Like you, I have seen multiple videos of the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
This one, which appeared on TikTok, shows beyond doubt that the ICE agent was never in danger. She was told both to leave and to get out of the car.
She was leaving. The ICE agent shot three times. She was murdered.
Stephen Miller is a case study in himself. He is a paradox. His family came to the U.S. over a century ago, for the same reason millions of other immigrants arrived: to find freedom, safety, and opportunity. Like so many other families from Eastern Europe, his family was impoverished. They worked and succeeded.
They were immigrants.
Surely Stephen knows his family history, but he is nonetheless hostile to immigrants today. He wants to kick out those that are here and bar those who haven’t made it inside the nation’s gates.
He isn’t just hostile to immigrants. He hates them.
Robert Reich writes here about Stephen Miller, a man totally lacking in empathy or gratitude:
Friends,
Trump’s Chief Bigot, Stephen Miller, said on Fox News this month that immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations.
“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller claimed. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
In fact, the data show just the opposite. The children and grand children and great grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.
In a new paper, Princeton’s Leah Boustan, Stanford’s Ran Abramitzky, Elisa Jácome of Princeton, and Santiago Pérez of UC Davis, used millions of father-son pairs spanning more than a century of U.S. history to show that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants were a century ago.
In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.
Stephen Miller’s great great grandfather, Wolf-Leib Glosser, was born in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus.
For much the same reasons my great grandparents came to America — vicious pogroms that threatened his life — Wolf-Leib came to Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 in his pockets. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English.
Wolf-Leib’s son, Nathan, soon followed, and they raised enough money through peddling and toiling in sweatshops to buy passage to America for the rest of their family, in 1906 — including young Sam Glosser, Stephen Miller’s great grandfather.
The family settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a booming coal and steel town, where they rose from peddling goods to owning a haberdashery, and then owning a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores, run by Sam, and Sam’s son, Izzy (Stephen Miller’s maternal grandfather).
Two generations later, in 1985, came little Stephen — who developed such a visceral hate for immigrants that he makes up facts about them that have no bearing on reality.
In a little more than eleven months, Stephen and his boss have made sweeping changes to limit legal immigration to America.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring that children born to undocumented immigrants and to some temporary foreign residents would no longer be granted citizenship automatically.
The executive order, which was paused by the courts, could throw into doubt the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of babies born each year. Miller and his boss want the Supreme Court to uphold that executive order.
After the horrific shooting of two National Guard members on August 26, by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national, Trump halted naturalizations for people from many African and the Middle Eastern countries.
Trump is also threatening to strip U.S. citizenship from naturalized migrants “who undermine domestic tranquillity.” He plans to deport foreigners deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilization” and aims to detain even more migrants in jail or in warehouses — in the U.S. or in other countries — without due process.
In addition to the unconstitutionality of such actions, they stir up the worst nativist and racist impulses in America — blaming and scapegoating entire groups of people.
As they make their case to crack down on illegal and legal immigration, Miller and Trump have targeted Minnesota’s Somali community — seizing on an investigation into fraud that took place in pockets of the Somali diaspora in the state, to denounce the entire community, which Trump has called “garbage.”
Let’s be clear. Apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants — all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands; some came enslaved.
Almost all of us are mongrels — of mixed nationalities, mixed ethnicities, mixed races, mixed creeds. While we maintain our own traditions, we also embrace the ideals of this nation.
As Ronald Reagan put it in a 1988 speech,
You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. But … anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Reagan understood that America is a set of aspirations and ideals, more than it is a nationality.
Miller and Trump want to fuel bigotry. Like dictators before him, Trump’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them.” His entire project depends on hate.
America is better than Trump or his chief bigot.
We won’t buy their hate. To the contrary, we’ll call out bigots. We won’t tolerate intolerance. We’ll protect hardworking members of our community. We’ll alert them when ICE is lurking.
We will not succumb to the ravings of a venomous president who wants us to hate each other — or his bigoted sidekick.
Trump’s military attack on Venezuela was unauthorized by Congress. It was lawless. His actions deserve condemnation by the UN and world leaders.
He mocks the very idea of a rules-based international order. He mocks the idea that Congress is a co-equal branch of the federal government.
But he achieved three goals by his audacious actions.
The great irony in the current situation was that he recently pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the ex-President of Honduras, who had been sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for sending some 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.
Maduro should have had a better lobbyist or helped underwrite the Trump ballroom and he would be a free man.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has returned to the days of gunboat diplomacy, where it ruled the hemisphere by force.
Perhaps he has made a deal with Putin and Xi. Trump gets his hemisphere. Putin gets Europe. Xi gets Asia.
I think Orwell predicted this long ago.
Jess Piper lives on a farm in rural Missouri. She taught American literature in high school for many years. She left teaching to run for the state legislature. She raised a goodly amount of money but lost. She has chastised the Democratic Party for abandoning large swaths of the country. In rural areas, most seats are uncontested. They are won by Republicans who have no opponents. She’s trying to change that and restore a two-party system.
As a former teacher, she is upset that so many students are miseducated about race and racism. She posted her views about that here.
She wrote:
I can’t tell you how many times I was asked the same question while teaching American Literature:
“If there is a Black History Month, why isn’t there a White History Month?”
My usual response? Because every month is White History Month. History is written by the victors — and colonizers. Much of the American history and literature we learned for generations erased the contributions of marginalized groups.
A strange fact is that much of the history and literature I learned in the South was written by the losers, not the victors. I learned an entirely incorrect version of history because my textbooks and curriculum were shaped by The Daughters of the Confederacy — I didn’t understand that until college.
That was purposeful.
For a few decades, we have made a conscious effort to highlight the experiences of minority groups in curriculum — no such effort is required for the majority because their experience is always present.
I think it is incredibly important to teach rural kids the literature and history of marginalized groups. Many of my former students lived in White spaces with limited travel experiences.
So, I applied for scholarships to learn what I had not been taught, and I traveled the country every summer to learn to be a better teacher. I studied slavery in New York and Mount Vernon and Atlanta and Charleston.
My students had the advantage of learning the history I had never learned. I had the confidence to teach the hard truth.
You can imagine, after so many years teaching an inclusive curriculum, I am horrified daily by the naked White supremacy I see coming from the Trump regime and many Republicans in general.
I have lived under a GOP supermajority for over two decades, and these lawmakers often slide into racism and try to cover their tracks by attacking the rest of us as being “woke” or “DEI warriors.”
It is projection.
A moment I will never forget is when a Missouri Representative stood on the House floor and spoke on “Irish slavery” to dispute the suggestion that Black folks have no exclusive claim to slavery and that both Black and Irish slavery should be taught in Missouri schools. He obviously failed American History as he did not understand chattel slavery and that most Irish immigrants were indentured servants, not enslaved people.
Indentured servitude is not an ideal situation, but it is not comparable to chattel slavery.
You know my infamous Senator Josh Hawley, who held up a fist on January 6, but you may not know my other Senator, Eric Schmitt, who is an open White supremacist. When comparing the two men, I am left to say Schmitt is even worse than his insurrectionist counterpart. Hawley is a Christian nationalist. Schmitt is both a Christian nationalist and a White supremacist.
In a speech titled “What Is an American,” Schmitt wrote:
America is not “a proposition” or a shared set of values, rather it is a country for White people descended from European settlers, whose accomplishments should not be diminished by acknowledging the people that some of them enslaved, the Native Americans they killed, or anyone else denied equal rights at the founding.
Schmitt went on to say that the real Americans are those who settled the country, denying both the people who lived here centuries before colonization and the Black people who were forced here on slave ships.
I am horrified by the speech — Schmitt references Missouri so many times that I want to scream. He is reinforcing the White supremacy that I specifically taught my students to watch for…to listen for. To speak out against.
Senator Schmitt even went so far as to make light of George Floyd’s killing. The entire speech had a “blood and soil” feel. It makes me sick. I am embarrassed to be his constituent.
I opened my news app yesterday to see that JD Vance gave a speech at the Turning Point USA Summit in which he said, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
My God. I am so tired. And I am White.
I can only imagine what it feels like to be a person of color in America and hear the daily racism. To feel racism. To exist in this country when our government is attacking Black and Brown folks. Disappearing them. Killing them.
So, I fight to elect people who do not espouse racist views and do not want to harm immigrants.
But I also do work in my own family. My children and grandchildren are White. They deserve the truth of the country of their birth. They should know what the Trump regime is doing in the name of White supremacy. So, I teach them.
I took my teenage daughter to Charleston. We visited the regular sites, and then I took her to the sites of the enslaved who were shipped across the world to be enslaved for their labor. She saw the slave pen downtown. I took her to Fort Sumter, where she listened to a Park Ranger tell her the main reason for the Civil War.
Slavery.
No, it wasn’t Northern Aggression — it was slavery. And if she ever has any doubt, she should read the South Carolina Declaration of Secession, which clearly states that the state broke from the union because of “An increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.”
I took her for a walk to Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The site of a brutal racist massacre. I explained what a White supremacist did to nine Black people who were praying in their own church…people who invited their murderer in with the love and compassion of their faith.
He murdered them because of the color of their skin and because he didn’t understand history. He thought Black people were given preferential treatment in this country. He had a profound lack of understanding that led him to murder.
The Trump regime is pushing this misunderstanding of history onto another generation, and we can’t sit by while it happens. Teaching hard history to White people is the business of other White people. Teaching about racism should not fall on the marginalized groups who are the target of racism.
Racism is a White problem…not the other way around.
It’s on people who look like me to do the hard work of challenging the naked White supremacy we see in our country.
We know the lies. We have to teach the truth.
~Jess
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private nonprofit tasked by Congress with helping preserve historical buildings, sued the Trump administration for tearing down the East Wing of the White House and asked a federal judge for an emergency stop-work order. The judge did not stop work on the new ballroom, but he did order the White House to get approval from the necessary agencies.
In his eagerness to build his gigantic ballroom, Trump bypassed the normal review process for making changes to a historic building.
Trump knew that if he went through the legally-required process, it would take years to get the necessary approvals, and some busybody preservationists might tell him to scale back his grand plans. The new ballroom–at 95,000 square feet– will be almost double the size of the entire White House–which is 55,000 square feet.
So he followed his personal motto: “Stop me if you can.”
Without asking permission he demolished the East Wing. It is gone, finished.
Now he will take his plans to the National Capital Planning Commission, which will hold hearings starting January 8.
Ordinarily, the NCPC review is rigorous and involves multiple hearings before a shovel touches the ground, reviewing esthetic and environmental issues.Trump expects to get done in a few months what customarily takes years of review before any work begins.
The 12-member NCPC will not pose a problem. The Washington Post reported:
The NCPC is led by Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary and Trump’s former personal lawyer, whom the president appointed as commission chair in July, and its members tilt toward Trump. The president appointed two other White House officials to the body, and the commission also includes nine seats apportioned to sitting Cabinet secretaries and other local and federal officials.
Trump’s grandiose plan must also win the approval of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. That should not be a problem either, because in October, Trump fired all six members of the Commission. That Conmission (if Trump has appointed new members) will review the proposed ballroom that will replace the East Wing and also Trump’s plan to build an Arc d’Trump.
It’s clear sailing with no dissents anticipated.
As has been widely reported, CBS’ “60 Minutes” announced that it would release a program about the notorious prison in El Salvador– CECOT–where the U.S. sent migrant prisoners, who were allegedly hardened criminals, “the worst of the worst.”
The program interviews released prisoners, who describe torture, beatings, and inhumane conditions that would never be permitted in U.S. prisons. It also reviewed records and concluded that few of those sent to CECOT were hardened criminals or terrorists.
Bari Weiss, the editor-in/chief of CBS News, stopped the release of the segment because no one in the Trump administration agreed to respond to it. Critics said that if that was legitimate grounds for blocking a story, the Trump administration could block all critical coverage by refusing to comment.
After CBS was sold to the Ellison billionaires, David Ellison hired Bari Weiss to be editor-in-chief and bought her website “The Free Press” for $150 million. Weiss has no experience in the broadcast industry.
Apparently the show aired in Canada, where a viewer copied it and posted it on Reddit.
Here is the link on Reddit. Decide for yourself whether Weiss was right to stop the show until someone from the Trump administration commented.
“Go to ProgressiveHQr/ProgressiveHQ13h agoCrystalVibes52
The 60 minutes interview that was not aired in the US was aired and recorded in Canada and posted on YouTube. It has since been taken down. No worries though, I screen recorded it.“
See it before it is taken down.
It was originally posted on YouTube but was taken down.
The Trump administration is engaged in a war against science and medicine. It has eliminated funding in many crucial areas of research conducted by universities and by the National Institutes of Health. Incalculable damage has been done to set back the search for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, infectious diseases, HIV, respiratory diseases, and pediatric cancer. People will die because of the ignorance of those who close down ongoing, vital research.
Trump has consistently claimed that “climate change” is a hoax. He has said that the term “climate change” refers to the weather. He hates wind farms and has cut federal funding for them. He has hated wind farms since wind turbines were built near his Trump International Golf Links in Scotland. He sued to block them but repeatedly lost.
Now he is closing down a major hub of climate research.
The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions.
The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.
But in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and said that the federal government would be “breaking up” the institution.
Mr. Vought wrote that a “comprehensive review is underway” and that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”
USA Today first reported on the White House plans.
Scientists, meteorologists and lawmakers said the move was an attack on critical scientific research and would harm the United States.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research was originally founded to provide scientists studying Earth’s atmosphere with cutting-edge resources, such as supercomputers, that individual universities could not afford on their own. It is now widely considered a global leader in both weather and climate change research, with programs aimed at tracking severe weather events, modeling floods and understanding how solar activity affects the Earth’s atmosphere.
The center’s research has often proved useful in unexpected places, such as when its studies of downdrafts in the lower atmosphere in the 1970s and 1980s led to development of wind shear detection systems around airports that helped address the cause of hundreds of aviation accidents during that era.
This is a link to a gift article.
Several reporters at The New York Times worked together for months unraveling the secrets of Jeffrey Epstein’s financial success. How did he go from being a high school math teacher to a multimillionaire? His greatest trick, it appears, was cultivating and leveraging friendships among people who were wealthy and powerful. Name-dropping was a tactic. So were lying and boasting, as he rose in elite circles, cultivating contacts, references, women, and friends.
Glenn Kessler spent 15 years as the Washington Post fact-checker. He stepped aside recently and now writes at his Substack blog. For years, he has had the daunting task of counting Trump’s lies. Trump has the unparalleled ability to lie with great sincerity even when he knows he is lying.
The hardest part about building a list of Donald Trump’s ten biggest lies in a year is the abundance of material.
When I ran The Fact Checker at The Washington Post, our team counted more than 30,000 false or misleading claims in his first term. That’s more than 20 erroneous claims a day. No one is keeping such a comprehensive list in his second term — it’s a thankless duty — but I’m sure he’s keeping the same pace.
Trump makes many false statements, big and small, and I tried to keep this accounting to substantive issues, both domestic and foreign. Even so, I found myself removing claims that others might consider worthy of inclusion.
For instance, he regularly claimed an executive order he issued on prescription drugs would “slash drug prices by 200 percent, 300 percent, 400 percent, 500 percent, 600 percent, 700 percent, 800 percent.” That’s a mathematical impossibility. A 100-percent cut would mean prices were zero. Trump is surrounded by so many lackeys that no one appears to have the heart to tell him.
Another arithmetic-challenged claim is Trump’s frequent boast that under his leadership the United States has secured nearly $20 trillion in new investments. That’s double the official White House count, which itself is a misleading brew of aspirations and vague promises, not actual investments. One clue this is bogus: Trump’s number is two-thirds of the annual gross domestic product of the United States.
Then there’s Trump’s claim that “Portland is burning to the ground,” apparently because he watched a Fox News report that included B-roll from 2020. This year, a few protesters outside an ICE facility have set some small fires, quickly extinguished. Again, why doesn’t his staff set him straight?
Another runner-up was Trump’s outrageous accusation that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had manipulated jobs numbers. He fired her after job-growth estimates were revised downward — a common occurrence. “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he fumed on social media, even though the estimates are derived from surveys conducted by professionals many rungs below the director. Trump never offered evidence for his claim.
Readers may have other nominations. Here’s my list for Trump’s biggest lies in 2025, in no particular order. Taken together, these falsehoods demonstrate how Trump governs — impulsively, defiantly, and often detached from reality.
“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”
Is it a lie if someone appears to firmly believe something? Trump may love tariffs but he’s been lying to himself as well as the American people about the impact. Every economist agrees that tariffs are a tax on consumers — not countries. Yet in his inaugural speech, Trump said the opposite. It is economic nonsense. Trump, of course, made this claim throughout the 2024 campaign (and in his first term), but it merits inclusion on the 2025 list because this lie had such real-world implications. Trump likely circumvented the Constitution by imposing such sweeping tariffs without congressional authorization, though the final verdict will come from the Supreme Court.
Throughout the year, Trump made many false claims about tariffs — “We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars. … We were losing $2 billion a day. … Now we’re making $3 billion a day” — and offering empty promises to use the “trillions” from tariffs to reduce taxes and pay down the national debt. The money raised from tariffs is not enough to reduce income taxes — and it is in fact another tax — and it won’t pay down the debt. That didn’t stop Trump from falsely claiming in November that tariffs would reduce the federal budget deficit by 25 percent.
By the end of the year, Trump offered $12 billion in aid to farmers hurt by his trade war with China — an unstated acknowledgment that tariffs do have costs for Americans.
“We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
On the face of it, this sounds idiotic, but Trump kept repeating it (and sometimes inflated the figure to $100 million) to justify terminating the U.S. Agency for International Development — an effort led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But USAID, which distributed condoms to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease, spent less than $50,000 on condoms in the entire Middle East in a year — and nothing in Gaza.
In a striking example of the White House’s sloppy staff work, someone appears to have confused Gaza, the Palestinian enclave on the Mediterranean, with the Gaza province of Mozambique in Africa — and then USAID funding with Health and Human Services Department money given to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation for HIV/AIDS prevention. It would be funny if it were not so sad.
Nevertheless, despite such fiction, USAID was dismantled, at great cost to the United States’ global reputation and with little impact on the $7-trillion federal budget. Though Trump in February claimed that DOGE had already saved as much as $500 billion, DOGE itself only tallied $214 billion by December. Of course, that’s also an exaggerated figure. When Politico scrubbed the data in August, it found the savings amounted to less than five percent of the claimed value. That’s because DOGE would count the ceiling value of contracts, which is far more than what the government has agreed to pay.
“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
Trump said this in February about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has, against the odds, managed to fend off a Russian assault on his country for nearly four years.
Trump, who for some inexplicable reason always tilts toward Russia, echoed the Russian position that it was pushed into the conflict. It’s akin to saying Japan was forced into attacking Pearl Harbor because the United States imposed a trade embargo in 1940, depriving Japan of oil. The trade embargo came after Japan’s provocative actions in the Pacific, such as the 1931 occupation of Manchuria following a Japanese-manufactured incident.
This comment is emblematic of a series of Trump’s lies about Ukraine — that Zelensky admitted U.S. aid is missing, that Zelensky has never said he has been grateful for American assistance, that the United States provided more aid than Europe, and so forth. Despite sometimes suggesting he was exasperated by Russia, Trump throughout the year has consistently favored Moscow over Kyiv in the conflict that, in the 2024 campaign, he claimed he would solve in 24 hours.
“We’ve ended weaponized government where, as an example, a sitting president is allowed to viciously prosecute his political opponent like me.”
Trump made this proclamation in his annual speech to a joint session of Congress, a clear example of a lie of commission. He and his allies already had fired career Justice Department and FBI employees who worked on the Jan. 6 cases or the Trump prosecutions, launched investigations into political groups and donors, and targeted law firms who worked on cases against him.
Soon, Trump ordered the indictments of former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, after firing the U.S. Attorney who decided the cases were weak. The cases rested on such shaky ground that they were soon dismissed. But they could be revived and Trump’s point was made — cross him and you will be in the crosshairs.
(For the record, there is no evidence that Joe Biden directed the Justice Department or local prosecutors to pursue the four criminal cases against Trump.)
“Just about everything is down. You know, this whole thing is, they use the word affordability. It’s a Democrat hoax.”
By year’s end, Trump’s approval rating had fallen sharply, largely because Americans perceived he was not focused on “affordability” — the rising cost of goods and services.
As usual, Trump thinks he’s doing great. In December he gave himself a score of “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” for his handling of the economy. When asked by Laura Ingraham why Americans were anxious, he dismissed the concern: “I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” Even though grocery prices were up, Trump insisted they were down.
Instead, he lied that any problems faced by Americans were the legacy of Biden’s presidency, claiming that “we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.” In fact, Trump inherited an economy with relatively low unemployment, falling inflation and strong growth. The month before the November election, the Economist newspaper published a cover story declaring that the U.S. economy was “the envy of the world.” Taking office, Trump upended the economy — and sent prices higher — by imposing sweeping tariffs.
“Don’t take Tylenol. Fight like hell not to take it.”
Trump’s news conference in September claiming a link between Tylenol and autism was an appalling display of ignorance and hubris.
He falsely suggested autism rates were soaring — from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 36 — when in fact the diagnosis of autism has increased because of better detection and expanded definitions. He seized on a disputed report to blame Tylenol, despite decades of research failing to find a causal link. He claimed nonsense that Amish don’t have autism because they refuse vaccinations. Surveys show many Amish vaccinate their children and that there is autism in the community. He cited a “rumor” that Cuba has no autism because the island can’t afford Tylenol. That curious claim was news to Cuba doctors. And then he told American women that they shouldn’t take Tylenol even if they suffer a fever — though fevers can be very harmful to fetuses. (Indeed, it may be fever, not Tylenol, that is linked to autism.)
“I’ve ended eight wars.”
No one can accuse Trump of modesty. In his desperate bid to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — Barack Obama won one, after all — Trump over the course of the year has added to his list of “wars” that he claimed he’s ended. But few of these were wars, Trump’s role was often tangential, and the resolution of the conflicts are likely temporary. Many of the pauses require careful follow-up to ensure implementation, and already some are falling back into bloodshed.
Yet that has not stopped Trump from claiming credit and even asserting “we’ve never had a president that solved one war, not one war.” That’s obviously false. Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating peace in the 1904-5 war between Russia and Japan, while Jimmy Carter negotiated the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
What’s on Trump’s list? Cambodia and Thailand (A border dispute keeps flaring up, and indeed restarted in December); Armenia and Azerbaijan (They signed a U.S.-brokered peace deal in August, with Trump hosting an Oval Office ceremony, but it must be ratified and Armenia needs to change its constitution); Israel and Iran (a ceasefire was declared after a 12-day conflict but the decades-long conflict continues); India and Pakistan (The long-running dispute over Kashmir continues, though a ceasefire was reached in May; Trump’s claim of credit has been rejected by India); Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Fighting continues though a peace agreement was signed with U.S. involvement); Egypt and Ethiopia (This is a mystery entry on Trump’s list as the nonviolent dispute is over hydroelectric dam opened by Ethiopia); Serbia and Kosovo (Another mystery entry as tensions have never eased since Kosovo broke off in 2008); Hamas and Israel (Trump pushed Israel to finally agree to a ceasefire in the two-year war, a real accomplishment, though a final resolution to the conflict appears elusive).
As you can see, it’s inflated and rather crass, much like accepting a dubious “world peace award” from FIFA and renaming the U.S. Institute of Peace after himself after the administration fired the staff and destroyed it.
“Every boat that you see get blown up, we save 25,000 – on average – 25,000 lives.”
Trump has been under fire for the administration’s military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats in international waters, and in defense he offered a nonsense figure. Dutifully, other administration officials have echoed the lie.
First of all, the administration had not provided evidence that the boats carried drugs. Trump asserts they were transporting fentanyl but that makes no sense since Venezuela mainly supplies cocaine to Europe. In three months, about 20 vessels have been hit by airstrikes, killing more than 80 people, so using Trump’s math that would mean 500,000 Americans lives supposedly were saved. Yet provisional federal data shows that the total number of U.S. overdose deaths was about 75,000 in the 12 months ending in April (the most recent period available).
In other words, Trump invented these numbers. (The “on average” is an effort at verisimilitude.) It’s not supposed to make sense — just sound good.
“These [Epstein] files were made up by Comey. They were made up by Obama. They were made up by Biden.”
One of the few issues Trump could neither spin nor shrug off centered on demands that his administration release the investigative files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a onetime friend from the 1990s with whom he later fell out. Trump had promised to release the files during the 2024 campaign, but then the Justice Department refused to do so. Pressure built in Congress for passage of a law to force the files’ release, and in July Trump lashed out, claiming the files were all made up by Democrats, name-checking former FBI director James Comey, Obama and Biden.
This claim is simply nuts. The files represent investigative evidence, so nothing was invented. Neither Obama nor Biden were in office when the FBI investigated Epstein — that happened under George W. Bush in 2007-2008 and Trump in 2018 — while Comey wasn’t even in government at the time. Epstein, who molested hundreds of girls, at first received a sweetheart deal that minimized his crimes, and then the case was reopened under Trump after a Miami Herald investigation. He was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial, an apparent suicide.
Trump’s instinct is to deflect problems onto his opponents, but he wasn’t successful in this instance. Congress passed the law, requiring the files be released by Dec. 19. The Justice Department has indicated it won’t meet the deadline.
“It won’t interfere with the current building. It will be near it but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building.”
This was Trump in July, speaking about his plans to add a ballroom to the White House complex.
Then, suddenly, in October, wrecking crews ripped down the entire East Wing of the White House. Trump was unrepentant about the fierce public outcry, dismissing the East Wing as “common brick, little tiny windows, it looked like hell.” (The White House skipped the requirement to submit its demolition plans, claiming the National Capital Planning Commission has no jurisdiction over demolition.)
In July, Trump had said the ballroom would hold 600 to 700 people and cost $200 million; now the plans call for about 1,000 people, the budget ballooned to more than $300 million, and the architect was replaced because he objected to Trump’s grandiose ambitions. The resulting 90,000-square-foot building will overshadow the existing 55,000-square-foot White House structure.
Is there any lie more emblematic of how Trump has approached his second term? He forges ahead, destroying any obstacles in his path, including the truth, while paying little heed to what Americans might think.
Trump, being Trump, turns everything into a story about him. When the news first came out that Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle were murdered in their home in Los Angeles, Trump posted a callous, cruel comment about their deaths. He wrote the following comment on Monday morning before the police arrested their son Nick.
Trump attributed their deaths to their hatred of him. What?
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
Trump’s message was so cynical and self-serving that several Republicans criticized his heartlessness.
Politico mentioned several Republicans who were taken aback by Trump’s narcissism.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the deaths of Reiner and his wife were “a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.”
Rep. Mike Lawler said that Trump’s comments were “wrong,” and that their deaths deserved “sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.”
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said Trump’s post was “inappropriate and disrespectful”; he challenged “anyone to defend it.”
Jenna Ellis, who was one of Trump’s personal lawyers who defended him after he lost the election in 2020, criticized Trump’s post.
The New York Times wrote about her reaction:
“A man and his wife were murdered last night. This is NOT the appropriate response,” Jenna Ellis, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer who is now a conservative radio host, wrote on social media on Monday. “The Right uniformly condemned political and celebratory responses to Charlie Kirk’s death. This is a horrible example from Trump (and surprising considering the two attempts on his own life) and should be condemned by everyone with any decency.”
Trump shows who he is without shame or guile. He has no empathy, no compassion, no sense of propriety. Every issue, every interaction, every event boils down to his self-interest. Nothing else matters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 