Trump Crime Family

24 million Americans will see their insurance premiums skyrocket. “This is absolute bullsh*t.”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

December 17, 2025

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.”

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No one will ever pay for this

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No one will ever pay for this.

By Jonathan V. Last

Someday this will be over.

I can’t tell you how it will resolve, or in which direction. Maybe America sinks into illiberal democracy, like Hungary. Or maybe we roll back the autocratic push and re-establish a stable democracy. But three years from now, or seven years from now, or twelve years from now, this intermediate period will end.

Here’s what I can tell you: If we get lucky enough save democracy, then the people who did this to America—the people who excused, and covered, and enabled Trump’s autocratic attempt—will take it as proof that Trump was never a real danger to begin with.

Look how overwrought you were, they’ll say. You spent a decade telling us that Trump was trying to overturn democracy. But the fact that we don’t live in a dictatorship proves that Trump was normal and that we should never listen to you hysterics.

Our success will be used to discredit us, like a quantum theory of suicide:1 If democracy survives, then that is proof that it was never under threat in the first place.

That’s just something for you to meditate on this holiday season. The people who did this to America will never pay a price. And if we defeat them, our success will be used as an argument against us.

It will be an approximation of our post-COVID experience. The Americans who made it through COVID took their survival as proof that the pandemic was never that serious and the real villains were the people and protocols that saved, and thereby inconvenienced, them.

Merry Christmas.

Source: Trump’s Consigliere Just Stepped in It

Trump says his coveted arch is his ‘primary’ focus — not bringing down soaring costs

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Trump

Massive arch would be constructed on a roundabout opposite the Lincoln Memorial in Virginia

By Andrew Feinberg

With just days remaining until millions of Americans will have to pay dramatically increased health care insurance costs unless Congress and the White House can agree on extending Covid-era tax credits, President Donald Trump says his top domestic policy aide has been tasked with something far more important.

The president told attendees at a Sunday White House Christmas reception that Domestic Policy Council boss Vince Haley’s “primary thing” is the construction of a massive triumphal arch to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary — not lowering healthcare costs or addressing the affordability issues that have driven a string of Democratic victories in off-year elections this year.

“It’s something that is so special. Uh, it will be like the one in, in Paris, but to be honest with you, it blows it away. Blows it away in every way,” he said. “And Vince came in one day and his eyes were teeming. I mean, he couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. He saw it and he wanted to do that.”

Addressing Haley, Trump added: “That’s your primary thing.”

The president first hinted at plans for the massive structure in October, when he displayed a model of the proposed project during an Oval Office meeting with Finnish president Alexander Stabb.

He more formally unveiled the project during his controversial dinner for donors to his White House ballroom project days later.

The massive construction project will involve erecting the arch on a traffic circle near Arlington Cemetery, with two giant white eagles attached to the top.

Trump has previously claimed that the roundabout was initially planned to be named Memorial Circle in 1902, with a statue of Confederate Civil War general Robert E Lee being erected on the site.

“Every time somebody rides over that beautiful bridge to the Lincoln Memorial, they literally say something is supposed to be here,” he said at the time.

The president also claimed that some of the money left over from the $300 million ballroom project will fund the construction of the arch, which strongly resembles the Arc de Triomphe in Paris that had been commissioned by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to commemorate soldiers who died in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

During his second term, Trump has launched several major construction projects, besides adding a ballroom to the White House and the arch.

 

Source: Trump says his coveted arch is his ‘primary’ focus — not bringing down soaring costs

Applebaum: The war only ends when the pressure is put on Russia

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President Trump this week pressured Ukraine to accept his administration’s peace proposal, one that heavily favors Russia. This as his administration’s national security strategy has put him at odds with American allies. Moderator Jeffrey Goldberg, Susan Glasser of The New Yorker, Amna Nawaz of PBS News Hour and Vivian Salama and Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic discuss all this and more.

It’s almost as if the Trump administration doesn’t want to admit or can’t understand that the war only ends when the pressure is put on Russia. It’s the most obvious solution to the problem, and it’s the one they just won’t take.”