This morning, four vulnerable Republicans signed onto the discharge petition all House Democrats have signed to force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring a bill to extend the premium tax credits for purchasing healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) markets to the floor for a vote. The proposal extends the credits for three years.
Republicans who recognize that the American people overwhelmingly want the extensions have been fighting their colleagues who want to get rid of the ACA and slash government spending in general. Instead of extending the credits, House leadership is proposing a package of policies popular among their conference; the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that it will drop about 100,000 people a year off health insurance through 2035 but will save the government $35.6 billion.
Without the extension of the premium tax credits, which Republicans permitted to lapse at the end of the year when they passed their July budget reconciliation bill that they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the 24 million Americans who buy insurance on the ACA marketplace will see their insurance premiums skyrocket, and millions will lose their health insurance altogether. And yet, Republicans oppose the extensions, which will cost the government about $350 billion over the next ten years. The Republicans’ extension of the 2017 tax cuts in that same bill will cost about $4 trillion over the same period.
Yesterday, Johnson dismissed the members of his conference who wanted to vote on the extension, saying that “many of them did want a vote on this Obamacare covid-era subsidy the Democrats created. We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve, and it just was not to be.” Representative Mike Lawler (R-NY) told reporters: “This is absolute bullsh*t.”
On Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump kicked off his nationwide tour to assure Americans that the Republicans are focused on bringing down costs. Voters turned to Trump in 2024 in large part because he promised that his understanding of the economy would enable him to bring down the prices that had risen in the global inflation spike after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world economy.
Within weeks of the election, Trump began to back off on that promise, telling a reporter for Time magazine in December 2024 that “it’s very hard” to bring down prices. Then in April he launched a tariff war that began to raise prices, while his on-again, off-again tariff rates discouraged businesses from investing while they waited to see what made economic sense.
Americans are not impressed with Trump’s handling of the economy. A poll by AP/NORC, which stands for Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago—a very reputable polling collaboration—released today shows that only 31% of American adults approve of Trump’s management of the economy, with 67% disapproving. Among Independents, that number breaks down to 15% approving and 80% disapproving.
Trump’s overall numbers are not much better. Just 36% of American adults approve of his job performance, with 61% disapproving. Among Independents, just 20% approve, while 74% disapprove. With them, he is underwater by an astonishing 54 points.
So Trump’s advisors have sent him off on a tour to convince Americans the administration shares their concerns about the economy.
The news of last Friday, November 28, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Joint Special Operations commander overseeing an attack on a small vessel carrying 11 people on September 2 to “kill everybody” is shaping up to be a fight over control of the United States government.
A missile strike shattered the boat and set it afire, but two men survived. A second strike fulfilled Hegseth’s order. According to Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post, 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.
There had already been significant pushback in the first place over the strikes, which legal experts say are unlawful. But the so-called double tap is illegal and a war crime even under the Trump administration’s flimsy justification for the strikes.
Lawmakers of both parties have pushed back on what Senator Angus King (I-ME) yesterday called “a stone cold war crime.” The Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), have vowed to launch investigations of the incident, as well as of the larger operation.
Yesterday, Hegseth and President Donald Trump began to distance themselves from the strike. Last night, Hegseth pinned the blame for the order on Admiral Bradley, posting: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.”
Today, at a televised meeting, Trump’s Cabinet officers rallied around the president, telling him he is brilliant and a miracle worker, and Trump threw his support behind Hegseth. Clearly, the president intends to stand by the weekend Fox News Channel host he installed in one of the most important positions in the United States government.
Shortly after the meeting, PBS NewsHour journalist Nick Schifrin reported that a U.S. official told him “[t]he US military struck the boat on September 2_four_times: twice to kill the 11 people who were on board, and twice more to sink the boat.”
Trump is slipping. After he drew attention by posting wildly on social media last night, today’s meeting was clearly designed to demonstrate that the president is alert, active, and on top of things. But this made-for-television photo opportunity was anything but a display of competence: Trump could not stay awake while his Cabinet members were praising him, and so we had the wild visual of Secretary of State Marco Rubio praising Trump as the only man who could end Russia’s war in Ukraine, gesturing at the president sitting next to him, who was, to all appearances, sound asleep.
At the Cabinet meeting today, Trump announced that “the word ‘affordability’ is a Democrat scam,” insisting falsely that his economic policies were bringing down costs. Trump won the 2024 election in large part by promising to bring down inflation, but prices have risen under him at the same time that the economy is slowing.
G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers pointed out today that Americans’ concerns about affordability are not just about costs, though. They are concerns about social mobility, economic inequality, and fairness, values that run opposite of Trump’s focus on funneling contracts and privileges to well-connected billionaires. People are unlikely to change their minds about the unreasonable power of that “Epstein class” as the deadline for the release of the Epstein files gets closer.
Now Trump’s defense secretary, already in trouble for sharing classified information about a strike on Yemen’s Houthis over a non-secure messaging app on which a reporter had been included, is tangled up in a war crime. Today, libertarian conservative writer George Will noted in the Washington Post: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” Will went on to refer to the Trump administration as a “moral slum.”
On Sunday, Miranda Devine of the New York Post reported on a leaked document written for congressional leadership by retired and active-duty FBI agents and analysts of the first six months of Kash Patel’s leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They said Patel is “in over his head” and that deputy FBI director Dan Bongino is “something of a clown.” Both Patel and Bongino are arrogant, the report says, and have an “unfortunate obsession with social media.” Under Patel, they say, the FBI is a “rudderless ship” and “all f*cked up.”
Trump made it clear during the Cabinet meeting that he has embraced the white nationalism of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who reject the nation’s longstanding principle of welcoming immigrants and have vowed to purge the nation of them, concentrating on those who are Brown and Black. Yesterday, Noem called them “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”
“I hear…Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions,” Trump said of Minnesota. “Every year, billions of dollars, and they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%, they contribute nothing. I don’t want ‘em in our country, I’ll be honest with you, okay. Somebody would say, ‘Oh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want ‘em in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want ‘em in our country. I can say that about other countries, too. I can say it about other countries, too. We don’t want them the hell, we gotta—we have to rebuild our country.”
Trump embraced the idea, popular with white nationalists and the neo-Nazi right wing, that the U.S. must reject the multiculturalism of our entire history or perish. “You know, our country’s at a tipping point,” he said. “We could go bad. We’re at a tipping point. I don’t know [if] people mind me saying that, but I’m saying it. We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”
Then he turned on an elected representative, using dehumanizing rhetoric historically associated with violence against a people. “Ilhan Omar [D-MN] is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work, these aren’t people that say, ‘Let’s go. Come on, let’s make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain. They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing. You know, if they came from Paradise, and they said, ‘This isn’t Paradise.’ But when they come from hell, and they complain and do nothing but b*tch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”
The Cabinet appeared to applaud, although it is not clear whether they were agreeing or hoping to stop him from talking like a Nazi.
Tonight the administration put Miller and Noem’s policy into place, pausing all immigration applications from 19 countries and halting the processing of green cards and citizenship applications. Federal authorities say they will target Somali immigrants in Minneapolis–St. Paul in an upcoming sweep, although Jaylani Hussain, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says about 95% of the Somalis in Minnesota are already U.S. citizens and that about 50% were born in the U.S.
According to Mike Balsamo and Steve Karnowski of the Associated Press, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey says Trump’s attack on Somalis “violates the moral fabric of what we stand by in this country as Americans. They have started businesses and created jobs. They have added to the cultural fabric of what Minneapolis is.” Minneapolis police—many of them Somali—will not work with federal officials in the sweep.
Also tonight, Trump announced that because former president Joe Biden used an autopen, “[a]ny and all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts,” pardons, and commutations he signed are “invalid.” This is bonkers, of course. All modern presidents have used autopens, including Trump himself, and there is no mechanism in the Constitution for erasing the actions of a previous president by fiat.
More to the point, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket pointed out, Trump himself said he had no idea who crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao was after having pardoned him. And in March, Trump told reporters he had not signed the proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, although his signature appears on the proclamation in the Federal Register.
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
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.”
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
