Saturday Report 12/13/25 — The Trump Grinch That Stole America!

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—The Trump Grinch that stole America! The Trump regime has fired the person in charge of government statistics and is trying to hide what’s going on, but every indicator out there seems to point to our having already fallen into a serious recession. Substack newsletters are complaining that they’re not getting new paid sign-ups, two nonprofits that I do fundraising for are falling seriously short for the first time in years, advertising revenue across the media are down, housing prices just went negative for the first time since the pandemic, and The Wall Street Journal nailed it this week with the first paragraph of a major story under the title Big Winner in Trump’s Trade War: The Grinch:
“Donald Trump was right again. ‘Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,’ he said in April about the consequences of his tariffs. ‘And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.’ Sure enough, Christmas is coming, and parents looking for toys face tariff-induced price hikes and shortages.”
His use of tariffs to extort gifts and deals for himself and his family members, the GOP’s renewed $5 trillion tax break for billionaires, his pro-Putin and anti-democracy rhetoric that’s driving away our traditional allies and trading partners, and his ICE and other abominations that have collapsed travel into the United States (thus injuring a major industry) have all added up to our economy going into the toilet, just like Democrats predicted before the election. Buckle up: this is going to be a wild ride. It wouldn’t surprise me to see us slip into a second Republican Great Depression, as the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover policies were so similar to what Trump’s up to.

— MAGA, meet the pothole: Trump floats withholding road money and refusing to pave roads in the Red states of his own base. How is that going to go over? The Heritage Foundation, architect of the second Trump presidency (and the Reagan Revolution back in the 1980s that’s gutted our middle class), put out a threat to Republican legislators in Indiana. They claimed that Trump would cut off federal funds to the state if the legislature didn’t help him/them rig the 2026 midterm elections with a massive new gerrymander that would leave the state with 9 Republican representatives in the House of Representatives and 0 Democrats. 
“Roads will not be paved,” wrote Heritage Action. “Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.”
Will he now follow through with the threat? If he does, he’ll be kneecapping his own base in that state, and if he doesn’t it’ll show every other Republican politician in the country that he’s really no longer the threat that he once was. The simple reality is that Trump’s slipping in virtually every way imaginable. The big question now is whether he’ll allow the slide in his power to continue, or will pull a Putin-style crackdown against the people he considers his political enemies. This may be a very, very dangerous moment for American democracy.

— Grand Theft Retirement: Trump’s GOP war on Social Security and Medicare rolls on. George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress began the privatization of Medicare when they invented the Medicare Advantage scam back in 2005; now more than half the people who think they’re on Medicare are actually on these private usually for-profit scam plans that will dump you once you start getting sick and expensive for them, not to mention how often they simply refuse to pay for tests, procedures, surgeries, etc.
But to add insult to injury, Trump’s Medicare director, the notorious quack-TV-doc and supplement peddler Dr. Oz, is rolling out in a few weeks a new “trial” program in six states where even people on real Medicare will have their doctors’ bills and requests for tests, procedures, etc., subject to “preclearance,” an euphemism for inserting an approval process in between you and your physician just like with the scam Medicare Advantage programs. They call it the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) model (Republicans love to gut successful government programs using the excuses of “waste and fraud”), and it’ll run in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Washington state. If you’re on real Medicare in one of those states, you may want to reach out to both your federal and state elected representatives and raise hell.
Meanwhile, Trump is also trying to get all of us so pissed off at Social Security that we’ll beg for him to hand the trillion-dollar program over to the big New York banks that bankroll the GOP. He’s doing this by having already fired or laid off over 8000 Social Security employees, and now his SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano’s planning to shut down local offices across the country to cut the number of people they can see by more than half.
The excuse they’re using is that the system will be running low on cash in the coming decade, but (as Democrats keep pointing out) if millionaires and billionaires simply paid the same percentage of their income into the system as you do, the system would be solvent for 70 more years and everybody in the country on SSA could get a $2000/year raise. Right now, once a person has made more than $171,000 a year they stop paying SSA taxes on anything above that, which is nuts. If you’re on Social Security, near that age, or just concerned about it being there when you retire, again, raise some hell.

— “Who is Antifa?” FBI Director can’t say because it’s not a membership club. The FBI’s Branch & Operations Director Michael Glasheen told Congressman Bennie Thompson that Antifa — short for anti-fascist — represented the “greatest threat” of domestic terrorism to America. In response, Thompson asked him who is Antifa, where is their headquarters, how many members they have, etc., and Glasheen was completely unable to answer the questions. Of course, he knew — as did the members of Congress questioning him — that there’s no such organization and people who oppose fascism aren’t a threat to our country.
Antifa is, in fact, most all of us. Arguably, my dad joined Antifa when, fresh out of high school at 17 in 1945, he joined the Army to go fight fascists. Ditto for all those members of the Greatest Generation who served our country in that war against the German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists. The simple reality is that the Trump regime is trying to invent a new “threat” they can use as an excuse to spy on those of us who oppose their neofascists policies and, in their dreams, one day imprison all of us. Like so much in Trumpworld, it’s all utter bullshit, albeit one of the most dangerous and anti-American forms of bullshit imaginable.

— Merry Christmas: the EU just kicked Trump and Putin in the nuts. The European Union got around Orbán’s obstruction on behalf of Putin and seriously froze over €200 billion in Russian assets, holding them to cover the costs of Ukrainian reconstruction. The EU is finally over Trump’s and Orbán’s pro-Putin meddling and is taking direct action; weapons for Ukraine are almost certainly next. In response, Russia is suing like crazy over the money and threatening nuclear war if weapons arrive.
Putin’s economy is collapsing, Ukraine is badly damaging their oil infrastructure, and Trump is increasingly looking impotent. He gave Ukraine “until Christmas” to take the deal he and Putin worked out that would give Russia about a quarter of Ukraine and keep them out of NATO forever. It’ll be interesting to see if, when they and the EU call his bluff, Trump will flip-flop and stop supporting Putin, or if the Butcher of Moscow still controls Donald like some kind of bizarre marionette. I’m betting on the latter, although why Trump always rolls over for Putin is still a mystery.

— Detained for “looking Somali”: ICE goon grabs a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis. A US citizen and resident of Minneapolis was sitting in a restaurant having a quiet lunch when he looked up and saw a masked man decked out in camo running across the room at him. The ICE goon tackled the young man to the ground, roughed him up, and put him in a headlock as the citizen kept begging to be allowed to show the agent his passport.
Instead, because he “looked Somali” (in other words, he was Black), he was dragged out to an unmarked vehicle and taken to an ICE facility miles away. When he was finally — hours later — allowed to show them his passport, they simply threw him outside into the snow and told him to walk the miles back to the restaurant where his coat and car were.
The incident horrified local and state officials. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told the 20-year-old man, “I apologize that this happened to you in my city, with people wearing vests that say ‘police.’ That’s embarrassing.” The city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, condemned the young man being “taken into custody for no reason at all, in clear violation of law and the Constitution of the United States for simply walking down the street and looking like he’s Somali,” and began reaching out to other mayors across the nation to coordinate resistance to ICE’s unconstitutional overreaches.
Minnesotta Governor Tim Walz wrote a strongly worded letter to puppy-killer Kristi Noem, saying, “The forcefulness, lack of communication, and unlawful practices displayed by your agents will not be tolerated in Minnesota.” Hopefully, he’ll follow through and find that agent, arrest him, and throw him into the clink for assault, although I doubt anybody’s holding their breath. This is what happens when you offer a cash bounty to officers for an arrest without requiring it to be legal and appropriate.

— What happened to Republican’s love of states’ rights? Republicans used to love “states’ rights” when the phrase was invoked to allow states to prevent Black people from voting or using public facilities. Now, not so much, when it comes to states wanting to regulate AI. This week, Trump signed an executive order forbidding states from regulating the new technology, as his AI czar — a tech-bro billionaire who’s himself heavily invested in AI — pushes to prevent any meaningful regulation of the emerging technology. After all, there’s big money to be made by the billionaires at the top of this particular pyramid, even if it may end up destroying the world.

— Not a Palace: National Trust sues to stop Trump’s “Presidential Ballroom.” The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a congressionally chartered historic preservation group, sued Trump yesterday, saying that no president can legally demolish the East Wing and start construction without the appropriate permits and public input. They claim Trump should have submitted plans to the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts because the two are required to approve any federal construction projects in DC, along with the requisite environmental and other reviews and permits.
They also accused Trump of violating the National Environmental Policy Act by proceeding with the demolition without protecting local residents and businesses from the release of asbestos and other toxics. Their complaint to the DC District Court was clear: “No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever — not President Trump, not [former] President Joe Biden, and not anyone else.” Trump, of course, thinks that he’s above the law because the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have given him such immunity that he can break any law he pleases with impunity. Keep an eye on this one.