and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post reported that the administration is claiming it does not have to consult Congress to continue its attacks on Venezuela. The 1973 War Powers Act says it does.

In 1973, after President Richard M. Nixon ordered secret bombings of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution to reassert its power over foreign wars. “It is the purpose of this joint resolution to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations,” it read.

The law requires a president to notify Congress in writing within 48 hours of the start of hostilities, including the legal grounds for those hostilities, the circumstances that caused them, and an estimate of their scope and duration. The law requires the president to get the approval of Congress for any hostilities lasting more than 60 days.

On September 4, 2025, Trump notified Congress of a strike against a vessel in the Caribbean that he said “was assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and to be engaged in illicit drug trafficking activities.” The letter added: “I am providing this report as part of my efforts to keep the Congress fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution.”

Monday will mark 60 days from that announcement, but the administration does not appear to be planning to ask for Congress’s approval. It has been reluctant to share information about the strikes, first excluding senior Senate Democrats from a Senate briefing, then offering House members a briefing that did not include lawyers and failed to answer basic questions. The top two leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Jack Reed (D-RI), have both said the administration has not produced documents, attack orders, and a list of targets required by law.

Representative Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Nakashima and Robertson: “The administration is, I believe, doing an illegal act and anything that it can to avoid Congress.”

T. Elliot Gaiser, who leads the Office of Legal Counsel under Trump, told a group of lawmakers this week that the administration is taking the position that the strikes on unnamed people in small boats do not meet the definition of hostilities because they are not putting U.S. military personnel in harm’s way. It says the strikes, which have killed more than 60 people, have been conducted primarily by drones launched off naval vessels.

Brian Finucane, who was the War Powers Resolution lawyer at the State Department under President Barack Obama and during Trump’s first term, explained: “What they’re saying is anytime the president uses drones or any standoff weapon against someone who cannot shoot back, it’s not hostilities. It’s a wild claim of executive authority.”
If the administration proceeds without acknowledging the Monday deadline for congressional approval, Finucane said, “it is usurping Congress’s authority over the use of military force.”

FMD

Michael V said:

FMD

They are doing their best to ruin the place.

November 2, 2025 (Sunday)

Last Monday, October 27, right-wing personality Tucker Carlson interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes for more than two hours, mainstreaming the podcaster whose praise for Hitler, vows to kill Jews, denial of the Holocaust, and apparently gleeful embrace of racism and sexism has, in the past, led establishment Republicans to avoid him.

When Fuentes had dinner at Mar-a-Lago in a gathering with then-former president Donald J. Trump in 2022, Republican officials condemned the meeting. Then Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “There is no room in the Republican Party for anti-semitism or white supremacy.” Amid the blowback, Trump suggested the meeting had been accidental, with Fuentes attending as a guest of rapper Ye, and the dinner being “quick and uneventful.”

Fuentes emerged as a right-wing provocateur in 2016 during a brief stint as a student at Boston University but fell out of establishment channels after appearing at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists and neo-Nazis shouted, “Jews will not replace us.”

Sidelined, Fuentes launched his own independent show, where he attracted a fanbase known as “Groypers” who ferociously opposed established right-wing politics. As Ali Brand noted on Friday in The Atlantic, in 2021, Fuentes said he wanted to drag the Republican Party “kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party.”

Fuentes took on Charlie Kirk, who established Turning Point USA in 2012 as a vehicle to attract young people to right-wing politics, encouraging his supporters to troll Kirk’s events. As Will Sommer reported last Thursday in The Bulwark, just days before Kirk was murdered in September, Fuentes taunted him, saying: “I took your baby, Turning Point USA, and I f*cked it. And I’ve been f*cking it. And that’s why it’s filled with groypers…. We already own you,” he said. “We own this movement.” By the end of October, Fuentes had about a million followers on X.

Certainly, neo-Nazi voices are becoming more obvious in the MAGA party. Last month, Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo of Politico reported on 2,900 pages of messages exchanged on the messaging app Telegram between leaders of the hard-line pro-Trump factions of Young Republican groups in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. In the edgy messages, the leaders used racist themes and epithets freely and cheered slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents. They expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

Also last month, the White House was forced to withdraw Trump’s nomination for Paul Ingrassia to head the Office of Special Counsel, a watchdog agency. Republican senators said they would not confirm him after the publication of texts in which Ingrassia said he has “a Nazi streak in me.”

Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed the Young Republicans’ chat as “stupid” jokes made by “kids,” although the eight members of the chat whose ages could be ascertained were 24 to 35 and included a Vermont state senator, chief of staff for a member of the New York Assembly, a staffer in the Kansas attorney general’s office, and an official at the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Carlson seems to think momentum is behind Fuentes. He has given Fuentes access to his own 16.7 million followers on X and posted a photograph of himself with his arm around Fuentes, both of them beaming.

The platforming of a white nationalist by a MAGA influencer who used to be mainstream started a fight on the right.

The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, posted a video defending Carlson’s interview from “the venomous coalition attacking him.” Activists founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank in 1973 in response to the 1971 Powell Memo calling for the establishment of “conservative” institutions to stand against the liberal ones dominating society. Heritage policies became central to the political thought of the Reagan Revolution and went on to shape the foreign policy of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, remaining a powerful force in Republican policy through Trump’s first term.

When Roberts took over the leadership of Heritage in 2021, he dedicated it to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Roberts says he looks to modern Hungary under authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán as “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” He brought Heritage and the Orban-linked Danube Institute into a formal partnership. The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán showed in Project 2025, which Heritage led, to map out a future right-wing presidency that guts the civil service and fills it with loyalists; attacks immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals; takes over businesses for friends and family; and moves the country away from the rules-based international order.

After Roberts put out his video, former Senate Republican leader McConnell commented on social media: “The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends. Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats. But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”

Senior analyst for tax policy at the Heritage Foundation Preston Brashers simply posted an image of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting depicting “Freedom of Speech”—a man in a flannel shirt and a Navy bomber jacket standing to speak at a meeting—with the caption “NAZIS ARE BAD.”

When Roberts’s chief of staff Ryan Neuhaus reposted a missive suggesting that those unhappy with Roberts’s video should resign, Brashers retorted that “most of us have been at Heritage a lot longer than he has. But if losing my job at Heritage is the consequence of posting “NAZIS ARE BAD”, it’s a consequence I’m prepared to face.”

The modern Republican Party was always an uneasy marriage between business interests who wanted tax cuts and deregulation, represented by lawmakers like McConnell, and the racist Dixiecrats and religious traditionalists who wanted to get rid of equal rights for racial minorities and women. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” Republican operative Grover Norquist explained in 1985, “but these groups can provide the votes.”

But while business got its tax cuts and deregulation over the years, the base voters of the party—especially the evangelicals who had come to see ending abortion as their key demand—did not see the country reorganized in the racial and gender hierarchies they craved. Trump promised to deliver that for them. When establishment Republicans fell away from Trump after the August 2017 Unite the Right rally—after Congress had passed and Trump had signed the 2017 tax cuts into law—Trump turned to the base, using the threat of their wrath to keep the establishment figures in line.

Now members of that base are strong enough to tie the party itself to Nazism, a line establishment figures like McConnell, who is 83 and retiring from the Senate in 2027, finally seem unwilling to cross.

But there is greater instability behind this fight than the split in today’s Republican Party. What held the Republican coalition together was a call for an end to the New Deal government put in place by both Democrats and Republicans after the Great Crash of 1929. But while wealthier Americans were happy to get their side of the bargain, many Republican voters seem less happy with theirs. They seem to have believed that government programs helped only minorities and what talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh called “feminazis,” but the extreme cuts to the federal government first under billionaire Elon Musk and then under Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought have hammered all Americans.

And now those cuts are hitting healthcare and food. Premiums for next year’s healthcare insurance plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplace are skyrocketing, and because of the way subsidies expanded under President Joe Biden, the hardest-hit states will be those that voted for Trump. Democrats in Congress are refusing to sign on to a continuing resolution to end a government shutdown unless the Republicans will work with them to extend the premium tax credits, but Trump is refusing to talk to Democrats about it.

The administration has been pressuring Democrats to agree to the Republicans’ terms for a continuing resolution by refusing to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program with a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. On Friday, federal judge John McConnell of Rhode Island ordered the government to use the emergency funds to provide SNAP benefits. Trump promptly took to social media. Bashing the Democrats, he said he would ask the court for direction as to how the government could fund SNAP legally.

On Saturday, Judge McConnell ordered the administration to use reserve funds for at least a partial payment this week and quoted back at him Trump’s social media post claiming “it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding” once McConnell provided more clarity. Meanwhile, economics journalist Catherine Rampell reported today that the administration has told grocery stores that they cannot offer discounts to customers affected by the lapse of SNAP.

That the Republicans are feeling the pressure of voters’ anger shows in the repeated statements of both Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) that they will produce a health plan better than the ACA just as soon as Democrats agree to the continuing resolution. On Air Force One Friday, Trump told reporters that it’s “largely Democrats” who use SNAP, and today Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who oversees SNAP, told the Fox News Channel that Democrats support SNAP because they want to give handouts to undocumented immigrants. Trump “will not tolerate waste, fraud, or abuse while hardworking Americans go hungry,” she posted on social media.

Perhaps it is Trump’s Great Gatsby party of Friday night that has me thinking about the 1920s. Or perhaps it’s the Republicans’ Nazi talk.

The United States had a strong Nazi movement in the 1930s, strong enough that more than 20,000 people attended a Nazi “Pro American” rally in commemoration of George Washington’s birthday in 1939. But it had an even stronger Ku Klux Klan movement in the 1920s, which burned like wildfire in the early years of the century.

After the horrors of World War I, an influenza pandemic, the visible rise of organized crime to get around the prohibition of alcohol, and the ongoing racial and ethnic changes to the country, KKK members across the countryside rallied to an “Americanism” that rejected international involvement, blamed the changes in the country on immigrants and Black Americans, and promised “reform.” Numbering about five million, KKK members swung elections, usually to the Democrats in the South and to the Republicans in the North. “We know we’re the balance of power in the state,” the grand dragon of the Illinois KKK said in 1924, “We can control state elections and get what we want from state government.”

But in 1925, powerful Indiana Klan leader D.C. Stephenson was convicted of raping and murdering Madge Oberholtzer. When the governor, whose election the Klan had supported, refused to pardon him, Stephenson began to name accomplices in the corrupt web of state politics, making it clear that the championing of traditional values had been a con.
Membership in the Klan plummeted, but its anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-New York City sentiments were still strong enough in 1928 to sink Democratic candidate Al Smith. “We now face the darkest hour in American history,” Ku Klux Klan forces wrote when Smith won the Democratic nomination. They called him the “Antichrist” and burned crosses in the fields of Oklahoma when he crossed the state line. Smith won only 40.8% of the vote to Republican Herbert Hoover’s 58.2%.

But then, the next year, the bottom fell out of the 1920s economy of rich and poor that F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered in The Great Gatsby. By 1930, some Americans were on their way to embracing Nazism. But others turned away. As they dealt with economic ruin, rural white Americans had left the KKK, whose membership fell to about 30,000. And in 1932, voters elected Al Smith’s campaign manager, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his own landslide as he focused on a new kind of economy, giving him 57.4% of the vote to Hoover’s 39.6%.

November 3, 2025 (Monday)

At the end of her interview with President Donald J. Trump, recorded on October 31 at Mar-a-Lago and aired last night, heavily edited, on 60 Minutes, Norah O’Donnell of CBS News asked if she could ask two more questions. Trump suggested previous questions had been precleared when he mused aloud that if he said yes, “That means they’ll treat me more fairly if I do—I want to get—It’s very nice, yeah. Now is good. Okay. Uh, oh. These might be the ones I didn’t want. I don’t know. Okay, go ahead.”

O’Donnell noted that the Trump family has thrown itself into cryptocurrency ventures, forming World Liberty Financial with the family of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. In that context, she asked about billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Binance. Zhao is cryptocurrency’s richest man. He pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering, resigned from Binance, paid a $50 million fine, and was sentenced to four months in prison.

Trump pardoned him on October 23.

O’Donnell noted that the U.S. government said Zhao “had caused ‘significant harm to U.S. national security,’ essentially by allowing terrorist groups like Hamas to move millions of dollars around.” She asked the president, “Why did you pardon him?”

“Okay, are you ready?” Trump answered. “I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt. And what I wanna do is see crypto, ‘cause if we don’t do it it’s gonna go to China, it’s gonna go to—this is no different to me than AI.

“My sons are involved in crypto much more than I—me. I—I know very little about it, other than one thing. It’s a huge industry. And if we’re not gonna be the head of it, China, Japan, or someplace else is. So I am behind it 100%. This man was, in my opinion, from what I was told, this is, you know, a four-month sentence.”

After he went on with complaints about the Biden administration—he would mention Biden 42 times in the released transcript—O’Donnell noted, “Binance helped facilitate a $2 billion purchase of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin. And then you pardoned .” She asked him: “How do you address the appearance of pay for play?”

Trump answered: “Well, here’s the thing. I know nothing about it because I’m too busy doing the other….” O’Donnell interrupted: “But he got a pardon….” Trump responded: “I can only tell you this. My sons are into it. I’m glad they are, because it’s probably a great industry, crypto. I think it’s good. You know, they’re running a business, they’re not in government. And they’re good—my one son is a number one bestseller now.

“My wife just had a number one bestseller. I’m proud of them for doing that. I’m focused on this. I know nothing about the guy, other than I hear he was a victim of weaponization by government. When you say the government, you’re talking about the Biden government.” And then he was off again, complaining about the former president and boasting that he would “make crypto great for America.”

“So not concerned about the appearance of corruption with this?” O’Donnell asked.

Trump answered: “I can’t say, because—I can’t say—I’m not concerned. I don’t—I’d rather not have you ask the question. But I let you ask it. You just came to me and you said, ‘Can I ask another question?’ And I said, yeah. This is the question….”

“And you answered…” O’Donnell put in.

“I don’t mind,” Trump said. “Did I let you do it? I coulda walked away. I didn’t have to answer this question. I’m proud to answer the question. You know why? We’ve taken crypto….” After another string of complaints about Biden, he said: “We are number one in crypto and that’s the only thing I care about.”

If, among all the disinformation and repetition Trump spouted in that interview, he did not know who he was pardoning, who’s running the Oval Office?

It appears House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) doesn’t want to know. At a news conference today, journalist Manu Raju noted: “Last week…you were very critical of Joe Biden’s use of the autopen… he didn’t even know who he was pardoning. Last night, on 60 Minutes…Trump admitted not knowing he pardoned a crypto billionaire who pleaded guilty to money laundering. Is that also concerning?”

Johnson answered: “I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t see the interview. You have to ask the president about that. I’m not sure.”

Pleading ignorance of an outrage or that a question is “out of his lane” has become so frequent for Johnson that journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who is very well informed about the news indeed, suggested today that journalists should consider asking Johnson: “Do you ever read the news, and do you agree it’s problematic for the Speaker to be so woefully uninformed?”

Johnson continues to keep the House from conducting business as the government shutdown hit its 34th day today. Tomorrow the shutdown will tie the 35-day shutdown record set during Trump’s first term. Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), whom voters elected on September 23, is still not sworn in. She has said she will be the 218th—and final—vote on a discharge petition to force a vote requiring the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files.

Trump and Johnson continue to try to jam Democratic senators into signing on to the Republicans’ continuing resolution without addressing the end of premium tax credits that is sending healthcare premiums on the Affordable Healthcare Act marketplace soaring. They continue to refuse to negotiate with Democrats, although negotiations have always been the key to ending shutdowns.

To increase pressure, they are hurting the American people.

The shutdown meant that funding for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on which 42 million Americans depend to put food on the table ran out on October 31. Although previous administrations—including Trump’s—have always turned to contingency funds Congress set aside to make sure people can eat, and although the Trump administration initially said it would do so this time as usual, it abruptly announced in October that it did not believe tapping into that reserve was legal. SNAP benefits would not go out.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge John McConnell of the District of Rhode Island ordered the administration to fund payments for SNAP benefits using the reserve Congress set up for emergencies. Since that money—$4.65 billion—will not be enough to fund the entire $8 billion required for November payments, McConnell suggested the administration could make the full payments by tapping into money from the Child Nutrition Program and other funds, but he left discretion up to the administration.

Today the administration announced it would tap only the first reserve, funding just 50% of SNAP benefits. It added that those payments will be delayed for “a few weeks to up to several months.” The disbursement of the reserve, it continued, “means that no funds will remain for new SNAP applicants certified in November, disaster assistance, or as a cushion against the potential catastrophic consequences of shutting down SNAP entirely.”

“Big ‘you can’t make me’ energy,” Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted. It’s also an astonishing act of cruelty, especially as grocery prices are going up—Trump lied that they are stable in the 60 Minutes interview—hiring has slowed, and the nation is about to celebrate Thanksgiving.

The shutdown also threatens the $4.1 billion Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) that helps families cover the cost of utilities or heating oil. Susan Haigh and Marc Levy of the Associated Press note that this program started in 1981 and has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress ever since. Trump’s budget proposal for next year calls for cutting the program altogether, but states expected to have funding for this winter. Almost 6 million households use the program, and as cold weather sets in, the government has not funded it.

When the Republicans shredded the nation’s social safety net in their budget reconciliation bill of July, the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” they timed most of the cuts to take effect after the 2026 midterm elections. But the shutdown is making clear now, rather than after the midterms, what the nation will look like without that safety net.

In the 60 Minutes interview, O’Donnell noted an aspect of Trump’s America that is getting funded during the shutdown. She said, “Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?”

“No,” Trump answered. “I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the—by the judges, the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama.” (In fact, a review by Kyle Cheney of Politico on Friday showed that more than 100 federal judges have ruled at least 200 times against Trump administration immigration policies.

Those judges were appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan, and 12 were appointed by Trump himself.)

It appears that the administration did indeed ignore today’s deadline for congressional approval of the ongoing strikes against Venezuela, required under the 1973 War Powers Act. It is taking the position that no approval is necessary since, in its formulation, U.S. military personnel are not at risk in the strikes that have, so far, killed 65 people.

November 4, 2025 (Tuesday)

So much for obeying a court order, even if begrudgingly and with manufactured delay. At 8:00 this morning, President Donald Trump announced that “SNAP BENEFITS…will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”

U.S. District Judge John McConnell of the Rhode Island District ordered the administration to fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for 43 million Americans at least partially by using a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. The judge also suggested using a different reserve to fund SNAP fully. But the administration is using the hunger of Americans to pressure Democrats to agree to send healthcare premiums skyrocketing, so it dragged its heels as deeply as possible to delay the payments. It said it would fund SNAP only at 50% and that the money could take “weeks or months” to go out.

Trump’s social media account announced that the White House intends to ignore the court’s order, but hours later White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the administration is fully complying with the court order.”

Myah Ward, Alex Gangitano, and Dasha Burns of Politico reported last Friday that Trump expected the Democrats to fold and accept Republican terms to reopen the government no more than ten days into a shutdown. His frustration that they are not doing as he expected is showing, especially as more Americans blame Trump and MAGA Republicans for the shutdown than blame Democrats. Last week, Trump demanded that Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota end the Senate filibuster, enabling the Republicans to pass the House Republicans’ continuing resolution with a simple majority vote. This was a nonstarter, since the filibuster has become central since 2009 to the ability of Republicans to block most Democratic legislation.

S0 Trump is railing at the Democrats—“It’s their fault. Everything is their fault,” he told reporters last week—and ratcheting up pain on the American people.

Adding to the administration’s pressure is Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has been hitting the media to insist that the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault. Today he warned that another week of the shutdown could lead to “mass chaos” that would force him to close some of the nation’s airspace. Air traffic controllers are federal employees and thus have been working without paychecks. Many are calling in sick or not showing up for work, forcing significant flight delays and cancellations.

Today the administration sent notices to federal employees suggesting that furloughed staff won’t be paid when the shutdown ends. Hannah Natanson, Jacob Bogage, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post note that a 2019 law guarantees they will.

Just a reminder: What the Senate Democrats are insisting on before agreeing to a continuing resolution is the extension of the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance marketplace. The Republicans neglected to extend those credits in their July budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—although they extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Without the credits, millions of people will be unable to afford healthcare insurance and will go uncovered, and coverage costs will skyrocket for millions more.

Seventy-eight percent of Americans want those tax credits extended. That includes 59% of Republicans. Only 22% don’t want them extended.

So Trump is refusing even to negotiate with Democrats to end the shutdown when almost 80% of Americans want what the Democrats are demanding.

Trump says the Democrats should back down. “It’s so easily solved,” he told reporters. “All they have to do is say, ‘Let’s go. Let’s open up our country.’” While this course would entrench Trump further as an autocrat who can dictate to the country, the true easy solution seems to be for the Republicans simply to agree to a policy that a solid majority of their own constituents—as well as more than three quarters of the country—want.

This fight is bonkers, but it reflects Trump’s determination to assert his power over the country. That determination showed today in an Axios story by Marc Caputo, Stef W. Kight, and Stephen Neukam. They quoted a Trump advisor as saying that if Senate Republicans don’t pass the continuing resolution without the Democrats by nuking the filibuster, Trump “will make their lives a living hell.” “He will call them at three o’clock in the morning. He will blow them up in their districts. He will call them un-American. He will call them old creatures of a dying institution. Believe you me, he’s going to make their lives just hell.”

Today was Election Day, with crucial elections on the ballots across the country.

In New Jersey, someone emailed bomb threats to precincts this morning. Election officials directed voters to other polling places.

With an approval rating under 40%, Trump spent the day panic-tweeting to suggest the elections are “rigged,” just as he did in 2020. He posted that should New York City voters choose Democrat Zohran Mamdani as mayor, “it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home.”

California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.”

Mail-in voting does not shut out Republicans. It makes voting accessible. Asked about Trump’s statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today: “It’s absolutely true that…there’s fraud in California’s elections. It’s just a fact.” The fact is, there is no evidence of any such thing, but Republicans are so eager to stop the measure that one right-wing donor alone spent more than $30 million on the effort.

It seems likely that the administration was preparing to declare a vote in favor of Proposition 50 fraudulent.

Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this).

Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.

Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students.

California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate.

And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor.

Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three Uber drivers. Just everything.”
Trump posted on social media: “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters.”

But in fact, today voters resoundingly rejected Trump and Trumpism, and tomorrow, politics will be a whole different game.

“ California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.” “

He’s such a fkn baby.

Neophyte said:

November 4, 2025 (Tuesday)

So much for obeying a court order, even if begrudgingly and with manufactured delay. At 8:00 this morning, President Donald Trump announced that “SNAP BENEFITS…will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”

U.S. District Judge John McConnell of the Rhode Island District ordered the administration to fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for 43 million Americans at least partially by using a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. The judge also suggested using a different reserve to fund SNAP fully. But the administration is using the hunger of Americans to pressure Democrats to agree to send healthcare premiums skyrocketing, so it dragged its heels as deeply as possible to delay the payments. It said it would fund SNAP only at 50% and that the money could take “weeks or months” to go out.

Trump’s social media account announced that the White House intends to ignore the court’s order, but hours later White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the administration is fully complying with the court order.”

Myah Ward, Alex Gangitano, and Dasha Burns of Politico reported last Friday that Trump expected the Democrats to fold and accept Republican terms to reopen the government no more than ten days into a shutdown. His frustration that they are not doing as he expected is showing, especially as more Americans blame Trump and MAGA Republicans for the shutdown than blame Democrats. Last week, Trump demanded that Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota end the Senate filibuster, enabling the Republicans to pass the House Republicans’ continuing resolution with a simple majority vote. This was a nonstarter, since the filibuster has become central since 2009 to the ability of Republicans to block most Democratic legislation.

S0 Trump is railing at the Democrats—“It’s their fault. Everything is their fault,” he told reporters last week—and ratcheting up pain on the American people.

Adding to the administration’s pressure is Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has been hitting the media to insist that the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault. Today he warned that another week of the shutdown could lead to “mass chaos” that would force him to close some of the nation’s airspace. Air traffic controllers are federal employees and thus have been working without paychecks. Many are calling in sick or not showing up for work, forcing significant flight delays and cancellations.

Today the administration sent notices to federal employees suggesting that furloughed staff won’t be paid when the shutdown ends. Hannah Natanson, Jacob Bogage, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post note that a 2019 law guarantees they will.

Just a reminder: What the Senate Democrats are insisting on before agreeing to a continuing resolution is the extension of the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance marketplace. The Republicans neglected to extend those credits in their July budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—although they extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Without the credits, millions of people will be unable to afford healthcare insurance and will go uncovered, and coverage costs will skyrocket for millions more.

Seventy-eight percent of Americans want those tax credits extended. That includes 59% of Republicans. Only 22% don’t want them extended.

So Trump is refusing even to negotiate with Democrats to end the shutdown when almost 80% of Americans want what the Democrats are demanding.

Trump says the Democrats should back down. “It’s so easily solved,” he told reporters. “All they have to do is say, ‘Let’s go. Let’s open up our country.’” While this course would entrench Trump further as an autocrat who can dictate to the country, the true easy solution seems to be for the Republicans simply to agree to a policy that a solid majority of their own constituents—as well as more than three quarters of the country—want.

This fight is bonkers, but it reflects Trump’s determination to assert his power over the country. That determination showed today in an Axios story by Marc Caputo, Stef W. Kight, and Stephen Neukam. They quoted a Trump advisor as saying that if Senate Republicans don’t pass the continuing resolution without the Democrats by nuking the filibuster, Trump “will make their lives a living hell.” “He will call them at three o’clock in the morning. He will blow them up in their districts. He will call them un-American. He will call them old creatures of a dying institution. Believe you me, he’s going to make their lives just hell.”

Today was Election Day, with crucial elections on the ballots across the country.

In New Jersey, someone emailed bomb threats to precincts this morning. Election officials directed voters to other polling places.

With an approval rating under 40%, Trump spent the day panic-tweeting to suggest the elections are “rigged,” just as he did in 2020. He posted that should New York City voters choose Democrat Zohran Mamdani as mayor, “it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home.”

California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.”

Mail-in voting does not shut out Republicans. It makes voting accessible. Asked about Trump’s statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today: “It’s absolutely true that…there’s fraud in California’s elections. It’s just a fact.” The fact is, there is no evidence of any such thing, but Republicans are so eager to stop the measure that one right-wing donor alone spent more than $30 million on the effort.

It seems likely that the administration was preparing to declare a vote in favor of Proposition 50 fraudulent.

Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this).

Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.

Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students.

California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate.

And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor.

Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three Uber drivers. Just everything.”
Trump posted on social media: “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters.”

But in fact, today voters resoundingly rejected Trump and Trumpism, and tomorrow, politics will be a whole different game.

Maybe, maybe not.

Divine Angel said:

“ California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.” “

He’s such a fkn baby.

Stand by for a really big tantrum. So big that you have never seen a tantrum this bigly.

Heather Cox Richardson

November 5, 2025 (Wednesday)

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a member of both the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, began his victory speech last night with a nod to Eugene V. Debs, labor organizer and Socialist candidate for president at the turn of the last century.

“The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”

The 34-year-old mayor-elect’s speech went on to deliver something that was more than a victory speech. It marked a new era much like the one that had given rise to Debs himself. After more than forty years in which ordinary Americans had seen the political system being stacked against them and, over time, forgotten they had agency to change it, they had woken up.

Mandami began by lifting up New York City’s working people, noting that “or as long as we can remember,” they “have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands…. And yet,” he said, “over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.”

“Tonight,” he said, “against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.” New York, he said, had delivered “ mandate for change. ​​A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.”

Mamdani thanked “the next generation of New Yorkers who refuse to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past.” And that was the heart of his message: that democracy belongs to ordinary people. “We will fight for you,” he said, “because we are you.”

He thanked “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.” He assured “every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point” that “this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.”

Mamdani celebrated the hard work of democracy in his win. It was a victory not just for all those who make up New York City, he said, but also for “the more than 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign into an unstoppable force…. With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics.”

With that base of Americans engaged in the work of democracy, Mamdami welcomed a new era. “There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared that we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us simply to more of the same,” he said. “And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn.”

But in New York City last night, he said, “we have answered those fears…. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy.”

“And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”

Mamdami promised a government that would answer to the demands of the people. It would address the city’s cost-of-living crisis, invest in education, improve infrastructure, and cut bureaucratic waste. It would, he said, work with police officers to reduce crime while also defending community safety and demanding excellence in government.

Mamdami pushed back not just against the smears thrown his way during the campaign, but also against the deliberate division of the country that has been a staple of Republican rhetoric since 1972, when President Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew embraced his role as the key purveyor of “positive polarization.” In its place, he called for community and solidarity.

“In this new age we make for ourselves,” Mamdani said, “we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another…. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too.”

Mamdami, who is Muslim, promised to “build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong—not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.”

He called for a government of both competence and compassion. “For years,” he said, “those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January first, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.”

Mamdani took on the problem of disinformation in modern politics, noting that “many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them.” He laid that disinformation at the feet of the very wealthy in their quest to divide working Americans to make sure they retain power. “s so often occurred,” he said, “the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system.”

Mamdani urged New Yorkers to embrace a “brave new course, rather than fleeing from it.” If they do, he said, “we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”

Mamdani identified the popular momentum to defeat President Donald J. Trump, but made the point that the goal is not simply to stop Trump, but also to stop the next Trump who comes along. While Mamdani’s prescription focused on the avenues of resistance open to New York City government, he emphasized that for the president “to get to any of us,” he will have to “get through all of us.”

Mamdani called for New Yorkers to “leave mediocrity in our past,” and for Democrats to “dare to be great.” When Mamdani said, “New York, this power, it’s yours,” and told New Yorkers, “his city belongs to you,” millions of Americans heard a reminder that they, too, are powerful and that the government of the United States of America belongs to them.

Mamdani won election yesterday backed by just over half the city’s voters, in an election characterized by extraordinarily high turnout. Andy Newman of the New York Times noted yesterday that in the last four New York City mayoral elections, fewer than a third of registered voters turned out. Yesterday, more than 2 million voters voted, the highest turnout for a mayoral election since 1969.

And that turnout is a key part of the story of yesterday’s Democratic wave. As Mamdani said, American voters appear, once again, to be aware of their agency in our democracy.

Bogsnorkler said:

Heather Cox Richardson

November 5, 2025 (Wednesday)

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a member of both the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, began his victory speech last night with a nod to Eugene V. Debs, labor organizer and Socialist candidate for president at the turn of the last century.

As Mamdani said, American voters appear, once again, to be aware of their agency in our democracy.

so it’s not the red apple after all but the red queen

:)

Thanks.

I nice positive story for once.

:)