December 31, 2025 (Wednesday)

And so, the sun sets on 2025.

At the end of this very difficult year, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for this community and for all you have done for me, for each other, and for our nation. For my part, I could not have continued to do what I do without your support and encouragement, and I thank you for it.

If you are comfortable writing it down, I’d love to see in the comments what you did this year to help preserve American democracy and what you hope for 2026. Let’s keep building our momentum.

I am entering the new year tired, I confess, but with high hopes and confidence that the American people can build a better future.

Let’s take this new year out for a spin and see what we can accomplish.

My best to you and yours for 2026.

Neophyte said:

December 31, 2025 (Wednesday)

And so, the sun sets on 2025.

At the end of this very difficult year, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for this community and for all you have done for me, for each other, and for our nation. For my part, I could not have continued to do what I do without your support and encouragement, and I thank you for it.

If you are comfortable writing it down, I’d love to see in the comments what you did this year to help preserve American democracy and what you hope for 2026. Let’s keep building our momentum.

I am entering the new year tired, I confess, but with high hopes and confidence that the American people can build a better future.

Let’s take this new year out for a spin and see what we can accomplish.

My best to you and yours for 2026.

And mine to you, HCR. Keep up the good work.

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

December 31, 2025 (Wednesday)

And so, the sun sets on 2025.

At the end of this very difficult year, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for this community and for all you have done for me, for each other, and for our nation. For my part, I could not have continued to do what I do without your support and encouragement, and I thank you for it.

If you are comfortable writing it down, I’d love to see in the comments what you did this year to help preserve American democracy and what you hope for 2026. Let’s keep building our momentum.

I am entering the new year tired, I confess, but with high hopes and confidence that the American people can build a better future.

Let’s take this new year out for a spin and see what we can accomplish.

My best to you and yours for 2026.

And mine to you, HCR. Keep up the good work.

+1

anuary 1, 2026 (Thursday)

On January 1, 1892, seventeen-year-old Annie Moore walked down the gangway from the steamship Nevada with her two brothers Anthony, eleven, and Philip, nine, and into history as the first person processed through the newly opened Ellis Island Immigrant Station. Between 1892 and 1954, when Ellis Island closed, more than 12 million immigrants would come through the facility on their journey to the United States.

The establishment of a federal facility for processing immigrants was a long time coming.

Before the Civil War, states processed immigrants to the U.S. on the docks as they came off boats. The system was haphazard and left immigrants bewildered at the bustle and noise of their new country and at the mercy of swindlers who took their money with promises to find them housing and jobs. Cities and states tried to regularize immigration both to protect the newcomers and to make sure they did not end up homeless and starving, a charge on the city.

The 1840s and the 1850s brought an influx to the East Coast of Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine and Germans fleeing economic hardship and the failed 1848 revolutions and of Chinese and Mexicans migrating to California to pan and dig for gold.

In 1855 the state of New York turned the site of a former U.S. Army fort on the southern tip of Manhattan into the Emigrant Landing Depot, more popularly known as Castle Garden. Between its opening on August 3, 1855, and December 21, 1889, the date of the last recorded data for the site, Castle Garden processed 8,280,917, or 75%, of the 10,956,910 immigrants who entered the United States.

When immigrants arrived at Castle Garden, officials divided them into two lines: English speakers and non-English speakers who would need translators. Officials recorded the names of the newcomers, the ship they arrived on, where they were going, and how much money they had. The new arrivals could buy train tickets from licensed agents, contact relatives, and rest, wash, and exchange money without fear of swindlers. An elaborate system for what was essentially a head tax paid by ship masters for each immigrant funded the operations.

But the coming of the Civil War slowed immigration as foreign men wondered if they would end up on the front lines.

In his third annual message on December 8, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln asked Congress to get involved in the process by establishing “a system for the encouragement of immigration.” Like other Republicans, Lincoln believed immigrants contributed mightily to the nation’s economy. He wrote: “there is…a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture and in our mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals,” while “tens of thousands of persons, destitute of remunerative occupation, are thronging our foreign consulates and offering to emigrate to the United States if essential, but very cheap, assistance can be afforded them.”

“he nation is beginning a new life,” he wrote, and “his noble effort demands the aid and ought to receive the attention and support of the Government.”

Republicans agreed. In their 1864 platform they resolved that immigration “should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.” Under their leadership, Congress passed the 1864 Contract Labor Law permitting immigrants to borrow money against their future homesteads to finance their voyage to the U.S. and promising that immigrants would not be drafted. Lincoln signed it on July 4, 1864. Immigration picked up again.

But just a decade later, in the midst of the depression that followed the Panic of 1873, California workers angry at what they saw as competition from Asian contract labor prompted federal regulation of Asian immigration to the U.S. In 1875 the Page Act prohibited the migration of contract laborers and alleged sex workers to the U.S. The Page Act did not require the inspection of ships for such people, though, and provided no way to enforce its provisions.

Driving federal immigration more significantly was the 1876 Henderson v. Mayor of New York Supreme Court decision that outlawed all state head taxes on immigrants, thus leaving facilities like Castle Garden and other institutions designed to help poor immigrants without financial support.

Shipping interests and businesses liked the end of the head taxes, but reformers worried that the collapse of immigrant services would make immigrants vulnerable again to swindlers and abusers. They called for federal regulation of immigration. At the same time, agitation against Chinese and Pacific Island immigration in the West continued, and legislators in eastern states worried that the end of the head taxes would stick them with impoverished immigrants in their borders.

Congress didn’t fast-track any such regulation because immigration was falling after the Panic of 1873. But as it began to rise again in 1879, and as Republicans realized they had to court anti-Chinese votes in California after a razor-thin loss there in 1880, lawmakers turned back to the issue.

In 1882, Congress passed the nation’s first sweeping federal regulations of immigration, with not one law, but two. The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of Chinese workers, although not scholars, diplomats, or businessmen. Three months later, the Immigration Act of 1882 imposed a 50-cent head tax on arriving immigrants and prohibited the entry of convicts, mentally ill individuals, and “any person unable to take care of him or herself.”

Nine years later, in 1891, Congress modified the 1882 Immigration Act to expand government control of immigration and to authorize and fund a federal immigration bureau that would both process legal immigrants and enforce immigration restrictions against those deemed unable to enter the U.S. The new law expanded the reasons that individuals could be rejected from the U.S, including physical illness with contagious diseases. The law made it clear that the federal government would have to replace Castle Garden with its own facility.

Officials turned to Ellis Island in upper New York Harbor offshore from Castle Garden, expanding the former site of oyster beds with landfill until eventually it came to cover about 27.5 acres. On the site, the government built a two-story structure as a main receiving building, then added a hospital, utility plant, laundry, offices, and a detention center.

Immigrants arrived at Ellis Island after a two-week journey from Europe. After entering New York Harbor, they sailed by the nearby Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island, dedicated just six years before the facility at Ellis Island opened. A gift to the people of the United States from the people )of France, Lady Liberty stood on a broken chain and shackle that symbolized the abolition of slavery in the U.S., and held up a torch to the newcomers. She held a tablet that represented the law. It was engraved with “July IV MDCCLXXVI”—July 4, 1776, the date of the Declaration of Independence.

When the immigrants’ ship anchored in New York Harbor, healthy first-class and second-class passengers, who had received a brief examination aboard ship, did not have to undergo the inspections the third-class passengers did. Those passengers, along with any people who were sick, boarded a barge or a ferry for the inspection station on Ellis Island. Once they arrived, they could expect to wait three to five hours for what would be an inspection of just a few minutes if they were in good health. Doctors would examine them for obvious illness, and officials would try to make sure they would be able to support themselves. Because steamship companies had to pay for the return trip of anyone who couldn’t pass inspection, as well as a fine for bringing those folks ineligible for immigration, they performed their own inspections in Europe, prescreening the people who arrived at Ellis Island.

On June 15, 1897, the wooden buildings of the original Emigrant Landing Depot burned to the ground, taking with them all immigration records held there since 1855. The government rebuilt, this time making the buildings fireproof. The new facility’s Registry Room, known as the Great Hall, served as many as 5,000 people a day. After arrival, the newcomers sat on benches under the huge arched windows and the spectacular Gustavino tiled ceiling, waiting to be called. After medical inspectors determined their physical fitness, legal inspectors asked the immigrants’ name, home town, occupation, destination, and how much money they had.

Once through their inspection, immigrants proceeded to the “Stairs of Separation.” Those bound for New York or New England moved down the left stairs. Immigrants headed anywhere else went down the stairs on the right. The middle stairs were for immigrants headed for the hospital or to dormitories to wait for a special board of inquiry hearing on their case. Those detained made up about 20% of those arriving, but ultimately only about 2% of them were denied entry.

From Ellis Island the newcomers rejoined family and friends or made their way to other states to work in factories or mines, or on farms. In 1965, Ellis Island became part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, formalizing its connection to Lady Liberty and the poem inscribed on the base of the statue in 1903. Emma Lazarus turned away from the old Colossus of Rhodes, the giant statue of the Greek sun god Helios that stood at the entrance to the harbor of the island of Rhodes and was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, to offer the world “The New Colossus,” a woman, Lady Liberty, the “Mother of Exiles.”

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

January 2, 2026 (Friday)

Just after midnight on January 1, in a private ceremony in the long-closed former City Hall subway station in Manhattan, New York Attorney General Letitia James swore Zohran Mamdani into office as mayor of New York on a historic Quran. Hours later, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) swore Mamdani in publicly in a ceremony on the steps of City Hall.
“My fellow New Yorkers—today begins a new era,” Mamdani said.

The new mayor emphasized that he represents the everyday people of New York City, “construction workers in steel-toed boots and halal cart vendors whose knees ache from working all day” and “neighbors who carry a plate of food to the elderly couple down the hall, those in a rush who still lift strangers’ strollers up subway stairs.” “I stand alongside over one million New Yorkers who voted for this day nearly two months ago,” Mamdani said, ”and I stand just as resolutely alongside those who did not…. I promise you this: if you are a New Yorker, I am your Mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you.”

Mamdani identified this era as “an opportunity to transform and reinvent.” “A moment like this comes rarely,” he said, and “arer still is it the people themselves whose hands are the ones upon the levers of change.”

“To those who insist that the era of big government is over,” Mamdani said, “hear me when I say this—no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.

“For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public. I cannot blame anyone who has come to question the role of government, whose faith in democracy has been eroded by decades of apathy. We will restore that trust by walking a different path—one where government is no longer solely the final recourse for those struggling, one where excellence is no longer the exception.”

Mamdani recalled past city leaders who called for an end to economic and social inequalities and celebrated the “gorgeous mosaic” that is New York City. Men like Bill de Blasio, David Dinkins, and Fiorello La Guardia believed “that New York could belong to more than just a privileged few,” Mamdani said. “It could belong to those who operate our subways and rake our parks, those who feed us biryani and beef patties, picanha and pastrami on rye” if they used the government “to work hardest for those who work hardest.” He promised to “resurrect that legacy.”

He called for everyday Americans to write a new story for New York City, weaving together the many languages, religions, and countries from which they came to become New Yorkers. He promised that city leaders would not try to divide New Yorkers, but rather would work to bring them together. Rather than using “the good grammar of civility…to mask agendas of cruelty,” he said, they would “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

The policies he promised are not simply about lowering costs, he said, but about “the lives we fill with freedom.” For too long, he said, “freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it.” “Here,” he said, “where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home.”

Mamdani’s speech was a declaration of a new kind of modern politics that focuses on “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” For decades, the Republican Party has called for dismantling the government, arguing that regulations and taxes were destroying Americans’ freedom from constraints. But for most Americans, government regulation and investments in social welfare like education and infrastructure guarantee freedom to build a life that is not cramped by preventable obstacles, including those imposed by the wealthy and powerful.

The idea of government regulation and a basic social safety net to permit Americans to live their lives to their fullest potential was a key principle of the New Deal launched by Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, and Mamdani was right to note that the New Deal was born in New York City.

It was in New York City that turn-of-the-century reformers like Frances Perkins recognized the desperate need of urban workers for laws that would protect them from workplace injuries, provide a safety net for widows and orphans, and guarantee a living wage. Those reformers worked with the Democratic Tammany Hall machine to push such legislation through the legislature, where it picked up support from Republicans. In the first three years after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York passed 36 bipartisan laws regulating factories. Other states, especially those with their own history of progressive reform, quickly followed suit.

FDR came from this political ferment, but reform quickly became bipartisan in New York City, where Republicans had their own history of progressivism under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt. In 1933, after a political scandal involving Tammany Hall, New Yorkers elected Republican Fiorello La Guardia to be their mayor after he ran a campaign supporting FDR for president. La Guardia helped to rebuild New York City’s economy during the Great Depression.

By recalling La Guardia and the New Deal, Mamdani was rejecting the modern ideology that demonizes government action rather than celebrating it. He appears to be in good company: an Economist/YouGov poll released on December 30 showed that 80% of Americans believe that “political institutions have been captured by the rich and powerful,” 82% believe that “elites are out of touch with the realities of everyday life,” and 74% believe that “leaders who come from ordinary backgrounds better represent people like me.”

One of Mamdani’s first official acts was designed to restore faith in government by attacking corruption. Mamdami revoked every executive order issued by the previous mayor, Eric Adams, after September 26, 2024. It was on that date that Adams was indicted on five federal charges of public corruption, including bribery, wire fraud, illegal campaign contributions, and conspiracy. After Adams spoke highly of President Donald J. Trump and appeared to agree to cooperate with his immigrant sweeps, the Justice Department in February 2025 moved to drop the charges. The evidence of corruption prompted multiple resignations from the Department of Justice.

In contrast to 34-year-old Mamdani’s inauguration in New York City, the Wall Street Journal on the same day published a story about President Donald Trump’s “signs of aging.” Authors Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Meridith McGraw note that at 79, Trump is “the oldest man to assume the presidency” and, “according to people close to him,” “is showing signs of aging in public and private.” He gets little sleep and has been recorded falling asleep at public events, appears to be having trouble hearing, doesn’t exercise regularly, and eats “a diet heavy on salty and fatty foods, such as hamburgers and french fries.” Trump told the journalists that he does not always follow the advice of his doctors because “I have very good genetics.”

After learning that the Wall Street Journal was writing about his health, Trump called the authors to “express…irritation about the public debate over his health.” The authors made it clear that Trump and his doctor say he is in excellent health, and his aides say he keeps a busy schedule.

The Wall Street Journal article was significant not because it acknowledges weaknesses many journalists have already recorded, but because a leading right-leaning media outlet is suggesting that Trump is not up to the task of the presidency.

This, in turn, suggests less about the president’s condition than about the danger for the Republican Party of having Trump at its head going into the 2026 midterm elections. On December 31, Republican polling firm Cygnal reported that in generic polling, 49% of Independents favored Democrats and only 29% opted for Republicans. The Independent’s Washington bureau chief, Eric Michael Garcia, called the poll “a flare gun for Republicans.”

Over Tuesday, December 30, and Wednesday, December 31, U.S. Southern Command announced it struck another five small boats that it claims were being operated by “narco-terrorists.” It killed another 13 people and possibly left some survivors. These latest strikes bring the total to at least 35 and the number of people killed to at least 115.
This morning, at 2:58, Trump’s social media account posted about the ongoing Iranian protests that have been sparked by the skyrocketing cost of living, writing: “If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

At 6:56 this morning, Trump posted on social media that “The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED’ (Meaning, was correct on 100% of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice president, was willing to take. P.S., I strongly believe that anyone running for President, or Vice President, should be mandatorily forced to take a strong, meaningful, and proven Cognitive Examination. Our great country cannot be run by ‘STUPID’ or INCOMPETENT PEOPLE! President DJT.”

Later in the morning, he posted one image of a dead bird near a windmill with the caption “Eagles going down!” and another with birds near windmills saying: “Killing birds by the millions!” MeidasTouch noted that the first image was a 2010 picture of a red kite in Spain and the other was a 2006 image from Taiwan.

Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark asked: “What does it mean when your doctors keep insisting you redo the cognitive exam?”

Heather Cox Richardson on How the Trump Administration is Pursuing ‘A Nazi Worldview’

Link.

January 3, 2026 (Saturday)

Today was the legal deadline for the Department of Justice to submit to Congress a written justification for any documents from the Epstein files that the department had redacted or withheld. But it seems unlikely the Justice Department met this deadline because it has missed the December 19 deadline for releasing the files themselves. Both of those deadlines were established by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed overwhelmingly by Congress on November 19, 2025.
Information from those files continues to trickle out. Those that have been released suggest the Department of Justice considered charging “co-conspirators” and that Trump traveled on Epstein’s private plane with Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, along with alleged victims, on several occasions. Mar-a-Lago routinely sent employees to perform massages and other spa services at Epstein’s home, where he exposed himself to those employees. According to Daniel Ruetenik of CBS News, video released on December 23 and 24, 2025, contradicts previous statements about the surveillance system in the prison in which sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in August 2019.

Trump has taken a hit on his domestic policy lately, as well. After the Supreme Court on December 23, 2025, rejected the administration’s argument that it had the power to deploy federalized National Guard troops in and around Chicago, Trump announced on December 31 that the administration is removing National Guard troops from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. Then he claimed that the troops had “greatly reduced” crime in those cities and vowed to “come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again—Only a question of time!”

“Donald Trump’s lying again,” Democratic Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted on social media. “He lost in court when Illinois stood up against his attempt to militarize American cities with the National Guard. Now Trump is forced to stand down.” “If President Trump has finally chosen to follow court orders and demobilize our troops,” said Democratic Oregon governor Tina Kotek, “that’s a big win for Oregonians and for the rule of law.”

And then, on New Year’s Eve, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a 255-page transcript of former special counsel Jack Smith’s December 17 closed-door testimony before the committee. The fact they chose to release it at a time when most Americans are not paying attention to the news tells you all you need to know about what Smith said. Republicans have insisted that Smith’s indictments of Trump were a sign that former president Joe Biden’s Justice Department was “weaponized” against Trump and MAGA supporters, but in his testimony—under oath—Smith said Trump was guilty.

As Parker Molloy covered in The Present Age, Smith said that his office had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.” Smith told the committee that the evidence for the indictment came not from the president’s enemies, but from Republicans who had worked for Trump, campaigned for him, and wanted him to win in 2020.

It is against this backdrop that the Trump administration launched a strike against Venezuela in the early hours of Saturday, January 3. Without consulting Congress, officials ordered the military to seize president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, flying them to New York City to face federal charges newly announced by the Southern District of New York.

Trump insists that Maduro is working with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to attack the U.S. with illegal narcotics. This has been the justification for U.S. strikes on small boats, apparently from Venezuela, that the administration claims have been trafficking drugs to the U.S. The administration has implied the deadly drugs it claims the boats are trafficking are illicit fentanyl, although it has told Congress they were transporting cocaine, which it has now indicted Maduro for trafficking.

But aside from drugs, Trump and his cronies have also increasingly emphasized their conviction that Venezuela “stole” oil from the U.S. and must return it. This appears to be a reference to the loss of U.S. rigs, pipelines, and other facilities when Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the oil companies operating within its borders on January 1, 1976, although Trump might mean the expansion of those seizures under president Hugo Chávez starting in 2007.

This morning, Trump informed the American people of what had happened in Caracas by calling in to Fox & Friends on the Fox News Channel from Mar-a-Lago to describe the strikes and the extraction of Maduro and Flores. He praised the team and boasted that no other country could have done what the U.S. did. “I mean, I watched it literally like I was watching a television show. And, uh… if you would’ve seen the speed, the violence—you know they say that, ‘the speed, the violence,’ they use that term—it’s uh, just, it was an amazing thing, an amazing job that these people did.”

In a midday press conference, members of the administration fleshed out the story of what they are calling “Operation Absolute Resolve.” Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to emphasize that the attack and extraction of Maduro and Flores were a law enforcement mission, Trump made it clear the goal was regime change in order to gain control of Venezuela’s oil. The administration acted unilaterally, without consulting Congress, and in apparent violation of international law.

Slurring his words and repeating himself as he read from a script and occasionally wandered off it, Trump called the operation “an assault like people have not seen since World War II” and said it was “one of the most stunning effective and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.”

Trump said the U.S. will “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” evidently not interested in supporting Edmundo González, the former diplomat who beat Maduro in the 2024 presidential election.

Trump turned immediately to Venezuela’s oil industry, saying that it had been “a total bust…pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping.” He explained that “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.” “This partnership of Venezuela with the United States of America,” he said, “will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe.”

If such a mission required U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela, he said, the administration was not afraid of such deployment.

The president launched into the language of his rally speeches—rote by now—before returning to oil. Although international law is clear that countries own the natural resources within their own territories, he claimed that Venezuela had “unilaterally seized, and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars…. They took all of our property. It was our property. We built it…and they stole it through force. This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country, considered the largest theft of property in the history of our country.”

And then he hit on the larger foreign policy principle his attack on Venezuela is designed to establish. “America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people and drive us back into and out of our own hemisphere,” he said. He said that the U.S. has now replaced the 1823 Monroe Doctrine—which he called “a big deal” that we “forgot” without explaining that it warned foreign countries from colonizing South America—with the “Donroe Document”: American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.

After World War II, the United States and its allies and partners put in place a rules-based international order to prevent future world conflicts. Under that order, the members of the United Nations agreed they would not threaten or attack another country. Russian president Vladimir Putin has sought to replace that rules-based order with the idea that powerful countries will create spheres of influence in their regions. That new world order would justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now the U.S. invasion of Venezuela with the promise that the U.S. is going to “run” the country from now on, as part of its quest to dominate the Western Hemisphere, means the U.S. has abandoned the post–World War II international order and is siding with Russia’s vision.

“By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Mr. Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors,” wrote the New York Times editorial board. That justification seems to be the point.

Trump warned Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro that he has to “watch his ass,” said “Cuba is going to be something we’ll end up talking about,” and warned that “something will have to be done about Mexico.” “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he said. Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, posted an image of Greenland covered with an American flag and the caption “SOON.”
When Maduro arrived in New York City tonight, official White House social media channels, including that of the president, showed him on his perp walk.
By afternoon, though, the triumphal story seemed to be sagging.

The New York Times reported that at least 40 civilians and military personnel were killed in the attack, which hit a three-story apartment building.

Although Trump told reporters that Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodríguez had been sworn into the presidency and that she seemed willing to work with the U.S. “to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Rodríguez insisted in a televised address to Venezuelans today that Maduro is the rightful president of Venezuela and must be released, and said the U.S. had “launched an unprecedented military aggression.” “If there is one thing that the Venezuelan people and this country are clear about,” she said, “it is that we will never again be slaves, that we will never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature.”

Ben Lefebvre, Zack Colman, and James Bikales of Politico reported that oil companies are leery of Trump’s plan that they will invest billions of dollars in rebuilding Venezuela’s oil industry. Two sources told the journalists that while oil companies would like reimbursement for the equipment and infrastructure they left behind in Venezuela when its government nationalized the oil fields, they are unenthusiastic about Trump’s demand that they invest heavily in rebuilding Venezuela’s destroyed petroleum industry in order to recoup their losses.

They say they have no idea how badly the infrastructure has decayed, and little interest in investing when it is not clear who will be running the country in the future. The administration has failed to reach out to oil executives with a long-term plan, experts told the journalists. One source said “it feels very much a shoot-ready-aim exercise.”

That lack of preparation appears to be in keeping with the overall post-raid planning. Trump told reporters today that administration officials were “designating various people” to “run” Venezuela, “and we’re gonna let you know who those people are.” Tonight Robbie Gramer and Juan Forero of the Wall Street Journal said the administration is “racing to assemble an interim governing structure for Venezuela” but noted that “he lack of details about what comes next led some U.S. officials to question why there was no detailed plan in place well before deposing Maduro.”

Gramer and Forero noted that Venezuela is twice the size of California and has 28 million people in it, millions of whom continue to support Maduro, whose government remains largely intact. Those supporters include armed cocaine-trafficking groups, some of whom fought as guerillas in Colombia, and an army of more than 100,000 soldiers.

Current and former U.S. officials told the reporter that the next phase of Trump’s operation in Venezuela is full of risks and the potential for blunders.

Thanks.

January 4, 2026 (Sunday)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the administration’s message about its strikes on Venezuela to the Sunday talk shows this morning. It did not go well.

Asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week under what legal authority the U.S. is going to run Venezuela, as Trump vowed to do, Rubio served up a lot of words but ultimately fell back on the idea that the U.S. has economic leverage over Venezuela because it can seize sanctioned oil tankers. Seizing ships will give the U.S. power to force the Venezuelan government to do as the U.S. wants, Rubio suggested. This is a very different message than Trump delivered yesterday when he claimed that the people standing behind him on the stage—including Rubio—would be running Venezuela.

When Stephanopoulos asked Rubio if he was, indeed, running Venezuela, Rubio again suggested that the U.S. was only pressuring the Venezuelan government by seizing sanctioned oil tankers, and said he was involved in those policies. When Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press also asked if Rubio was running Venezuela, Rubio seemed frustrated that “People fixating on that. Here’s the bottom line on it is we expect to see changes in Venezuela.” Historian Kevin Kruse commented: “Yeah, people are fixating on a Cabinet Secretary being given a sovereign country to run because the president waged war without congressional approval and kidnapped the old leader. Weird that they’d get hung up on that.”

When Stephanopoulos asked why the administration thought it didn’t need congressional authorization for the strikes, Rubio said they didn’t need congressional approval because the U.S. did not invade or occupy another country. The attack, he said, was simply a law enforcement operation to arrest Maduro. Rubio said something similar yesterday, but President Donald J. Trump immediately undercut that argument by saying the U.S. intended to take over Venezuela’s oil fields and run the country.

Indeed, if the strikes were a law enforcement operation, officials will need to explain how officers managed to kill so many civilians, as well as members of security forces. Mariana Martinez of the New York Times reported today that the number of those killed in the operation has risen to 80.

Rubio highlighted again that the Trump administration wants to control the Western Hemisphere, and he went on to threaten Cuba. Simon Rosenberg of The Hopium Chronicles articulated the extraordinary smallness of the Trump administration’s vision when he wrote: “We must also marvel at the titanic idiocy of our new ‘Donroe Doctrine’ for it turns America from a global power into a regional one by choice. I still can’t really believe they are going through with this for it is so batsh*t f-ing crazy, and does so much lasting harm to our interests.”

Shortly after Trump told reporters yesterday that Venezuela’s former vice president, now president, Delcy Rodríguez is “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Rodríguez demanded Maduro’s return and said Venezuela would “never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature.” Indeed, U.S. extraction of Maduro and threats to “run” Venezuela are more likely to boost the Maduro government than weaken it.

In a phone call today with Michael Scherer of The Atlantic, Trump threatened Rodríguez, saying that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Tonight on Air Force One, Trump told reporters that the U.S., not Rodríguez, is in charge of Venezuela.

Trump also told Scherer that he does indeed intend to continue to assert U.S. control in the Western Hemisphere, telling Scherer that “we do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense.” Greenland is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), meaning it is already part of U.S. national defense.

Although he ran for office on the idea of getting the U.S. out of the business of foreign intervention, Trump embraced the idea of regime change in Venezuela, telling Scherer: “You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse.” He continued: “Rebuilding is not a bad thing in Venezuela’s case. The country’s gone to hell. It’s a failed country. It’s a totally failed country. It’s a country that’s a disaster in every way.”

At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris noted that military intervention in Venezuela is even more unpopular with the American people “than Trump’s tariffs and health care cuts.” In September, only 16% of Americans wanted a “U.S. invasion of Venezuela,” with 62% against it. A December poll showed that 60% of likely voters opposed “sending American troops into Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power.” Only 33% approved. Even support for strikes against the small boats in the Caribbean could not get majority support: 53% opposed them while only 42% approved.

“By the time American forces touched Venezuelan soil early Saturday morning,” Morris writes, “Trump had already lost the public.”

But officials in the administration no longer appear to care what the American people want, instead simply gathering power into their own hands for the benefit of themselves and their cronies, trusting that Republican politicians will go along and the American people will not object enough to force the issue. The refusal of the Department of Justice to obey the clear direction of the Epstein Files Transparency Act seems to have been a test of Congress’s resolve, and so far, it is a gamble the administration appears to be winning.

Morris notes that a December CBS poll showed that 75% of Americans, including 58% of Republicans, correctly believed a president must get approval from Congress before taking military action against Venezuela. The president did not get that approval. By law, the president must inform the Gang of Eight before engaging in military strikes, but if an emergency situation prevents that notification, then the president must inform the Gang of Eight within 48 hours. The Gang of Eight is made up of the top leaders of both parties in both chambers of Congress, as well as the top leaders from both parties on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) who as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee is a member of the Gang of Eight, told CBS’s Margaret Brennan this morning that neither he nor House minority leader and fellow Gang of Eight member Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had been briefed on the strikes. Himes said: “I was delighted to hear that Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been in regular contact with the administration. I’ve had zero outreach, and no Democrat that I’m aware of has had any outreach whatsoever. So apparently we’re now in a world where the legal obligation to keep the Congress informed only applies to your party, which is really something.”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)—also a member of the Gang of Eight—told reporters that he hadn’t been briefed either and that the administration had deliberately misled Congress in three classified briefings before the strikes. In those briefings, officials assured lawmakers that the administration was not planning to take military action in Venezuela and was not pursuing regime change. “They’ve kept everyone in the total dark,” he said.

Nonetheless, Himes told Brennan that he thought Trump’s Venezuelan adventure would not go well: “We’re in the euphoria period of…acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2003, when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011, when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. These were very, very bad people, by the way, much, much worse than Maduro and Venezuela, which was never a significant national security threat to the United States. But we’re in that euphoria phase. And what we learned the day after the euphoria phase is that it’s an awful lot easier to break a country than it is to actually do what the president promised to do, which is to run it…. et’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning knowing what? My God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.”

Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) was more direct: “The U.S. attack on Venezuela is illegal,” he posted. “Congress never authorized this use of military force. I will vote to stop it. This is insane. Health care costs and food prices are surging. Trump’s response is we’re going to run another country. Batsh*t crazy.”

Neophyte said:

January 4, 2026 (Sunday)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the administration’s message about its strikes on Venezuela to the Sunday talk shows this morning. It did not go well.

Asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week under what legal authority the U.S. is going to run Venezuela, as Trump vowed to do, Rubio served up a lot of words but ultimately fell back on the idea that the U.S. has economic leverage over Venezuela because it can seize sanctioned oil tankers. Seizing ships will give the U.S. power to force the Venezuelan government to do as the U.S. wants, Rubio suggested. This is a very different message than Trump delivered yesterday when he claimed that the people standing behind him on the stage—including Rubio—would be running Venezuela.

When Stephanopoulos asked Rubio if he was, indeed, running Venezuela, Rubio again suggested that the U.S. was only pressuring the Venezuelan government by seizing sanctioned oil tankers, and said he was involved in those policies. When Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press also asked if Rubio was running Venezuela, Rubio seemed frustrated that “People fixating on that. Here’s the bottom line on it is we expect to see changes in Venezuela.” Historian Kevin Kruse commented: “Yeah, people are fixating on a Cabinet Secretary being given a sovereign country to run because the president waged war without congressional approval and kidnapped the old leader. Weird that they’d get hung up on that.”

When Stephanopoulos asked why the administration thought it didn’t need congressional authorization for the strikes, Rubio said they didn’t need congressional approval because the U.S. did not invade or occupy another country. The attack, he said, was simply a law enforcement operation to arrest Maduro. Rubio said something similar yesterday, but President Donald J. Trump immediately undercut that argument by saying the U.S. intended to take over Venezuela’s oil fields and run the country.

Indeed, if the strikes were a law enforcement operation, officials will need to explain how officers managed to kill so many civilians, as well as members of security forces. Mariana Martinez of the New York Times reported today that the number of those killed in the operation has risen to 80.

Rubio highlighted again that the Trump administration wants to control the Western Hemisphere, and he went on to threaten Cuba. Simon Rosenberg of The Hopium Chronicles articulated the extraordinary smallness of the Trump administration’s vision when he wrote: “We must also marvel at the titanic idiocy of our new ‘Donroe Doctrine’ for it turns America from a global power into a regional one by choice. I still can’t really believe they are going through with this for it is so batsh*t f-ing crazy, and does so much lasting harm to our interests.”

Shortly after Trump told reporters yesterday that Venezuela’s former vice president, now president, Delcy Rodríguez is “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Rodríguez demanded Maduro’s return and said Venezuela would “never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature.” Indeed, U.S. extraction of Maduro and threats to “run” Venezuela are more likely to boost the Maduro government than weaken it.

In a phone call today with Michael Scherer of The Atlantic, Trump threatened Rodríguez, saying that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Tonight on Air Force One, Trump told reporters that the U.S., not Rodríguez, is in charge of Venezuela.

Trump also told Scherer that he does indeed intend to continue to assert U.S. control in the Western Hemisphere, telling Scherer that “we do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense.” Greenland is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), meaning it is already part of U.S. national defense.

Although he ran for office on the idea of getting the U.S. out of the business of foreign intervention, Trump embraced the idea of regime change in Venezuela, telling Scherer: “You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse.” He continued: “Rebuilding is not a bad thing in Venezuela’s case. The country’s gone to hell. It’s a failed country. It’s a totally failed country. It’s a country that’s a disaster in every way.”

At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris noted that military intervention in Venezuela is even more unpopular with the American people “than Trump’s tariffs and health care cuts.” In September, only 16% of Americans wanted a “U.S. invasion of Venezuela,” with 62% against it. A December poll showed that 60% of likely voters opposed “sending American troops into Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power.” Only 33% approved. Even support for strikes against the small boats in the Caribbean could not get majority support: 53% opposed them while only 42% approved.

“By the time American forces touched Venezuelan soil early Saturday morning,” Morris writes, “Trump had already lost the public.”

But officials in the administration no longer appear to care what the American people want, instead simply gathering power into their own hands for the benefit of themselves and their cronies, trusting that Republican politicians will go along and the American people will not object enough to force the issue. The refusal of the Department of Justice to obey the clear direction of the Epstein Files Transparency Act seems to have been a test of Congress’s resolve, and so far, it is a gamble the administration appears to be winning.

Morris notes that a December CBS poll showed that 75% of Americans, including 58% of Republicans, correctly believed a president must get approval from Congress before taking military action against Venezuela. The president did not get that approval. By law, the president must inform the Gang of Eight before engaging in military strikes, but if an emergency situation prevents that notification, then the president must inform the Gang of Eight within 48 hours. The Gang of Eight is made up of the top leaders of both parties in both chambers of Congress, as well as the top leaders from both parties on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) who as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee is a member of the Gang of Eight, told CBS’s Margaret Brennan this morning that neither he nor House minority leader and fellow Gang of Eight member Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had been briefed on the strikes. Himes said: “I was delighted to hear that Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been in regular contact with the administration. I’ve had zero outreach, and no Democrat that I’m aware of has had any outreach whatsoever. So apparently we’re now in a world where the legal obligation to keep the Congress informed only applies to your party, which is really something.”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)—also a member of the Gang of Eight—told reporters that he hadn’t been briefed either and that the administration had deliberately misled Congress in three classified briefings before the strikes. In those briefings, officials assured lawmakers that the administration was not planning to take military action in Venezuela and was not pursuing regime change. “They’ve kept everyone in the total dark,” he said.

Nonetheless, Himes told Brennan that he thought Trump’s Venezuelan adventure would not go well: “We’re in the euphoria period of…acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2003, when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011, when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. These were very, very bad people, by the way, much, much worse than Maduro and Venezuela, which was never a significant national security threat to the United States. But we’re in that euphoria phase. And what we learned the day after the euphoria phase is that it’s an awful lot easier to break a country than it is to actually do what the president promised to do, which is to run it…. et’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning knowing what? My God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.”

Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) was more direct: “The U.S. attack on Venezuela is illegal,” he posted. “Congress never authorized this use of military force. I will vote to stop it. This is insane. Health care costs and food prices are surging. Trump’s response is we’re going to run another country. Batsh*t crazy.”

The bad people part what a joke.
Many of the bad leaders were installed by the USA to counter the commies or some other Middle Eastern nation.
Allowed to do whatever they wanted until they didn’t toe the line anymore.

Thanks Neophyte.

January 5, 2026 (Monday)

Five years ago, on January 6, 2021, more than 2,000 rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the process of counting the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president of the United States. They tried to hunt down House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and chanted their intention to “Hang Mike Pence,” the vice president. They fantasized that they were following in the footsteps of the American Founders, about to start a new nation. Newly elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5, 2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history.” On January 6 she wrote: “Today is 1776.”

In fact, it was not 1776 but 1861, the year insurrectionists tried to overthrow the government in order to establish minority rule. They wanted to take away the right at the center of American democracy—our right to determine our own destiny—in order to keep Donald J. Trump in the White House, making sure the power of elite white men could not be challenged. It was no accident that the rioters carried a Confederate battle flag.

Since the 1980s, Republicans pushed the idea that a popular government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends. As cuts to regulation, taxation, and the nation’s social safety net began to hollow out the middle class, Republicans pushed the idea that the country’s problems came from greedy minorities and women who wanted to work outside the home. More and more, they insisted that the federal government was stealing tax dollars and destroying society, and they encouraged individual men to take charge of the country.

After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, more commonly known as the motor voter law, enabling people to register to vote at motor vehicle departments, Republicans increasingly insisted Democrats were cheating the system by relying on the votes of noncitizens, although there was never any evidence for this charge.

As wealth continued to move upward, the idea that individuals and paramilitary groups must “reclaim” America from undeserving Americans who were taking tax dollars and cheating to win elections became embedded in the Republican Party. By 2014, Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters “patriots” when they showed up armed to meet officials from the Bureau of Land Management who tried to impound Bundy’s cattle because he owed more than $1 million in grazing fees for running cattle on public land.

The idea of reclaiming the country for white men by destroying the federal government grew, along with the idea that Democrats could win elections only by cheating. In 2016, Trump insisted that his female Democratic opponent belonged in jail and that he alone could save the country from the Washington, D.C., “swamp.” Other Republican leaders who had initially shunned him began to support him when it became clear that he could mobilize a new crop of disaffected voters who could put Republicans into office.

And they continued to support him, claiming initially that he could be kept in check by establishment Republicans like his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who moved from leading the Republican National Committee to the White House for the first six months of Trump’s first term. In his first months in office, Trump delivered the tax cut Republican leaders wanted, as well as the appointment of one out of every four federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices, who would protect the Republican project in the courts.

But the idea that Trump could be kept in check fell apart in September 2019, when it appeared he was trying to rig the 2020 election. A whistleblower revealed that Trump had called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in July 2019 to demand that Zelensky smear former vice president Joe Biden, who was beating Trump in most polls going into the 2020 election season. Until Zelensky did so, Trump said, the administration would not release the money Congress had appropriated to fund Ukraine’s fight against Russia, which had invaded Ukraine in 2014.

The attempt to withhold congressionally appropriated funds in order to tilt an election was a glaring violation of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act codifying the executive branch’s duty to execute the laws Congress passed. In the congressional investigation that followed, witnesses revealed that Trump’s cronies were running a secret scheme in Ukraine to undermine official U.S. policy and benefit Trump’s allies.

Republicans in 1974 had turned against President Richard Nixon for far less, but although Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said not a single Republican senator believed Trump, they stood behind him nonetheless. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues: “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing…. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

But once acquitted, Trump cut loose from any oversight. He sought revenge and insisted that “hen somebody is President of the United States, the authority is total.” “The federal government has absolute power,” he said, and he had the “absolute right” to use that power if he wanted to.

As early as 2019, Trump had “joked” about staying in power regardless of the 2020 election results, and on October 31, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon told a private audience that Trump was going to declare that he had won the 2020 election no matter what. Trump knew that Democratic mail-in ballots would show up in the vote totals later than Republican votes cast on Election Day, creating a “red mirage” that would be overtaken later by Democratic votes.

“Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said, by calling the election early and saying that the later votes were somehow illegitimate. “That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” Bannon continued: “Here’s the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again…. He’s gonna say ‘F*ck you. How about that?’ Because…he’s done his last election.”

Early returns on Election Night 2020, November 3, showed Trump ahead. But, more quickly than anyone expected, Democratic votes turned the key state of Arizona blue, and the Fox News Channel called the race for Biden. Furious, Trump took to the airwaves at about 2:30 the next morning and declared he had won, although ballots were still being counted and several battleground states had no clear winner. “We won’t stand for this,” he told supporters, assuring them he had won. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop.”

But it didn’t, and by the time all the ballots were counted, the election was not close: Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.

Trump insisted a Democrat could not have won honestly. Over the next few months, his campaign demanded recounts, all of which confirmed that Biden won. Trump or his surrogates filed and lost at least 63 lawsuits over the 2020 election, most dismissed for lack of evidence.

As legal challenges failed, Trump pressured Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” to win the state of Georgia. Trump’s allies plotted for Trump supporters in seven battleground states to meet secretly and submit false slates of electors for Trump. Two slates would enable Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count the electors from the now-contested states, so that either Trump would be elected outright, or Pence could say there was no clear winner and send the election to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. Since there were more Republican delegations than Democratic ones, Trump would be president.

“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Trump’s evangelical chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote on November 24, 2020, to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni.

Determined to retain control of the government, certain congressional Republicans went along with the charade that the election had been stolen. Trump allies in the House began to echo Trump’s accusations and to say they would question the counts from certain states. Such challenges required a paired vote with a senator, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who saw himself as a top 2024 presidential contender, and Ted Cruz of Texas, who didn’t want to be undercut, led 11 other senators in a revolt to challenge the ballots.

For weeks, Trump had urged his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., for a “Stop the Steal” rally arranged for January 6, the day Congress would count the certified electoral ballots. Speaking at the Ellipse near the White House that morning, Trump and his surrogates told the crowd that they had won the election, and Trump warned: “We are going to have to fight much harder.”

Trump claimed that Chinese-driven socialists were taking over the country and told the crowd: “We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy.” “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated…. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

And, knowing they were armed, he told them to march to the Capitol.

As Trump’s supporters attacked, lawmakers from their hiding spots begged the president to call off his supporters, but he did nothing for more than three hours. After 5:40, when the National Guard had been deployed without his orders, thus making it clear the rioters would be overpowered before either taking over the government themselves or giving him an excuse to declare martial law, Trump issued a video statement.

“I know you’re hurt,” he said. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now…. We love you. You’re very special.” He tweeted: “Remember this day forever!”

When the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for a second time on January 13, 2021, for incitement of insurrection, only 10 Republicans voted in favor, while 197 voted no (4 did not vote). In the Senate trial, 7 Republican senators joined the Democrats to convict, while 43 continued to back Trump.

In a speech after his vote to acquit, McConnell said, “There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” but said he must answer for his actions in court. “Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office,” McConnell said. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

In November 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to investigate Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump for four felonies associated with his attempt to retain power illegally.

Trump fought back, arguing that he had presidential immunity for his actions. Smith asked the Supreme Court to decide the case immediately, but it waited until the last possible moment, on July 1, 2024, to decide Donald J. Trump v. United States, finding that presidents have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. Trump himself had appointed three of the justices in the majority.

A second grand jury returned a new indictment stripped of the actions now immune, but by then it was too late: Trump was reelected president, and the Department of Justice has an understanding that it will not indict or prosecute a sitting president. And so, five years after the events of January 6, 2021, we are learning what it means to have a president who has demonstrated his determination to overthrow our democracy and who does not have to answer to the law.

Although he was elected with less than 50% of the votes cast, Trump claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” As soon as he took office in January 2025, the president and his henchmen flouted the 1974 Impoundment Control Act again, seizing Congress’s right to control the nation’s finances. Trump used emergency powers to ignore the Constitution and deployed troops in Democratic-led cities. When Congress required the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files, the administration largely ignored the law. Today, more than two weeks after the deadline, it had released less than 1% of the files. Ignoring the rights afforded to individuals by the Constitution, Trump is seizing people off the streets and prosecuting his perceived enemies.

Trump has taken on himself the right to go to war with another country in order to take its oil, and is openly working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since the 1940s. Today, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

That vision is a profound rejection of the principles of the rules-based international order, which was designed to use power for deterrence rather than domination. It is also a profound rejection of the principles of American democracy, a system of checks and balances to channel power into a government that could deliver stability and prosperity to all the people, not just a select few.

In 1863, when that system was unraveling under pressure from those who wanted to base society on a system of enslavement that enriched an elite, Republican president Abraham Lincoln asked Americans to remember those who had died to protect a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln asked Americans to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion,” and to resolve that “these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

“ Trump had called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in July 2019 to demand that Zelensky smear former vice president Joe Biden”

Oh to be a fly on the wall in Zelenskyy’s office that day!

It’s astonishing how Trump was even eligible to run for POTUS again after Jan 6 (and everything else), let alone elected.

Epstein files? What Epstein files?

January 6, 2026 (Tuesday)

“They say that when you win the presidency you lose the midterm,” President Donald J. Trump said today to House Republicans. “I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy. They don’t. They have a horrible policy. They do stick together. They’re violent, they’re vicious, you know. They’re vicious people.”

“They had the worst policy. How we have to even run against these people—I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator. Nobody is worse than Obama. And the people that surrounded Biden.”

And there you have it: in a rambling speech in which he jumped from topic to topic, danced, and appeared to mimic someone doing something either stupid or obscene, Trump explained the ideology behind his actions. He and MAGA Republicans have absorbed the last 40 years of Republican rhetoric to believe that Democratic policies are “horrible” and that only Republicans “have the right policy.” If that’s the case, why should Republicans even have to “run against these people?” Why even have elections? When voters choose Democrats, there’s something wrong with them, so why let them have a say? Their choice is bad by definition. Anything that they do, or have done, must be erased.

That is the ideology behind MAGA, amped up by the racism and sexism that identifies MAGA’s opponents as women, Black Americans, and people of color. In their telling, the world Americans constructed after World War II—and particularly after the 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Black and Brown voting—has destroyed the liberty of wealthy men to act without restraint. Free them, the logic goes, and they will Make America Great Again.

As tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He continued: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

“Because there are no truly free places left in our world,” he wrote, Thiel called for escaping into cyberspace, outer space, or seasteading.

While tech leaders are focusing on escaping established governments, Trump’s solution to an expanded democracy appears to be to silence the voters and lawmakers who support the “liberal consensus”—the once-bipartisan idea that the government should enable individuals to reach their greatest potential by protecting them from corporate power, poverty, lack of access to modern infrastructure, and discrimination—and to erase the policies of that consensus.

Nowhere does Trump’s conviction that he, and he alone, has the right to run the United States show more clearly than in the White House’s rewriting of the history of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol were Trump supporters determined to overthrow the free and fair election of Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes in 2020, replacing him with Trump by virtue of their belief that no Democrat could be fairly elected.

But the official White House website reversed that reality today, claiming that the insurrectionists who beat and wounded at least 140 police officers, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol building, and called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence were “peaceful patriotic protesters.” The real villains, the White House wrote in bold type, were “the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters.”

In reality, modern Republican policies have rarely served everyday people, while the policies enacted by Democratic president Joe Biden demonstrably did. Biden rejected the ideology that called for cutting taxes, regulations, and social services in the name of liberty. Instead, he urged Congress to invest in public infrastructure, creating jobs, and he shored up the social safety net.

As Biden prepared to leave office in January 2025, Trump claimed that the U.S. was in freefall, “a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” But Peter Baker reported in the New York Times that the opposite was true: Biden and his administration were leaving behind a country that was in the best shape it had been since at least 2000.

There were no U.S. troops fighting in foreign wars, murders had plummeted, deaths from drug overdoses had dropped sharply, undocumented immigration was below where it was when Trump left office in 2021, stocks had just had their best two years since the last century. The economy was growing, real wages were rising, inflation had fallen to close to its normal range, unemployment was at near-historic lows, and energy production was at historic highs. The economy had added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020.

Baker quoted chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi, who said: “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.”

Once in office, Trump set about dismantling the policies that had achieved those results. And now, after destabilizing the country at home, he is working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since World War II. In addition to an illegal attack on Venezuela to extract Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Trump is threatening Colombian president Gustavo Petro, saying “Cuba is ready to fall,” and warning Mexico to “get their act together.”

Although his sights are primarily on countries in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has also warned that if Iran starts “killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States.”

Trump has also threatened Greenland, which is a self-governing island that is part of Denmark, an ally in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As NATO allies, Greenland and the U.S. have cooperated on defense for decades, so Trump’s declaration that the U.S. needs Greenland for national defense makes no sense.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a statement Sunday: “The Kingdom of Denmark—and thus Greenland—is part of NATO and is therefore covered by the alliance’s security guarantee. We already have a defense agreement between the Kingdom and the United States today, which gives the United States wide access to Greenland. I would therefore strongly urge the United States to stop the threats against a historically close ally and against another country and another people who have said very clearly that they are not for sale,” she said.

On Monday, Fredriksen said: “If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops. That is, including our NATO and thus the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War.” Today, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Denmark issued a statement of support for Greenland, Denmark, and NATO.

In Venezuela, the U.S. took Maduro and Flores but rather than supporting the actual winner of the 2024 presidential election, Edmundo González, or opposition leader María Corina Machado, the administration left the Maduro government in place, led by former vice president Delcy Rodríguez.

María Luisa Paúl reported in the Washington Post today that in the hours since Maduro’s removal, the Venezuelan government has cracked down on those showing support for the U.S. operation. It detained at least 14 journalists, sent armed gangs into the capital, restricted protests, and arrested citizens who appeared to be “involved in promoting or supporting the armed attack by the United States of America.”

Machado said the government’s actions are “really alarming.”

Trump claims that the U.S. is “running” Venezuela, and he has dropped the pretense that he is concerned about drug traffickers or Maduro’s seizure of the presidency. Instead, he has made it clear that what he really wants is for the Venezuelan government to give him access to the country’s oil. In much the same way as he claims Democrats were responsible for January 6 because they honored the will of the voters and refused to give him the second term he wanted, Trump maintains that Venezuelans “stole” the American oil that sits under their own land.

Trump’s plan to tear up the rules-based international order and replace it with U.S. control over the Western Hemisphere will cost the world dearly, but using the U.S. military to threaten other countries and seize control of their resources does create big winners:

This evening, Trump’s social media account posted: “I am pleased to announce that the interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America. This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States! I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately. It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

Thanks.

(sigh)

January 7, 2026 (Wednesday)

This morning, a federal agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good as she was driving away from ICE agents on a residential street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. According to Minneapolis leaders, Good was a legal observer: a volunteer trained to observe police conduct in case of future legal action.
Three videos taken at the scene show a maroon SUV perpendicular on a snowy street. A silver SUV driving up the street stops. Two officers wearing badges that say “police” and body armor get out of the vehicle and walk toward the maroon car.

One of them says, “Get out of the f*cking car,” and the other reaches through the open driver’s side window while trying to open the door. The driver backs up the vehicle, and straightens the wheel as if making a three-point turn. Then she starts slowly to accelerate along the street.

A third officer who has been standing on the side of the road pulls out a gun as the car is turning away. He shoots three times. The maroon car does not hit anyone as it rolls up the street, hitting another vehicle and then a utility pole. The shooter walks briskly away, apparently uninjured.

Seen in slow motion, a video shows the wheels of the maroon vehicle were fully turned away from the shooting officer, who made no effort to jump away, clearly suggesting he did not feel as if he were in danger. His first shot went through the windshield; the next two went through the driver’s side window as the car moved past him. An onlooker shouted “What the f*ck?!”

Video taken by another eyewitness shows ICE agents refusing to allow a self-identified physician to tend to the victim and telling him to back up. Although there is no one tending the clearly visible woman in the car, an agent says: “We have medics on scene. We have our own medics.” When another bystander screams: “Where are they? WHERE ARE THEY?!” an agent tells her, “Relax.” “How can I relax?” she shouts. “You just killed my f*cking neighbor.”

Yesterday the Trump administration deployed federal agents and officers to Minneapolis for what they called the largest federal immigration operation ever carried out, eventually planning to deploy 2,000 agents. The administration has been attacking Minnesota’s Somali community, and Homeland Security Kristi Noem was present at an ICE arrest yesterday, telling a man in handcuffs, who Homeland Security later said was from Ecuador, “You will be held accountable for your crimes.”

Rebecca Santana and Michael Balsamo of the Associated Press reported that Minnesota governor Tim Walz called the deployment “a war that’s being waged against Minnesota.” “You’re seeing that we have a ridiculous surge of apparently 2,000 people not coordinating with us, that are for a show of cameras,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) insists that its actions are protecting American citizens from “the worst of the worst” criminal immigrants, so the shooting of a young white woman, married and the mother of a young child, and how that would look, made it appear eager to smear Good.

It immediately put out a statement that looked much like what it said after officers shot 30-year-old Chicago teaching assistant Marimar Martinez in October when it claimed she had “ambushed” agents, ramming their vehicle before an agent shot her five times. Footage showed that, in fact, the agents had rammed her car, and after the shooting one had sent a text message bragging: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” The Department of Justice dropped the charges it had filed against her, asking a judge to “dismiss the indictment and exonerate” Martinez and her passenger.

Today, DHS posted on social media that “ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries. This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”

Trump jumped in with his own fact-free post lying that the shooter had been run over: “I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot at her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe that he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

That both DHS and Trump posted false accounts of the shooting even as there are four videos circulating that reveal those accounts to be lies shows they no longer are making any attempt to justify their actions. Instead, they are demanding Americans abandon reality in favor of whatever the administration says. If this works, it would be a demonstration of totalitarian power, the ability to control how people think. Accepting that lie is a loyalty test.

But it is not working.

First of all, Sarah Jeong of The Verge noted that the reason there are so many videos is because “people cared enough to show up where ICE was and record them. It wasn’t just one or two legal observers, and when Good was shot, they didn’t abandon her.”

Second, elected Democrats are pushing back. “I’ve seen the video,” Governor Walz wrote. “Don’t believe this propaganda machine. The state will ensure there is a full, fair, and expeditious investigation to ensure accountability and justice.” To reporters, he said: “We’ve been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety, that someone was going to get hurt. Just yesterday I said exactly that. What we’re seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines, and conflict. It’s governing by reality TV and today that recklessness cost someone their life. I’ve reached out to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and I’m waiting to hear back.”

He told Minnesotans that, like them, he was angry, but “they want a show. We can’t give it to them. We cannot. If you protest and express your First Amendment rights, please do so peacefully as you always do. We can’t give them what they want…. To Americans, I ask you this. Please stand with Minneapolis.”

Walz prepared to call out the Minnesota National Guard if necessary, demonstrating that there would be no need for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in troops. He reminded Minnesotans that the Minnesota National Guard does not wear masks and that it is theirs, not Trump’s.

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey told reporters that the DHS statement was “bullsh*t. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed.” “To the family, I’m so deeply sorry,” Frey said. “There’s nothing that I can say right now that’s going to make you or your relatives, friends of the victim feel any better.” To ICE and other federal agents deployed in Minnesota, he added: “Get the f*ck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart…and now somebody is dead.”

But something else was also going on today. At the same time the administration was pouring gasoline on the domestic fire ICE had sparked and the international fire it had set with its attacks on Venezuela and threats against Greenland, it was quietly making a number of major financial moves.

The smallest of those moves was that today Trump asked Fulton County, Georgia, for a $6.2 million payout in attorneys’ fees and costs after the criminal charges against him in Georgia were dismissed. Trump had been indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia by pressuring Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 votes to give him a victory in the state of Georgia. In November 2025 a new special prosecutor dropped the charges, citing the difficulty of prosecuting a case against a sitting president. Trump boasted on social media of his victory over an “illegal, unconstitutional, and unAmerican hoax,” and continued to push the lie that Democrats stole the election.

Vicky Ge Huang of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial today applied for a national banking license from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, part of the Treasury Department. A banking license would integrate the Trump family’s cryptocurrency more fully into mainstream finance.

If the Treasury Department issues the license—a potential outcome that critics say reveals a major conflict of interest for the president—the president and chair of the new company would be Zach Witkoff, whose father is the son of Trump’s envoy to Russia Steve Witkoff, who the Wall Street Journal recently reported had been handpicked for his role by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The younger Witkoff started World Liberty Financial in 2024 with Trump’s sons Don Jr., Eric, and Barron.

Today, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told an audience at a Goldman Sachs energy industry event in Miami, Florida, that the United States will take control of all oil from Venezuela for the foreseeable future. Lisa Desjardins and Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour reported this afternoon that Trump administration officials have told lawmakers that they plan to put the money raised from their seizure of Venezuelan oil into bank accounts outside the U.S. Treasury. Desjardins clarified that “ources said they understood these as similar or decidedly ‘off-shore’ accounts.”

Yesterday, Trump announced that, as president of the United States, he would control the money from the sale of Venezuelan oil.

And then, this afternoon, Trump’s social media account first threatened the defense contractor Raytheon, saying that “ither Raytheon steps up, and starts investing in more upfront Investment like Plants and Equipment, or they will no longer be doing business with Department of War.”

Then, the same account posted: “After long and difficult negotiations with Senators, Congressmen, Secretaries, and other Political Representatives, I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars. This will allow us to build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe. If it weren’t for the tremendous numbers being produced by Tariffs from other Countries, many of which, in the past, have ‘ripped off’ the United States at levels never seen before, I would stay at the $1 Trillion Dollar number but, because of Tariffs, and the tremendous income they bring, amounts being generated, that would have been unthinkable in the past (especially just one year ago during the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, the Worst President in the History of our Country!), we are able to easily hit the $1.5 Trillion Dollar number while, at the same time, producing an unparalleled Military Force, and having the ability to, at the same time, pay down Debt, and likewise, pay a substantial Dividend to moderate income Patriots within our Country!”

Simon Rosenberg of The Hopium Chronicles wrote: “Trump has gone completely mad.”

Thanks.

“ The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot at her in self defense”

Next he’ll be calling them crisis actors. How does one get paid to be an agitator of this level?