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He's an absolute child who is just pissing away billions of dollars after he zeroed out foreign aid, cut cancer research, and ripped health care away from 12 million people.

ah i see trump has asked someone what "that huge island" is, again. just keep him away from maps for a couple days he'll forget about it

Spakovsky figured it out? Spakovsky?

He's not resigning. All joking aside he's going to be like Jared, someone who operates outside formal legal lines of authority and is governed by personal loyalty to Trump.

yikes nominally holding a bunch of jobs at once is common across the admin, like Vought and Rubio

is Landry resigning? (or is he going to hold multiple jobs at once, like a Hapsburg princeling with a titular claim to some part of the Netherlands that he’s never visited?)

They’re going to destroy one of the best museum systems in the world because they’re triggered by anything that isn’t trump worshipping propaganda

When you choose neutrality on bigotry... You have chosen bigotry.

terrific reporting on the most unambiguously corrupt administration in US history: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Worth noting, I guess, that inside of a year we've gone from administration officials taking selfies of themselves at CECOT and bragging about how it's hell on earth to now getting their horrible little media worms to kill stories about it

it remains extremely funny that trent lott had to resign as senate majority leader for saying something that by the standards of today's GOP would be deemed insufficiently based and evidence of squishiness

It's not madness. Republicans have been paid to explicitly protect the fossil fuel industry from losing market share to climate action and the GOP is following through for their donors.

CBS justifies killing 60 Minutes story on CECOT is 'you have to get the principals on camera' is a layer cake of incompetence & censorship. The "principals" are the prisoners who told you what the government is doing, not the White House staffers who sent them to an illegal prison to be tortured!

this is such a critical connection to draw too, because Kennedy's working from the same playbook for his attacks on the trans community that he also uses to attack vaccines and disabled people.

You can just say that to the White House, it’s easy

really cannot be emphasized enough that bari weiss has literally never done journalism. i don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. i mean that in the “has never performed the job she was hired to do” sense

Bari Weiss, looking up briefly from her group chat with JD Vance and Stephen Miller: “Sorry, you need to get someone from the administration on the record. Wish I could help.”

I wonder if “Sure I don’t have any real reporting experience, but neither does Bari Weiss and she’s EIC of CBS News” would fly in a cover letter

Also worth noting that this antisemitic trope was used to argue against drawing red lines against antisemites and white nationalists.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Fwiw I think the “apologize for being white” thing is very clearly about making sure white people don’t feel an obligation to alleviate past injustices or make society fairer. Ultimately to do that you have to raise taxes and the billionaires holding Vance’s leash don’t want that.

Inside the federal government as Trump and DOGE pushed it past its breaking point in 2025, as told by some of the more than 1,200 federal workers @hannahnatanson.bsky.social and @merylkornfield.bsky.social have spoken to this year

A big part of being a historian is being a detective! Who did this? Why? Where? Why does it matter in the grand scheme of things? You have to learn how to probe, how to uncover, how to read against the grain, how to find unusual sources, how to interpret those sources. How to piece together a puzzle

you start out with a stupid mean weird guy. you let him have some arguments online for a decade or so. then you let him decide what science means for everyone

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

this is well put and a good thread

Can’t stop thinking about this. The Trump administration is essentially extorting hospitals into dropping gender-affirming care—without Medicare or Medicaid they’d go bankrupt. It’s akin to a backdoor ban even for people with private insurance, a proposal that wouldn’t pass Congress.

I know people are rightly going to be worried about child health, their own health. But we also can't afford this. Like, John Hopkins did an estimate (next link) and every measles case during outbreaks cost on average $43,000 to treat. That kid who got tetanus cost $1 million dollars to treat /1

makes me want to chew glass wapo.st/4aXfzn5

sic fuckin’ semper

the main reward you are likely to get for total loyalty to trump is the destruction of your career and your reputation www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/n...

this is excellent: “it’s not just public goods that don’t matter: it’s the public. The leaders Trump socializes with most often do not have to answer to a public, and that seems like a pretty good gig to the president - and (more importantly) his circle.”

Computer, enhance

Renaming gerrymandering as "Roblining" seems fitting for a guy who has spent his whole career trying to allow gerrymandering communities of color out of representation

the same “we wouldn’t have so many COVID cases if we didn’t test so much” logic they apply to climate change and pollution impacts

I’m fairly certain we’ll get two or three days of AI proof-of-life videos before anyone associated with the White House officially admits it

every tech guy with an AI “girlfriend”

hyped for this

The next few days are going to be hard. The fear is palpable. So please, if you’re at all wondering: I wish you could see how much the world needs you. Right now, all that matters is getting to morning. * thetrevorproject.org/get-help/ * pflag.org/resource/support-hotlines/ * translifeline.org/

"What of that, my dear!" said Scrooge's nephew. "His wealth is of no use to him. He don't do any good with it. He don't make himself comfortable with it. He hasn't the satisfaction of thinking—ha ha ha!—that he is ever going to benefit us with it."

The #1 movie when you were 10 years old is how your 2026 is going to go. (looks like i'm finally going to become the Joker?)

This is a great story about trying to do ordinary pluralist politics under the lawless rule of an administration that exclusively understands politics in the friend-enemy mode. CO senators try to protect a home state research center which Vought lawlessly seeks to abolish as an enemy institution

If our legislators are bought and regulators captured by a powerful tech industry, any law or regulation coming from those institutions will tend to reflect the ideologies and desires of the industry, not the people who those legislators and regulators are meant to represent. /3

One of the most on-brand stories i have about myself is that I found out the truth about Santa around age 8 because i read a newspaper article about how to tell your kids the truth about Santa I kept my new knowledge to myself

Sometimes courage is not the presence of hope but the absence of fucks

There's really interesting social science on how white people significantly overestimate the number of people of color in a room or in a picture. A room with, like, 20% POC will be perceived as majority POC.

I cannot tell you what the viable case is for journalists, politicians, and especially for companies to maintain a presence on X. The US-based audience is small; it is filled with horrific garbage; engagement is low and CPM is heinously overpriced. But inertia and nostalgia are that powerful. /6