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Improbably, the White-Nationalist-In-Chief still plunges to lower, ranker, more nakedly racist depths as he tries to deflect from his failings, lies, naps and crimes. The fake Peace President’s ugly apogee, topping murders at sea, banning migrants “non-compatible with Western Civilization,” siccing ICE dogs on innocents et al: His vicious invective against Somalis as “garbage” while his Stepford bigots stand silent before it all, complicity unbound. Ferris Bueller's hapless teacher: "Anyone? Anyone?"
Obviously the mild cluelessness of blank students facing Ben Stein's teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off pales before the toxic spectacle of a blithering, execrable fascist stirring up gutter-level hatred as he spews "possibly the most openly racist shit any US president has ever been caught saying." The dissonance of the furious bigotry erupting from an alleged national leader - its vitriol, animus, beyond-the-pale crudeness, the eerie silence into which it falls - also prompts a jarring, queasy sense of, "what the fuck is wrong with this picture?" even as it comes from a ghastly human whose most longstanding, foundational tenet is brutish racism (plus greed), going back to his KKK father, his deadly hatred for the Central Park Five, his snarling claim all Mexicans are criminals and rapists.
In his ongoing "shitification of American politics," there's always, obviously much more. There's blithering, gaslighting, verbal incontinence: "Affordability is a con job, a hoax started by Democrats." Self-serving grandiosity: "The Ukraine war never would have happened if I'd been president." Outlandish fantasy: "They're finding money in our country now they never knew existed. The other day - $30 billion. Where did it come from? I said, 'Why don't you check the tariffs shelf?' They call back: Sir, you're right.'" (America: "Of all the things that didn’t happen, this didn’t happen the most.") Cult worship: The National Park Service has removed MLK Jr. Day and Juneteenth from their free admission days, replacing them with Dear Leader's birthday; he'll be 12 next year.
In further Stalinesque self-glorification - and in the first time a living (sort of) president (ditto) named a building for himself while in office - months after DOGE tried to illegally seize control of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a non-profit think tank for international conflict resolution, the building has re-emerged with massive silver letters as the Donald J. Trump U.S Institute of Peace. A White House spokesbot, lauding straight-faced the what is it now 38? wars he's ended, declared, "Congratulations, world!" The world, noting the Orwellian renaming of an institute created in 1984, helpfully if hopelessly pointed out that Orwell's dark masterwork "was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual," but here we are.
Other atrocities proliferate. The report Trump’s military occupation of U.S. cities has cost over $473 million - from $270 million in D.C and $172 million in L.A. to $13 million in Chicago - even as he cut more than $1 trillion from vital domestic services. The fact that both of the DOJ's wildly unqualified, illegally appointed partisan hacks/pretend acting U.S. attorneys Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan still claim to hold their non-existent positions. The fact that, after boasting about rolling back food stamps and her "gratitude and joy for this work," USDA Sec. Brooke Rollins is still "hellbent on people going hungry" in blue states. Passage of Texas' racist redistricting coup - "Let's talk about cowardice" - and the White House's icky Daddy's Home holidays meme.
And everything "no stupid rules of engagement" dunk-tank clown Pete Hegseth does: The Signalgate report that his massive security leak "risked endangering U.S. military personnel," which he somehow turned into, “Total exoneration." His slimy, shifting narratives - the Pentagon has no idea who's on board vs. they're all on a secret list of military targets - for 48 minutes of murderous video showing "what it looks like when the full force of the United States military is turned on two guys clinging to a tiny piece of wood and about to go under," aka, "a shooting gallery with helpless targets" which is clearly either a war crime or murder - plain and simple,” both impeachable, though Megyn Kelly would've preferred "they lose a limb and bleed out a little."
Still, with sinking polls, rising prices, Epstein lurking, a tragic D.C shooting to open the floodgates and billions for ICE's jackbooted thugs, the splenetic racism from a presidential bully pulpit is paramount, a timeless scapegoating ploy now at "absolutely unique" levels of depravity. "It all started with Barack Hussein Obama," he raved, before attacking Somalis who have "nothing" to do with the shooting or anything else. America will "go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage," "They have destroyed our country," "Ilhan Omar is "garbage," "her friends are garbage," Somalia "is just people walking around killing each other," "they come from hell and do nothing but bitch," "their country stinks," "we don’t want them," "Minnesota is a hellhole right now," ”Let them go back to where they came from." And, evil one, may you too. Oh please.
His on-camera racistmania was dutifully lapped up, first by the obsequious (seated) members of his creepy circle jerk, then by the obsequious (standing) minions - blinding white, stiffly smiling, hands clutched, tongues tied - performatively gathered for his "supine authoritarian MAGA messaging...a barely coded cry of 'Everybody into the pool!' for a supporting cast of racist demagogues." One by one, they obeyed. J.D. banged on the table to lay the blame where it belonged: "Why did homes get so unaffordable? Because we had 20 million illegal aliens taking homes that ought by right to go to American citizens." Marco Rubio, in some insane optics - try watching without sound - feverishly genuflected to the peace president, sitting next to him, dozing off.
ICE Barbie thanked him for having "kept the hurricanes away" and "saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you’ve blown up in the Caribbean"; she urged a travel ban on "every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies" - but not those getting free jets - who "slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch benefits (from) AMERICANS. We don't want them." Whew. She flamboyantly echoes both Stephen Goebbel's Nazi rhetoric and Trump's calls for stripping citizenship, blocking all refugees - except sad white Afrikaners - from a vague list of “third world countries,” aka brown and black, "non-compatible with Western Civilization" - an illegal move that def turns the racism up to 11. Manifesting "cultishness off the charts," Press Barbie celebrated all this as "amazing" and "epic."For Minnesota's Somali community of up to 80,000, the largest in the country, it is "extraordinarily harmful." Already tense in the wake of an alleged $250 million fraud scandal involving federal nutrition aid and two non-profits - both run by white people but involving dozens of Somalis - pressure from the new racist surge feels "inescapable...The volcano has erupted." Though many are U.S. citizens, and Minneapolis' police chief has told officers they'll be fired if they don't stop illegal force by ICE goons, people are afraid to go to work, to school, to Friday prayers, especially in Somali-dense areas like "Little Mogadishu" and the Karmel Mall. "We know authoritarianism," said a Somali city council member, and with it the potency of racism and nativism. After Haitians eating pets, he said, "It's just the next iteration."
Meanwhile, ugly ripples ooze from Trump's rhetoric. ICE thugs keep thugging, though most of their victims have no criminal record and some are U.S. citizens. They've sicced dogs on people, resulting in horrific injuries and reviving MAGA's sick "good old days." They have a cruel new plan dubbed "Operation Irish Goodbye" to arrest those already self-deporting, and they're canceling citizenship ceremonies for people from the "wrong" countries. A 2025 blood-and-soil US National Security Strategy touts great replacement theory, warns Europe it faces "civilizational erasure" by migrants of color, supports their fascist groups, rejects our allies for Russia, imagines a "Crusader-style reconquest (of) Europe by the white right." He just trashed a "decaying" Europe with "weak" leaders, 'cause brown people. A Wisconsin worker was fired and went viral for calling a Somali couple "niggers"; fellow racists raised $100,000 for her, echoing "garbage" slurs.
Despite outrage about his murders at sea, Dunk-tank Pete killed four more brown people, bragged about it, insisted Trump can kill "as he sees fit" and gave a speech with ominous shock-and-awe echoes declariring "narco-terrorists are the al-Qaida of our hemisphere (and) we will keep killing them." Then the most petty, hateful person on the planet - spite-revoking a pardon?! - giddily accepted a hideous, made-up, Happy Meal, savagely mocked FIFA Peace Prize and medal - the “Trump dance! the Village People! - to appease his no-Nobel ego because "if you show up with a tchotchke (and) give it to the three-year-old in the Oval Office, he will (be) happy." Gavin Newsom got the Kennedy Center Peace Prize: “AUDIENCE WAS AMAZING (CHAIRS NOT GREAT)...CROWD WENT WILD."The View gave out medals too: "You get a medal! And you get a medal!" Okay, all medaled up. Now can he go home?

A study published this week about tens of thousands of starving African penguins is highlighting what scientists warn is the planet's sixth mass extinction event, driven by human activity, and efforts to save as many species as possible.
Researchers from the South African Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment (DFFE), the United Kingdom's University of Exeter, and other institutions examined a pair of breeding colonies north of Cape Town, South Africa, and published their findings Thursday in Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology.
"These two sites are two of the most important breeding colonies historically—holding around 25,000 (Dassen) and around 9,000 (Robben) breeding pairs in the early 2000s. As such, they are also the locations of long-term monitoring programs," said study co-author Azwianewi Makhado from the DFFE in a statement.
As the study explains: "African Penguins moult annually, coming ashore and fasting for 21 days, when they shed and replace all their feathers. Failure to fatten sufficiently to moult, or to regain condition afterwards, results in death."
The team found that "between 2004 and 2011, the sardine stock off west South Africa was consistently below 25% of its peak abundance, and this appears to have caused severe food shortage for African penguins, leading to an estimated loss of about 62,000 breeding individuals," said co-author and Exeter associate professor Richard Sherley.
The paper notes that "although some adults moulted at a colony to the southeast, where food may have been more plentiful, much of the mortality likely resulted from failure of birds to fatten sufficiently to moult. The fishery exploitation rate of sardines west of Cape Agulhas was consistently above 20% between 2005 and 2010."
Sherley said that "high sardine exploitation rates—that briefly reached 80% in 2006—in a period when sardine was declining because of environmental changes likely worsened penguin mortality."
Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels is warming ocean water and impacting how salty it is. For the penguins' prey, said Sherley, "changes in the temperature and salinity of the spawning areas off the west and south coasts of South Africa made spawning in the historically important west coast spawning areas less successful, and spawning off the south coast more successful."
The researcher also stressed that "these declines are mirrored elsewhere," pointing out that the species' global population has dropped nearly 80% in the last three decades. With fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs left, the African penguin was uplisted to "critically endangered" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species last year.
Sherley told Mongabay at the time that the IUCN update "highlights a much bigger problem with the health of our environment."
"Despite being well-known and studied, these penguins are still facing extinction, showing just how severe the damage to our ecosystems has become," he said. "If a species as iconic as the African penguin is struggling to survive, it raises the question of how many other species are disappearing without us even noticing. We need to act now—not just for penguins, but to protect the broader biodiversity that is crucial for the planet's future."
Looks like the combined effects of climate change and over fishing are key factors in decimating the populations of these penguins.www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...
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— Margot Hodson (@margothodson.bsky.social) December 5, 2025 at 4:46 AM
Fearful that the iconic penguin species could be extinct within a decade, the conservation organizations BirdLife South Africa and the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) last year pursued a first-of-its-kind legal battle in the country, resulting in a settlement with the commercial fishing sector and DFFE.
The settlement, reached just days before a planned court hearing this past March, led to no-go zones for the commercial anchovy and sardine fishing vessels around six penguin breeding colonies: Stony Point, as well as Bird, Dassen, Dyer, Robben, and St. Croix islands.
"The threats facing the African penguin are complex and ongoing—and the order itself requires monitoring, enforcement, and continued cooperation from industry and the government processes which monitor and allocate sardine and anchovy populations for commercial purposes," Nicky Stander, head of conservation at SANCCOB, said in March.
The study also acknowledges hopes that "the revised closures—which will operate year-round until at least 2033—will decrease mortality of African penguins and improve their breeding success at the six colonies around which they have been implemented."
"However," it adds, "in the face of the ongoing impact of climate change on the abundance and distribution of their key prey, other interventions are likely to be needed."
Lorien Pichegru, a marine biology professor at South Africa's Nelson Mandela University who was not involved in the study, called the findings "extremely concerning" and warned the Guardian that the low fish numbers require urgent action "not only for African penguins but also for other endemic species depending on these stocks."
President Donald Trump's administration has drastically slashed resources for enforcing tax laws, and the result has been a massive plunge in tax-related prosecutions.
A Tuesday report from Reuters found that federal tax prosecutions in 2025 fell to "their lowest level in decades this year," falling by 27% over the last year.
The report noted that the Trump administration has made "deep cuts to the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigative unit," and has also reassigned some agents who worked in the unit to focus more on immigration cases.
The Trump administration has even assigned more than 20 IRS agents in the agency's DC office to conduct patrols alongside city police officers as part of the president's purported plan to reduce crime in the capital city, Reuters reported.
Reuters also observed that the US Department of Justice closed its Tax Division, and that "a third or more of the criminal lawyers who worked there quit."
Sources told Reuters that the Trump administration explicitly told DOJ prosecutors earlier this year that tax prosecutions were not a top priority, and one source said that DOJ leadership under the second Trump administration was "very skeptical about white-collar crime and whether we should be doing those cases."
The report added that US attorneys' offices at the moment are unlikely to pick up the slack for enforcing tax laws given that DOJ records show "more than 1,000 lawyers have left US attorneys’ offices this year, roughly double the number who quit or were pushed out in previous years."
David Hubbert, a senior fellow at the Tax Law Center at New York University’s law school, told Reuters that these cuts would likely result in a surge in tax cheating.
"Decreasing criminal enforcement across all types of taxpayers would signal an indifference to cheating and insults the millions of honest filers who pay the taxes they owe," Hubbert explained.
The Republican healthcare proposal that's set for a vote in the US Senate on Thursday would not prevent insurance premiums from skyrocketing for tens of millions of Americans and would likely harm sicker people by promoting high-deductible plans.
The GOP bill, led by Sens. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), would allow enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits to expire, replacing them in 2026 and 2027 with an annual payment of up to $1,500 in tax-advantaged health savings accounts to help cover out-of-pocket costs.
The catch is that only Americans enrolled in high-deductible bronze or catastrophic plans on the ACA exchanges would be eligible for the funding, which could not be used on monthly premiums. In 2026, the average individual deductible for bronze plans is $7,476, and the average for catastrophic plans is $10,600.
Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, said Tuesday that "premium payments would still more than double next year" under the GOP plan, which does not have enough support to overcome the Senate's 60-vote filibuster.
"Healthy people could be better off in a high deductible plan with a health savings account," Levitt noted. "People who are sick would face big premium increases or a deductible they can't afford."
Brad Woodhouse, president of the advocacy group Protect Our Care, called Senate Republicans' legislation "an utter joke that would set healthcare progress back by decades and leave Americans high and dry without the care and coverage they deserve."
"Republicans are proving once again how unserious they are," said Woodhouse. "Instead of protecting hard-working families, Sens. Cassidy and Crapo want to force them off the insurance plans they like and onto junk plans that leave them at risk of crippling medical debt. That’s not what American families want, and it’s certainly not what they deserve.”
Asked earlier this week if he supports the Crapo-Cassidy bill, President Donald Trump responded, "I like the concept."
The Senate GOP plan was introduced as a counter to Democrats' push for a clean three-year extension of the enhanced ACA subsidies. Republicans, who passed legislation over the summer that enacted the largest-ever cuts to Medicaid, are expected to vote down the Democratic plan on Thursday.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that if the ACA tax credits lapse at the end of the year, "a couple making $44,000 (208% of the poverty level) will see their monthly marketplace premium rise from $85 to $253—an annual increase of $2,013."
With the Senate vote looming, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La) is "still trying to figure out" his healthcare proposal, Politico reported Tuesday.
"The goal is for GOP lawmakers to have 'something' to vote on before the end of next week, according to one of the senior House Republicans involved in the talks," the outlet added, "even if there is no time left for the Senate to pass it before the subsidies lapse."
Despite US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's claim that "no American citizens have been arrested or detained" as part of the Trump administration's violent and widely condemned immigration operations, ProPublica has tracked more than 170 cases, and a Senate report released Tuesday shares the stories of 22 of them.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released Unchecked Authority: Examining the Trump Administration's Extrajudicial Immigration Detentions of US Citizens ahead of a public forum with House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and five Americans unconstitutionally detained by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents.
"While the second Trump administration has been marked by brazen lawlessness in many areas, the daily drumbeat of shocking stories detailing the behavior of federal immigration officials has been particularly chilling," the report states.
"The subcommittee's findings add to a growing body of evidence that the Trump administration is seeking to build a nationwide paramilitary force with vast resources that lawlessly detains citizens based on its own whims—an effort which has a number of unfortunate and obvious historical parallels," the publication continues.
"They couldn't even agree who had authority over me because none of them did. I was never arrested. Never charged. Never given an explanation. Never given an apology."
The report also notes that the testimonies included "represent only a subset of the likely hundreds of American citizens who have been unlawfully detained," and "also do not account for the many green-card holders, visa recipients, and others who have been captured and whose immigration status may cause them to be subject to even more severe treatment and harsher conditions than the appalling experiences of the Americans documented herein."
On June 8, when Cary Lopez Alvarado—a 23-year-old born and raised in Los Angeles County, California—was taking lunch to her husband, who was providing maintenance services on private property, masked immigration agents targeted him and her cousin in a work truck. Lopez Alvarado, who was pregnant, approached and took a video of the scene, where agents tried to pry open the vehicle's doors and threatened to break a window.
According to the report:
Cary tried again to tell the agents to stop, but, before she could finish her sentence, the officer put his hands on her and shoved her into the side of the truck. Two other agents immediately rushed over to further detain her. Cary knelt and clutched her mid-section to shield her baby from the assault. "I wasn't resisting at all," Cary recalled. "I can't fight back; I'm pregnant." The officers yanked her up and placed handcuffs around her wrists, all the while shoving her stomach against the truck. Her cousin attempted to intervene; "Be careful. Don't you see she’s pregnant?" he pleaded. At this point, Cary became dizzy from the altercation. When she regained awareness, she saw three agents on top of her cousin and several more in the process of throwing her husband on the ground. Then, the agents began kicking the back of the unoccupied work truck. A viral photo shows Cary, handcuffed and heavily pregnant, being led by a masked agent into a car.
The document also details the experience of Dayanne Figueroa, a first-generation Mexican American and working mom to a 6-year-old in Chicago, Illinois. When she was driving down a residential street to work on the morning of October 10, an unmarked, silver Dodge Durango SUV with blacked-out windows rammed into the side of her car. She reached for her phone to call local police, "but within seconds, two masked men in camouflage leapt out of the Durango and ran over to Dayanne's black Mercedes-Benz; one raised a gun in Dayanne's direction, and the other had an assault rifle strapped around his shoulder," the report says.
"Moments later, a third armed and masked agent appeared. Two of the men ripped open Dayanne's car door and grabbed her," the report continues, noting that bystanders recorded videos. "Two agents forcibly dragged her out of her car by her legs, ripping both shoes off, slamming her to the concrete, and digging their knees into her body to restrain her, directly over the site of her recent surgery. The agents flipped over Dayanne—who stands at 4 feet 11 inches and weighs 120 pounds—and put her in handcuffs, cinching them so tight that Dayanne has since suffered nerve damage to her wrists. Three agents carried Dayanne to an unmarked, red SUV and threw her inside, while a fourth agent reached into her car and grabbed her laptop, purse, and cellphone."
They initially took her to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Broadview, where federal agents have violently responded to protesters and held immigrants in "horrific and inhumane conditions." She was then brought to a Federal Bureau of Investigation facility in another Chicago suburb, Lombard, where she started urinating blood. That afternoon, she was eventually released to paramedics. Figueroa recalled that "they couldn't even agree who had authority over me because none of them did. I was never arrested. Never charged. Never given an explanation. Never given an apology."
UPDATE: Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chair Sen. Blumenthal releases "Unchecked Authority" report with firsthand accounts from 22 US citizens "who were physically assaulted, pepper sprayed, denied medical treatment, and detained—sometimes for days—by federal immigration agents"
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— Tyler McBrien (@tylermcbrien.com) December 9, 2025 at 8:57 AM
While Figueroa's young child was not part of her encounter with federal agents, the report stresses that when children are involved in ICE and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents' interactions, "they are treated with reckless disregard."
For example, a now-6-year-old Massachusetts girl on the autism spectrum, called M. in the report, "was separated from her parents by ICE agents in an apparent attempt to lure her parents to leave private property so they could be apprehended" in September.
"M. was violently ill upon being returned to her family and had to be treated in the emergency room, miss school for a week, and has continued to struggle with nightmares," according to the document. It also notes that "her father has a pending asylum case and her mother has a pending request to obtain a legal status."
In a Tuesday statement announcing the report, Blumenthal said that "Americans should have a hard time recognizing our great nation in these stomach-turning, heartbreaking stories of brutal assaults on our fellow citizens."
"Masked ICE and CPB agents chillingly seizing Americans isn't the nation we know and cherish," he added. "Totalitarian tactics have no place in our democracy. I hope that elevating stories of abhorrent abuse will reinforce our resolve to preserve democratic rights."
Tuesday's public forum at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC featured testimony from American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Figueroa, and four other citizens who have encountered immigration agents, including Wilmer Chavarria, a school superintendent from Vermont, and Javier Ramirez, a Californian who was assaulted by DHS and denied adequate treatment for diabetes while being held for four days.
The other two participants are also from California: George Retes is a US Army veteran who missed his daughter's birthday after being violently arrested and detained during a raid at his job site, and Andrea Velez was falsely charged with assaulting an officer during an immigration raid she encountered on her way to work in Los Angeles.
"I served my country. I wore the uniform," Retes has warned. "If it can happen to me, it can happen to any one of us."
This article was updated after the hearing to include a video of the event and links to the witnesses' written testimonies.
President Donald Trump said in an interview published Tuesday that a US land attack on Venezuela is coming and signaled that he is open to launching similar military action against Colombia and Mexico.
“We’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon, too,” Trump told Politico's Dasha Burns, citing the pretext of stopping fentanyl from entering the United States.
Trump repeated his baseless claim that during the administration of his predecessor, the "very stupid" former President Joe Biden, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro "sent us millions of people, many from prisons, many drug dealers, drug lords," and "people in mental institutions."
Burns then noted that most of the illicit fentanyl sold in the United States "is actually produced in Mexico," which along with Colombia is "even more responsible" for trafficking the potent synthetic opioid into the US. She asked Trump if he would "consider doing something similar" to those countries.
"I would," Trump replied. "Sure, I would."
Pressed on his contradictory pardon of convicted narco-trafficking former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández while threatening war against Venezuela, Trump feigned ignorance, claiming that "I don't know him" and asserting that "he was set up."
Trump's latest threat against Venezuela comes amid his deployment of warships and thousands of troops off the coast of the oil-rich South American nation, his approval of covert CIA action against Maduro's government, and more than 20 airstrikes on boats his administration claims without evidence were smuggling drugs in the southern Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.
The Trump administration's targeting of Venezuela evokes the long history of US "gunboat diplomacy" in Latin America and continues more than a century of Washington's meddling in Venezuelan affairs. It also marks a historic escalation of aggression, as the US has never attacked Venezuelan territory.
Officials in Venezuela and Colombia, as well as relatives of men killed in the boat bombings, contend that at least some of the victims were fishermen who were not involved in drug trafficking.
The strikes have killed at least 87 people since early September, according to administration figures—including shipwrecked survivors slain in a so-called double-tap bombing. Legal experts and some former US military officials contend that the strikes are a violation of international law, murders, war crimes, or all of these.
Critics also assert that the boat strikes violate the War Powers Act, which requires the president to report any military action to Congress within 48 hours and mandates that lawmakers must approve troop deployments after 60 days. The Trump administration argues that it is not bound by the War Powers Resolution, citing as precedent the Obama administration's highly questionable claim of immunity from the law when the US attacked Libya in 2011.
A bipartisan bid to block the boat bombings on the grounds that they run afoul of the War Powers Act failed to muster enough votes in the Senate in October.
"Note that it’s now taken as a given—as an unremarkable and baked-in fact about our politics—that Trump is mulling a ground invasion of Venezuela and a dramatic expansion in his bombing campaign with no congressional authorization," New Republic staff writer Greg Sargent observed Tuesday in response to the president's remarks to Politico.
"What emerges from this interview," he added, "is that Trump is pulling all of this—the substantive case for these bombings, the legal justification for them, the rationale for mulling a massive military escalation in the Western Hemisphere—out of his rear end."
The lawmakers accused the Social Security Administration of "a slash-first, think-later approach," for which "beneficiaries will pay the price."
Leading Senate Democrats and Independent US Sen. Bernie Sanders this week pressed the Trump administration for answers following reports that the Social Security Administration is planning to dramatically reduce visits to its field offices.
"We write with concerns regarding recent reports that the Social Security Administration is reorganizing its field office operations, and has established a goal of cutting the number of field office visits in half—amounting to 15 million fewer visits annually," Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a letter to SSA Administrator Frank Bisignano.
"Given that beneficiaries are already waiting months for field office appointments, and the agency has not shared with Congress or the public on how it plans to achieve this goal, we are concerned that these efforts are in fact part of a plan to 'quietly kill field offices,' implementing a backdoor cut in benefits by making it harder for Americans to access the Social Security customer services they need," the senators said.
"The Trump administration has relentlessly attacked Social Security."
Earlier this month, Nextgov/FCW revealed that the Social Security Administration said in internal documents that it wants “no more than 15 million total” in-person visits to its field offices in fiscal year 2026—or about half the current number of such visits. An anonymous SSA staffer told the outlet that senior agency officials are aiming for “fewer people in the front door" and for "all work that doesn’t require direct customer interactions to be centralized.”
As Warren's office noted Thursday:
The Trump administration has relentlessly attacked Social Security. Under Commissioner Bisignano, the administration has implemented policy changes that make it harder for Americans to get their benefits, including by implementing burdensome in-person and bug-prone identification processes that force millions more beneficiaries to visit field offices each year—at the same time they are slashing SSA’s workforce by around 7,000 and closing regional offices.
Instead of staffing up to meet these needs, SSA’s field office capacity has significantly declined. Beneficiaries are being forced to wait hours to get help—only to be told they will need to call to schedule an appointment.
"We are concerned that your plan is to force beneficiaries onto SSA’s bug-prone website or push them into customer service phone tree 'doom-loops'—which will almost certainly result in delayed or missed benefits for some individuals," the letter adds. "Once again, you seem to have adopted a slash-first, think-later approach to 'modernizing' SSA, and beneficiaries will pay the price."
The senators are asking Bisignano if the reports of proposed SSA office visit reductions are accurate, and if so, how and when the plan will be implemented, how the agency will "provide services to beneficiaries that would otherwise go to field offices," and how the reductions will affect already lengthy wait times and service online users and callers to the agency's 1-800 number.
The lawmakers' letter comes as Republican senators on Thursday voted down a proposed three-year extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, a move that is expected to result, on average, in a doubling of health insurance premiums for around 22 million people. Critics said the vote underscores the need for single-payer healthcare legislation like the Medicare for All Act reintroduced by Sanders and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) earlier this year.
The trade deficit has grown and the US has lost manufacturing jobs during the first nine months of Trump's second term.
A new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute claims that the signature trade deal from President Donald Trump's first term has actually "created more problems than it fixed."
The report, published Thursday, notes that the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), signed into law by Trump in 2020, has completely failed to fulfill Trump's stated goal of lowering the US trade deficit with Canada and Mexico, which has grown from a combined $125 billion in 2020 to $263 billion in 2025.
This increased trade deficit was particularly notable when it comes to the auto industry, says the report, written by EPI senior economist Adam S. Hersh.
"In the critical automotive industry that Trump said he wanted to reshore, imports of motor vehicles and parts from Mexico nearly doubled following USMCA, rising to $274 billion in 2024, up from $196 billion in 2019," the report explains. "Light-duty vehicles imports from Mexico rose 36% while imports of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles increased a whopping 256%."
The report also finds that the trade deal "left a gaping loophole for Chinese manufacturers to exploit duty-free access to North American markets without reciprocal market access for US manufacturers," the result of which was "Chinese firms expanded their direct investment footprint in Mexico by as much as 288% through 2023."
The bottom line, says the report, is "Trump’s USMCA created more problems than it fixed," and that "today the pressure on manufacturing jobs and deterioration in the trade balance with Mexico are worse than before USMCA."
However, the report also says that the US, Canada, and Mexico have an opportunity to significantly improve on USMCA given that the deal is up for review next year.
Among other things, the report recommends closing the loopholes that have allowed Chinese manufacturers to rapidly expand their footprint in Mexico; expanding the the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism that "has helped improve wages and working conditions in a number of specific workplaces"; and slashing intellectual property rights provisions that "currently allow companies to preempt local laws addressing negative externalities from digital service provision."
The EPI report came on the same day that American Economic Liberties Project's Rethink Trade program released an analysis showing that Trump so far has failed to live up to his pledge to reduce the US trade deficit and revive domestic manufacturing.
In all, Rethink Trade found that the US trade deficit increased more during the first nine months of 2025 than it did during the first nine months of 2024. Additionally, the group found that the US has actually lost 49,000 manufacturing jobs since the start of Trump's second term.
Lori Wallach, director of the Rethink Trade program, said that "the nine-month data show outcomes that are the opposite of President Trump’s promises to cut the trade deficit and create more American manufacturing jobs."
She noted that Trump's trade deals so far "seem to prioritize the demands of Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and other usual beneficiaries of decades of failed US trade policy instead of fixing the root causes of our huge trade deficit to help American manufacturing workers and firms as he promised."
"How dare she sit there and talk about 'threats to our homeland' when she's the one using OUR tax dollars to terrorize our communities," said another protester.
A protester dressed as a priest confronted US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about the Trump administration's violent crackdown on immigrants during a Thursday hearing held by the House of Representatives' Committee on Homeland Security.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief has often spoken about her Christian faith—she said just two days ago on a government social media account that "I have relied on God and placed my faith in Him throughout my career in public service."
During the Republican-led committee's hearing on "Worldwide Threats to the Homeland," a man in black and red religious attire began shouting about recent raids and other actions by DHS, including two department agencies: Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
"Stop ICE raids! The power of Christ compels you!" the man shouted. "End deportations! The power of Christ compels you! Love thy neighbor! The power of Christ compels you!"
As police removed that man from the room, another protester stood and shouted similar messages: "Stop ICE! Get ICE off our streets! Stop terrorizing our communities!"
The second man—who displayed a sign that read, "No ICE, No Troops," and noted an affiliation with the peace group CodePink—was also swiftly forced from the room by police.
In a statement from CodePink, Bita Iuliano, another activist who attended the hearing, took aim at Noem: "How dare she sit there and talk about 'threats to our homeland' when she's the one using OUR tax dollars to terrorize our communities. If she really wants to protect our homeland, which by the way is stolen land, she should stop asking for more and more of our tax dollars for a department that is making our neighbors afraid to leave their homes."
"ICE should be abolished, and that money should be used to fund what our communities actually need—healthcare, schools, housing, the fight against climate change, to name a few," Iuliano argued, also calling out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
"Noem, along with Hegseth, Rubio, and the rest of the war criminal crew, are the ones terrorizing our communities, from our streets here to Palestine, Venezuela, and all over the world," she said. "They are the ones making it unsafe, and they're using our dollars to do it. All we have are our voices, and we're going to make sure we're heard."
Various faith leaders have also spoken out against the Trump administration's attacks on immigrants, including Pope Leo XIV, whose hometown of Chicago has been a key target of DHS action since President Donald Trump returned to power in January.
Pointing to Christian scripture, the first-ever American pontiff said in early November: "How did you receive the foreigner, did you receive him and welcome him, or not? I think there is a deep reflection that needs to be made about what is happening."
Pope Leo also advocated for allowing religious leaders to access people who have been detained, saying that "many times they've been separated from their families. No one knows what's happening, but their own spiritual needs should be attended to."
Shortly after that, more than 200 US Catholic bishops released a rare joint statement last month stressing that "human dignity and national security are not in conflict" and calling for "meaningful reform of our nation's immigration laws and procedures."
The pope then urged "all people in the United States to listen" to the bishops and said that while "every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter," the way immigrants are being treated in the US "is extremely disrespectful."