Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
November 30, 2025
November 30, 2025
On Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine that illuminated the administration’s approach to the world at home, as well as overseas. Authors Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson explained that the administration’s plan for peace was a Russian-led blueprint for joint U.S.-Russia economic cooperation that would funnel contracts for rebuilding Ukraine, extracting the valuable minerals in the Arctic, and even space exploration to a few favored U.S. and Russian businessmen.
Many of those business leaders have close ties to the White House.
“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Trump envoy Steve Witkoff told the journalists. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”
On ABC’s This Week this morning, Representative Don Bacon (R-NE), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said to host Jonathan Karl: “Putin’s the invader, he’s the dictator, he’s murdered all his opponents. But I just don’t see that moral clarity coming from the White House. We saw that Wall Street Journal article yesterday that many people around the president are hoping to make billions of dollars—these are all billionaires in their own right—from…Russia, if they get a favorable agreement with Ukraine. That alarms me tremendously. I want to see America being the leader of the free world, standing up for what’s right, not for who can make a buck…. I don’t want to see a foreign policy based on greed. I want to see it based on doing the right thing.”
There is far more at stake here than morality, although that is clearly on the table.
The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain. It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law.
It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.
In the New York Times today, Cecilia Kang, Tripp Mickle, Ryan Mac, David Yaffe-Bellany, and Theodore Schleifer explored the story of David Sacks, an early technology entrepreneur with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who now advises the White House on AI and cryptocurrency policy while investing in the companies that benefit from those policies. Sacks has brought Silicon Valley leaders, including the chief executive of Nvidia, into contact with White House officials. Shortly after, the government got rid of restrictions on Nvidia’s chip sales to foreign countries, a change that could net Nvidia as much as $200 billion.
Tom Burgis of The Guardian explained today how the Trump family is using its position in the federal government to advance its personal interests and enrich itself. Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric have thrown themselves into cryptocurrency, broken ground on new golf courses, and rushed through permissions for new buildings in foreign countries at the same time U.S. government policies over tariffs, cryptocurrency, and pardons, for example, seem to advance those interests.
“The Trumps’ most natural allies,” Burgis wrote, “first in business, now also in politics—have long been the rulers of the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, who see no distinction between their states’ interests and their families’.”
When New York Times reporters Ken Bensinger and David Fahrenthold published an article about Trump disclosing the donors who funded his transition to his second term a full year after promising to do so, they noted that the 46 individuals on the released list included billionaires and others who were later appointed to office. White House spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said: “President Trump greatly appreciates his supporters and donors; however, unlike politicians of the past, he is not bought by anyone and does what’s in the best interest of the country. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
As wealth and power flow through the executive branch, Trump is overriding the rule of law that is designed to protect the rest of us from self-dealing by unscrupulous individuals. On Wednesday he commuted the sentence of private equity executive David Gentile, convicted in August 2024 of defrauding 10,000 investors in a $1.6 billion scheme that included securities and wire fraud. According to Kenneth P. Vogel of the New York Times, prosecutors said the victims were small business owners, teachers, nurses, farmers, and veterans: “hardworking, everyday people.” “I lost my whole life savings,” one victim wrote about his losses. “I am living from check to check.”
A judge sentenced Gentile to seven years in prison. He reported to authorities on November 14, was incarcerated, and was released less than two weeks later after Trump commuted his sentence.
There is a growing sense that an elite group of wealthy people is running the world without accountability to the law, and that the Trump administration is protecting and even advancing the people in that group. That sense is key to popular anger at the administration’s refusal to release the FBI files about its investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The documents from the Epstein estate released by the House Oversight Committee on November 12 showed a chummy friendship between Epstein and political, academic, and economic leaders eager to retain access to Epstein’s money, information, and connections even after he pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution.
MAGA voters backed Trump in the belief that he would hold such people to account, but it is now clear he is protecting them instead. Indeed, as Mona Charon of The Bulwark noted today, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon, whom Charon describes as “Trump’s consigliere, strategist, propagandist, and former senior counselor at the White House,” was on such friendly terms with Epstein that it was to him Epstein turned to scrub his public image after his initial guilty plea.
The realization that Trump is bolstering and protecting an entitled elite rather than defending everyday Americans victimized by them has dovetailed with this administration’s undermining of the economy, firing of civil servants, attacks on public health, and destruction of the nation’s social safety net to create angry references to “the Epstein class.”
Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) explained to NPR’s Scott Detrow earlier this month: “[T]he Epstein class is a group of people with extreme wealth who have donated to politicians and been part of a system where they think the rules don’t apply to them, and they have created a system that has shafted a lot of forgotten Americans. That’s why Donald Trump ran and was central to his campaign. And many people, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, believe he’s become part of the swamp that he said he would drain. He’s forgotten the forgotten Americans he said he would stand up for.”
Unlike the robber barons of the late nineteenth century, today’s power elite is, as Anand Giridharadas of The Ink wrote on November 23 in the New York Times, a borderless network of people connected not to nations or their fellow citizens but to each other. They exchange nonpublic information and capital to enable the members of that group to control events, disregarding the effects of their decisions on those outside their network.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggested Friday that the deep unpopularity of AI comes in part from the fact that it has become a symbol “of a society in which all the big decisions get made by the tech lords, for their own benefit and for a future society that doesn’t really seem to have a place for most of the rest of us.”
Popular anger at this “Epstein class” is sparking a political realignment. Democratic leaders have been hammering on how Republican policies benefit the wealthy at the same time that Trump’s tariffs send household costs upward and the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—slashes the social safety net and drives up the cost of health care premiums. The extraordinary demand for energy caused by the massive data centers AI requires has sent energy costs skyrocketing.
In November, voters turned away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats, expressing concerns about the economy and “affordability.” Chris Stein of The Guardian explained today how 33-year-old John McAuliff flipped a Republican seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in those elections. McAuliff attracted Republican voters by going door to door, talking with voters about data centers and the infrastructure they require and noting voters’ own rising electricity costs.
McAuliff told Stein that the rising prices are “essentially an artificial tax on everyday Virginians to benefit Amazon, Google, some of the companies with the biggest market [capitalizations] in human history. Which is not to say they don’t provide benefits to those communities, but we need to do a much, much better job of extracting those benefits, because the companies can afford them.”
Voters’ anger at the administration’s support for the Epstein class is now so palpable it has inspired some MAGA leaders to try to cast themselves as populist leaders standing against the wealthy who control the government, a stand that puts them at odds with the White House. “I’ve always represented the common American man and woman as a member of the House of Representatives which is why I’ve always been despised in Washington DC and never fit in,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) began her resignation letter.
In 1932, in a similar time of political realignment, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt attracted voters across the political spectrum when he promised “a new deal for the American people,” with “more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.” “Let us…constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage,” he told the delegates to the Democratic National Convention when he accepted its nomination for president. “This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”
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Notes:
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-u-s-peace-business-ties-4db9b290
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/30/don-bacon-moral-clarity-ukraine-00670982
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/07/what-kleptocracy-and-how-does-it-work
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/technology/david-sacks-white-house-profits.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/politics/trump-david-gentile-commutation.html
The BulwarkSteve Bannon Was Epstein’s Comeback Consultant. Where’s the Uproar?IF YOU FOLLOWED THE TWISTS AND TURNS of the Jeffrey Epstein saga over the last few weeks, you already know that several prominent names emerged from the tranche of emails that the Epstein estate released. But there is one big name that has so far received very little attention…Read morea day ago · 3263 likes · 274 comments · Mona Charenhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/us/politics/trump-transition-donors.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/opinion/meaning-epstein-emails.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ai-populism-and-the-centibillionaire-shangri-la
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/30/virginia-democrat-state-legislature-datacenters
X:
mtgreenee/status/1992037226415554642
Bluesky:
thebulwark.com/post/3m6uhiwnau222
November 29, 2025
November 29, 2025
In the wake of yesterday’s report from Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Special Operations to kill the survivors of a September 2 strike on a small boat off Venezuela, the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees have announced they intend to conduct “vigorous oversight” and “gather a full accounting” of the operation. The two committees referred to the Department of Defense by that name, rather than by the “Department of War” rebrand Hegseth and Trump have pushed.
Today former judge advocate generals (JAGs), military lawyers, in the Former JAGs Working Group issued a statement declaring that it unanimously “considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” and called for “anyone who issues or follows such orders [to] be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.”
The Former JAGs Working Group organized in February 2025 after Hegseth purged JAGs from the Army and Air Force and systematically dismantled the military’s legal guardrails. “Had those guardrails been in place,” they wrote, “we are confident they would have prevented these crimes.”
Congress appears to be stepping up on this issue, and that willingness to cross Trump suggests members are recalculating Trump’s power relative to their own. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted: “This is genuinely big news…. Republicans are challenging Trump now because he seems weak. No one wants to back a weak horse.”
A Gallup poll released yesterday shows President Donald J. Trump’s job approval rating at 36% with disapproval at 60%. Since last month, Trump’s approval has plummeted 11 points. Republicans’ approval of Trump has fallen seven points to a second-term low, while approval among Independents has fallen eight points to its lowest point in either term. Only 3% of Democrats approve of his job performance. Although war conditions usually help a president’s popularity, Trump’s threat to attack Venezuela attracts the support of only 30% of Americans. Seventy percent oppose such military action.
There are signs that the MAGA coalition is fracturing. A Politico poll released yesterday shows that just 55% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 see themselves as MAGA. While the MAGA 55% remain largely loyal to Trump, 38% do not consider themselves as MAGA and are less enamored of him than are his MAGA loyalists.
Last week a new feature on X that permitted users to see where accounts originate revealed that a number of high-engagement MAGA accounts that claim to be those of patriotic Americans are in fact from Russia, Eastern Europe, India, Nigeria, Thailand, and Bangladesh. Since X pays certain content creators for tweets that drive engagement, posters from other countries have a financial incentive to post material that feeds the anger of American users and thus will get reposted.
The splintering of the MAGA coalition showed when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced on November 21 she would not run for reelection in a public letter that attacked Trump and “Establishment Republicans.” She called out Trump’s threats to primary her, and said, “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”
Three days later, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News said her letter “rang true to” many House Republicans. One senior House Republican wrote to Sherman: “This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage. ALL. And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen. That is the sentiment of nearly all—appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file. The arrogance of this White House team is off putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened. They don’t even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies. Not even the high profile, the regular rank and file random members are more upset than ever. Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms.
“More explosive early resignations are coming. It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”
Today, Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX), a staunch Trump ally, announced he would not seek reelection in 2026, saying he intends to “focus on my family.” Nehls co-sponsored legislation to put Trump on the $100 bill—although federal law prohibits using a living person’s likeness on U.S. currency—and to rename Washington Dulles International Airport, which serves the nation’s capital, after Trump.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, recently joined California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, in speaking out against the Trump administration’s plan to offer up to 34 offshore drilling leases off the coasts of Alaska, California, and Florida.
CNN’s Erin Burnett recently interviewed chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase Jamie Dimon. His answer to her questions as to why his company has not contributed to Trump’s proposed ballroom suggested he is anticipating a change in administration. “We have an issue,” he answered, “which is anything we do, since we do a lot of contracts with governments here and around the world, we have to be very careful how anything is perceived, and also how the next D[epartment] O[f] J[ustice] is going to deal with it. So we’re quite conscious of risks we bear by doing anything that looks like…buying favors….”
Dissatisfaction with Trump and his MAGA party is showing in Indiana, too, where administration officials have put extraordinary pressure on state legislators to redistrict the state to try to net the Republicans more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. On Wednesday, November 26, Andy East of the Indianapolis Daily Journal reported on Indiana state senator Greg Walker, a Republican who is standing firm on his refusal to vote in favor of redistricting. “I was taught as a child the difference between right and wrong,” Walker told The (Columbus) Republic, “and this is just wrong on so many levels.”
Walker said Trump invited him for an Oval Office visit on November 19. Walker declined, suggesting the invitation violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using public resources for partisan purposes. He said he would have reported the violation to federal authorities “if I thought that there was anyone of integrity in Washington that would follow through on my accusation and actually cause someone to lose their job over it.”
He continued: “How does [Trump] have the time to mess with a nobody like me with all of the important matters that are to take his attention as the leader of the executive branch in this nation? There is no way that he should have time to have a conversation with me about Indiana mapmaking when that’s not his business, for starters. But secondly, doesn’t he have anything better to do? I can make a big list of things that are more important for him to focus on.”
Mid-decade redistricting was “the president trying to save his own skin by holding a majority in Congress,” Walker said. “It’s so that he’s not impeached again. That’s all this is about.”
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Notes:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/699221/trump-approval-rating-drops-new-second-term-low.aspx
https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-maga-influencers-accidentally-unmasked-as-foreign-actors/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/28/maga-trump-voters-divide-00670647
https://punchbowl.news/article/house/what-mtg-got-right/
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-benjamin-franklin-100-bill-gop-proposal-2038753
X:
mtgreenee/status/1992037226415554642
Bluesky:
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joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3m6ro2bdxqc2i
rgoodlaw.bsky.social/post/3m6stsqbh6c2c
simonwdc.bsky.social/post/3m6phs6u47c2u
acyn.bsky.social/post/3m6s4shef2k2b
November 28, 2025
November 28, 2025
As Trump’s popularity continues to drop, the MAGA coalition shows signs of cracking, and Trump’s mental acuity slips, there is a frantic feel to the administration, as if Trump’s people are trying to grab all they can, while they can.
A source has told The Telegraph that Trump is sending special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to Moscow to offer Russia’s president Vladimir Putin U.S. recognition of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and most of the other four eastern oblasts of Ukraine: Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. This is the territory covered in the “Mariupol Plan” in which Russian operatives told Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, they would help Trump win the election in exchange for his looking the other way as Russia took control of the region.
Ten days ago, Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios reported on a 28-point plan that the U.S. was allegedly working on to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. Quickly, though, it became clear that the plan was actually a Russian plan that offered Russia everything it wanted—including giving Crimea and most of the four oblasts to Russia while forbidding Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and limiting the size of its military—and offered Ukraine virtually nothing. Trump was demanding that Ukraine sign onto the plan by Thanksgiving.
Then it turned out that the U.S. State Department had had nothing to do with the plan; it appeared to be the work of Witkoff, Kushner, and Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who is under U.S. sanctions.
Meanwhile, according to Dan De Luce, Courtney Kube, and Abigail Williams of NBC News, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll delivered the plan to Ukraine and warned Ukrainian leaders they were losing the war and must settle. Diplomatic negotiations are not a normal role for a U.S. Army secretary, who is the top civilian official within the U.S. Department of Defense, responsible for manpower, personnel, equipment, finances, and so on in the U.S. Army. Driscoll is a close ally of Vice President J.D. Vance and seems to be gaining power as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth loses it.
Neither Ukrainians nor Europeans had been consulted on the plan, and their leaders worked frantically to shift U.S. support back toward Ukraine, consistent with Washington’s formal position. Over the course of last week, Jeanna Smialek, Christopher F. Schuetze, and Lara Jakes of the New York Times reported, European and Ukrainian leaders persuaded Secretary of State Marco Rubio to include European nations and Ukraine in negotiations.
Then, on Tuesday, November 25, 2025, Bloomberg published the transcript of an October 14 phone call between Witkoff and Russian foreign-policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, in which Witkoff acknowledged that a peace deal would involve Ukrainian land concessions and coached Ushakov on how to flatter Trump to get the peace deal the men wanted. It also published a transcript of an October 29 call between Ushakov and Dmitriev in which Dmitriev told Ushakov that a U.S. “peace” plan would be as close “as possible” to Russia’s demands. It is unclear who leaked the recordings to Bloomberg, but Shaun Walker of The Guardian reported speculation that the leak came from a source in U.S. intelligence who opposed the U.S. push to reward Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
The Independent reports that Putin is refusing to give up any of his demands for an end to the war, although Russia’s central bank has begun to sell gold reserves to shore up its faltering economy. Putin told reporters in Kyrgyzstan that Russia will continue to attack Ukraine “until the last Ukrainian dies” in order to gain control of Ukraine’s industrial east.
A source told The Telegraph that the Trump administration is ready to make its own deal to recognize Russia’s control of that region. “It’s increasingly clear the Americans don’t care about the European position,” a source told The Telegraph. “They say the Europeans can do whatever they want.” Russia said it assumes it is negotiating with the U.S. alone.
Tonight, Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report that Witkoff, Kushner, and Dmitriev designed their plan to bypass U.S. national security officials and create opportunities for U.S. businessmen to win multibillion-dollar deals to develop energy and rare-earth minerals in Russia, Ukraine, and the Arctic. “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals,” the journalists report, “Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”
Meanwhile, for the past day, Trump’s social media account has been posting screeds against immigrants, using the Wednesday shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard stationed in Washington, D.C., as justification. As Joyce White Vance noted, a court ruled on November 20 that the deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia was illegal but stayed the order ending it until December 11 to permit the government to appeal.
On Wednesday a suspect identified as Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal shot Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, who died from her injuries, and Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, who is critically injured, Lakanwal was also shot, but his injuries are reportedly not life threatening. Lakanwal worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan, then came to the U.S. in 2021 as part of the evacuation and resettlement of Afghans after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan. Lakanwal was granted asylum in the U.S. earlier this year.
Last night—Thanksgiving—at 11:25 p.m., Trump’s social media account posted an image of an airplane packed with refugees from Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrew and the Afghan military collapsed in August 2021. The U.S. exit came from a February 29, 2020, agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, but not the Afghan government, during the first Trump administration known as the Doha Agreement, or the “Agreement for bringing Peace to Afghanistan.” The U.S. promised to secure the release of 5,000 of the Taliban’s fighters imprisoned by the Afghan government and to withdraw U.S. troops by May 2021 in exchange for the Taliban promising to stop killing U.S. soldiers.
When he took office, President Joe Biden extended the deadline until August 31 but did not reverse Trump’s commitment. As the U.S. pulled out the final 2,500 troops Trump had left in the country, the Afghan army collapsed.
Disregarding both Trump’s own part in the exit from Afghanistan and Trump’s own administration’s vetting of Lakanwal for asylum, Trump’s social media post blamed “Joe Biden and his Thugs” for “the horrendous airlift from Afghanistan.” It claimed that “[h]undreds of thousands of people poured into our Country totally unvetted and unchecked,” and said: “We will fix it.”
Just one minute after linking the shooting to Biden’s policies, Trump’s social media account continued: “A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the World, for being ‘Politically Correct,’ and just plain STUPID, when it comes to Immigration.”
What followed was a screed that sounded like it was written by white nationalist Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who is on a crusade to expel immigrants from the U.S. It was divided into two posts, with what seemed designed to be the second post published a minute before what looked like it was supposed to be the first.
In reverse order, then, the account claimed, falsely, that most immigrants are “from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels,” and that they are supported extravagantly by taxes paid by U.S. citizens. It blamed refugees for the nation’s “[f]ailed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits,” and used a slur to describe Minnesota governor Tim Walz, claiming he has done nothing to get rid of his state’s Somalian refugees.
The next post blamed immigration policy for eroding the U.S. standard of living, and announced a dramatic purge of immigrants from the country: “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
The idea of stripping some of the country’s 24.5 million naturalized citizens of their citizenship changes the nature of what it means to be an American. As Faiza Patel and Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center noted last month, from 1990 to 2017 only about 11 people a year lost their citizenship, usually for having hidden serious criminal activity or human rights violations in applying for citizenship. In contrast, observers today note that when Hitler came to power in 1933, the German government began to strip Jews, as well as Roma and political opponents, of their German citizenship, paving the way for the confiscation of their property, their rights, and eventually their lives.
Trump’s social media post went on: “These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”
On Tuesday, lawmakers said the counterterrorism division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has opened an investigation into the six lawmakers who made a video reminding service members that they must refuse unlawful orders and that the lawmakers would stand behind them as they did so. Trump loyalists have turned their statement on its head, insisting that since Trump has never given an unlawful order, their video encouraged service members to disregard lawful orders and thus was “sedition” punishable by death.
Today, Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Hegseth told a Joint Special Operations commander overseeing an attack on a small vessel carrying 11 people on September 2 to “kill everybody.” A missile strike shattered the boat and set it afire, but two men survived. A second strike fulfilled Hegseth’s order. According to Horton and Nakashima, the commander, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, said “the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” In a report, the Joint Special Operations Command said the second strike was not to kill survivors, but to remove a navigation hazard.
Former military lawyer Todd Huntley, who advised special operations forces for seven years, told the Washington Post journalists that the strikes against civilians amount to murder because the U.S. is not at war, while even during wartime, killing those who cannot fight back is a war crime.
Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA), a Marine Corps veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said: “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.” Hegseth dismissed the story as “fake news.”
The administration justifies its strikes on the Venezuelan boats by claiming to fight “narcoterrorism,” but today Trump announced a full pardon for former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty last year by an American jury of conspiring to import 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. He was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. Trump announced the pardon on social media, writing “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”
Tonight, Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported that Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and the committee’s top Democrat, Jack Reed (D-RI), issued a statement saying: “The Committee is aware of recent news reports—and the Department of Defense’s initial response—regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. The Committee has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
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Notes:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/19/ukraine-peace-plan-trump-russia-witkoff
Foreign Office by Michael Weiss“He Must Have Got This From K.”Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images…Read more8 days ago · 397 likes · 39 comments · Foreign Officehttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/27/world/europe/europe-ukraine-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/us/politics/ukraine-russia-peace-talks-daniel-driscoll.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/top-trump-aide-coached-russians-214543842.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/25/trump-envoy-on-russia-ukraine-peace-deal
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/us/politics/witkoff-leaked-transcript-deference-russia.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/26/who-leaked-steve-witkoff-call-kremlin-trump-analysis
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/11/28/trump-thanksgiving-post-slur/87506151007/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/11/28/trump-thanksgiving-post-slur/87506151007/
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llglrd/2019670401/2019670401.pdf
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-inquiry-six-democrats-illegal-orders-video/#
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/world/americas/trump-pardon-honduras-hernandez.html
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-u-s-peace-business-ties-4db9b290
X:
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Bluesky:
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November 27, 2025
November 26, 2025
November 26, 2025
Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday…but not for the reasons we generally remember.
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.
In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.
And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.
Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year, Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to wreck the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
In 1863, November’s last Thursday fell on the 26th. On November 19, Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He reached back to the Declaration of Independence for the principles on which he called for Americans to rebuild the severed nation:
”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln urged the crowd to take up the torch those who fought at Gettysburg had laid down. He called for them to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
And in 1865, at least, they won.
Happy Thanksgiving.
—
November 25, 2025
November 25, 2025
Last week, a poll conducted for Global EV Alliance, made up of electric vehicle driver associations around the world, found that 52% of Americans would avoid buying a Tesla for political reasons.
Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk pumped more than $290 million into electing President Donald J. Trump and supporting the Republicans in 2024. After taking office, Trump named Musk to head the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a group that slashed through government programs and fired civil servants.
In response, protesters organized “Tesla Takedowns,” gathering at Tesla dealerships to urge people not to buy the vehicles. The protests spread internationally. In March, Trump advertised Teslas on the South Lawn of the White House to try to help slumping sales, to no avail.
In September, consumers flexed their muscle over parent company Disney’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talk show on ABC after pressure from Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr over Kimmel’s comments following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. About three million subscribers canceled Disney+ in September, while Hulu, which Disney owns, lost 4.1 million. Monthly cancellations previously had averaged 1.2 million and 1.9 million, respectively. While not all of those cancellations could be chalked up to consumer anger over Kimmel’s suspension—Disney subscription prices went up at around the same time—Kimmel was back on the air in five days.
Every day, I am struck by all the ways in which we are reliving the 1890s.
In that era too, consumers organized, using their buying power to affect politics. As the first general secretary of the National Consumers League, Florence Kelley, put it: “To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have responsibility.”
After the Civil War, an economic boom in the North combined with the loss of young men in the war to make education more accessible to young white women. By 1870, girls made up the majority of high school graduates. Fewer than 2% of college-age Americans went to college; women made up 21% of that group. Away from the confines of home, these privileged young women studied social problems and the means of addressing them while they developed friendships with like-minded classmates.
In the mid-1880s, those women began to experiment with using their talents and newfound friendships to repair the nation’s social fabric that had been torn by urbanization and industrialization. To recreate a web of social responsibility in the growing industrial cities, young middle-class women moved into ethnic working-class neighborhoods to minister to the people living there. Jane Addams, who opened Chicago’s Hull-House with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, rejected the idea of a nation divided by haves and have-nots. She believed that all individuals were fundamentally interconnected. “Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal,” Addams later wrote.
The people who lived in these “settlement houses” dedicated themselves to filing down the sharp edges of industrialization, with its tenement housing, low wages, long hours, child labor, and disease, along with polluted air and water and unregulated food. They turned their education to addressing the immediate problems in front of them, collecting statistics to build a larger picture of the social costs of industrialization, and lobbying government officials and businessmen to improve the condition of workers, especially women and children.
They soon discovered a different lever for change.
In the midterm election of 1890, politicians recognized the power of women to swing the vote for or against a political party. When Republicans got shellacked, their leaders blamed women, who were increasingly the family shoppers, for urging their husbands to vote against the party that had forced through the McKinley Tariff of that year, raising tariff rates and thus raising consumer prices. Thomas Reed, the Republican speaker of the House, complained the party had been defeated by “the Shopping Woman.”
Historian Kathy Peiss notes that between 1885 and 1910, the six women’s magazines known as the “big six” were founded, including Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, and Good Housekeeping. By 1895, advertisements were strategically placed near recipes throughout the magazines, and brand names were scattered through their stories, a recognition of women’s role as shoppers.
Increasingly, reform-minded women were turning to women’s roles as consumers to reshape American industrialism. They came to believe that the “ultimate responsibility” for poor conditions “lodge[s] in the consumer.” Leveraging the power of consumption could force employers to pay higher wages, establish better conditions, and protect workers. In 1891, Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose brother Robert Gould Shaw had commanded Black soldiers in the Massachusetts 54th in the 1863 Second Battle of Fort Wagner, helped to form the Consumer’s League of the City of New York (CLCNY), patterned after a similar English organization, to rally consumers to support better conditions for the workers who made the goods they bought.
In 1899, Lowell and Jane Addams founded the National Consumers League, with Florence Kelley at its head. The organization worked to combat child labor and poor working conditions and, in an era when milk was commonly adulterated with chalk and formaldehyde and candies were decorated with lead paint, lobbied for government regulation of food and drugs.
Today, the relationship between consumption and reform has taken on heightened meaning after the Tesla and the Disney boycotts. The day after Thanksgiving is the start of the holiday shopping season, and like their predecessors of a century ago, reformers are focusing on consumers’ power to push back on the policies of the Trump administration, launching a campaign they call “We Ain’t Buying It.” “We aren’t just consumers; we’re community builders,” their website says. “We’re driving the change we want to see, and demanding respect.”
As Joy-Ann Reid put it in an Instagram video: “Dear retailers who’ve decided you don’t like diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you really love ICE and you have no problem with them busting into your establishments to drag people away: Here’s the thing. We ain’t buying it. I mean, for real, for real, we ain’t buyin’ it.”
She explained: “We’re gonna spend our money with businesses who actually respect our dollars, respect our communities, and respect our diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are going to buy from people who respect immigrants, who respect immigrants’ rights, and respect freedom and liberty. We are going to buy from establishments that respect our right to vote and our right to live in a free society. And if you ain’t that, we ain’t buying it.”
“Let’s show them our power,” she told listeners. “Let’s show them what we can do together.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/elon-musk-2024-election-spending-millions
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/trump-musk-tesla-white-house-showroom-buys-car-rcna195905
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/18/jimmy-kimmel-protest-disney-abc-burbank
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/business/media/disney-subscription-cancellations-kimmel.html
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/jimmy-kimmel-returns-late-night-disney-tuesday-1236525670/
https://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol1no1/peiss-text.html
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (The Macmillan Company, 1912), at: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/addams/hullhouse/hullhouse.html, p. 227.
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