Saturday Report 12/27/25 — Trump to Democrats,“Enjoy What May Be Your Last Merry Christmas!”

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— Lift a toast to all the new billionaires made in 2025, including 50 of them just in the tech arena. Because of changes made to our tax laws by Reagan and Clinton, they don’t even pay income taxes like you and me; instead, they borrow against their assets, live on the borrowed money, and pay interest (a few percent) instead of the income tax that you and I pay that can add up, with state and local taxes, to as much as almost half of our income. This didn’t “just happen.” It was engineered. And the prime mover was Ronald Reagan and the GOP’s full-throated embrace of neoliberalism when they seized Congress and the White House in the 1990s. Before Reagan, high marginal tax rates (90%) acted as a hard ceiling on greed. You could be rich, but you couldn’t become morbidly rich without giving most of it back to the society that made your wealth possible. Reagan blew that up. He slashed top tax rates, cut capital gains, deregulated finance, and turned borrowing against assets into the preferred way to live tax-free. Never sell. Never take income. Borrow forever. That’s how billionaires are made. And then came the bipartisan betrayal. Bill Clinton didn’t reverse Reaganism; he normalized it. He signed Gingrich’s Tax Reform Act of 1996 that cemented billionaire control over America’s wealth, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996, blowing away media ownership caps, content liability, and opening the door to today’s oligarch-owned information ecosystem. A handful of billionaires now own what we see, hear, and argue about, and they’ve used that power to convince Americans that extreme inequality is freedom. This wasn’t economics: it was class warfare. Reagan fired the opening shot. Clinton waved it through. And democracy has been bleeding ever since on the altar of great wealth.

— Trump threatens Democrats on Christmas day, saying “Enjoy What May Be Your Last Merry Christmas!” It followed this sick and twisted man calling Democrats “scum” in his official Christmas message, preceding the threat noted above. We now have secret police rampaging across our nation wearing masks for the same reason the old Klan used to: so they can’t be identified and held to account when they break the law. We have regulatory agencies being run by people from — or invested in — the industries they’re supposed to regulate. Senior administration officials like Tulsi Gabbard and Marco Rubio openly parrot Russian talking points while Trump trashes our European allies. Prosecutors are appointed specifically to go after Trump’s political enemies like in your generic third world tinpot dictatorship. Members of Congress and the Supreme Court get rich on insider trading and from being showered with “gifts” from billionaires and industries seeking favors.

— Drip, drip, drip come the rape and abuse allegations against Trump, who a jury has already found raped (according to the judge) E. Jean Carroll and more than 20 other women have accused of sexual abuse or rape. Most recently, the Christmas Eve document dump includes a alleged report from a limo driver about an underage girl allegedly raped by both Epstein and Trump, who then committed suicide perhaps with Maxwell’s help. MAGA world, however, after going nuts over phony allegations involving a pizza parlor in DC and Hillary Clinton, are responding with a collective shrug. “He already admitted this stuff,” they seem to be saying, “in the Access Hollywood tape. This is old news and so what?” As long as Trump has his goons attacking Black and Brown people, trash-talks women (particularly female reporters), and aligns himself with foreign dictators and American billionaires, all is good. The party of moral rectitude has been revealed as a fraud; they only pretended to those positions to get the votes of the suckers in the evangelical movement, who appear to be willing to forgive and forget as long as Trump keeps saying America is a Christian nation and gives their megachurches billions in subsidies and payments for schools, daycare, etc.

— Bondi’s Department of Justice now appears to be saying that if you’re taking pictures of masked ICE agents beating up, shooting, or otherwise abusing immigrants (or American citizens) you’re guilty of “domestic terrorism” and can be arrested by those same unaccountable ICE agents and disappeared into their growing collection of concentration camps. Following Tim Cook’s and Apple’s pathetic decision to cave to Trump regime pressure and eliminate the “ICE Block” app that lets people know when the masked secret police are in their communities, Noem, Bondi, Miller, and Bovino appear about to go on a tear based on Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7. If you’re “guilty” of “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” or “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity,” you, too, may be heading to one of those privately-run for-profit camps in the coming year.

— The Trump regime is on the brink of turning routine travel into a permanent surveillance apparatus and most travelers have no idea. What started as a simple entry authorization for visitors from allied countries is being twisted into a data-hoovering monster. Under the new proposal, travelers wouldn’t just answer a couple of questions: they’d have to hand over years of personal communications, social media history, multiple phone numbers and emails, family details, and biometric identifiers like fingerprints and DNA just to step foot in the country. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s real. It’s happening now. And if you don’t raise hell before February 9, 2026, it could quietly become law. This is how surveillance states are built. First the data grab targets foreigners. Then it normalizes. Then it spreads. And history (including the PATRIOT Act) tells us that once surveillance infrastructure exists, it never stays in its box. It expands, it digests more of your life, and you barely notice until it’s too late. This isn’t “modernization.” It’s a privacy apocalypse masked as security. Share your outrage with your elected officials (Congress’ phone: 202-224-3121) before it’s permanent.

— Trump’s racism brings nursing home crisis. Tens of thousands of people working relatively low-wage and often unpleasant jobs in nursing homes around the country are legal immigrants from Haiti, here on work visas. But, because they’re Black and not from “Norway,” Trump’s racist henchmen have already pulled legal work visas from thousands and will be ending work visas for over 100,000 Haitians starting February 3rd. Nursing homes are already experiencing staff shortages because of the pulled visas, and the situation is expected to become a full-blown crisis for the industry in a few weeks. As Raw Story reports: “Rob Liebreich, CEO of Goodwin Living in northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., let go of 14 migrants who had their work permits stripped. Sixty more employees face an uncertain future over their permanent legal status.” Meanwhile, Trump complains that Norwegians don’t want to immigrate to America to take these jobs. Sick and twisted doesn’t begin to describe this situation and the people driving it.

— The official White House Spiritual Advisor, Paula White, says of Epstein’s best friend: “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God, and I won’t do that.” Meanwhile, a “great unchurching” is going on in America, as over 40 million Americans have stopped showing up in houses of worship over recent decades. Could the two things have something to do with each other? Prior to 1980, modern American presidents and their political parties largely stayed away from religion, but that year the Reagan campaign brought in their VP candidate’s son, George W. Bush, to create a bridge between the campaign and the religious right. The merger with the likes of Falwell and Reid was fabulously successful, with “a thousand points of light” representing billions of taxpayer dollars flowing to church-run operations at the same time the Reagan administration stopped enforcing the law that forbids churches from preaching politics from the pulpit if they want to keep their tax exemption. It started with “voter guides” being passed out at services, but has since morphed into open and blatant spitting in the face of Jesus, who famously said to render onto Caesar what was Caesar’s and onto God what was God’s. As the GOP’s wealthy preacher cronies continue to replace faith and spiritual experience with cynical tribalism and White Christian Nationalism, horrified Americans are turning to personal spiritual experience, meditation, and even psychedelics. Houses of worship, which used to be essential hubs of community where all were welcome, have instead become what Christ called “dens of thieves.” It’s a tragedy for religion, the spiritual experience, and our democratic republic that was conceived as staying on the secular side of Jefferson’s and Madison’s “wall of separation” between church and state.

— Recession watch: Ten housing markets are in a crash right now, with more soon to come. So far, nine of the ten are in Texas and Florida (the last is Champaign, Illinois) but the loss of immigrant labor to ICE’s rampage increasingly has the entire housing industry in a bind. Combine that with Trump’s reckless “give me a hotel, golf course, jet, or a billion dollars or else” tariffs, and his radical dialing back on the Inflation Reduction Act’s thousands of construction projects and we’re looking at a serious economic problem in the coming year, according to many observers. Just in time for the midterm elections next November. Hang on; the ride is about to get really rocky.

— Racist MAGA goes nuts over King Charles III’s Christmas message. Louise and I watched his speech on BBC TV and were nearly in tears over the notion of a man who appears to be a genuinely decent national leader calling his people to their highest moral and political standards. The King told the world that through “the great diversity of our communities, we can find the strength to ensure that right triumphs over wrong,” provoking a virtual explosion on Musk’s increasingly-sewer-like social media site. MAGA followers were falling all over themselves to claim that racial diversity is causing the destruction of Great Britain (rather than pulling out of the EU, as Russian social media trolls promoted a few years back). If it wasn’t so disgusting, it’d be pathetic.

— Geeky Science: Eat your chocolate and drink your coffee! New research finds that both foods contain theobromine, which appears to measurably slow aging at the cellular level by activating or suppressing certain genetic activities associated with youthfulness and aging. They both also contain polyphenols, which are known to have powerful protective anti-oxidant properties. Time to start putting powdered dark chocolate into the percolator with your ground coffee? Sounds like a New Year’s treat to me…