“One of the great virtues to have [in Trumpworld] is that you got caught doing bad things and not giving a fuck… That’s the definition of Donald Trump’s career. He’s been caught over and over again. I think they value that greatly.”

this is going to be an ongoing problem in the post-Trump world

Immigration Officials Deport Queens 6-Year-Old and Father Who Fled China www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/n...

I always point out that a single queer kid feeling slightly more accepted after seeing cheap Pride merch at a Target in Buttcracksville, Idaho is more important than every radical queer theorists’ entire body of work combined, and I will hopefully never budge on that statement

god the full court press about how "no one wants to work any more" during the Biden years was relentless

it is extremely funny that the American populace unironically treated the era of seeing of "help wanted" signs as a bad sign

An example of how Trump is a vehicle for grievances because everyone driven by resentment projects onto him. A leftist like AOC feels America is beautiful and wants to improve it. A crank leftist likes the idea of destroying America, but is totally powerless, therefore they approve of Trump doing it

Things are going great over at X, The Everything App

‘The baby was completely gray’: Immigrants choose between health care and risk of deportation veritenews.org/2025/12/16/i...

Of course it's a strawman to say that the anti-Trump position here is "White House sacred, do not touch" (It's "it's bad for Trump to do this without legal authorization, in the manner of a king" and "what he doesn't like about the White House is that it's conspicuously NOT a royal palace")

The networks were afraid not to run Trump because they assumed he would use his office to punish them if they didn’t. The irony is that this is what Biden was warning about, a warning they chose not to share with America.

very pleased to publish @alanallport.bsky.social on 1940. foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/18/f...

Washington Post has more reporting on this. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

ok so maybe I was wrong when I said Putin would never invade. and maybe I was wrong when I said Putin will win in a week and we should not help. But now we’re here, and I'm going to tell you what putin is thinking, and I’m going to do it in the most patronizing way possible

And before someone shows up and says “sone democrats voted for it too so it doesn’t matter who wins,” democrats voted no 207-3. Republicans voted yes 213-4. It is not ambiguous which party trans people should want in charge.

impeach him for this, too

“The research collectively suggests that America is becoming more anti-Semitic because its young people are becoming more anti-Semitic."

NEW: Humanitarian officials staged a last-minute plea to Trump officials at their fancy hotel to re-start food aid $ for a huge refugee camp in Kenya. The Trumpers blew it off and babies starved. @annamaria.bsky.social & Brett Murphy www.propublica.org/article/keny...

pardoned January 6 rioters have been advising Justice Department officials how to pursue – and perhaps prosecute – the very prosecutors who helped put them behind bars. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

My mom is a Vietnamese immigrant and on her immigration papers, she has her name written the Vietnamese way (Last Middle First.) On her Social Security card and driver's license, she has it the European way (First Middle Last.) That would likely be enough for Republicans to strip her citizenship.

First we were getting DOGE checks…then it was $2k tariff checks…now it’s just $1.7k checks for military families. Also, he can’t do any of these things without congress, which he’s losing a grip on.

Making the most depressing point I can make yet again: the US media is going to treat Donald Trump with far less vitriol in response to him starting a random war in Venezuela vs the sheer level of vitriol that they hurled at Joe Biden for ENDING the War in Afghanistan.

I'm told that HHS has just terminated all funding agreements with the American Academy of Pediatrics. Here's a letter HHS sent canceling one of the grants, relating to work on birth defects. Canceled because the project "emphasizes equity, diversity, and inclusion as key foundational components"

He honestly thinks it’s his house.

Trump administration is moving to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, according to a senior White House official, taking aim at one of the world's leading climate research labs. www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

This is one tough read.

This piece by @jamellebouie.net is so good: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/o...

“If our opponent is to be made to comply with our will, we must place him in a situation which is more oppressive to him than the sacrifice which we demand”

insane

Everyone wants to make “sense” of things, but we are all currently hostage to an irrationalist epistemic environment. You might as well just read the entrails of a slaughtered goat to divine where events are headed.

It is international law 101 that a military blockade is not just a violation of the UN Charter, but a crime of aggression. Unless that blockade is in response to an 'armed attack.' None of President's Trump's list of complaints come close to an armed attack. 1/

It's so cool how every Republican President since Herbert Hoover presided over the beginning of a recession but idiot swing voters refuse to learn this.

So cool how we just willfully induced a national malaise

NEW: The new head of the panel overseeing the National Cancer Program has speculated about the links between Covid vaccines and "turbo cancer," promoted ivermectin and HCQ, and generally seems less than ideal for his new role. @davidgilbert.bsky.social has the details!

Donald Trump is so easily graspable that it befuddles the mind. You want to stare at him because he simply *cannot* be exactly what he seems to be, and the longer you stare, the more horrifying and alien that irreducible simplicity becomes. Surely it can't just be "orange man bad." But it is! He is!

The absolute vacancy of Donald Trump remains, perversely, one of the most compelling things about him

This person should not & cannot be normalized as an acceptable representative of the US government in international negotiations over anything.

I think this is bad, and probably another low point for some very basic notions of human decency in the United States.

Genuinely think our society is lost if we can’t find a way to start caring that the ostensibly most powerful man in the world acts like this.

Just a reminder that at least 600 Americans were fired for failing to show sufficient respect after Charlie Kirk's murder.

just a dreadful, classless piece of shit incapable of normal human emotion or empathy

Once again, one very easy way for the Paper Of Record™️ to escape the constant criticism which it has found itself subject to these last years would be for it to stop acting in ways that <completely justify> all of the constant criticism which it has found itself subject to these last years

The true universal language is externalizing your own failures by blaming them on The Jews.

Literally every single bad decision this country has made over the past half-century can be attributed to “a lot of voters are panicky racist morons” but left, center, and right all have a vested interest in denying that and keep tying themselves in more ornate knots to avoid confronting it

The last half century has sucked for American politics in a lot of ways and the worst of these is easily the pan-ideological consensus that the gutter bigotry of the worst elements of society must be downplayed, coddled, Listened To And Learned From because it’s just an outgrowth of Something Else

*Literally all investigations of firms with ties to Trump crypto businesses or involving Trump donors have been dropped. *The pattern of non-enforcement for crypto is different from other SEC cases

What's striking about Trump's lies, and those of his apologists, is that they're not even plausible. They don't try to be plausible. As others have noted, that's kind of the point. True authoritarian control and power is telling a blatant and obvious lie, and showing you can get away with it.

Armed ICE agents trapped US citizens in a restaurant and demanded their papers. Federal agents walked into East African restaurants in Cedar-Riverside, MN. They closed and blocked the doors. Then they demanded to see everyone’s papers. Every person present was a US citizen.