Saturday Report 12/6/25 — MAGA Mistletoe: Is "Daddy’s Home" Trump’s Strongman Branding?

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Trump’s disgusting “Christmas Card” on Instagram implying his followers (and the citizens of the US) are merely children who must do whatever he says and tolerate whatever he does.

FYI, our “Ask Thom Anything” monthly zoom call for paid subscribers will be next Saturday, as I’m in Seattle today speaking at Town Hall about my new book The Last American President.

— Trump released his new National Security Strategy and it looks like the focus is based on the racist “Great Replacement Theory” that posits “international Jews” are funding immigration of Black and Brown people into “European” (ie white) countries including the United States to replace the white population. It’s what the young Nazis were chanting about in Charlottesville back when Trump first became president when they repeated, over and over again, “Jews will not replace us.”
If Trump is putting “civilisational erasure” and “majority non-European” panic into an official National Security Strategy, that’s racism getting a government letterhead. It takes a white-nationalist story about “replacement” and turns it into policy, which means whole groups of people get treated as a threat by definition, not as Americans with rights.
That’s how democracies slide into authoritarianism, a script we’ve seen most recently followed by Putin in Russia and Orbán in Hungary: first you pick a scapegoat, then you build the machinery to punish them, and pretty soon the target list grows until it includes anybody who challenges Dear Leader.

— When the government can kill without consequences, what’s left of democracy? If this report is accurate — if the U.S. military struck a boat, watched two unarmed men cling to wreckage for an hour, and then hit them again — we’re not talking about a policy dispute; we’re talking about the kind of lawless violence democracies are supposed to prevent.
A democracy doesn’t survive on elections alone; it survives on the rule of law, transparency, and the idea that government power is restrained, especially the power to kill. If the Trump administration can wave a wand, declare a “war” on drugs, and then use that made-up battlefield to execute suspected criminals without trial, without surrender, without due process, and then hide the most damning footage while demanding applause, we’ve crossed a line into something ugly and familiar from history: a state that treats human beings as targets and calls it “security.”
And once that precedent is set, it doesn’t stay on the ocean. It creeps home. It becomes the justification for using the military, for militarized policing against anyone they can label “dangerous,” “terrorist,” or merely inconvenient. That’s the bargain authoritarianism always offers: let us break the rules this once to get the bad guys. But when no one is held accountable, the real message to every agency and every future president is simple: the law is optional if you have power. And that’s how democracies die: not with a coup on a single day, but with a slow normalization of brutality, impunity, and lies told in the name of “law and order.”

— Bob Kennedy delivers a lifetime of disease and death to babies? Kennedy’s hand-picked vaccine council has ended automatic vaccination against Hepatitis B for babies immediately after birth. This is a disease that leads to liver cirrhosis and cancer later in life; a quarter of all people infected as children will die prematurely. And even if mom doesn’t have it, it’s all over the place: like the flu, the virus can be acquired by touching surfaces touched by people actively shedding it (although it’s not airborne). We enacted this at-birth vaccination policy during the Clinton administration and in the years since then millions of lives have been saved as infections have declined by 99 percent. But Kennedy and his fanatic anti-vaxxers seem to have a different agenda than protecting Americans and our children from disease…

— Has Kash Patel ordered his agents to act as Uber drivers and deliver one his girlfriend’s “inebriated” pals home? Back in the day, Bill Clinton fired his FBI Director (William Sessions) because Sessions had required FBI agents to run personal errands for his wife. Now we have Patel using the FBI jet to zoom around to and with his (much younger) girlfriend and, most recently, reportedly ordered agents to drive home one of his girlfriends’ friends. If the allegation is true, the bigger picture is something called “personal-rule corruption”: a powerful public official treating armed federal personnel like private servants. It signals that government power has become a reward for loyalty and a tool for convenience instead of law and public service. That kind of impunity corrodes democracy because it tells agencies that accountability is optional, missions are secondary, and the taxpaying public exists to serve the powerful, not the other way around. If anything demands investigation and impeachment (if Patel doesn’t resign first), this is it.

— Is Trump going to let big corporations loot America via the tax code? Multiple sources are reporting that the Trump administration is considering killing off the 15% alternative minimum tax on corporations that have otherwise been successful in evading paying income taxes on their profits. The bigger picture is simple: this is the tax system being rigged in the shadows so giant corporations can pay less, while everyone else picks up the tab. When government works like a private help desk for corporate lobbyists, it drains money from public services and poisons democracy by teaching people that power, not fairness, is what makes the rules.

— Is Trump’s conspiracy machine turning anger into pipe bombs? This is what happens when a demagogue turns politics into a conspiracy-based religion: a man allegedly plants pipe bombs in Washington, and investigators say he told the FBI he believed the 2020 election was stolen, which is exactly the poisonous Big Lie Trump and his allies have poured into the country for years. When leaders manufacture “enemies” and tell followers democracy is fake, some followers stop voting and start reaching for explosives, and that’s a direct harm to America and democracy because it normalizes political violence and destroys trust in elections and peaceful transfer of power. And now that we know that the young man arrested was a True Believer, don’t expect this story to get any meaningful traction on rightwing media…

— Is Trump’s Christmas greeting “Daddy’s Home” an authoritarian warning? Trump’s “Daddy’s home” White House holiday Instagram Christmas Card isn’t just cringe, it’s a flashing red warning light for a republic. When the official seat of American democracy starts marketing a president as a father figure who’s come back to “set things right,” we’re not in the world of civic equality anymore. We’re in the world of submission and strongman politics, where citizens are cast as children, dissent is treated as disobedience, and accountability gets replaced by worship. And that’s the poison: democracy doesn’t need a “daddy.” Democracies need competent public servants who respect the Constitution, tell the truth, and accept limits on their power. The “joke” works only if you accept the authoritarian premise underneath it, that the country is a household, the leader is the patriarch, and everyone else should pipe down and fall in line. That’s how you train a movement to cheer power for power’s sake, and it’s how nations slide from self-government into cult-of-personality rule.
So no, it’s not harmless. It’s propaganda wearing a Santa hat: an invitation to trade citizenship for fandom, rights for loyalty, and democracy for a boss who demands adoration. America doesn’t need a “daddy” standing in front of the White House with a thumbs-up. America needs leaders who understand that in this country, the people are the bosses, and the president is just an employee.