Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

December 19, 2025 (Friday)

This past week feels like the final, chaotic days of a political era.

Last weekend was marred by horrific incidents of violence that drew attention even in a nation sadly accustomed to violence: a mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday that killed two people and wounded nine more; a mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, during a Hanukkah celebration that killed 15 people and wounded 40 others; and then on Sunday the news that beloved filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their home from knife wounds.

The Reiners’ deaths were immediately associated with a family member who struggles with addiction and mental health issues, but on Monday morning, President Donald Trump greeted the news with a social media post suggesting that their deaths were a result of Reiner’s political opposition to Trump. 

The backlash to Trump’s statement was immediate and bipartisan, but Trump rejected calls to delete the post. Instead, before reporters, he doubled down on his criticism of the filmmaker who gave us This is Spinal Tap, A Few Good Men, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and so on, and who portrayed Michael “Meathead” Stivic on All in the Family during its nine-year run from 1971 to 1979.

On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published two articles based on eleven interviews journalist Chris Whipple conducted with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, revealing key members of the administration as a dysfunctional group of radical zealots making decisions haphazardly without any sense of public duty. The world Whipple portrayed looked so chaotic that Wiles promptly claimed she had been misrepresented, only to have Whipple note that everything he had quoted was on tape. The White House then appeared to pressure key members of the administration to reinforce the idea they were unified by posting on social media statements supporting Wiles. 

On Wednesday, four Republicans in the House of Representatives joined all of the Democrats to force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to hold a vote on extending the premium tax credits for purchasing healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act markets. Their willingness to force a vote on yet another issue Johnson was trying to avoid—the others were the Epstein Files Transparency Act and a measure to restore union rights to government employees—indicated both that Johnson’s power is shaky and that Republican lawmakers are feeling the heat over public concerns about the economy. 

Also on Wednesday, former special counsel Jack Smith testified before the House Judiciary Committee, telling it 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. Smith had asked to testify in public, an offer Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) rejected. A New York Times article by Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim, recounting a phone call Trump made in late 2020 pressing David Ralston, then speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, to hold a special session to overturn Trump’s loss in the election, reinforced Smith’s testimony. 

Then, Wednesday night, Trump spoke to the nation in what was supposed to be a speech about the economy as Americans are giving him poor marks on his handling of it. The speech was shorter than his usual, coming in at just under twenty minutes. Trump shouted his way through a rushed speech so full of lies that economist Paul Krugman said he couldn’t “find a single factual assertion Trump made that was true.” What Tom Nichols of The Atlantic saw was “an unnerving display of fear.” 

As Nichols wrote, “Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job.” But there was more to it than just an indication of the president’s weakening poll numbers or declining mental acuity. It seemed to mark an end for the Reagan Revolution whose ideology Trump has pushed to its brutish conclusion.

When Trump yelled that he had “inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” and slammed “Radical Left Democrats,” Somali Americans, immigrants, and transgender Americans while claiming he “fights for the law-abiding, hardworking people of our country…who make this nation run, who make this nation work,” he was amping Republican rhetoric since the 1980s into caricature. 

In the 1980s, Republicans told Americans that the modern government that had regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, protected civil rights, and stabilized the international order since World War II was “socialism.” Undeserving Americans like President Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens,” who were coded to be Black Americans from inner cities, or talk radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh’s “feminazis”—women who demanded equal rights—were cheating the system to take tax money from hardworking white taxpayers. 

Cutting business regulations and taxes would usher in extraordinary economic growth that would boost the prosperity of hardworking Americans, they insisted, leaving behind those unwilling to work. 

Except it didn’t. A February 2025 report from RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, written by Carter C. Price found that if the system in place before 1975 had stayed in place, the bottom 90% of Americans would have had almost $80 trillion more in 2023 than they did. When Democratic president Joe Biden took office in 2021, he set out to restore the economic system in place before 1981, protecting workers, boosting infrastructure investment, breaking up monopolies, and protecting consumers. 

It worked. Far from being the economic “disaster” Trump claimed, the economy he inherited was, according to The Economist, “the envy of the world.” “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust,” Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr wrote. If Trump had left that system in place, he would have gotten credit for a booming economy as the investments made under Biden took hold. 

Instead, he undermined that government with dramatic layoffs and undermined that economy with tariffs, continued deregulation, and additional tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while cutting the tax credits that supported the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance markets. On Wednesday he was reduced to promising payments of $1,776 to military personnel, implying that money would come from tariffs. But fact checkers noted immediately that any such payments would come from money Congress appropriated to subsidize housing allowances for service members. 

Trump’s false claims that Biden had left the U.S. to be “invaded by an army of 25 million people, many who came from prisons and jails, mental institutions and insane asylums,” and that under Biden we had “transgender for everybody, [and] crime at record levels” exaggerated the rhetoric of “welfare queens” into open dehumanization. 

Trump also echoed longstanding Republican claims that Democrats can win elections only by offering handouts to their voters or by cheating through voter fraud committed by undocumented immigrants, a charge that never had a shred of evidence. Trump took to its logical conclusion the idea that only Republicans could legitimately win elections on January 6, 2021, when his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the legitimate results of a presidential election.  

Trump ’s panicked shouting at the American people seemed to recognize that Americans have turned against not just his economic policies, but also the ideology that underpinned them.

As it has lost the support of the people, the administration appears to be acting without regard to the law.  On Thursday, Ellen Nakashima, Alex Horton, and Dan Lamothe reported in the Washington Post that the administration’s attacks on small boats coming from Venezuela were a redirection of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s determination to strike cartels in Mexico. Miller wanted to strike in Mexico to give the administration a quick win by stopping immigrants from coming across the border. But when the Mexican government slowed the activities of the cartels, the administration turned to attacking the boats from Venezuela. 

“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” a government official told the Washington Post journalists. The official said Miller was behind the directive Trump signed in July authorizing lethal force against two dozen foreign criminal groups the administration called “designated terrorist organizations.” That directive accused those organizations of deliberately killing Americans with drugs, making them enemy combatants, a construction legal analysts say has no basis in the law. 

Miller’s goals dovetailed with those of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who wants to force Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, eager to demonstrate his competence after revealing classified information on a Signal chat, also got on board. 

Now the administration’s goal is apparently Venezuela’s oil. On Wednesday, Miller posted on social media: “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.” Last week, Trump told reporters: “We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water. And now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening.”

Also on Thursday, the administration reported that the “highly respected” board of the Kennedy Center, for the most part hand-picked by Trump, had voted “unanimously” to rename the performing arts center the “Trump-Kennedy Center” “because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.” Immediately, board member Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH) said there was nothing “unanimous” about it: she had been muted on the call and prevented from voting. Others noted that this name change is illegal: it is Congress that established the name of the Kennedy Center, and Congress must approve any name change.

On Friday, workers added Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center. Cable news host Chris Hayes noted that anyone removing the new letters could be arrested and charged with a crime, although that act “would be no more unlawful than what they’re doing right now.” 

Meanwhile, House speaker Johnson sent congressional representatives home for the holidays, presumably to quiet the fights over extending the premium tax credits and to make sure his members weren’t there to comment about the release of the Epstein files, required by law on Friday. 

On Friday—today—former special counsel Jack Smith asked the House Judiciary Committee to release his testimony about Trump’s participation in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election to the public. He says the American people should hear the facts of the criminal cases against Trump. 

Today was also the deadline by which Congress, through the Epstein Files Transparency Act, required the administration to release all of the files compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a searchable format. Lawmakers forced that bill through the House thanks to a discharge petition, and then the Senate passed it overwhelmingly. 

But the Department of Justice did not meet the requirements of the law. It announced midday it would release only some of the files. And then, when it did release some of them, they were so heavily redacted they clearly thwarted the intention of the law. Nashville, Tennessee, investigative reporter Phil Williams noted that the files were redacted in such a way that they would hide Trump and highlight Democrats: a search of the word “Clinton” delivered 109 hits while a search of the word “Trump” produced only two. This, despite a recent New York Times article about how they were best friends who bonded over their pursuit of women.  

News outlets reported that the Department of Justice had redacted not just the names and identifying information of victims, but also of “politically exposed individuals and government officials.” The Epstein grand jury documents are simply 119 blacked-out pages. Republican representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, said the document release “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.” 

The second Trump administration has exposed the lie of Reaganomics, as well as the rot at the heart of an administration dedicated to the idea that some people are better than others. It has also shown the ridiculous cultlike behavior of those who adhere to that idea. 

Former senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), who as the 2012 Republican presidential nominee talked to supporters about “makers” and “takers” in an embrace of the economic ideology of the Reagan years, published an op-ed in the New York Times today that appeared to acknowledge the political ideology of the past forty-five years has failed. He called for addressing the economic inequalities in the United States by placing higher taxes on the rich, people like him.

In a sign of which way the wind is blowing, Republican senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming announced today she would not run for reelection in 2026. So did Elise Stefanik (R-NY), elected to office as a moderate who then switched her allegiance to Trump to rise briefly to Republican leadership in the House. She is abandoning not just her run to become New York’s governor, but also any attempt at reelection to the House of Representatives. 

This evening, the U.S. launched a massive attack on more than seventy suspected Islamic State targets in central Syria, in retaliation for the deaths of two U.S. Army soldiers and an interpreter last Saturday. “This is not the beginning of a war—it is a declaration of vengeance,” Defense Secretary Hegseth posted on social media. “The United States of America, under President Trump’s leadership, will never hesitate and never relent to defend our people…. Today, we hunted and we killed our enemies. Lots of them. And we will continue.”