Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

December 2, 2025 (Tuesday)

The news of last Friday, November 28, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Joint Special Operations commander overseeing an attack on a small vessel carrying 11 people on September 2 to “kill everybody” is shaping up to be a fight over control of the United States government. 

A missile strike shattered the boat and set it afire, but two men survived. A second strike fulfilled Hegseth’s order. According to Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post, the commander, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, said “the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” In a report, the Joint Special Operations Command said the second strike was not to kill survivors, but to remove a navigation hazard. 

There had already been significant pushback in the first place over the strikes, which legal experts say are unlawful. But the so-called double tap is illegal and a war crime even under the Trump administration’s flimsy justification for the strikes. 

Lawmakers of both parties have pushed back on what Senator Angus King (I-ME) yesterday called “a stone cold war crime.” The Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), have vowed to launch investigations of the incident, as well as of the larger operation. 

Yesterday, Hegseth and President Donald Trump began to distance themselves from the strike. Last night, Hegseth pinned the blame for the order on Admiral Bradley, posting: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.” 

Today, at a televised meeting, Trump’s Cabinet officers rallied around the president, telling him he is brilliant and a miracle worker, and Trump threw his support behind Hegseth. Clearly, the president intends to stand by the weekend Fox News Channel host he installed in one of the most important positions in the United States government. 

Shortly after the meeting, PBS NewsHour journalist Nick Schifrin reported that a U.S. official told him “[t]he US military struck the boat on September 2_four_times: twice to kill the 11 people who were on board, and twice more to sink the boat.” 

Trump is slipping. After he drew attention by posting wildly on social media last night, today’s meeting was clearly designed to demonstrate that the president is alert, active, and on top of things. But this made-for-television photo opportunity was anything but a display of competence: Trump could not stay awake while his Cabinet members were praising him, and so we had the wild visual of Secretary of State Marco Rubio praising Trump as the only man who could end Russia’s war in Ukraine, gesturing at the president sitting next to him, who was, to all appearances, sound asleep.

At the Cabinet meeting today, Trump announced that “the word ‘affordability’ is a Democrat scam,” insisting falsely that his economic policies were bringing down costs. Trump won the 2024 election in large part by promising to bring down inflation, but prices have risen under him at the same time that the economy is slowing. 

G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers pointed out today that Americans’ concerns about affordability are not just about costs, though. They are concerns about social mobility, economic inequality, and fairness, values that run opposite of Trump’s focus on funneling contracts and privileges to well-connected billionaires. People are unlikely to change their minds about the unreasonable power of that “Epstein class” as the deadline for the release of the Epstein files gets closer.   

Now Trump’s defense secretary, already in trouble for sharing classified information about a strike on Yemen’s Houthis over a non-secure messaging app on which a reporter had been included, is tangled up in a war crime. Today, libertarian conservative writer George Will noted in the Washington Post: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” Will went on to refer to the Trump administration as a “moral slum.” 

On Sunday, Miranda Devine of the New York Post reported on a leaked document written for congressional leadership by retired and active-duty FBI agents and analysts of the first six months of Kash Patel’s leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They said Patel is “in over his head” and that deputy FBI director Dan Bongino is “something of a clown.” Both Patel and Bongino are arrogant, the report says, and have an “unfortunate obsession with social media.” Under Patel, they say, the FBI is a “rudderless ship” and “all f*cked up.”  

Trump made it clear during the Cabinet meeting that he has embraced the white nationalism of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who reject the nation’s longstanding principle of welcoming immigrants and have vowed to purge the nation of them, concentrating on those who are Brown and Black. Yesterday, Noem called them “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” 

“I hear…Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions,” Trump said of Minnesota. “Every year, billions of dollars, and they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%, they contribute nothing. I don't want ‘em in our country, I'll be honest with you, okay. Somebody would say, ‘Oh, that's not politically correct.’ I don't care. I don't want ‘em in our country. Their country's no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don't want ‘em in our country. I can say that about other countries, too. I can say it about other countries, too. We don't want them the hell, we gotta—we have to rebuild our country.” 

Trump embraced the idea, popular with white nationalists and the neo-Nazi right wing, that the U.S. must reject the multiculturalism of our entire history or perish. “You know, our country’s at a tipping point,” he said. “We could go bad. We’re at a tipping point. I don't know [if] people mind me saying that, but I'm saying it. We could go one way or the other, and we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

Then he turned on an elected representative, using dehumanizing rhetoric historically associated with violence against a people. “Ilhan Omar [D-MN] is garbage. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work, these aren't people that say, ‘Let's go. Come on, let's make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain. They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing. You know, if they came from Paradise, and they said, ‘This isn’t Paradise.’ But when they come from hell, and they complain and do nothing but b*tch, we don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.” 

The Cabinet appeared to applaud, although it is not clear whether they were agreeing or hoping to stop him from talking like a Nazi. 

Tonight the administration put Miller and Noem’s policy into place, pausing all immigration applications from 19 countries and halting the processing of green cards and citizenship applications. Federal authorities say they will target Somali immigrants in Minneapolis–St. Paul in an upcoming sweep, although Jaylani Hussain, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says about 95% of the Somalis in Minnesota are already U.S. citizens and that about 50% were born in the U.S. 

According to Mike Balsamo and Steve Karnowski of the Associated Press, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey says Trump’s attack on Somalis “violates the moral fabric of what we stand by in this country as Americans. They have started businesses and created jobs. They have added to the cultural fabric of what Minneapolis is.” Minneapolis police—many of them Somali—will not work with federal officials in the sweep. 

Also tonight, Trump announced that because former president Joe Biden used an autopen, “[a]ny and all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts,” pardons, and commutations he signed are “invalid.” This is bonkers, of course. All modern presidents have used autopens, including Trump himself, and there is no mechanism in the Constitution for erasing the actions of a previous president by fiat. 

More to the point, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket pointed out, Trump himself said he had no idea who crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao was after having pardoned him. And in March, Trump told reporters he had not signed the proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, although his signature appears on the proclamation in the Federal Register.

December 4, 2025 (Thursday)

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, said. “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel,... killed by the United States.”

Himes was talking about a video of a U.S. strike against two survivors of a first strike in the Caribbean on a small boat allegedly carrying cocaine to the U.S. Today Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the Special Operations commander who ordered the strike, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine briefed members of Congress in a closed-door session on the events of that day.

The U.S. attacked the boat on September 2, in an unannounced operation against what it claims are drug runners, meaning the men on the boat had no way of knowing they were targets. After the strike, the administration  announced it had begun strikes against what it insists are drug boats manned by gang members.

The administration says President Donald Trump has “determined” that the U.S. is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that those in the boats are formally “combatants,” but it has not reinforced those claims with the legal authority they need. After informing Congress of the strikes on September 4 to ensure Congress was “fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution,” Trump has since ignored that resolution, which requires congressional approval for hostile actions to continue longer than 60 days, a deadline that passed in early November. 

As Charlie Savage explained today in the New York Times, legal experts say this operation is not lawful. Civilians engaged in trade—even illicit trade—are not enemy combatants. For that matter, the public, so far, has seen no hard evidence but only heard the administration’s claim that the boats are engaged in drug trafficking.  

Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, and Haley Britzky of CNN explained that the initial strike of September 2 killed nine of the eleven people on the boat immediately. It set the vessel on fire and split it in half, capsizing it and leaving two survivors clinging to the wreckage. For the next 41 minutes, U.S. officers watched as the men struggled to right what was left of the boat. Then, rather than rescuing the two men, Admiral Bradley ordered a second strike that killed them, now saying he intended to destroy the vessel, which the administration claims was a military target. 

Shelby Holliday and Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal reported last night that Bradley would tell Congress that the men appeared to be communicating by radio with other “enemy” vessels in the area and thus were still combatants, an argument defense officials have been making for weeks now. But Bradley did not say that today. Instead, he admitted the men were in no position to communicate with other vessels. He told congressional lawmakers that he ordered the strike because the vessel appeared to be afloat thanks to packages of cocaine and that the survivors could have floated to safety and continued to traffic the drugs.

A source told the CNN reporters that Bradley’s rationale was “f*cking insane.” 

Even if the U.S. is at war with drug traffickers—a dubious argument—it is a war crime to kill individuals who are “outside of combat,” no longer posing an imminent threat. It’s hard to imagine that two unarmed, shipwrecked men trying to right the remains of a capsized boat in the ocean hundreds of miles from the U.S. posed a threat.

While some Republicans—notably Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas— are defending the strike, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said: “There is a difference between being accused of being a bad guy and being a bad guy. It is called the presumption of innocence. It is called due process. It is called, basically, justice that our country was founded upon.” 

Paul told MS NOW columnist Eric Michael Garcia he wanted Hegseth to testify before Congress under oath, saying that “Congress, if they had any kind of gumption at all, would not be allow[ing the] administration to summarily execute people that are suspected of a crime.” He said he wanted the full video of the strikes released: “[I]f the public sees images of people clinging to boat debris and being blown up, I think that there is a chance that finally, the public will get interested enough in this to stop this.”

Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “I am deeply disturbed by what I saw this morning. The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2nd strike, as the President has agreed to do. This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump Administration’s military activities, and demonstrates exactly why the Senate Armed Services Committee has repeatedly requested—and been denied—fundamental information, documents, and facts about this operation. This must and will be [only the] beginning of our investigation into this incident.”

As of this morning, the U.S. had carried out more than 20 strikes on the small boats the president says are run by “narco-terrorists,” killing at least 87 people.

This evening, Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point USA posted on social media: “Every new attack aimed at Pete Hegseth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean.” 

Hegseth quoted Kolvet and commented: “Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat.” 

U.S. Southern Command confirmed the strike against a small boat in the eastern Pacific, saying that “[i]ntelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route…. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed.”

December 6, 2025 (Saturday)

On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.

In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower. 

Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

The next day, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America, and on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.

The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.

Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.

The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany's Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were Black American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Indigenous Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.

The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.

Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?

Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.

But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.

President Donald J. Trump and his cronies have abandoned the principles of democracy and openly embraced the hierarchical society the U.S. fought against in World War II. They have fired women, Black Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ Americans from positions in the government and the military and erased them from official histories. They have seized, incarcerated and deported immigrants— or rendered them to third countries to be tortured— and have sent federal agents and federal troops into Democratic-led cities to terrorize the people living there.

They have traded the rule of law for the rule of Trump, weaponizing the Department of Justice against those they perceive as enemies, pardoning loyalists convicted of crimes, and now, executing those they declare are members of drug cartels without evidence, charges, or trials. They have openly rejected the world based on shared values of equality and democracy for which Americans fought in World War II. In its place, they are building a world dominated by a small group of elites close to Trump, who are raking in vast amounts of money from their machinations. 

Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?

When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.

We hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the radical right will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.

Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.

December 8, 2025 (Monday) 

Last Wednesday, December 3, a reporter asked President Donald J. Trump if he would release the video of the September 2 strike on a small boat off the coast of Venezuela that killed two survivors of a previous strike that had split their boat, capsized it, and set it on fire. He answered: “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.” 

Today, just five days later, a reporter began to ask Trump a question, beginning with the words: “You said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2nd off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegseth announced that….” Trump interrupted her. “I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that.” Turning slightly to make a side comment to someone else, he said: “This is ABC fake news.”

As G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers estimates that 56.1% of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president while only 39.7% approve, and as his agenda appears more unpopular by the day, Trump and his loyalists appear to be trying to cement his power over the United States of America.  

On Sunday, Trump appeared to pressure the Supreme Court to let his tariffs stand, despite the fact that the Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to regulate tariffs. Trump’s justification for seizing the power to impose them is the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which permits a president to regulate financial transactions after declaring a national emergency. Trump declared a national economic emergency in April before launching his tariff war.

Observers expect the Supreme Court to hand down a decision about the constitutionality of Trump’s tariffs later this week, and the justices’ questioning during oral arguments suggests they are not inclined to accept Trump’s assumption of such dramatic economic power over the U.S. 

Last night, on social media, Trump tried to position tariffs as central to national security, an area where the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court have tended to uphold the president’s authority. He posted, “While the United States has other methods of charging TARIFFS against foreign countries, many of whom have, for YEARS, TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF OUR NATION, the current method of Tariffing before the United States Supreme Court is far more DIRECT, LESS CUMBERSOME, and MUCH FASTER, all ingredients necessary for A STRONG AND DECISIVE NATIONAL SECURITY RESULT. SPEED, POWER, AND CERTAINTY ARE, AT ALL TIMES, IMPORTANT FACTORS IN GETTING THE JOB DONE IN A LASTING AND VICTORIOUS MANNER.”

Trump continued: “I have settled 8 Wars in 10 months because of the rights clearly given to the President of the United States. If countries didn’t think these rights existed, they would have said so, LOUD AND CLEAR! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Last Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC’s Squawk Box that the administration believes it can continue its tariff agenda using different laws even if the Supreme Court strikes down its current policy.

Trump’s tariffs have hit farmers particularly hard, making imported goods like machinery and fertilizer more expensive while destroying the markets for products like corn, soybeans, and wheat to create what economists estimate could be losses of $44 billion in net cash income for farmers from their 2025–2026 crops.  

Today Trump announced the administration intends to give farmers one-time payments totaling $12 billion. At an event at the White House, Trump told reporters: “[W]e love our farmers. And as you know, the farmers like me, because, you know, based on, based on voting trends, you could call it voting trends or anything else, but they're great people.” 

Utah County Democratic Party chair Darin Self commented: “The President of the United States unilaterally levied a tax on all of us and is redistributing our taxes to a core segment of his supporters.” “A bailout is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” corn and soybean farmer John Bartman said on a press call for the Democratic National Committee in mid-October. “Government bailouts do not make up for our loss of income. We don’t want a bailout. We want markets for our crops. We want to be able to work hard every year and enjoy the fruits of our labor and know that we did it on our own.” 

Administration officials are calling the program the “Farm Bridge Assistance” program, saying it is designed to help farmers until Trump’s economic policies become successful, a promise Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins echoed later in the day when she told Larry Kudlow of the Fox News Channel: “The relief is coming…. It really is a golden age just right around the corner.” 

But Trump spent $28 billion bailing out farmers during his first term, during his first trade war with China, without creating a “golden age,” and Matt Grossman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the administration has announced it will not publish an already-delayed October report on wholesale-price inflation, saying it will roll those figures into another delayed report due in November and release them in mid-January. It’s probably safe to assume those numbers will not tell a story the administration likes. 

The right-wing justices on the Supreme Court might refuse to support Trump’s bid to take control of the country’s economic system, but in arguments today they appeared poised to give him the power to take control of the modern American government by stacking the independent agencies that do much of the government’s work with officials loyal to him. 

In March, Trump fired the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. Since 1935, the Supreme Court has said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Although Trump himself initially appointed Slaughter, he claimed he fired her because her continued service on the independent commission was “inconsistent with [the] Administration’s priorities” and that he had the right to do so under the authority granted to him by Article II of the Constitution despite the fact Congress set up the position in such a way that it would be shielded from presidential politics.

This argument is an attempt to establish the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory the right wing has pushed since the 1980s, when it began to distrust the will of voters as they expressed it through Congress, and thus tried to find ways to assert the power of the president and reduce the power of Congress. 

The theory of the unitary executive says that since the president is the head of one of the three independent branches of government—those are the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch—he has sole authority over the executive branch and cannot be reined in by the other two branches. Trump has leaned into this idea since 2019, when he told attendees at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit being held in Washington, D.C.: “I have an Article II, where I have…the right to do whatever I want as president.”

The Supreme Court’s 2014 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision supported Trump’s radical reading of the powers of the president when it took the radical position that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed in the course of official presidential duties. In his second term, Trump has worked to fit his power grabs within the contours of that decision. Now the Supreme Court appears primed to hand him another win by finding the president has complete control over the officers in the executive branch, including the independent agencies established by Congress but which Congress has been placing in the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington. 

Representing the government, Solicitor General John Sauer told the court that the president must be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.” 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that this political destruction of the independent agencies Congress had established to provide nonpartisan expertise on issues like how to regulate pollutants would hurt the country. “[H]aving a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don't know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States,” she said. 

Law professor Deborah Pearlstein wrote: “It is really, really hard to get your head around the raw hubris of the majority. They really will be destabilizing the operating structure of the entire U.S. government. Why? Because they believe they have a better idea about how the past century should've been done.”

The court should decide the case in June.

But there are signs that Republican lawmakers are joining the Democrats to push back against Trump’s quest for power. CNN’s Natasha Bertrand reports that tomorrow, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, will brief the Gang of Eight, presumably on the military strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, especially the strike of September 2. The Gang of Eight is made up of the leaders from both parties in both chambers of Congress, and the chair and ranking member of each chamber’s intelligence committees. 

Bertrand also reports that the head of U.S. Southern Command Admiral Alvin Holsey, who will retire two years ahead of schedule on December 12 after disagreements with Hegseth over the strikes, will meet virtually with members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees. 

Lawmakers will be voting this week on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that lays out priorities and funding authorization for the Defense Department, funding that is then appropriated in different legislation. When the lawmakers released their final version of the bill on Sunday, they had put into it a measure to withhold 25% of Hegseth’s travel budget until the Defense Department hands over the “unedited video of strikes conducted against designated terrorist organizations in the area of responsibility of the United States Southern Command” to the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

December 10, 2025 (Wednesday)

Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-seven years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). 

In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans. In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.

The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved countries around the globe.

Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.

President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.

“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.

The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”

Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”

The thirty articles that followed established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.” 

Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.”

They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property. 

They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.” 

They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”

They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one’s] control.”

They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”

They included the right to participate in art and science.

They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.” 

Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles. 

Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more. 

Indeed, today is the forty-first anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR. 

The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.  

Last year, under President Joe Biden, the White House celebrated Human Rights Day by recommitting to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” The State Department bestowed the Human Rights Defender Award on eight individuals who have defended migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, and democracy. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan. 

The U.S. government did not recognize Human Rights Day this year.

Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. "There is growing concern...that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them," a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”

The official did not tell Pamuk which of the administration’s actions its officials think the ICC would investigate, but said there was “open chatter” that the court might target administration officials. On social media, opponents of the administration have begun to refer to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as “Hagueseth,” after The Hague, Netherlands, where the ICC holds its official meetings.

Legal analysts have expressed grave concern that the administration's attacks on small boats in the Caribbean are unlawful, and many have called a September 2 strike that killed shipwrecked survivors from a previous strike either murder or a war crime.  

Yesterday, Damien Cave, Edward Wong, and Maria Abi-Habib of the New York Times reported that lawyers for the Pentagon proposed sending two survivors from an October strike against a small boat in the Caribbean to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador, where prisoners previously rendered there reported widespread torture and abuse. Defense Department officials were keen to make sure survivors didn’t end up in a U.S. court where the administration’s insistence that the men were an immediate danger to the U.S. because they were trafficking drugs would come under legal scrutiny. 

Shocked, lawyers for the State Department refused, and the two men were sent back to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador.

December 12, 2025 (Friday)

Today former Alabama senator Doug Jones launched his campaign to become the state’s next governor. He announced on November 24 that he would enter the race, but said in a speech tonight that he chose today for the official launch because the date marks exactly eight years since he won a 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate. In that election, voters tapped Jones, a Democrat, to fill the seat formerly held by Republican Jeff Sessions, who left the seat empty when he went to Washington, D.C., to be President Donald J. Trump’s first attorney general. 

Jones’s election was an “earthquake,” Daniel Strauss of Politico reported at the time. For the first time in 25 years, the Senate seat Jones had won would go to a Democrat in what Strauss called “a huge political setback” to Trump. After he won, Jones told his supporters: “At the end of the day, this entire race has been about dignity and respect. This campaign has been about the rule of law. This campaign has been about common courtesy and decency.”

If Jones wins the Democratic primary for governor, he will likely face off for the governorship against current Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach who beat Jones to win the Senate seat in 2020 after then-president Trump strongly backed him. During the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the certified electoral votes that would make Democratic candidate Joe Biden president, both Trump and his then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani called Tuberville to get him to delay the counting of the votes. 

Tuberville has remained a staunch Trump ally, embracing the increasing MAGA emphasis on protecting “western culture,” insisting that undocumented immigrants are, as Representative Michael Rulli (R-OH), said today, “terrorizing our people,” “killing our children,” “raping our women, just like they do in England,” and “destroying western culture.” That language is at the heart of the administration’s recent National Security Strategy, which advanced the idea that the U.S. and Europe must protect a white, Christian, “Western identity.” This week, Tuberville echoed it when he claimed that Alabama’s Muslims embrace an “ideology…incompatible with our Western values.” 

The MAGA claim that white Christians in the United States and Europe are engaged in an existential fight to protect their superior race from being overwhelmed by inferior racial stocks has roots in the U.S. that reach all the way back to the fears of white southerners in the 1850s that if human enslavement could not spread to the West, the growing population of Black Americans in the South would overwhelm them, probably with violence. 

The theory that race defined history got its major “scientific” examination in the U.S. in 1916 with a book by lawyer Madison Grant titled The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History. Grant’s book drew from similar European works to argue that the “Nordic race,” from England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, was superior to other races and accounted for the best of human civilization. In the U.S., he claimed, that race was being overwhelmed by immigrants from “inferior” white races who were bringing poverty, crime, and corruption. To strengthen the Nordic race, Grant advocated, on the one hand, for an end to immigration and for “selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit” through sterilization, and on the other hand, “[e]fforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes.” 

Grant’s ideas were instrumental in justifying state eugenics laws as well as the 1924 Immigration Act establishing quotas for immigration from different countries. But his ideas fell out of favor in the 1930s, especially after Germany’s Adolf Hitler quoted often from Grant’s book in his speeches and wrote to Grant describing the book as “my bible.”   

In this era it is easy to see the strand of American history that informs the worldview of someone like Tommy Tuberville. But Jones has also inherited a strand of American history.

In his speech tonight, the former senator talked about the economic concerns of people in Alabama, noting the administration’s $40 billion support for Argentina’s president Javier Milei while American farmers lose markets, the loss of access to healthcare, the skyrocketing cost of energy, and the inability of young people to find a job that pays the bills. 

But he also talked about history. He talked about his earlier election, when Alabama proved it could transcend partisan labels and stand up for the values that made Alabama great. Jones rejected the administration’s “attacks on democracy, on freedom of speech and freedom of religion; attacks on minorities and the media, attacks on the rule of law where political adversaries are targeted and political cronies are pardoned; proven science is cast aside, placing our health at risk; policies and executive orders that only benefit the tech bros and billionaires while working folks struggle to make ends meet, farmers are losing their markets and forced to take handouts to survive….”

Instead, Jones called for reinforcing Alabama values of “hard work,” “fairness,” “looking out for your neighbor, even when you don’t agree on everything,” “telling the truth—even when we don’t want to hear it,” and believing “that every person deserves dignity, respect, opportunity, and a voice.” “Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values,” he said. “They’re Alabama values.” 

Jones’s campaign launch today built on his 2017 senatorial win, but his career reaches back from that. Jones is perhaps best known for his successful prosecution of two Ku Klux Klan members for their participation in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four young girls. The local Ku Klux Klan had not been able to stomach the organization of the Birmingham community for Black rights and had responded by bombing the church that was the heart of community organizing. President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997, and Jones’s support for charges against church bombers Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry brought a jury to a guilty verdict after the two men had walked away from accountability for their actions for almost 60 years.

Jones came to be in the position of U.S. attorney that would enable him to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had killed four children after law school because as a second-year student in 1977 he had watched former Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley prosecute Robert Chambliss for his participation in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. 

Jones had skipped class to be present at that trial because, in a chance encounter, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had encouraged him to go to courthouse trials to see good lawyers in action. Jones took Douglas at his word and watched as Baxley brought the first of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombers to justice. “It had a profound effect on me,” Jones later recalled. “Not only did I witness a great trial lawyer and learn from him, I also witnessed justice and what it means to be a public servant.” 

The encounter between Justice Douglas and Jones came about because Douglas had been invited to speak at the University of Alabama Law School, where Jones was a student, in 1974 on the twentieth anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in the public schools to be unconstitutional. 

Justice Douglas was a member of the Supreme Court when it issued its unanimous Brown v. Board decision overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. In 1896, the court had said segregation was constitutional so long as the facilities provided to Black people were equal to those provided to white people. The Brown decision exposed “separate but equal” as a lie. It concluded that “[s]eparate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and thereby launched the modern era of desegregation. 

Douglas worked to protect Americans’ civil liberties from a powerful government. He  once told New York Times court reporter Alden Whitman that he had gone into the law after working summers as a migrant farmhand. “I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the I[ndustrial] W[orkers of the] W[orld] who I saw being shot at by the police. I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law.”

Douglas took his seat on the Supreme Court in 1939 following the retirement of Justice Louis Brandeis, who had personally recommended to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Douglas should take his place. The first Jewish justice, Brandeis had taken his own seat on the court in 1916—the same year Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race—and, with the help of his sister-in-law Josephine Goldmark, pioneered the concept of basing the law on the actual conditions of life in the United States rather than on previous legal opinions. On the bench, Brandeis was a crusader for social justice against the nation’s established powers. 

Brandeis was the son of immigrants from Prague who were abolitionists, opposing the American institution of enslavement. His uncle was a delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president. 

Progressivism is as deeply rooted in American history as reaction.

In his speech tonight, Jones noted that Alabama politicians “love to say they are running to protect our values” and encouraged voters to make it clear to elected officials what those values are. He urged people in Alabama to rise above the current political divisions and build a government not for the powerful, but— as Lincoln said— a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

“On that election day in 2017 we gave the people, not just in Alabama but across this country, something even more significant,” Jones said. “We gave them hope for a stronger democracy. And today, eight years later, we’re rekindling that hope, that optimism, that enthusiasm. Let’s face it,” he added, “there is a greater urgency for hope today than there was in 2017.”

December 14, 2025 (Sunday)

Last Sunday, on December 7, Mydelle Wright, a well-regarded preservationist, filed a declaration before a court, saying that President Donald J. Trump is trying to get around the law to bulldoze four historic federal buildings. The four are the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, named for the first Black Cabinet member, completed in 1968 and on the National Register of Historic Places as a building worthy of preservation for its historical significance or artistic value; the New Deal–era General Services Administration (GSA) Regional Office Building; the 1919 Liberty Loan Building, which is the last of the World War I era “tempos” erected as the city grew to accommodate a changing government; and the 1940 Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, full of priceless murals that date from its start as the home of the Social Security Board, the precursor to the Social Security Administration. 

Now retired, Wright spent 20 years working for the GSA, the agency that oversees federal buildings. She said she had heard and believed that the White House was circumventing the GSA and its legal procedures to solicit bids to recommend the four buildings for demolition. By law, GSA has sole authority over this process; nonetheless, she said, “key GSA personnel have only just learned of the White House’s activities.”  

White House lawyers told the court that Wright’s declaration was “impermissible and factually inaccurate.” But the buildings are in styles popular in the twentieth century, ones Trump denigrated in an August executive order when he called for public buildings to be built in a style of classical architecture based on that of ancient Athens and Rome.

Wright’s declaration came as part of a lawsuit launched in November by the DC Preservation League and the law firm Cultural Heritage Partners after Trump told Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham he was planning to repaint the grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building—a National Historic Landmark built in 1888—white. The proposed change had undergone none of the required expert consultation, public input, or consideration of potential damage. 

By suing over potential damage to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building before the president could damage it, the plaintiffs seek to prevent the sort of damage Trump inflicted on the White House when he bulldozed the East Wing in October without any of the required reviews, environmental studies, public input, or congressional approval. 

In 1949, Congress chartered the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation to “facilitate public participation in the preservation of sites, buildings, and objects of national significance or interest.” On Friday, December 12, the trust sued to stop Trump from building his proposed 90,000-square-foot addition to the White House. It noted that he had torn down the East Wing without securing any of the legal approvals he needed and that the White House greeted public concerns about the demolition by issuing a press release claiming that “‘unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies’ were ‘manufactur[ing] outrage’ and ‘clutching their pearls’ over President Trump’s ‘visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House.’”

The White House has expressed its opinion that the president does not have to have permits or permission to tear down buildings, only to put them up. But now, without permissions, it appears to have begun construction on the ballroom, despite the fact that the first architect Trump initially picked for the project has stepped aside.

“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever—not President Trump, not President Joe Biden, and not anyone else,” the lawsuit says. “And no president is legally allowed to construct a ballroom on public property without giving the public the opportunity to weigh in.”

It turns out that Trump arranged for the dirt from the demolition of the East Wing to be dumped on the East Potomac Golf Links, one of three public golf courses in the Washington, D.C., area Trump is hoping to renovate after pushing aside the nonprofit group that holds a 50-year lease to restore and operate the courses and keep them affordable. All three of the courses—East Potomac, Rock Creek Park Golf, and Langston Golf Course—are on the National Register of Historic Places. Trump says if he takes control of them, D.C. residents will pay a lower fee to use them than golfers from outside the area. 

In an interview on Friday with Meridith McGraw of the Wall Street Journal about the economy, Trump took repeated calls from friends and allies, including one from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who, McGraw wrote, “joined by speakerphone to discuss the administration’s plans for Washington, D.C. golf courses.” 

Today Trump told reporters that chief of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Vince Haley, has “a policy thing that's going to be unbelievable happening…. We're building an arc like the Arc de Triumph,” he said, mixing English and French, “and we're building it by the Arlington Bridge, the Arlington Cemetery, opposite the Lincoln Memorial. You could say, Jefferson, Washington, everything, 'cause they're all right there, and it's something that is so special. It will be like the one in Paris, but to be honest with you, it blows it away, blows it away in every way.”
In The Guardian last week, Judith Levine noted that Trump is erasing the face of a federal government that served the American people, replacing it with his own. 

Nowhere is this clearer than in the looming loss of the Cohen building, with its murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and Seymour Fogel. On December 10, Timothy Noah, who has been following this story, posted images of those murals in Backbencher. They were designed to showcase the 1935 Social Security Act that established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The Shahn murals show the evils of a world of economic insecurity, showing “endless waiting, men standing and waiting, men sitting and waiting, the man and boy going wearily into the long empty perspective of a railroad track.” He showed the “little girl of the mills” and “breaker boys working in a mine. The crippled boy issuing from the mine symbolizes the perils of child labor…a homeless boy is seen sleeping in the street; another child leans from a tenement window.” He showed “the insecurity of dependents—the aged and infirm woman, the helpless mother with her small child.”

Shahn illustrated the alleviation of that insecurity through government action. He showed “the building of homes…[and] tremendous public works, furnishing employment and benefitting all of society…youths of a slum area engaged in healthy sport in handball courts…the Harvest— threshing and fruit-gathering, obvious symbols of security, suggesting also security as it applies to the farm family.”

Now the government is focusing not on protecting everyday Americans, but on protecting those in the “Epstein class.” On Friday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released 89 of the more than 95,000 photos it received from the Epstein estate. Those include images of right-wing Trump media ally Steve Bannon in a relaxed selfie with Epstein, Bannon talking with Epstein across a desk that has a framed photo of what appears to be an unconscious woman, Trump surrounded by young women, and a picture of “Trump condoms,” priced at $4.50. They feature the president’s face as an older man and bear the caption “I’m HUUUUGE!”

These images are not part of the FBI Epstein investigation files, which by law must be released in full no later than December 19. Yesterday, Aaron Blake of CNN reported on a Reuters-Ipsos poll which found that only 18% of Americans think it’s “somewhat” or “very” likely that Trump didn’t know about Epstein’s behavior with children. Thirty-nine percent of Republicans say they think he knew, compared to 34% who think he didn’t. 

Yesterday, Meryl Kornfield, Hannah Natanson, and Lisa Rein of the Washington Post reported that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is cutting up to 35,000 healthcare positions by the end of the year. Most of those positions are currently unfilled and include doctors, nurses, and support staff. Already this year, the VA has lost almost 30,000 employees from buyout offers and attrition. The reporters say the cuts will reduce  the number of VA healthcare employees to about 372,000, down 10% from last year. The administration is trying to steer veterans to the private healthcare system. 

On Thursday the House passed a measure to overturn Trump’s elimination of union rights at federal agencies. A bipartisan group of members forced the vote past House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) with a discharge petition, but it is unlikely to pass the Senate, where Republicans oppose it. Trump said ending union rights was necessary to protect national security. 

Last week, Sharon Lerner of ProPublica reported that the Environmental Protection Agency announced it is nearly doubling the amount of formaldehyde it considers safe to breathe. Formaldehyde is used in products from building materials and leather goods to craft supplies. It causes cancer, miscarriage, asthma, and other health issues by altering DNA. Lobbyists for the chemical industry have been working to water down government regulation of it for years. The method of assessment behind the proposed new rule for formaldehyde could change government regulation of other carcinogens, as well.  

While the government under Trump and MAGA Republicans is backing away from measures that benefit everyday Americans, it is finding the energy to chase Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego Garcia. Ábrego Garcia is from El Salvador, a country he fled in 2011 at age 16 after the Barrio 18 gang threatened his life. In 2019, a judge denied him asylum but granted him protection from removal out of concern for his safety, allowing him to live and work in the U.S. In March, despite the protection from removal, the administration arrested Ábrego Garcia and sent him to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT terrorist prison, where he was beaten and tortured.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to bring him back to the U.S. It appealed; the Supreme Court unanimously ordered it to “facilitate” Ábrego Garcia’s return. The administration claimed that “facilitate” only required it to let him into the country if he arrived; it did not require the government to seek his release. 

It brought him back in June, after Tennessee indicted him for transporting immigrants, landing him in prison in that state. While he was in prison, the government tried to remove Ábrego Garcia to several other countries but claimed falsely that Costa Rica, where he asked to go and which had offered to receive him, refused to take him. Instead of sending him to Costa Rica, they continued to imprison him while proposing to send him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and Liberia, countries where he faced harm or the threat of removal to El Salvador and which didn’t want to take him. 

In August, Ábrego Garcia was released on bail and went back to Maryland, where officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him when he checked in with them. In October, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw found there was a “realistic likelihood” that the Department of Justice had sought immigrant-trafficking charges against Ábrego Garcia as punishment for challenging his removal to El Salvador. 

On Thursday, Judge Xinis said ICE could not hold Ábrego Garcia because there was no final deportation order for him, noting that the judge had not ordered one in 2019. Ábrego Garcia was released at the end of the day, but the administration ordered him to report to ICE’s Baltimore field office at 8:00 the next morning. The Department of Justice had gone to an immigration judge—immigration judges work for the Department of Justice; they are not independent—who issued an order to correct a “scrivener’s error” in the original 2019 order protecting Ábrego Garcia from deportation to say there was a deportation order all along. This appeared to be a precursor to arresting him again. 

On Friday, Judge Xinis granted the request of Ábrego Garcia’s lawyers to bar the government from arresting him again until she hears from both parties.

On Friday, Ábrego Garcia checked in at the ICE field office in Baltimore, where he told supporters: “Regardless of this administration, I believe this is a country of laws, and I believe that this injustice will come to its end. Keep fighting. Do not give up. I wish all of you love and justice. Keep going.”

December 17, 2025 (Wednesday)

This morning, four vulnerable Republicans signed onto the discharge petition all House Democrats have signed to force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring a bill to extend the premium tax credits for purchasing healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) markets to the floor for a vote. The proposal extends the credits for three years. 

Republicans who recognize that the American people overwhelmingly want the extensions have been fighting their colleagues who want to get rid of the ACA and slash government spending in general. Instead of extending the credits, House leadership is proposing a package of policies popular among their conference; the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that it will drop about 100,000 people a year off health insurance through 2035 but will save the government $35.6 billion. 

Without the extension of the premium tax credits, which Republicans permitted to lapse at the end of the year when they passed their July budget reconciliation bill that they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the 24 million Americans who buy insurance on the ACA marketplace will see their insurance premiums skyrocket, and millions will lose their health insurance altogether. And yet, Republicans oppose the extensions, which will cost the government about $350 billion over the next ten years. The Republicans’ extension of the 2017 tax cuts in that same bill will cost about $4 trillion over the same period. 

Yesterday, Johnson dismissed the members of his conference who wanted to vote on the extension, saying that “many of them did want a vote on this Obamacare covid-era subsidy the Democrats created. We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve, and it just was not to be.” Representative Mike Lawler (R-NY) told reporters: “This is absolute bullsh*t.” 

When the Republican-controlled House Rules Committee struck down all the Republican attempts to amend the Republican bill by extending the tax credits, four Republicans signed the Democrats’ discharge petition. The four Republicans who signed are Lawler and Brian Fitzpatrick, Rob Bresnahan, and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania. David G. Valadao of California told Marianna Sotomayor, Kadia Goba, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post that he would have signed, too. 

This evening, the House passed the Republican healthcare measure, which is expected to die in the Senate. The House will vote on extending the premium tax credits in January. 

Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported today on a court filing by lawyers for the government that claims it is legal for the administration to distribute federal money only to Republican-dominated states, withholding it from Democratic-dominated states. The government admitted that it withheld grants from the Department of Energy according to “whether a grantee’s address was located in a State that tends to elect and/or has recently elected Democratic candidates in state and national elections (so-called ‘Blue States’).” Without evidence, the government claimed that such discrimination “is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.” 

Kornfield and Natanson note that this is a “remarkably candid admission” that “echoes…Trump’s frequent vows to punish cities and states that he sees as his enemies, from withholding disaster relief for Southern California to targeting blue cities with National Guard troops.”

Joey Garrison of USA Today reported yesterday that a senior White House official told him the Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Since 1960, NCAR scientists have studied Earth’s atmosphere, meteorology, climate science, the Sun, and the impacts of weather and climate on the environment and society. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote that “[d]ismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.”

Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought told Garrison that the center is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and that the government will break it up, moving what he called “any vital activities such as weather research” to “another entity or location.” Earlier that day, Garrison notes, the administration cancelled $109 million in grants to Colorado.

Colorado governor Jared Polis said he had not heard the news about NCAR but that “[i]f true, public safety is at risk and science is being attacked. Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families. If these cuts move forward, we will lose our competitive advantage against foreign powers and adversaries in the pursuit of scientific discovery.” 

Trump has repeatedly attacked Polis, a Democrat, since his refusal to pardon former Colorado election official Tina Peters, convicted by a jury for state crimes in facilitating a data breach in her quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Peters is serving a nine-year prison sentence. On December 11, Trump granted Peters a “full pardon,” but since presidents cannot issue pardons for state crimes, that means little unless Polis also pardons her.
  
Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket reported yesterday on escalating calls for violence to free Peters coming from prominent right-wing figures. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted after the threat to close NCAR that he was “[h]earing this is payback for Colorado not honoring Trump/Peters ‘pardon.’” 

Former special counsel Jack Smith testified today behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. According to Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News, who obtained portions of Smith’s opening statement, Smith told the committee that he and his team found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump engaged in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed Smith earlier this month, rejecting Smith’s offer to testify in public. Jordan was among those claiming to be outraged at the news that Smith had obtained the call records of nine congressional Republicans related to the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election. Those records listed who was called and the time, date, and length of the call, without information about the content of it. 

In 2022 the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed that Trump and Jordan had a ten-minute phone call on the morning of January 6. That afternoon, Jordan objected to the counting of the votes that would certify Democrat Joe Biden as president. Jordan refused to cooperate with the committee when it asked for more information. 

Smith told the committee that the phone records “were lawfully subpoenaed and were relevant to complete a comprehensive” investigation. He continued: “January 6 was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 100 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police officers that day. Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election.”

“I didn’t choose those Members,” Smith said, “President Trump did.”

Republicans were hoping to undermine Smith and to portray him as part of a Department of Justice weaponized under the Biden administration. “Jack Smith should be in jail—if not prison,” Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney of Politico. “He’s a crook. Jack Smith is a crook, and he needs to be held accountable for all his games that he played.”

After Smith testified, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Jordan “made an excellent decision in not allowing Jack Smith to testify publicly, because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities of January 6.”

Today, news broke that Trump has added plaques to the hall of portraits of former presidents hanging in the White House. A plaque under the photo of President Barack Obama says he “was one of the most divisive political figures in American History,” who “passed the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act.” 

Under a photograph of an autopen, with which Trump replaced the portrait of Biden, the plaque begins: “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History. Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States, Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction….”