LIVE COVERAGE
A Petty, Vicious Wall Of Shame
The awful keeps spewing. The latest proof there is truly, repulsively no bottom: The most broken, powerful human being on the planet has added to his crappy, gaudy, reality-show "Presidential Walk of Fame" bronze plaques below the photos denoting a boorish, revisionist "history" of each president. Inevitably, he saves the crudest insults for his predecessors - "divisive" Obama, "crooked" Biden - while praising his own supreme reign. America on the fucking, endless, childish ugly of it: "This is so exhausting."
As always, there are of course more substantive horrors underway. Pam Bondi has told the FBI to create a list of domestic terrorist groups - the non-existent Antifa and anyone else who espouses “radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism or anti-Christianity” - and establish a “cash reward system” to encourage them to snitch on each other. Because what climate change/it still snows doesn't it?, Trump is also dismantling Colorado's National Center for Atmospheric Research, home to the largest federal research lab on climate change and natural disasters.
In addition, because what science?, anti-vax crackpot RFK Jr's Health and Human Services (sic) Department has terminated seven multi-million-dollar grants to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is now suing said crackpot for his COVID vaccine changes. The initiatives were aimed at reducing sudden infant death, improving adolescent health, preventing fetal alcohol syndrome, identifying autism early and other worthy goals; officials said they were cancelled because the group used "identity-based language," including "racial disparities" and "pregnant people." Really.
Finally, Pee Wee German Stephen Miller issued a fascist mission statement in support of our pointless, upcoming war against Venezulela, arguing the U.S. has long "operated as a 'reverse empire'" that enriched foreign nations and sacrificed our wealth and security while "all we got in return were migrants." "No more," he raves. "America's might will secure America's rights...For Americans, first and always." By which, many clarified, he means, "rich white people. Everyone else to the camps." Other comments: "Sounds like Chap. 15 in Mein Kampf," "Sounds better in the original German," and, "Miller is a grotesque, shrill, squirrel of a thing."
All of these efforts, lest we forget, have been undertaken to please a small, sick, empty shell of a man who Avatar director James Cameron calls "the most narcissistic asshole in history since fucking Nero." Now, in a somehow particularly infuriating (for those of us who cherish facts) and childlishly petty (for those of us who think "leaders" shouldn't be) move, he's now added plaques to the photos along his cheesy, race-to-the-bottom "Presidential Walk of Fame" outside the West Wing "as a tribute to past Presidents, good, bad and somewhere in the middle." As Press Barbie hilariously brags, "as a student of history" (sic), Trump himself authored "many of its eloquently written descriptions" - evidently what he's been doing when not golfing. One patriot: "Well done, dumbass."
They are, of course, crude, juvenile, self-serving garbage. Reagan's plaque boasts he was "a fan" of Trump. Bill Clinton's notes "his wife Hillary" lost to Trump. The plaque for "Barack Hussein Obama" acknowledges him as our first Black President before calling him "one of the most divisive political figures in American history." He allegedly "passed the highly ineffective Unaffordable Care Act," caused the spread of ISIS (no mention of W's contributions), weaponized federal bureaucracies against opponents, spied on Trump's 2016 campaign and created "the Russia Russia Russia hoax, the worst political scandal in American history." Sigh.
Biden, already trolled with the image of an autopen - the eloquent author is 12 - gets worse. "Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History." He "took office (in) the most corrupt Election ever seen" and "oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our nation to the brink of destruction" - pot/kettle - with high inflation, weaponized law enforcement, Green New Scam, "abolishing" the Southern Border, insane asylums, "Afghanistan Disaster." His "devastating weakness" made Russia invade Ukraine and Hamas attack Israel. He issued "blanket pardons to Radical Democrat thugs" and "the Biden crime family." Sigh redux.
But "despite it all" - trumpets please - the manchild king triumphed in a landslide to "SAVE AMERICA!" Now he's "delivered" on his promise to "usher in the Golden Age of America," and "THE BEST IS YET TO COME!" Some beg to differ. They suggest his plaque should read, "Pedophile, Narcissist, Rapist, and Convicted Felon." They marvel, "Damn, his dick really is that tiny." They exclaim, "This is insane," "What the actual fuck," "God I hate this man," "This is embarrassing," and, "I am at my wit's end." In all, notes Canadian pundit Dean Blundell, "The United States of America is going through some things right now."
In Wednesday night's "prime time unraveling," there was more. His racist, dementetd, drug-addled, "nothingburger" of a speech, in which "basically nothing he is saying is true," was brutally summarized as "old man yells at country," "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?", his "Pettysburg Address," "what presidential panic looks like," "Stop talking about Epstein," "lie harder and louder," "the Worst Wing," "This is pathetic," "Nazis On Drugs,'" "authoritarian fantasy at its finest" - colossal invasion! drug prices down 600% in magic math! the first peace in the Middle East in 3,000 years!", "This wasn't confidence. This was agitation." From MAGA: "Why is he yelling at us?" "He's talking so fast he sounds panicked," "the most pointless presidential address (in) American history." From Newsom: 100 "Me Me Me Me Me's." From us: For God's and our sanity's sake, once and for all, fucking quiet Piggy.
'Attack on Independent Science': Trump EPA Removes All Mention of Human-Caused Climate Crisis From Public Webpages
The Trump administration has removed all references to human-caused climate change from Environmental Protection Agency webpages, as well as large amounts of data showing the dramatic warming of the climate over recent decades and the resulting risks.
According to a Tuesday report from the Washington Post, one page on the "Causes of Climate Change" stated as recently as October that "it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land," a statement that reflects the overwhelming consensus in peer-reviewed literature on climate.
That statement is now nowhere to be found, with those that remain only mentioning "natural" causes of planetary warming like volcanic activity and variations in solar activity.
"The new, near-exclusive emphasis on natural causes of climate change on the EPA's website is now completely out of sync with all available evidence demonstrating overwhelming human influence on contemporary warming trends," explained Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, who posted about the changes on social media.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which examines tens of thousands of studies from around the globe, found that virtually all warming since the dawn of the industrial era can be attributed to human carbon emissions.
This can be confirmed using the Wayback Machine's last snapshot (from Oct 8, 2025). At some point between Oct 8 & Dec 8, major changes were made to this and other EPA climate change content. Information has either been removed completely or "adjusted" to emphasize natural causes.
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— Daniel Swain (@weatherwest.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Pages about the catastrophic results of climate change have also been scrubbed: One of them allowed users to view several climate change indicators, like the historic decline of Arctic sea ice and glaciers and the increased rates of coastal flooding due to rising sea levels. That page has been deleted entirely.
Another page, which answered frequently asked questions about climate change, now no longer includes questions like, "Is there scientific consensus that human activities are causing today’s climate change?” "How can people reduce the risks of climate change?" and "Who is most at risk from the impacts of climate change?" The page provides no indication that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon, instead only discussing natural factors.
That page links to another that has since been deleted. It once provided extensive information about the risks climate change poses to human health, "from increasing the risk of extreme heat events and heavy storms to increasing the risk of asthma attacks and changing the spread of certain diseases carried by ticks and mosquitoes." Another deleted page discussed the impacts of climate change on children's health and low-income populations.
“This is, I think, one of the more dramatic scrubbings we’ve seen so far in the climate space,” said Swain. "This website is now completely incorrect regarding the changes in climate that we’re seeing today and their causes... It’s clearly a deliberate effort to misinform.”
During his 2024 campaign for reelection, President Donald Trump and his affiliated super political action committees received more than $96 million in direct contributions from oil and gas industry donors, according to a January report from Climate Power. Since retaking office, he has moved to dramatically expand the extraction and use of planet-heating fossil fuels while eliminating investment in clean energy and electric vehicles.
Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, "Deleting and distorting this scientific information only serves to give a free pass to fossil fuel polluters who are raking in profits even as communities reel from extreme heatwaves, record-breaking floods, intensified storms, and catastrophic wildfires."
Cleetus said that the purging of climate information from EPA sites was a prelude to "the likely overturning of the endangerment finding, a legal and scientific foundation for standards to limit the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change and threatening human health."
In July, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled a proposal to rescind the 2009 finding, which determined that climate change endangers human life and serves as the legal basis for greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act.
Undermining climate science is core to that effort, which Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, said at the time, "could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules.”
Shortly after Zeldin announced the rule change, the Department of Energy cobbled together a “Climate Working Group” comprising five authors handpicked by Secretary Chris Wright to produce a climate report that disputes the IPCC's findings and the scientific consensus on climate change.
The report did not undergo peer review and omitted around 99% of the scientific literature the IPCC relied on for its comprehensive findings. A group of climate scientists that independently reviewed the paper found that it “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics.”
Cleetus said Tuesday that “EPA is trying to bury the evidence on human-caused climate change, but it cannot change the reality of climate science or the harsh toll climate impacts are taking on people’s lives... This isn’t just about data on a website; it’s an attack on independent science and scientific integrity.”
Trump Economy 'Stalling Out' as Unemployment Rate Hits Highest Level in 4 Years
Federal data belatedly released Tuesday shows that the US unemployment rate rose to the highest level in four years last month as President Donald Trump's administration continues its assault on the government's workforce and American corporations lay off workers at a level not seen in decades.
The unemployment rate rose to 4.6% in November, up from 4.4% in September, according to the Labor Department report, whose release was delayed due to the recent government shutdown.
US employers added 64,000 jobs last month following the loss of 105,000 jobs in October, fueled by the Trump administration's large-scale layoffs of federal workers. The manufacturing sector, which Trump has promised to bolster with his tariff regime, shed 5,000 jobs in November, according to the newly published federal data.
Over the past six months, the US has averaged just 17,000 jobs added per month—a number that underscored concerns about the frailty of Trump's economy.
"Today’s long-awaited jobs report confirms what we already suspected: Trump’s economy is stalling out and American workers are paying the price," said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative. "Far from sparking a manufacturing renaissance, Trump’s reckless trade agenda is bleeding working-class jobs, forcing layoffs, and raising prices for businesses and consumers alike. Trump may give himself an A++++ on the economy, but these latest jobs numbers are failing working families.”
Another notable trend in today's payroll release is the gradual slowdown in nominal wage growth. As the unemployment rate rises, workers struggle to find jobs and have less leverage when it comes to demand higher wages. Both indicate a slowdown in affordability for workers and their families.
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— Elise Gould (@elisegould.bsky.social) Dec 16, 2025 at 10:17 AM
The new figures were released after Trump kicked off a tour of battleground states in an effort to defend his economic policies, which voters—including many of the president's own—increasingly blame for driving up prices. Trump and White House officials have insisted, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that the US economy is stronger than it's ever been.
Julie Su, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and former acting head of the Labor Department, said Tuesday that "for months, Donald Trump and his administration have been hiding data about the economy, leaving workers and employers in the dark when trying to make critical hiring decisions."
"But you can’t hide the reality every American knows," said Su. "An economy where costs are too high for people to afford the basic necessities and also can’t find jobs is an economic crisis that requires massive change so that working people can actually come out on top."
Flag Linked to Christian Nationalism, Jan. 6 Hung at Education Dept
The union for US Department of Education workers has raised alarm about a top department official's display of a flag with Christian nationalist associations that was flown during the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol building.
The flag was spotted outside the Washington, DC, office of Murray Bessette, the principal deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, according to a report on Monday from USA Today. However, it's not clear how long it's been displayed there.
The stark white banner, emblazoned with a pine tree and the phrase "An Appeal to Heaven"—a reference to John Locke's “Second Treatise on Government”—was first used during the American Revolution and flown by six schooner privateers known as "Washington's Cruisers" for naval operations and supply capture missions.
The flag was flown sporadically throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, most prominently in New England. But it remained relatively obscure until recently.
As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained in November, it has undergone a revival among proponents of Christian nationalism over the past decade:
Its affiliation with Christian supremacist politicians largely began in 2013 after being reintroduced as a symbol of supremacy by Dutch Sheets, a highly influential leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, today’s most powerful Christian supremacist movement.
The NAR is an anti-democratic Christian supremacist movement that seeks to control all areas of national life, from the halls of Congress to one’s living room, compelling all Americans to align their lives with NAR’s worldview. According to NAR leaders, those who oppose them are not just wrong but under the control of the demonic, and are even possibly demonic entities themselves.
Sheets, a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, helped to mobilize thousands of Christian followers to the Capitol leading up to the January 6 riot, where supporters of the president sought to violently overturn the electoral victory of his opponent, former President Joe Biden. The pastor referred to the recognition of Biden's election as "an evil attempt to overthrow the government of the United States of America."
The "Appeal to Heaven" flag was spotted on multiple occasions at the Capitol on that day and at other "Stop the Steal" events protesting Trump's 2020 election loss. It has continued to cause controversy in the years since.
In 2023, the right-wing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was seen flying the flag outside his New Jersey beach house. Alito blamed his wife for the flag flying outside their property just weeks before a documentarian published a secret recording of him expressing his desire to return the country to “a place of godliness,” and agreeing with radical right-wing groups who he said refuse to “negotiate with the left.”
The flag has also been displayed by several Republicans in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has expressed many Christian nationalist viewpoints, including a distaste for the idea that the Constitution requires the separation of church and state.
Its appearance outside Bessette's office is not the first time a government agency has displayed the flag during the second Trump presidency. In June, the Small Business Administration also displayed it during a ceremony, though only for about a day, according to Wired.
Rachel Gittleman, the president of the union for Education Department workers nationwide, said in a statement that the agency "has no place for symbols that were carried by insurrectionists."
“Since January, hardworking public servants at the US Department of Education have been subjected to threats, harassment, and sustained demoralization," she added. "Now, they are being asked to work in an environment where a senior leader is prominently displaying an offensive flag—one that, regardless of its origins in the American Revolution, has come to represent intolerance, hatred, and extremism."
The use of a flag with Christian nationalist affiliations is especially noteworthy at the Education Department, which has been at the center of Trump's push to "bring back religion in America" and promote “Judeo‑Christian principles.”
Trump has endorsed state-level policies requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms, which he called a "major step in the revival of religion." In September, he also said that he would soon roll out a policy to provide "total protection" for prayer in public schools, which has long been considered unconstitutional when sponsored by school or state officials.
Petition Signers Want Elon Musk to Be ‘The Richest Man in Town’ This Christmas
"Let's make the world's richest man the richest man in town!" urges a new campaign launched Friday by the economic advocacy group Tax Justice Network, borrowing a memorable line from the classic film "It's a Wonderful Life."
The group's global petition emphasizes that SpaceX owner Elon Musk is already the richest person in the world, with a net worth of $508.4 billion—more than double the assets of the planet's next-richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page.
Tax Justice Network's (TJN) petition invites Musk to give 44% of his wealth—$223.6 billion—to the children of the world. That amount of money would allow the purchase of a $90 gift card for all 2.4 billion of the planet's children under the age of 18, and could stop more than 100 million children from going hungry this holiday season.
And Musk would still be the richest person alive, emphasized the group.
Let’s make the world’s richest man feel like the richest man in town this Christmas! Sign our Christmas card inviting Elon Musk to gift 44% of his wealth to the children of the world to create 2 billion smiles and still be the world’s richest man alive! #WealthTax #TaxTheSuperRichc.org/jnnZhmp6J4
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— Tax Justice Network (@taxjustice.net) December 12, 2025 at 10:40 AM
The campaign quotes Harry Bailey's famous line declaring his brother George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, "the richest man in town" in "It's a Wonderful Life," after George's neighbors donate money to save him from financial ruin.
“We’re obviously poking a little fun here but the point is to show how extreme the concentration of wealth has become," said Alex Cobham, chief executive at TJN. "Depending on where you are in the world, if you earn the average wage, you’d need to work anywhere from 20 times to a thousand times longer than humans have existed to earn as much wealth as Elon Musk has collected."
The petition notes that TJN and the world's children "would also settle for a 2% wealth tax on the superrich," which would allow countries around the world to raise $2 trillion per year if it was applied to the richest 0.5% of people on the planet.
"That’s enough public money to meet most countries’ climate finance needs, and leave billions to spare for local public services," the group said.
The group pointed to a recent G20 report declaring a global "inequality emergency" and last week's World Inequality Report, which found that fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires—just 0.001% of the world's population—own three times more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of humanity.
"Within almost every region, the top 1% alone hold more wealth than the bottom 90% combined," noted TJN.
The petition emphasizes the difference between collected wealth—the kind enjoyed by Musk and other superrich people—and earned wealth. The vast majority of people earn money for what they do, notes TJN. Musk and other billionaires "get paid for what [they] own, so dividends for owning stocks and rent money for owning real estate."
Billionaires including Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Oracle executive Larry Ellison famously take salaries of just $1, but the money that's made them part of the world's superrich is their collected wealth, emphasized TJN.
"Earned wealth cannot create billionaires," said TJN. "Only collected wealth grows fast enough to do so. It’s impossible to earn a billion dollars."
A ProPublica report in 2021 detailed how billionaires like Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid a collective "true tax rate" of just 3.4% while the median American household made $70,000 and paid a tax rate of 14%.
"This special tax treatment has helped the superrich quadruple their wealth since the 1980s to extreme levels," said TJN. "Studies directly link this rise in extreme wealth to lower economic productivity, to more households going into debt and to people living shorter lives."
Musk in the past has pledged to use his extreme wealth to help people around the world—only to renege on his promises. In 2022, he challenged then-World Food Program chief David Beasley to prove, as Beasley had stated, that a small fraction of Musk's wealth could help address world hunger. He pledged to donate $6 billion by selling his Tesla stock if the WFP could prove the contribution would "solve world hunger."
The WFP responded with a report detailing how $6 billion could feed 42 million at-risk people and prevent them from going hungry for a year. But Musk didn't follow through with his pledge, instead donating $5.7 billion of his Tesla shares to his own foundation.
This year, Musk spearheaded a push to slash government spending on foreign aid, with the US Agency for International Development a key target. The cuts have already proven deadly for children in impoverished nations.
Cobham on Monday pointed to research showing that the skyrocketing wealth of the richest 1% of Americans over the past 40 years has not led "to more investments, and instead resulted in dissaving among non-rich households."
“We now have plenty of evidence showing that extreme wealth shrinks economies, makes people poorer, and threatens democracy," said Cobham. "The best way to protect people, economies, and planet from the harms of extreme wealth is to end the special tax treatment that collected wealth gets over earned wealth. We must tax extreme wealth more effectively to protect the earner way of life we all rely on. Whether you’re a wealth collector or a wealth earner, we all have an equal responsibility to pitch in our fair share.”
As Hegseth Refuses to Release Video of Boat Murder, AOC Calls Briefing a 'Joke'
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that the Pentagon will not release unedited video footage of a September airstrike that killed two men who survived an initial strike on a boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea, a move that followed a briefing with congressional lawmakers described by one Democrat as an "exercise in futility" and by another as "a joke."
Hegseth said that members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees would be given a chance to view video of the September 2 "double-tap" strike, which experts said was illegal like all the other boat bombings. The secretary did not say whether all congressional lawmakers would be provided access to the footage.
“Of course we’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth told reporters following a closed-door briefing during which he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio fielded questions from lawmakers.
As with a similar briefing earlier this month, Tuesday's meeting left some Democrat attendees with more questions than answers.
“The administration came to this briefing empty-handed,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters. “If they can’t be transparent on this, how can you trust their transparency on all the other issues swirling about in the Caribbean?”
That includes preparations for a possible attack on oil-rich Venezuela, which include the deployment of US warships and thousands of troops to the region and the authorization of covert action aimed at toppling the government of longtime Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Tuesday's briefing came as House lawmakers prepare to vote this week on a pair of war powers resolutions aimed at preventing President Donald Trump from waging war on Venezuela. A similar bipartisan resolution recently failed in the Senate.
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and co-author of one of the new war powers resolution, said in a statement: “Today’s briefing from Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth was an exercise in futility. It did nothing to address the serious legal, strategic, and moral concerns surrounding the administration’s unprecedented use of US military force in the Caribbean and Pacific."
"As of today, the administration has already carried out 25 such strikes over three months, extrajudicially killing 95 people," Meeks noted. "That this briefing to members of Congress only occurred more than three months since the strikes began—despite numerous requests for classified and public briefings—further proves these operations are unable to withstand scrutiny and lack a defensible legal rationale."
Briefing attendee Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.)—who is in the administration's crosshairs for reminding US troops that military rules and international law require them to disobey illegal orders—said of Trump officials, "Obviously, they have issues with what is in that video, and that’s why they don’t want everybody to see it."
Defending Hegseth's decision to not make the boat strike video public, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) argued that “there’s a lot of members that’s gonna walk out there and that’s gonna leak classified information and there’s gonna be certain ones that you hold accountable."
Mullin singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who, along with the Somalian American community at large, has been the target of mounting Islamophobic and racist abuse by Trump and his supporters.
“Not everybody can go through the same background checks that need to be cleared on this,” he said. “Do you think Omar needs all this information? I will say no.”
Rejecting GOP arguments against releasing the video, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said after attending Tuesday's briefing: “I found the legal explanations and the strategic explanations incoherent, but I think the American people should see this video. And all members of Congress should have that opportunity. I certainly want it for myself.”
'Straight-Up Nazi Stuff': Trump Admin Plans to Strip More Naturalized Americans of Citizenship
"Requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years," said one former immigration official, "turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty."
Policy experts were skeptical Wednesday that the Trump administration could legally or practically carry out its threat to strip more naturalized Americans of their citizenship. Still, they warned that new guidance issued by the White House to immigration officials would ramp up "fear and terror" in immigrant communities and could portend the targeting of naturalized citizens who President Donald Trump views as adversaries.
The guidance was issued Tuesday to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field offices, with officers directed to supply the Department of Justice (DOJ) with "100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year.
The denaturalization process is "deliberately hard" for the federal government, noted American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, and stripping people of the citizenship is a rare step only taken in cases of fraud when they applied to be a citizen or in other narrow circumstances.
As such, between 2017-25, there have been just over 120 denaturalization cases filed with the Office of Immigration Litigation at the DOJ.
Under the first Trump administration, denaturalization cases peaked at 90 in one year in 2018, and the directive issued Tuesday signaled the White House is aiming for a far bigger escalation as it also continues its mass deportation operation and blocks people from seeking asylum as they are permitted to under international law.
Reichlin-Melnick called the directive for a denaturalization quota "vicious and cruel," and pointed out that the president is asking USCIS and the DOJ to take on an onerous task.
"These cases are hard to file and win, and require a lot of DOJ resources, and the DOJ is stretched thin already. So we’ll see; I have serious doubts about their ability to do this," said Reichlin-Melnick.
USCIS refers cases to the DOJ, which must prove in a federal court that it has "unequivocal evidence" that someone obtained their citizenship illegally or fraudulently.
"The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that citizenship and naturalization are too precious and fundamental to our democracy for the government to take it away on their whim. Instead of wasting resources digging through Americans’ files, USCIS should do its job of processing applications, as Congress mandated,” Amanda Baran, a former senior USCIS official who served during the Biden administration, told the New York Times.
Naturalized Americans account for 26 million people in the US, with 800,000 people sworn in last year. In most cases, a person who loses their citizenship status is classified as a legal permanent resident.
Trump has repeatedly called to denaturalize Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and to deport her over her criticism of his policies, and has made the same threat against New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist.
In those threatened cases, wrote Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, earlier this month, "it appears that crime isn’t so much a motivation as disloyalty."
"Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more 'American' is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable," wrote Waldman. "We are a nation of immigrants and also a nation of laws. The courts must continue to ensure that those laws protect naturalized citizens from being punished for speaking out."
Three other Brennan Center experts also recently wrote about the history of denaturalization efforts in the US, including during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s:
Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led witch hunts, with denaturalization often used as a tool against accused communists or sympathizers. Among those targets was Harry Bridges, an Australian-born, nationally known labor leader accused of being a communist, who faced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to revoke his citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, not once, but twice.
"This is straight-up Nazi stuff and I’m calling on my fellow Jewish Americans who know where this can lead to be in the vanguard against it," said Dylan Willams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, also noting that the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee has endorsed Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who has called for the denaturalization and expulsion of Muslim Americans and immigrants.
Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS official, told the Times that Trump's quota for denaturalization cases "risks politicizing citizenship revocation" as it has been in the past.
“And requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years," she said, "turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty for the millions of naturalized Americans.”
63% of US Voters Oppose Attack on Venezuela as Trump's March to War Accelerates
The new poll comes as the US president openly plots to seize Venezuela’s oil supply.
President Donald Trump has taken increasingly aggressive actions against Venezuela in recent weeks, but a new poll released Wednesday shows US voters are not on board with a new war.
A new poll from Quinnipiac University found that 63% of voters oppose military operations inside Venezuela, with just 25% registering support.
What's more, a US military strike in Venezuela would draw significant opposition even from Republican voters, 33% of whom told Quinnipiac that they would oppose such an action. Eighty-nine percent of Democratic voters and 68% of independent voters said they were opposed to a US military campaign in Venezuela.
Trump's policy of bombing suspected drug trafficking boats in international waters, which many legal experts consider to be acts of murder, drew significantly less opposition in the new survey than a prospective attack on Venezuela, but it is still unpopular, with 42% in favor and 53% opposed.
A potential war is also unpopular with Venezuelans, as a recent survey from Caracas-based pollster Datanalisis found 55% opposed to a foreign military attack on their nation, with 23% in favor.
The Trump administration's boat strikes, which have now killed at least 99 people, have been just one aspect of its campaign of military aggression against Venezuela. The US military last week seized a Venezuelan oil tanker, and Trump has said that it's only a matter of time before the military launches strikes against targets inside the country.
Trump on Wednesday also said that one goal of his campaign against Venezuela would be to seize the country's oil supply.
“Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had—they took it away because we had a president that maybe wasn’t watching,” Trump said while talking to reporters. “But they’re not gonna do that. We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. They threw our companies out. And we want it back."
Venezuela first nationalized its oil industry in 1976, and the US has no legitimate claim to the nation's petroleum supply.
Description of FCC as 'Independent' Scrubbed From Agency Website After Chair Says It Isn't
One critic called the removal—which came immediately after FCC Chair Brendan Carr ignored nearly a century of historical precedent by claiming the agency is not independent—"a chilling authoritarian touch.”
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr stunned many observers Wednesday by suggesting that the FCC is subordinate to President Donald Trump—an assertion followed almost immediately by the removal of the word "independent" from the agency's website.
Pressed by Democratic—and some Republican—lawmakers during a contentious Senate Commerce Committee hearing that addressed the FCC's mission of independently implementing and enforcing US communications laws and regulations, Carr said that "formally speaking, the FCC is not independent."
Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) read aloud from the FCC's website, which at the time proclaimed the agency's independence.
"Is your website lying?" asked Luján.
"Possibly," replied Carr.
Within minutes of Carr's testimony, the mission statement on the FCC's website no longer described the agency as "independent."
Addressing Carr's apparent fealty to Trump, Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) asked, "If you don’t think that the FCC is independent, then is President Trump your boss?”
Carr replied: “President Trump has designated me as chairman of the FCC. I think it comes as no surprise that I’m aligned with President Trump on policy.”
A former telecommunications attorney, Carr has been criticized for siding with corporations and against the public interest on nearly ever major issue to come before the FCC. Many of his views are laid out in the chapter on the FCC he authored for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government.
As chair, Carr has been accused by critics including Democratic lawmakers—some of whom have demanded his firing or resignation—of being a Trump sycophant, especially over his role in getting ABC late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel suspended for joking about the assassination of far-right firebrand Charlie Kirk.
Asked by Kim if it would be appropriate "for the president or senior administration officials to give you direction to pressure media companies," Carr declined to directly answer the question.
“The easy answer is, ‘No.’ It’s not a hypothetical," the senator said. "Trump is not your boss. The American people are your boss."
Matt Wood, general counsel and vice president of policy at the advocacy group Free Press Action, said that "if Brendan Carr proved anything today, it’s only that he’s willing to shout down senators and contort his supposed free speech principles to protect Trump’s ego and attack Trump’s critics."
Wood lamented that Carr "proudly trashed his own agency’s historical independence."
"Right after senators pointed out the contradiction between the FCC’s online description and Carr’s claim that Donald Trump ultimately called the shots, language noting the agency’s independence disappeared from the FCC.gov website—a chilling authoritarian touch," he added.