Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 4
November 14, 2025
November 14, 2025
In a transparent attempt to distract from the many times his own name appears in the documents from the Epstein estate members of the House Oversight Committee released Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Democrats whose names appeared in the documents. He singled out former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and who is a Democratic donor.
Although the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and is supposed to be nonpartisan in protecting the rule of law, Bondi responded that the Department of Justice “will pursue this with urgency and integrity.” Maegan Vazquez and Shayna Jacobs of the Washington Post note that reporters have already covered the relationship of Epstein with Clinton, Summers, and Hoffman for years, and that in July, Justice Department officials said an examination of the FBI files relating to Epstein—a different cache than Wednesday’s—“did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Meidas Touch noted: “In normal times, it would be a major scandal for the President to direct his AG to criminally investigate his political opponents to deflect from his own involvement in a major scandal—and for the AG to immediately announce she is doing it. The Epstein scandal and cover up just got even bigger.”
Earlier this week, the administration cited the food delivery app DoorDash as an authority on dropping consumer prices; today the city of Chicago announced a settlement in a four-year lawsuit charging that DoorDash took advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to list restaurants without their permission and mark up food prices. DoorDash will pay $18 million in cash and credits to restaurants, delivery drivers, and consumers.
Trump has steadfastly and falsely maintained that foreign countries pay for tariffs. But today he signed an executive order ending tariffs on beef, coffee, bananas, cocoa, and other commodities from certain countries to lower prices after voters said they are concerned about the economy. Representative Richard Neal (D-MA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said the administration was “putting out a fire that they started and claiming it as progress.”
Trump has seemed particularly nervous that the Supreme Court might uphold the lower courts that have declared most of his tariffs illegal, reiterating that having to pay back tariff money would be “a National Security catastrophe.” Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) reminded Really American Media that Trump has been “using tariffs to enrich himself and his family,” using them—or the threat of them—to get golf course deals in countries around the world, as well as using them to punish countries Trump believes are hurting his right-wing allies.
In contrast, Trump’s administration is rewarding his ideological allies. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Argentina’s leader Javier Milei appears to have received more financial support from the U.S. government than the $20 billion more widely reported. The U.S. withdrew $870 million from its account at the International Monetary Fund shortly before a similar sum appeared in Argentina’s IMF fund just in time for that country to pay an $840 million debt. It is, one redditor noted, “turning into a scandal.”
News broke today that the Department of Justice is in talks with Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn to settle his $50 million claim against the government for damages related to the investigation into his conversations with a Russian operative before Trump took office. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and Trump later pardoned him. A federal judge dismissed Flynn’s lawsuit and the Biden administration fought it, but now the Trump administration appears to have engaged with Flynn over it.
Last week, Flynn suggested he might run for president in 2028 to keep the MAGA movement going.
Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported today that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s $220 million ad campaign, which she says is a crucial tool to stop undocumented immigration, has funneled $143 million to a company in Delaware called Safe America Media. The company lists the Virginia home of a Republican operative, Michael McElwain, as its address and was created days before contracts awarded to it were finalized.
One of the subcontractors who fulfilled a Safe America Media contract was the Strategy Group, whose chief executive officer, Ben Yoho, is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin. Noem’s top advisor, Corey Lewandowski, who introduced Noem to Yoho, has done significant work for the Strategy Group, and Noem used the Strategy Group for her 2022 campaign for South Dakota governor. Subcontractors are not listed in federal contracting databases.
The Department of Homeland Security skipped the normal competitive bidding process for its ad campaign, citing the need for “critical communications to the public” to go out quickly. Charles Tiefer, a former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and an expert on federal contract law, told Elliott, Kaplan, and Mierjeski, “It’s corrupt, is the word,” suggesting Noem was hiding her friends as subcontractors. He called for an investigation by the House Oversight Committee and the Homeland Security inspector general. That inspector general, Trump loyalist Joseph Cuffari, survived the January 2025 purge of inspectors general.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said career officials run its contracting and do it “by the book.”
William Turton and Christopher Bing of ProPublica reported today that FBI Director Kash Patel waived the standard polygraph exams required to obtain top security clearances for Deputy Director Dan Bongino and two other senior FBI staff members. The exam includes questions about foreign contacts, drug use, whether someone has a criminal history, and mishandling of classified information.
Like Patel himself, former right-wing podcaster Bongino had no prior experience at the FBI. The deputy director has access to the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which includes some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, including information from the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
Government officials told Turton and Bing that ascending to the FBI’s second-highest-ranking official without passing a standard background check is unprecedented.
A forthcoming book by reporter Olivia Nuzzi, about which the New York Times reported today, says that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a recovering heroin addict with whom she had a relationship, told her he uses psychedelics, despite claiming to have stopped using drugs decades ago.
Tonight Trump turned against those Republicans who voted in favor of the release of the Epstein files compiled by the FBI during its investigation of the sex offender. He announced he was “withdrawing my support and Endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene,” and went after Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who introduced the discharge petition, calling him a “LOSER!”
Greene responded that Trump was “coming after me hard to make an example to scare all the other Republicans before next weeks vote to release the Epstein files. It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level…. I have supported President Trump with too much of my precious time, too much of my own money, and fought harder for him even when almost all other Republicans turned their back and denounced him. But I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump.”
Tonight Aaron Rupar of Public Notice wrote: “I just don’t see how we can pretend even for a moment that anything involving our federal government is remotely normal when the president is covering up his involvement in a child sex trafficking ring. Like, what are we doing here[?]”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (which was 25 years old yesterday—congratulations, Josh and the TPM folks!) wrote: “Investigate whoever he wants. Trumps drowning on every front.”
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/11/14/trump-justice-epstein-democrats/
https://www.propublica.org/article/fbi-kash-patel-dan-bongino-waived-polygraph
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/14/doordash-chicago-lawsuit/
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-coffee-beef-fruit-4fe084c2724ec6d92096efa263fdcf76
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.6979743
https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-dhs-ad-campaign-strategy-group
X:
GenFlynn/status/1987644606129881519
Bluesky:
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economy/comments/1ow17oe/the_imf_affair_is_turning_into_a_scandal_trump/
November 13, 2025
November 13, 2025
We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.
That spin has been hard at work in the past few days over the economy. Trump is clearly worried that the Supreme Court is going to find that much of his tariff war is unconstitutional, as the direction of the justices’ questioning in its November 5 hearing suggested. On Monday he claimed that the U.S. would have to pay back “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars” if the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional, and that “would be a National Security catastrophe.” He blamed “Anarchists and Thugs” for putting the U.S. into a “terrible situation” by challenging his tariffs. Hours later, he increased the number to $3 Trillion—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the number was actually about $195 billion.
Yesterday, White House officials suggested they would never be able to release October’s jobs report or inflation numbers, blaming the Democrats. They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.
The administration has justified its violence against undocumented immigrants by insisting those they round up are violent criminals, “the worst of the worst.” That claim is increasingly exposed as a lie, and Americans are pushing back.
Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica reported on the September 30 raid on an apartment complex in Chicago in which federal agents stormed the complex in a helicopter and military-style vehicles, broke into apartments, and marched individuals outside, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members and filming them for a video the administration circulated that portrayed them as criminals.
Government agents arrested 37 people in the raid but ultimately claimed that only two of them were gang members. The journalists spoke to one and found he had no criminal record. Federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone arrested in the raid. Instead, the journalists observed in immigration court that government lawyers never mentioned criminal charges or gang membership. Judges simply ordered them deported or let them leave voluntarily, which would enable them to apply to return to the U.S., a sign they are not actually seen as a threat to the country.
On Tuesday, Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported on the administration’s targeting of individuals who, until now, were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. President Barack Obama established DACA for those brought to the U.S. as children until Congress could pass legislation to give those “Dreamers” a path to legal residence. Thanks to the program, Dreamers by the hundreds of thousands gave the U.S. government their personal information in exchange for a promise they would not be deported. But Congress never acted, and now, in its quest to reach 3,000 deportations a day, the administration is targeting the DACA recipients, whose adherence to the rules the government established makes them easy to find and target.
Yesterday, Robert Tait of The Guardian noted that Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a group that monitors human rights in Latin American, report that the Veneuzelans the Trump administration sent to the infamous CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador endured systematic torture, including beatings and sexual violence. Only 3% of those the U.S. rendered to El Salvador had been convicted of a violent crime in the U.S.
As immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “We paid El Salvador to torture, abuse, and rape completely innocent Venezuelans so that [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump could claim they were tough on immigrants.”
The executive director of Cristosal, Noah Bullock, accused the administration of wanting “to demonstrate and send a message of brutality.” A White House spokesperson said:: “President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public.”
Today, retired Chicago broadcast journalists published a letter to people in the Chicago area saying what the federal government is doing to Chicago is “wrong.” It is “a brutal and illegal campaign against fellow Chicagoans, mainly Latinos: violent abductions, gutting families, using tear gas around children, roughing up witnesses, ramming cars and even taking a day care teacher from her school.” This “is not law enforcement,” they wrote; “it is terror.”
For the first time in twelve years, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a “Special Message” yesterday. Addressing the administration’s immigration enforcement policies, the bishops said they were “saddened by…the vilification of immigrants,” “concerned about the conditions in detention centers,” “troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and…hospitals and schools,” and “grieved” over the damage the immigration raids have done to families. “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people,” they wrote. “We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”
But the administration’s attempt to convince Americans to believe them, rather than their lyin’ eyes, doesn’t appear to be succeeding very well.
MAGA has been at least partly demoralized by the information coming out of the Epstein documents, with right-wing influencer Dinesh D’Souza, for example, defending Trump by saying: “Right now, we don’t have anyone else.” Trump media ally Stephen Bannon told supporters: “Trump’s…an imperfect instrument, but one infused by divine providence. Without him, we’d have nothing.”
Bloomberg reports that 62% of Americans they polled say the cost of everyday items has climbed over the past month and that 55% of employed Americans say they’re worried about losing their job. It also notes, as CNBC economic commenter Carl Quintanilla pointed out, that international stocks are outperforming the U.S. S&P stock index by the widest margin in 16 years. Yesterday the University of Michigan consumer confidence survey hit its lowest reading in 65 years.
Tonight Ana Swanson, Maggie Haberman, and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported that the administration is attempting to lower food prices by preparing exemptions to tariffs, suggesting that some members of the administration are finally facing the fact that Trump’s fantasy ideology cannot defy reality forever.
Other administration officials are still clinging to their ideology. Although Colombia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have stopped sharing certain intelligence information with the U.S. because they consider the administration’s strikes on small boats illegal, Jennifer Jacobs and James LaPorta of CBS News reported today that senior military officials have presented Trump with options for land strikes in Venezuela.
Tonight, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media: “President Trump ordered action—and the Department of War is delivering. Today, I’m announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR.” “[T]his mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people. The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood—and we will protect it.”
It appears that the administration is considering attacking another country under the pretext of stopping drug trafficking, in an echo of nineteenth-century imperial power that mimics the territorial ambitions of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
Political strategist Simon Rosenberg commented: “If Trump wags the dog in Venezuela it is going to do enormous damage to his already degraded brand here in the US. Zero support for this in the public. Will be seen for what it is—[a] transparent attempt to rescue his flailing Presidency.”
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/12/venezuelans-el-salvador-trump-torture-report
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/tariff-revenue-soars-fy-2025-amid-legal-uncertainty
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicago-venezuela-immigration-ice-fbi-raids-no-criminal-charges
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/us/politics/trump-tariffs-food-prices.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-venezuela-military-options/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/13/letter-chicago-immigrants-broadcast-journalists/
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November 12, 2025
November 12, 2025
It turns out Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and House Democrats were right to call it the “Epstein Shutdown” for the last several weeks on social media and in interviews. As Marc Elias of Democracy Docket put it today, while it was clear what the Democrats wanted from the shutdown—lower costs for healthcare insurance premiums, affordability, and for Trump to stop breaking the law—it was never clear what the Republicans wanted. They seemed simply to be doing as Trump demanded.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) kept House members from conducting any business at all. The House last voted on September 19, gathering in Washington, D.C., again only after the Senate on Monday passed a measure to reopen the government. The hiatus gave Johnson an excuse not to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), whose voters elected her on September 23. Grijalva had promised to be the 218th and final vote on a discharge petition that would force the House to vote on a measure that would require the Department of Justice to release files relating to the government investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Elias notes that he, like many of us, considered as plausible the idea that the government shutdown was a way to keep the Epstein files under wraps, but there were other plausible theories as well. Maybe Trump and his cronies wanted to gut the federal workforce. Maybe they wanted to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Maybe Trump simply wanted to run the country without the interference of Congress.
Today put the Epstein files firmly in the center of the story.
The House got down to business this morning after a 54-day break to work on the Senate measure to reopen the government. Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform immediately released three emails from a cache of more than 23,000 documents the committee received recently from the Epstein estate. The first email was one Epstein sent to his associate Ghislaine Maxwell on April 2, 2011. It referred to a story in which the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes solved a case by noting that a dog didn’t bark at a crime scene because it knew the perpetrator. The reference has come to mean an expected action or piece of evidence whose absence proves guilt.
Epstein wrote: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75% there.” Maxwell replied: “I have been thinking about that…”
The second email the Democrats released was from January 2019, from Epstein to Trump biographer Michael Wolff. In it, Epstein said of Trump: “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop[.]”
In a third email thread from December 2015, after Trump had declared his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election, Wolff told Epstein that CNN would ask Trump about his relationship with Epstein. Epstein asked what Wolff thought Trump should answer. Wolff wrote: “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house,… [y]ou can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”
As legal analyst Asha Rangappa noted, this exchange suggests that Epstein would have leverage over Trump if Trump tried to say he had not been at Epstein’s house or on his plane, in other words, that Trump was there and Epstein had receipts.
After the Democrats released these three emails, Johnson called the release “[a]nother publicity stunt by the Democrats” and claimed: “They’re trying to mislead people.” Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) issued a statement accusing the Democrats of “cherry-picking documents and politicizing information.” The committee then released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from the Epstein estate.
Those were hardly better. In a 2015 email, Epstein gave tips on stories about Trump and girls to then–New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas Jr. When others asked Thomas for stories, Epstein wrote: “Have them ask my houseman about donad [sic] almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.” In another email, Epstein offered “photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas urged: “I am serious man—for the good of the nation why not try to get some of this out there.”
But a story revealing this information did not appear in the New York Times before the 2016 presidential election or afterward.
In one 2018 email referring to Trump’s payment of hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, Epstein wrote: “i know how dirty donald is.”
Despite how explosive these documents were, they do not appear to be the end of the story. They came from the Epstein estate, but the files from the FBI investigation into Epstein have not yet been released. Whatever is still outstanding appears to be even worse than what we have seen, as evidenced by Trump’s frantic attempts to stop the discharge petition.
With the House back at work, Johnson had little choice but to swear in Grijalva. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:00.
In the hours before that deadline, the president tried to get one of the four Republican representatives who had signed the discharge petition to remove their signature. He appeared to focus on Nancy Mace (R-SC), with whom he tried to connect by phone, and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whom he invited to meet with him in the White House Situation Room, which is equipped to prevent recording. CNN reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI director Kash Patel joined Trump and Boebert at the meeting.
When asked about the meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Doesn’t that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns?” For his part, Trump took to social media to call the released documents an attempt by Democrats to bring up the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” to deflect from “how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects.” He urged “any Republicans involved” to be “focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”
Trump’s efforts to get someone to take their name off the discharge petition failed. Johnson swore in Grijalva at 4:00, as scheduled, and she immediately signed it. Now the petition needs to “ripen” for seven legislative days. Then Johnson has two legislative days to schedule a vote on a measure to require the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files it holds.
Faith Wardwell and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported this evening that senior Republicans believe as many as 100 Republicans will support the bill when it comes to the floor. Many of them are facing constituents who voted for Trump in the belief that he would release the Epstein files as he promised and who are angry that the administration appears to be covering them up in the service of rich elites. Others likely recognize that they do not want to be seen as participating in that coverup, especially with the threat of even worse material waiting to drop.
If the House passes the bill, it will go to the Senate and, if the Senate passes it, to Trump for his signature. If he vetoes it, Congress has the option to override his veto.
In the past, Trump has managed to avoid accountability for his actions by using lawsuits to delay while whipping up his supporters to take his side against what he called “witch hunts” or “hoaxes.” Republican lawmakers went along in part because they didn’t want to alienate his base.
Now, though, a significant portion of MAGA has broken with him, his popularity is low—a new Associated Press–NORC poll has his approval rating at 33%— and last week’s elections showed his coalition is abandoning him. It is not clear that Republican senators will defend him, especially since his erratic behavior—like bulldozing the East Wing of the White House—appears to be increasing.
As Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who backed the House discharge petition, told CNN: “This vote is going to be on your record for longer than Trump is going to be president. And what are you going to do in 2028 and 2030 when you’re in a debate…and they say, ‘How can we trust you? You covered up for a pedophile back in 2025.’”
Midday today, as new revelations from the Epstein documents were hitting social media every few minutes, Representative Swalwell posted: “This is the beginning of the end.”
Tonight the House passed the Senate’s continuing resolution to fund the government, ending the longest government shutdown in U.S. history: 43 days. The vote was 222–209, with all but two Republicans voting in favor and all but six Democrats voting against it, saying they would not support a continuing resolution that did not extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act markets. Republicans neglected to extend those credits in their budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—and without them, millions of Americans will be unable to afford healthcare coverage, and premiums will skyrocket for millions more.
The measure funds the government through January 30, 2026; overturns the layoffs of federal employees administration officials made during the shutdown and guarantees workers’ pay; and appropriates money to pay for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits through September 2026, taking them out of Trump’s hands as a pressure point in January.
Failing to get an extension of the healthcare premium tax credits into the continuing resolution, House Democrats filed a discharge petition to force the House to vote on a measure that would extend the credits for three years. “There are only two ways this fight will end,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told his colleagues. “Either Republicans finally decide to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits this year. Or the American people will throw Republicans out of their jobs next year and end the speakership of Donald J. Trump once and for all.”
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Notes:
https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/it-was-the-epstein-shutdown-all-along/
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance But His Emails...Before he was elected in 2016, Donald Trump bragged about grabbing women by the pu**y and barging into rooms of partially dressed young pageant contestants. A jury concluded he assaulted E. Jean Carroll in a dressing room. So nothing that’s in the Epstein emails is a surprise. It’s confirmation…Read morea day ago · 994 likes · 109 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/epstein-emails-trump-news-updates.html
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/12/new-epstein-files-emails-released-doj-trump
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/12/congress/house-epstein-vote-gop-defections-00649624
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/politics/government-shutdown-vote-trump.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/12/government-shutdown-vote-end/
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November 11, 2025
November 11, 2025
In 1918, at the end of four years of World War I’s devastation, leaders negotiated for the guns in Europe to fall silent once and for all on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was not technically the end of the war, which came with the Treaty of Versailles. Leaders signed that treaty on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off the conflict. But the armistice declared on November 11 held, and Armistice Day became popularly known as the day “The Great War,” which killed at least 40 million people, ended.
In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson commemorated Armistice Day, saying that Americans would reflect on the anniversary of the armistice “with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations….”
But Wilson was disappointed that the soldiers’ sacrifices had not changed the nation’s approach to international affairs. The Senate, under the leadership of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts—who had been determined to weaken Wilson as soon as the imperatives of the war had fallen away—refused to permit the United States to join the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild: a forum for countries to work out their differences with diplomacy, rather than resorting to bloodshed.
On November 10, 1923, just four years after he had established Armistice Day, former President Wilson spoke to the American people over the new medium of radio, giving the nation’s first live, nationwide broadcast.
“The anniversary of Armistice Day should stir us to a great exaltation of spirit,” he said, as Americans remembered that it was their example that had “by those early days of that never to be forgotten November, lifted the nations of the world to the lofty levels of vision and achievement upon which the great war for democracy and right was fought and won.”
But he lamented “the shameful fact that when victory was won,…chiefly by the indomitable spirit and ungrudging sacrifices of our own incomparable soldiers[,] we turned our backs upon our associates and refused to bear any responsible part in the administration of peace, or the firm and permanent establishment of the results of the war—won at so terrible a cost of life and treasure—and withdrew into a sullen and selfish isolation which is deeply ignoble because manifestly cowardly and dishonorable.”
Wilson said that a return to engagement with international affairs was “inevitable”; the U.S. eventually would have to take up its “true part in the affairs of the world.”
Congress didn’t want to hear it. In 1926 it passed a resolution noting that since November 11, 1918, “marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed,” the anniversary of that date “should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”
In 1938, Congress made November 11 a legal holiday to be dedicated to world peace.
But neither the “war to end all wars” nor the commemorations of it, ended war.
Just three years after Congress made Armistice Day a holiday for peace, American armed forces were fighting a second world war, even more devastating than the first. The carnage of World War II gave power to the idea of trying to stop wars by establishing a rules-based international order. Rather than trying to push their own boundaries and interests whenever they could gain advantage, countries agreed to abide by a series of rules that promoted peace, economic cooperation, and security.
The new international system provided forums for countries to discuss their differences—like the United Nations, founded in 1945—and mechanisms for them to protect each other, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949, which has a mutual defense pact that says any attack on a NATO country will be considered an attack on all of them.
In the years since, those agreements multiplied and were deepened and broadened to include more countries and more ties. While the U.S. and other countries sometimes fail to honor them, their central theory remains important: no country should be able to attack a neighbor, slaughter its people, and steal its lands at will. This concept preserved decades of relative peace compared to the horrors of the early twentieth century, but it is a concept that is currently under attack as autocrats increasingly reject the idea of a rules-based international order and claim the right to act however they wish.
In 1954, to honor the armed forces of wars after World War I, Congress amended the law creating Armistice Day by striking out the word “armistice” and putting “veterans” in its place. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a veteran who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and who had become a five-star general of the Army before his political career, later issued a proclamation asking Americans to observe Veterans Day:
“[L]et us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”
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Notes:
https://www.va.gov/opa/vetsday/docs/proclamation_1954.pdf
https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/november-11/
https://www.va.gov/opa/vetsday/vetdayhistory.asp
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/10/politics/woodrow-wilson-house-history/
Wilson’s 1923 radio address on November 10, 1923, which has slightly different wording than his written notes, is available on YouTube.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss46029.mss46029-478_0018_1212/
November 10, 2025
November 10, 2025
Last night, the Senate advanced a measure to end the government shutdown, which at 41 days today is the longest in U.S. history.
Seven Democrats and one Independent voted with all but one Republican to advance a measure that funds the government through January 30 of next year. It includes funding for military construction and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and operations for the legislative branch, or Congress. Tucked within that last appropriation is a measure that allows the eight Republican senators whose phone logs were seized during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to sue the government for up to $500,000 apiece.
The measure stops the administration’s firings of public employees during the shutdown, reinstating them with full pay. States will be reimbursed for monies they spent covering for federal shortfalls during the shutdown. This means air traffic controllers, who have been working without pay for more than a month, will get paid again.
The measure also funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), although it does not restore the cuts Republicans made to it in their budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
While the measure provides more funding for Indigenous health services, it does nothing to extend the premium tax credits for insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act healthcare marketplace. Without those credits, millions will lose their healthcare insurance and millions more will face skyrocketing premiums. Republicans did not extend the premium tax credits in their July budget reconciliation bill, although they did extend tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
Senate Democrats said they would not advance a measure to end the shutdown without a deal to extend the premium tax credits, but seven of them, along with one Independent, have now done so. Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has promised to bring to the Senate floor a bill to extend the premium tax credits before the end of the second week of December. It will be written by the Democrats.
In the 60–40 vote, Rand Paul (R-KY) did not join the rest of the Republican senators to advance the measure. Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Independent Angus King of Maine all voted with the Republicans to advance the measure.
Last night’s vote did not pass the bill, which still faced procedural hurdles in the Senate that the chamber is cleared tonight. It now goes to the House, which must either pass it, reject it, or amend it.
If Trump signs the measure into law, the 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP payments will get relief. The two million federal workers who need paychecks will get them, and airlines should eventually get back to business as usual. These are no small things: aside from the individual human cost of the shutdown, the undermining of the federal government threatened to destroy it, and the administration’s cuts to air traffic were hitting cargo planes, adding yet another blow to the weakening economy just before the busiest shopping season of the year.
News of the terms of the deal to end the shutdown hit the country rather like a cue ball hitting a rack: lots of balls started to move in wildly different directions.
The eight senators who voted with the Republicans appear to have lost any hope Trump would negotiate and, in that absence, decided they had to relieve the pain of the shutdown. As Dan Drezner noted in his Drezner’s World, Trump’s behavior during the shutdown made it clear he simply didn’t care how badly Americans got hurt. “He did not just refuse to negotiate,” Drezner noted. “During the shutdown month he also completely bulldozed the East Wing, cut SNAP benefits, witnessed producers passing on the cost of tariffs to consumers, announced curbs on air travel, and participated in a Great Gatsby–style party at Mar-a-Lago.”
Voters hated this, but Trump didn’t appear to care. Indeed, his administration was working to ratchet up the pain of lost SNAP payments and canceled flights, including not just passenger planes but cargo planes right before the shopping season in which many businesses make the income that keeps them afloat for the year. In the senators’ statements about why they voted with the Republicans, Drezner noted a pattern: the words “pain” and “hurt.”
As Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark noted, the Democrats gave in to Republican plans with few concessions, but the shutdown hurt Trump’s popularity and the Democrats won a vote on the ACA subsidies, which is a terrible issue for the Republicans. Seventy-eight percent of Americans actually want such a measure to pass, meaning that a vote—even one only in the Senate—will help clarify for voters what’s at stake.
Another moving ball was the voters and organizers who turned out for Democrats last Tuesday and who had made it very clear they think it’s long overdue for the Democrats to stand up to Trump. Ezra Levin of Indivisible, which organized the No Kings rallies, described his reaction to the deal as “incandescent rage, incredible disappointment.” “What do we do to demand a better party, a party that actually fights back?” he asked.
Democratic party leaders appeared to acknowledge that the momentum of the party is behind a fight against Trump and MAGA authoritarianism. The senators who voted with the Republicans are all either retiring, not up for election in 2026, or not running for another office, while Democrats who are in one of those categories were vocal about their anger over the vote.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted a video on social media warning: “Bullies gain power when righteous people yield to the face of their wrongdoing. I didn’t want this shutdown. I want it to end, but not at any cost. And of course, I wish that there was a path to saving this democracy and saving people’s health care that didn’t involve pain. This shutdown hurt. It did. But unfortunately, I don’t think there is a way to save this country, to save our democracy, without there being some difficult, hard moments along the way…. [T]here’s no way to defend this,” he said. “And you are right to be angry about it. I’m angry about it.”
There are Republican balls in play, as well.
President Donald J. Trump did not want the shutdown to end this way. He was trying to use the pain he was inflicting on the American people to force Republican senators to end the filibuster and pass a series of measures that would essentially have made him a dictator. The Republican senators were clear they didn’t want to do that. And now, they haven’t. They chose a way out of the shutdown fight that did not support Trump’s ambitions. After nine months in which they appeared to do his bidding, that’s an interesting development.
Trump does not appear to be giving up his position on hurting the country easily. Late last night, three judges from the First Circuit refused to stop the lower court order saying that the administration must pay SNAP benefits in full, and today, the administration went back to the Supreme Court to ask it to freeze those payments.
Trump also posted an attack on air traffic controllers, saying to those who took time off during the shutdown “I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU. You didn’t step up to help the U.S.A. against the FAKE DEMOCRAT ATTACK that was only meant to hurt our Country. You will have a negative mark, at least in my mind, against your record. If you want to leave service in the near future, please do not hesitate to do so, with NO payment or severance of any kind! You will be quickly replaced by true Patriots, who will do a better job….” In fact, the country has a shortage of air traffic controllers.
Trump called Democrats “the enemy” today, but told reporters he would abide by the deal, saying that “they haven’t changed anything.” But they have.
And that’s yet another moving ball. If the Senate passes its measure and sends it to the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will have to bring the House into session to conduct work. He has had the chamber on hiatus since September 19, 2025, when the Republicans passed a continuing resolution that offered the Democrats nothing, and has kept members out of Washington, D.C., ever since.
Bringing the House back into session will require Johnson to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ). Erum Salam of MSNBC reported that Johnson told Republicans on a conference call today that the “first order of business will be to administer the oath to Grijalva.” Grijalva says she will be the final signer on the discharge petition that will force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. Johnson and administration officials have worked hard to keep those files under wraps, especially since news broke that Trump is mentioned in them.
And then, in the midst of all the drama last night, Justice Department pardon attorney Ed Martin posted a document on social media revealing that Trump had issued an extraordinarily broad pardon to “all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities, participation in, or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of Presidential Electors, whether or not recognized by any State or State official, in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election, as well as for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 Presidential Election.”
As Kyle Cheney of Politico noted, the pardons of those who tried to steal the 2020 presidential election for Trump were largely symbolic because they had not been charged with federal crimes. What they do is suggest that he will protect those who try to cheat for him in the future, an interesting development considering the measure in the government-funding bill allowing senators to sue the government for accessing their phone logs during the events of January 6, 2021.
The sweeping pardons also might be softening up the ground for a pardon or a commutation for convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A whistleblower has provided documents to the House Judiciary Committee showing that Maxwell has asked for a commutation of her prison sentence.
And Trump’s popularity continues to drag. Last night he got soundly booed at a Washington Commanders football game.
Lots of balls moving around the table.
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Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/5597952-senate-democrats-shutdown-government/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/government-shutdown-senate-deal/
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1191/vote_119_1_00610.htm#position
The Contrarian Incandescent Rage: Ezra Levin on the Eight Democrats Who Put Americans LastEzra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, summarizes Sunday’s shocking vote to re-open the government, without the Democrats winning anything tangible with perfect clarity: “there is something deeply broken within the Democrat system… Listen now4 days ago · 172 likes · 37 comments · Jennifer Rubin and Ezra Levinhttps://www.cnn.com/2025/10/17/us/no-kings-protests-trump
Drezner’s WorldThe Madman Theory's Perfect TargetThe hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has written at length about Trump’s belief in the madman theory of bargaining and how that faith has not really been rewarded. It’s not that Trump has been unable to coerce other actors in world politics; it’s that those actors were acquiesced due to…Read more4 days ago · 50 likes · 17 comments · Daniel W. Dreznerhttps://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5597340-live-updates-government-shutdown-trump-syria/
https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/first-circuit-snap-ruling-must-fund.pdf
https://thehill.com/homenews/5597856-maxwell-prison-perks-whistleblower/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/us/politics/senators-shutdown-smith-phone-searches.html
The BulwarkGive Chuck a Break. It Could Have Been Worse.Sorry for no Triad on Friday. There’s a longer explanation down in #3…Read more4 days ago · 1226 likes · 1247 comments · Jonathan V. Last
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/johnson-promises-swear-adelita-grijalva-7-weeks-later-rcna243076
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/10/g-s1-97245/senate-shutdown-vote
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