Scandal-ridden Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned from Trump’s cabinet today amid an investigation into allegations that she drinks heavily on the job, slept with a subordinate, and that both her husband and her father have been sexually harassing and inappropriately texting young staff at the Labor Department. Her husband, an anesthesiologist, was actually barred from entering the department headquarters in February after two female staffers accused him of sexually assaulting them, which was caught on camera. But Chavez-DeRemer’s attorney insists that her resignation “is not the result of legal wrongdoings” but rather a “personal decision” to leave the administration for a job in the private sector. (Sure, Jan.)

Chavez-DeRemer is the third cabinet secretary to “resign” or be fired during Trump’s second term, and notably, all three have been women. Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March due to “a culmination of her many unfortunate leadership failures including the fallout in Minnesota, the ad campaign, the allegations of infidelity, the mismanagement of her staff, and her constant feuding with the heads of other agencies, including CBP and ICE,” an administration official told NBC News. A month later, Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi—despite her reportedly begging him not to—because he was frustrated with her mishandling of the Epstein files and failure to prosecute his political enemies.

In reality, while these women were objectively terrible cabinet secretaries, they weren’t any worse than some of the men in the Trump’s cabinet who still have jobs—Trump just found them to be useful scapegoats on which to pin all of the failures of his administration. The drinking allegation against Ms. Chavez-DeRemer is particularly funny to consider in this regard:

The original complaint to the inspector general accused Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her aides of drinking on the job and keeping a stash of liquor at the office, according to The New York Post, which first reported the complaint in January.

In one text message, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer asked a staff member to bring rosé to her hotel room.

“Do they sell by the bottle,” she asked. The staff member responded that they did, but were out of rosé. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer responded with another selection: “How about the josh sauvi B.”

I’ll admit that it’s a little amusing to read about this woman’s request for josh sauvi B1 amid the list of scandals forcing her departure, considering that some of Trump’s male appointees are so notoriously hammered at all times that social media has taken to nicknaming his cabinet the “Liquor Cabinet.” Pete Hegseth is such a wreckless alcoholic that he had to promise the Senate he would stop drinking if they gave him the Department of Defense. (He’s also been credibly accused of rape and was confirmed to Trump’s cabinet despite that and the drinking problem.) FBI Director Kash Patel announced today that he’s suing The Atlantic over a deeply reported story about his excessive drinking that claims his staff has trouble waking him up sometimes when he’s passed out.

It does feel a little bit like firing the women first would play better with MAGA, who are unclear on whether they believe women should even have the right to vote, much less help Trump to run the country. Republicans like to sprinkle a few women into positions of power for optics, because how can you call Trump a sexist pig if he’s got women like Pam Bondi in his cabinet, openly worshipping and defending him around the big table at those meetings? The Pam Bondis of the cabinet also tend to be the most disposable and the easiest to point a finger at when your poll numbers start circling the drain. Anyone who votes for Trump will be quick to believe him when he blames his problems on a woman. Of course she was a failure; probably a snake who betrayed him, too. Time to get serious and replace her with a man.

Of course, none of this is to defend Chavez-DeRemer—she and her entire family sound like creeps. She took staffers to strip clubs and allegedly pressured the young women to give sexual attention to her husband and dad. During her tenure as labor secretary, the department has broadcast white nationalist propaganda on social media and forced thousands of civil servants out of jobs. She deserves to be fired or exiled whatever exactly happened. But until I see one single man in Trump’s cabinet lose his job for being equally ill-behaved and dysfunctional as the women being thrown under the bus left and right, then this is just more rank misogyny dressed up as an administration having standards.

Hi readers,

After nine beautiful years in Brooklyn, I am shrinking my life into two suitcases and moving to Rio de Janeiro in June.

To be sure, this feels like something one might do in their twenties rather than in the middle of their career. I’m 42 now; I have unexplained lower back pain. My hangovers last three days. I have a small dog who requires an ungodly amount of paperwork to migrate to South America. Moving to a beach city in Brazil with only my clothes and 6-year-old Maltipoo was not on my Bingo card for this decade.

I won’t be writing a Lena Dunham-style “Why I’m Leaving New York” essay about why, because my reasons are pretty simple: My partner and I were an immigrant and a journalist in a country that is increasingly hostile to both. He moved back to his hometown, Rio de Janeiro, in December, and I’m joining him there in June. It’s a romantic decision, in part, but also one that’s best for me right now as it becomes impossible to support myself in New York as a freelancer. I love Rio; its vibrance and sweatiness and soul remind me of New Orleans, except it’s nestled between the sea and mountains1 and is genuinely, shockingly beautiful. And the U.S. dollar, at least for now, stretches a lot further in Brazil than it does in the U.S., so I can afford a much better quality of life there than I can in Brooklyn.

This move also tracks for me in terms of the past few decades of my life: I spent ten years in D.C. and then left when Trump was elected the first time; I spent nearly ten years in New York and am now exiting after Trump’s second election. Brazil has successfully imprisoned its own right-wing aspiring autocrat and is moving in the right direction lately, but should a Bolsonaro scion take power again there in ten years, perhaps I’ll flee again to somewhere even further. The South Pole? A life fleeing fascist regimes by the decade would at least make for great semi-autobiographical novel material.

As for Nightcap, I have great news: It’s not only continuing apace but expanding! I’m writing this post today rather than closer to the actual move on June 1 because we’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of Nightcap this week—my newsletter is a toddler!!!—and I have a couple announcements about it. One, I’ve lowered the monthly and annual subscription price a bit for you guys to accommodate everyone’s subscription fatigue and to acknowledge the rising prices of everything else in this country under Trumponomics, in hopes that folks who regularly enjoy reading this newsletter and find it informative and stirring might be moved to support it. I will keep writing Nightcap for as long as I have enough paid subscribers to make it worth the time and effort, and as always, I am deeply grateful to each and every one of Nightcap’s patrons.

Secondly, in addition to my regular writings, I’ll be adding a new section at the bottom just for paid subscribers that will be more of a personal account of moving to Brazil. I’ll write about attempting to learn Portuguese and to culturally assimilate, post photos and stories of adventures in and around Rio, share the challenges and triumphs of starting over in a strange place with no friends (yet), and just generally enjoy having a freestyle, non-politics section of the newsletter. I hope you’ll come along for the ride!

xx,

Laura

ps. If you know someone in Rio whom you think I should know, please consider introducing us!

My stomach lurched yesterday as I watched the videos of Iranians forming human chains around their bridges and power plants as the seconds ticked away toward the arbitrary 8 p.m. deadline Trump had set for when their “whole civilization will die.” Some interpreted his post as a nuclear bomb threat; I was equally worried about the slow, painful deaths the population might face if he used regular bombs to destroy their power and water and food supplies and commit ecological terrorism on a population of 92 million people.

Imagine having to wait around to see what kind of bombs a genocidal madman across the world is going to use to kill you and your children and whether or not he was being serious, after he tweeted about your murder with the casualness of promoting a new TV show. Imagine having to hold hands with your neighbor around the local power plant to block a bomb from plunging your city into darkness, knowing that Pete Hegseth is probably the kind of man who would be more inclined to nuke the place if he saw you standing next to it.

To most of the world’s relief, Trump was bluffing this time when he threatened genocide. And Iran had called his bluff, refusing to negotiate with him at all despite his increasingly unhinged threats. As the deadline approached, it appears that Trump got nervous and sought a quick escape hatch from his own bluff. He asked Pakistan, as a “mediator,” to throw together a quick two-week deal that basically gave Iran everything it wanted: a ceasefire for Iran and its allies, explicit control over the Strait of Hormuz including a $2 million-per-ship toll paid to Iran (as reparations for our attacks), and acceptance of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, among other perks.

All of this leaves the United States worse off than where we were before we started this nonsensical $45 billion war, which has killed 13 Americans and 3,500 Iranians (including 240 school children) and replaced the Supreme Leader with his younger, more hardline son. We have a worse deal in place now than Obama’s Iran deal, which he had secured diplomatically without any bloodshed or war crimes, and we’ve destroyed our own reputation as a sane, stable country while wrecking the global economy and spiking the price of oil. In other words, we have lost this war by every possible metric: strategically, economically, legally, morally, ethically. Iran stood up to Trump, and he folded like the paper tiger he is.

Of course, this isn’t to suggest that the war is over or the deal buttoned up or the ceasefire even happening. Israel immediately violated the ceasefire last night, as they tend to do, and started bombing the hell out of Lebanon again. Israel is reportedly angry that Trump left them out of ceasefire negotiations in his haste to get a deal done before 8 p.m., considering that Netanyahu needs to be in a forever war in order to cling to power. In light of Israel’s attacks, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz within 24 hours of agreeing to open it, and now Trump looks even more like a fool with his pants down for getting nothing out of this agreement and leaving the world economy in freefall.

AND STILL, I would much prefer this national humiliation as an outcome to one of the darkest days in American history than waking up to the news of armageddon. Yesterday really felt like it could go either way—a 50-50 probability for me. There are no guardrails on Trump because Congress has apparently rolled over and died. The president is a known bluffer, to be sure, but he’s also extremely vulnerable to manipulation and surrounded by unhinged warmongers who see Muslim kids as animals. Pete Hegseth, who’s really talking like a radical religious extremist lately, has spent the last few weeks firing all the top brass in the military because they’re the kinds of men who would refuse illegal orders and push back on his war crimes. The idea that one of these overgrown boys who treats war like a videogame would get a little too hopped up on steroids or whatever and push the mass murder button is not actually that far-fetched to me.

I would love to have a country to feel patriotic about. I would love for Congress to step up, relocate their spines, and impeach and remove both Trump and Hegseth before we all have to sit through another day waiting to see whether our senile president is going to follow-up on the casual evening genocide he threatened. But the United States has put me in a position where I want us to lose this war we started, because that’s preferable to the horrors of the alternative. The moral and ethical response to the Iranian regime killing protesters is not to kill hundreds of thousands more of them ourselves. We are the bad guys now.

Hi readers, and happy Trans Day of Visibility to all who celebrate. I don’t know how to gently transition to the subject of today’s newsletter so I’m just going to dive right in: Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s husband has a “busty bimbo” alter ego who loves to cross-dress in massive fake boobs and leggings and pay thousands of dollars to interact online with adult fetish models. And we know this because an immigrant sex worker, who is likely undocumented, leaked screenshots to the press to get back at Noem for overseeing DHS’s brutal ICE raids and inhuman concentration camps.

The story, which was published today by the Daily Mail along with a trove of explicit texts and photos of Bryon wearing wonky double Fs, wasn’t met with the denials you would expect. Kristi Noem was reportedly “blindsided” and “devastated” by the story and asked for “privacy and prayers at this time” for herself and her family. And Donald Trump had the most hilarious possible response: “They confirmed it?” he told the Daily Mail reporter. “Wow, well, I feel badly for the family if that’s the case, that’s too bad.”

After the story published, Axios reporter Marc Caputo just went ahead and tweeted that he nearly had the same scoop—and it came from an immigrant sex worker seeking revenge against Kristi.

Now, here’s why we’re allowed to laugh at and even be enraged by this situation. It’s not because anyone on the left gives a shit about a man with a cross-dressing kink. Lord knows we don’t care what folks do in their private lives if it isn’t hurting other people, and I frankly don’t see that much difference between Bryon Noem putting on a breast plate and Kristi doing this weird cosplay in full kit:

Rather, the problem here is that in addition to this kind of salacious, gender-bending scandal leaving one of Trump’s cabinet members wide open to blackmail by a foreign government, Kristi Noem has been prominently serving in an administration that is actively trying to torture queer and trans people and eliminate them from public life under the banner of some kind of moral and religious superiority.

Just this morning, Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court sided with a Christian “therapist” in Colorado who challenged the state’s ban on conversion therapy for gay and trans kids. The plaintiff in Chiles v. Salazar had argued that rather than trying to “convert” her clients, she was just trying to help them “with their stated desires and objectives in counseling, which sometimes includes clients seeking to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with one’s physical body.” We know that conversion therapy is akin to child abuse and torture and can lead to lasting psychological problems. But in his opinion, Justice Gorsuch of course agreed with the plaintiff that Colorado’s ban “censors speech based on viewpoint”—essentially ruling that talk therapy is a kind of free speech, rather than medical care subject to state regulation.

JD Vance is currently promoting a book about his faith called Communion while railing against “radical gender ideology.” Pete Hegseth has been going on insane rants about Christianity and divine assistance in his Holy Crusade against Iran while purging the military of gay and trans people and bombing Iranian elementary schools. And Kristi Noem is asking for prayers about her husband’s huge boob fetish while children are dying in American detention centers because their food is full of worms.

So yes, we are allowed to delight in Noem’s humiliation right now and marvel at the exposure of her and her party’s hypocrisy, once again. She shot her puppy, slept with her campaign manager on taxpayer-funded private jets, enriched herself and her boyfriend through illegal government contracts, turned the mass suffering and incarceration of innocent brown people into social media content about herself, and deserves to be tarred and feathered and bullied for the rest of her life.

I flew into Laguardia last night about 30 minutes before the runway crash between an Air Canada plane and a fire truck that killed two pilots, injured dozens of people and shut down the airport. The collision was apparently caused by a miscommunication from an exhausted air traffic controller who was distracted by a different emergency at the time, while his tower was understaffed at night. This is the second fatal plane accident in the U.S. since Trump took office, as his administration has been firing air traffic control employees "without cause nor based on performance or conduct” in order to “save money.”1 And last night’s incident was just a blip on the radar compared to the massive air travel crisis that Trump has not only created but is now deliberately making worse in his own country as his dictatorship slips out of his hands.

The mess started a month ago when the Iran war created a global jet fuel shortage by choking off oil shipments at the Strait of Hormuz. Airlines across the world have already been raising the price of plane tickets dramatically and preparing to cancel some longer flight routes altogether in anticipation of their fuel reserves running low. Iran has also attacked several airports and hotels in the Middle East in retaliation, which is causing a ripple effect of flight cancelations throughout Europe and Africa. The oil crisis and resulting international travel fuckery have become so egregious that it appears the “goal” of this war we started is now just to reopen the strait that closed because the war. It’s that circular Vietnam war logic all over again, driving us further into this pointless quagmire of violence.

On top of climbing ticket prices and international flight cancellations, we’ve now got a domestic travel crisis due to the partial government shutdown. TSA agents are entering their second full week without pay, and they’ve responded by quitting their jobs and calling out sick by the thousands, which is causing hours-long security lines and missed flights across all major U.S. airports. Trump is desperate to blame Democrats for the chaos, but it’s actually Republicans in Congress who’ve blocked TSA funding nine times because it doesn’t also include more money for ICE. The Democrats are holding off for certain ICE reforms, like banning face masks and requiring them to have judicial warrants to break into people’s homes, but have been eager to fund TSA and the rest of the agencies at Homeland Security with clean, standalone bills in the meantime. Republicans wouldn’t come to the table.

Amid the standoff, Trump has decided to pour ICE onto the problem. He originally framed this plan as sending ICE agents in to offset the TSA shortage and help ease the security lines, despite their lack of training for that very specific job. But now he’s fully admitting that ICE is just heading into airports to harass and arrest people and piss off his political opponents by sowing additional chaos and fear. “That’s why the Democrats are going crazy,” he told a reporter this morning. “ICE loves it because they’re able to now arrest illegals as they come into the country. It’s very fertile territory.”

ICE has already made one horrifying arrest of a mother in front of her child at San Francisco’s airport today, which serves as a preview of what’s to come. We should expect some violence, which seems to happen everywhere Trump sends groups of armed men to crack down on peaceful people minding their own business.

Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans finally reached a deal to fund TSA and give the airports some relief. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R) caved and agreed that Republicans would vote yes on funding all of the DHS agencies except ICE—including TSA, FEMA and the Coast Guard—and deal with ICE funding separately in reconciliation. But when he finally took that bipartisan deal to Trump yesterday, the president threw a tantrum and killed it, demanding instead that Republicans refuse to fund TSA unless its tied to passing the SAVE America Act. (That voter suppression bill, as I wrote last week, does not have the votes to pass without blowing up the filibuster, and Thune has said repeatedly that Republicans don’t have the votes to blow up the filibuster either.)

So, given the option of just letting Congress fund TSA and avoiding weeks or months more of travel hell facing Americans, Trump is leaving the mess in place on purpose and sending in untrained, masked white supremacists with guns to harass travelers on top of it. This is the policy equivalent of approaching a starving person with a bag full of food, punching that person in the face instead of giving them the food, and saying you’ll beat them harder if they choose to remain hungry. Trump is governing by spite, and there don’t appear to be any checks or balances on his decisions by the Republicans who control the House and Senate.

Congress should go ahead and pass their TSA funding deal without Trump’s blessing and force him to veto it. Let him personally own the reason someone couldn’t make it home to their sister’s wedding or their mother’s funeral this weekend. The president is actively making our lives more miserable and restricting our ability to move around the country and the world. It’s bad policy and bad politics—and I suspect American voters will be so filled with rage come November that no voter suppression bill could possibly be strong enough to stop the backlash that’s coming.

On Sunday, International Women’s Day, President Donald Trump declared that he won’t sign any new legislation into law until Congress passes the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that he believes would lock in election wins for Republicans “for 50 years” by disenfranchising millions of people—mainly married women, low-income people, and people of color.

“Great Job by hard working Scott Pressler on Fox & Friends talking about using the Filibuster, or Talking Filibuster, in order to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, an 88% issue with ALL VOTERS. It supersedes everything else,” he wrote on Truth Social. “MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE. I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION - GO FOR THE GOLD.”

For months, Republicans have been appearing on Fox News and CNN trying to spin the SAVE America Act, which the House has already passed, as a very moderate and basic voter ID bill that just requires you to show a driver’s license to vote just as you would to get on a plane or buy a drink. This is blatantly untrue, and these lawmakers should be asking themselves why it would be necessary to lie about what a bill like this actually does in order to get the public behind it.

What the bill actually does is ban mail-in voting with narrow exceptions for the military and disabled people, require proof of citizenship to vote (not just an ID, but an original birth certificate or passport, which half the country does not have), and force states to hand over their voter rolls to the Trump administration. Married women who have changed their names would be forced to re-register to vote with a birth certificate in hand and sign an affidavit confirming their marital status, which is designed to be a big enough burden to make many women stay home. Queer and trans folks who have changed their names would face similar burdens under the new law, as well as those who can’t afford passports.

Trump believes that passing this bill is the only way he’ll win the midterm elections with tanking approval ratings and that it would make the United States a one-party country for the next half a century. In other words, it would fix the elections for Republicans by suppressing kinds of voters who already don’t like them. (Married women broke for Trump in 2024, ironically, while single women broke for Harris, so I’m not convinced that this bill would be the slam dunk for himself that he thinks it would. But voter suppression is unequivocally bad.)

I’ve been watching this bill closely for months, as the pressure ramps up for Republicans to pass it. Senate Republicans would need 60 votes to pass it outright, which they don’t have, even with John Fetterman (D-Pa.) switching sides1. So Trump and paid MAGA influencers have been trying to convince Senate Majority Leader John Thune to deploy the talking filibuster to pass it, meaning senators can only filibuster the bill for as long as they’re willing to stand up and talk old-school style on the Senate floor, which would allow the bill to pass by a basic majority. Unfortunately, Republicans really have to have their shit together in order to pull off that gimmick, because it places the burden on the majority party to maintain quorum, whereas Democrats would be able to introduce as many amendments as they want for weeks and months to wear down the GOP. Per NBC:

A talking filibuster under current rules would require 51 GOP senators in or near the chamber at all times, while Democrats would need just one member to hold the floor to sustain the filibuster, and would have the luxury of rotating among themselves. If the number of Republicans dips below a majority, or a “quorum,” a single Democrat could move to adjourn.

Thune basically said today that Republicans do not have the votes or the discipline to make this work, so the bill will go to a regular doomed vote in the Senate. “We don’t have the votes, either to proceed [to] a talking filibuster nor to sustain one if we got on one,” Thune said at a leadership press conference Tuesday. “That’s just a function of math. There isn’t anything I can do about that.”

That means Trump and Republicans will be unable to fix the November midterms harder than they are already trying to fix them via gerrymandering, ICE intimidation, and other kinds of election fuckery. (See Texas last week.) They’ll have to face their deep unpopularity head on.

MAGA influencers on X, naturally, are having a meltdown.

Trump has not weighed in yet on Thune’s press conference, but I imagine he won’t react very well to being told no. That his fate is written. And I guess I’m really excited about all the legislation he won’t be signing.

What happened in Texas yesterday, despite two very obvious instances of election fuckery, should be genuinely terrifying to Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Let’s start with the voter suppression: In Dallas County, which is of course heavily Democratic and Hispanic, Republicans decided at the 11th hour to abandon the use of countywide vote centers, which allow voters to show up at any polling place, and return to a system of assigned precinct-based polling places due to lingering conspiracy theories about voting machines. This meant that hundreds of voters who hadn’t been alerted to the change were turned away, demoralizing them and delaying the whole voting process. Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Terri Burke said that "around one-third of the voters are having problems.” One woman named Veronica Anderson, who had walked 2.5 miles to the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center to vote, told a reporter for the Dallas Free Press, “I walked up here because I want to vote so, so bad.” She said when they turned her away, it felt like “your self-esteem and everything is torn down.” (This damn near made me cry.)

It gets worse: Because of the polling place confusion, which was exacerbated by Texas’ recent redistricting, a judge in Dallas County agreed to extend voting hours to 9 p.m. to give voters a little extra time to find their correct spot. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is challenging Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary, successfully petitioned the state Supreme Court to block that decision. Election officials were then ordered to set aside all ballots that hadn’t been cast by 7 p.m.—again, at the request of a candidate who was actively on one of the ballots. Paxton’s race went to a run-off, incidentally, and the confusion around the voting hours and setting aside of certain ballots will almost certainly be the subject of a legal challenge.

Considering how egregious the election fuckery was in Texas yesterday—and the fact that Republicans spent well more than double what Democrats spent on these races—it should be even more terrifying to Trump and the GOP that Democrats actually set voter turnout records in the state. Roughly 2.3 million Dems voted in the primary compared to 2.1 million Republicans, which is the first time since 2002 that they’ve outvoted the GOP in a midterm primary in Texas. In heavily Hispanic Zapata County, turnout was 143% the total number of votes Harris won in the 2024 general election.

Democrats even outvoted Republicans in the four districts that Republicans just gerrymandered to gain Trump seats:

James Talarico, the progressive seminarian challenging Rep. Jasmine Crockett, won his primary despite Bari Weiss’ CBS News censoring his Stephen Colbert interview. Talarico had been lagging in the polls behind Crockett, mostly due to his lack of name recognition, but the Colbert incident backfired and propelled him into broader fame (Streisand Effect!). This should also alarm Republicans, because Talarico actually does have a shot at defeating Paxton or Cornyn for a U.S. Senate seat come November and “turning Texas blue.” He very much looks like a young, clean-cut, Bible-quoting Republican white guy, and he uses that fact to challenge right-wing hypocrisy pretty deftly from the left.

Adding to the GOP’s pain, three Trump-backed candidates lost their primaries: Sid Miller, Cecil Bell Jr. and Stan Kitzman. And the Cornyn/Paxton primary going to a run-off is a nightmare for the party, because it means that two prominent Texas Republicans have to spend money attacking and exposing each other for weeks instead of attacking Talarico. (We know there’s a lot to expose about Paxton, in particular, because he’s already been impeached and investigated for fraud and corruption.)

Meanwhile, Crockett respectfully accepted her primary loss and endorsed Talarico, offering a unifying message of support for the party’s best shot to flip the Senate in November.

I don’t know if this is the year that Texas turns blue. Their politics are still plagued by bigotry and corruption and controlled by the oil companies. But I think if Democrats ever had a chance to claw back power in the Lone Star State and cause a real political earthquake, that chance is sitting in front of them right now.

Trump declared war on Iran—rather, that he’s joining Israel’s war on Iran—from his country club in Florida in the middle of the night on Saturday, once again without getting the permission of Congress. In a video posted to social media, he offered various justifications for these sudden attacks that don’t really add up, including that Iran was developing nuclear weapons1 and the recent shootings of Iranian protesters. “When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump said, addressing Iranians. “It will be yours to take.” As for how they should go about doing that, Trump wrote that police and revolutionary guard forces should “peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves,” as if it’s not delusional to suggest that the protesters will just hold hands and form a new peaceful government with the same guards who have been massacring them by the thousands.

Trump then spent the rest of the night offering clues as to what was really on his mind as he pretended to care about the freedom of the Iranian people, posting on Truth Social at 4 am that Iran had helped Biden beat him in 2020. “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” he wrote with a link to a far-right media site. (He made this same debunked claim about Venezuela after capturing Maduro in January.) A few minutes later—still in the wee hours of the morning and shortly after declaring war—he posted another article unrelated to Iran with the headline, “As Georgia prosecutor pursued Trump, Biden DOJ ‘invited’ her to get lucrative grant, memos show.”

It’s unsurprising that Trump had elections on his mind as he lobbed bombs into yet another country—we already know that he considers attacking Iran to be one obvious tool in a flailing president’s toolbox that they can use to cling to power, because he predicted for years that Obama would do the same.

By the time most of the country had woken up to the news that we are in a new endless Middle East war, the US-Israel missile campaign had already obliterated an elementary school for girls in Iran, killing an estimated 165 people, mostly children, and injuring 96 more. By today, three US troops had been killed in Iran’s retaliatory attacks, and Trump posted a new video announcement declaring that “there will be more before it ends.” And while Iranians are obviously celebrating the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Trump’s own intelligence has warned him that Khamenei is likely to be replaced by hardliners from the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Needless to say, it’s critical right now that we have clear-eyed, well-funded, independent reporting on this war that only 21% of Americans support, as well on the motivations of the man who started it. The timing of these attacks strongly suggests that Trump is using war not only as a pretext to declare a national emergency that could help him seize control of the midterms, but also to change the conversation away from the Epstein files and the recent revelation that the Justice Department withheld documents related to the testimony of a minor who accused him of sexual assault. Trump sees attacking Iran as an escape hatch from his domestic problems, and the media shouldn’t accept his framing on any of this.

Unfortunately, the right-wing capture of legacy news outlets continues at an alarming pace. Yesterday Bari Weiss, who was recently appointed editor-in-chief of CBS News after Trump ally Larry Ellison bought it, tweeted a fire emoji in support of the US-Israel attacks on Iran—or specifically, in support of an Iranian activist’s clapback against Zohran Mamdani’s criticism of the war, which amounts to the same thing.

The outlet Weiss ran before she took over CBS, the Free Press, is openly, aggressively anti-Mamdani and pro-Israel, so we can expect CBS now to have the same tilt. Anderson Cooper recently quit his job at 60 Minutes because Weiss was stalling a piece he’d been working on about the “white genocide” Trump claims is happening in South Africa. (CBS obviously axed Stephen Colbert’s show straight away.)

Meanwhile, Bezos’ Washington Post has conveniently gutted its foreign desk and laid off its entire Middle East bureau just weeks before we started a new war there. And Paramount Skydance, the same company that bought and ruined CBS, is about to gobble up Warner Bros. in a nightmare media merger that would include CNN and HBO. That means Trump ally David Ellison would have the power to destroy CNN’s newsrooms and put Bari Weiss in charge of that whole enterprise too, or someone equally fascism-friendly. The last remaining non-state cable news would be MSNOW. And regardless of whether you personally watch CNN or find yourself ideologically aligned with its anchors, they are one of the last well-funded newsrooms willing to pay for on-the-ground war correspondents, and trust that we would desperately miss the stories that they break.

The one thing standing in the way of this merger from hell is California’s attorney general Rob Bonta, who has promised to challenge it and, if he can’t block it entirely, at least put sand in its gears so it takes as long as possible for the deal to go through. Perhaps he can drag it out til the fall, so that Trump and his allies don’t control nearly all forms of media, entertainment, and communications in this country for too long ahead of an election that will decide whether we have still a representative democracy or not going forward.

In the meantime, everybody needs to be subscribing to independent media and emotionally preparing for our breakups with HBO Max.

Folks: We’ve been told that nobody cares about women’s sports more than Donald Trump does. "Under the Trump administration, we will defend the proud tradition of female athletes, and we will not allow men to beat up, injure and cheat our women and our girls," he said one year ago after signing an executive order banning trans women from participating in women’s athletics. It was one of the very first things he did as president.

So I could forgive some people for being confused by the very differing responses the Trump administration has had to the USA men’s and women’s hockey teams both going into overtime to beat Canada for the gold. Over on the men’s side, FBI director Kash Patel spent $75K in taxpayer dollars to fly on a private jet to watch the final game and party with the team in the locker room after, where he jumped around and chugged beers like a coked up frat boy (while Savannah Guthrie’s mother remains kidnapped).

Then Trump called the men’s team to congratulate them and offered to fly them to his State of the Union Address tomorrow. Desperate for their approval, he bragged about how his government planes can take off through any kind of weather, and then he tucked in a joke about how he was obligated to invite the dumb little women’s team too. “I must tell you, we're going to have to bring the women's team, you do know that,” he can be heard saying on speakerphone, as the players laugh. “I do believe I probably would be impeached."

Kash Patel was not seen partying with the women’s team, which was surely a relief to them, nor did Trump personally call to congratulate them and name-check their goalie. And shortly after Trump’s phone call to the men was made public today, the women’s team announced that they unfortunately can’t make it to the White House tomorrow due to scheduling conflicts.

“We are sincerely grateful for the invitation extended to our gold medal–winning U.S. Women’s Hockey Team and deeply appreciate the recognition of their extraordinary achievement,” a USA Hockey spokesperson said. “Due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments following the Games, the athletes are unable to participate.”

Obviously, the men shouldn’t show up either. But the way they were lapping up Trump’s attention like dogs in that video, I suspect most of them don’t mind when the president joke like a 12-year-old boy about women’s sports being trivial after the literal Olympic games, much less do they have the depth to grasp the more pressing reasons for protest. Groups of men peacocking for each other’s approval by throwing women under the bus is a tale as old as time.

In other news…

Here’s an absolutely unhinged story: A group of Republican congresswomen, Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), are calling on Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) to resign after text messages surfaced showing that he pressured one his staffers to send him explicit photos and engage in an affair before she died by self-immolation.

"'Send me a sexy pic,' Rep. Tony Gonzales texted Regina Ann Santos-Aviles, then director of his regional district office in Uvalde.

Santos-Aviles replied that she’d had a rough week and 'you don't really want a hot picture of me.'

'Yes I do,' Gonzales texted, adding, 'Hurry.'"

At one point the congressman asked his staffer about her sexual preferences, to which she replies, “This is going too far boss.”

Santos-Aviles, a mother, died by suicide in September after the alleged affair. She lit herself on fire at home.

The women calling on Gonzales to resign are the same women who broke with the GOP on the Epstein files.

Lauren Boebert, whose problems I’ve written about extensively, is even standing up to those in her own party who are pointing out that losing Gonzales could cost Republicans their razor-thin majority in the House.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), supposedly an Evangelical Christian, refused to pull his endorsement of Gonzales in light of the texts. "You have to allow investigations to play out and all the facts to come out,” he said today.

So once again, Mike Johnson finds himself on the wrong side of Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, two of the most unhinged members of Congress (one got a hand job during a local theater performance of Beetlejuice and the other faked a wrist injury after shaking hands with a trans rights advocate), in defense of sexual misconduct. And the GOP’s House majority is now threatened by a man who literally drove a woman to set herself on fire.

Every single survivor raised their hand. Some of them glared directly at the back of Bondi’s head as she continued to ignore them, as captured in this now-viral photo by NBC News.

Bondi wore a cross around in her neck. At the table in front of her was a “burn book” full of insults she had prepared with tabs for each Democratic lawmaker who addressed her. She ranted and raved at the questioners, deflecting and pointing fingers and generally sounding like Parker Posey on booze and Lorazepam. “You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer,” she snapped at Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) at one point. “You’re not even a lawyer.”

But it was Jerry Nadler’s (D-N.Y.) line of questioning that caused the crash-out of the day. “How many of Epstein’s co-conspirators have you indicted?” Nadler asked Bondi. “How many perpetrators are you even investigating?”

The answer is zero. But Bondi dodged the question, instead complaining about Nadler’s “theatrics” and launching into an unhinged rant about the stock market. "The DOW is over 50,000 dollars!” she said. “I don't know why you're laughing. You're a great stock trader as I hear, Raskin. The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. That's what we should be talking about."

Yes, the Attorney General of the United States really told members of Congress today that instead of talking about the mass coverup of a network of rich and powerful child rapists—implicated in a shocking trove of documents that mention our sitting president more than a million times— they should shut up and be grateful that their stocks are up. Because that’s how it’s always worked, right? If you’re doing well by the shareholders, we’ll ignore your crimes. Everything that doesn’t affect the bottom line is just noise. Property over people; wealth trumps all.

Indeed, this DOJ has zero interest in prosecuting anyone involved in Epstein files. The’ve met with zero of his victims, though they have “mistakenly” doxxed many of them by redacting the perpetrators’ names instead of the girls that were abused. The only person DOJ officials have seemed interested in talking to is convicted child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, who was moved to a luxury prison with puppy visitations and custom meals in exchange for making a nice statement about Trump. (She’s still offering to clear his name in exchange for a full release.) And Karoline Leavitt has been responding to all Epstein questions this week with a simple, “We’re moving on from that.”

Perhaps the administration would like to move on from it, and I can see why. But there’s a growing majority of people who would vote for any Democrat at this point who campaigns on a promise to circle back and prosecute the fuck of all of these people for their crimes and their cover-ups. And Bondi’s demeanor today suggested that she knows she wouldn’t be spared.

Last night, on the 5th day of Black History Month, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video clip on Truth Social that falsely claims the 2020 election was stolen from him and depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as dancing apes in the jungle, to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

The stunningly racist video drew such instant and widespread outrage on the internet that even MAGA Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) felt compelled to break ranks with Trump and condemn it. Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate and chair of the GOP Senate Campaign Committee, posted on X: “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”

Scott, of course, knows the post wasn’t “fake,” in the sense that Trump’s account did actually post it. Per Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng, Trump may not be the one clipping and publishing his own racist videos, but he personally approves them all:

According to sources intimately familiar with the matter, video and photo posts to the president’s Truth Social account go through layers of approval. Trump signs off on the content posted, but he often does not find, and certainly does not clip or upload, these clips himself. He is often presented with a menu of options by senior aides for approval, and the footage or images are reviewed by advisers, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.

White House Press Sec Karoline Leavitt did her typical gaslighting rounds this morning and claimed the clip was fine because it was originally part of a larger video depicting Trump as the Lion King. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Leavitt said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.” Of course, there is no pair of ape characters in The Lion King, and Trump didn’t post the rest of the video showing any other characters from the movie—just the Obamas as primates, which suggests that he and his handlers simply wanted to post the Obamas as primates.

Less than an hour later, the White House changed their tune entirely and told reporters the post had actually been “erroneously made” by a staffer and taken down.

This claim would be bullshit on its face, but it’s made worse by the fact that Leavitt had already defended the ape video and called outrage about it “fake” before the White House took it down and claimed it was posted by accident.

What it looks like to me is that the president and his allies have been posting so much gutter racism on Truth Social, X, and elsewhere—keep in mind that Elon Musk is openly white supremacist now and flooding the zone with neo-Nazi content—that they didn’t expect this kind of uproar over the ape video. They didn’t expect it to make front page headlines in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and be splashed across cable news, because they thought they’d worn the media down to the point where we just accepted a certain level of rank bigotry as the new normal.

I’m thinking now about the book event I went to last night, which could not be more relevant this morning. My dear friend and former colleague Chris Matthias wrote a new book about antifa called To Catch a Fascist, which reads like a spy thriller and which I highly recommend, and he did a Q+A with acclaimed independent journalist Marisa Kabas at the Brooklyn Heights Library. Chris has been reporting deeply on antifa’s fight to expose the radical right for years, and last night he talked about the Nazi meme-ification of American politics and how it’s created some of the worst moments in our electoral history—like the claim J.D. Vance amplified that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s pet cats and dogs. What happens in many of these situations is that faceless neo-Nazis on the internet generate these racist memes and inject them into the mainstream via bots and trolls as Trump-supporting political commentary, and then when the White House itself actually regurgitates them as propaganda, it moves fringe racism into the realm of the acceptable.

Mathias said something last night that really resonated with me, which is that one of the biggest challenges of being a journalist covering politics or covering the far right at this moment is maintaining one’s sense of shock. It would be too easy to be confronted with Trump posting a racist meme about the Obamas and think, is this even news anymore? He’s always been racist. His posts are always offensive. He’s an asshole, yeah, we know.

On the other hand, the official social media account of the president of the United States posted a video depicting the nation’s only Black president and his wife as apes, while his roving gang of paramilitary thugs is kidnapping brown children and sending them to American-made concentration camps. This is a shocking development on top of a shocking moment in history, and no amount of outrage, actually, should feel like enough. And the fact that the White House was shamed hard enough that they backed off and took the video down is a reminder that they’re weaker and smaller than they like to pretend.

ICE summarily executed a second U.S. citizen in broad daylight during protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Saturday: 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti.

According to Minnesota police, Pretti had no criminal history beyond traffic violations, he worked with critically ill veterans, and he was legally carrying a gun in his belt while filming ICE agents with his cell phone. Video from the scene shows Pretti trying to help a woman who had been shoved by one of the agents, before six or seven agents pile on top of him, pepper spray and beat him while he’s restrained on the ground, remove the gun from his holster, and then shoot him several times in the chest until he’s dead. He never reaches for the gun or threatens the agents in any way; his hands are empty, he’s disarmed and lying helpless on the ground before they start spraying bullets into his body. They could have just arrested him, even though he hadn’t done a single illegal thing—but they killed him because they felt like it.

AP reports that after the shooting, “an angry crowd gathered and screamed profanities at federal officers, calling them ‘cowards’ and telling them to go home. One officer responded mockingly as he walked away, telling them: ‘Boo hoo,’” much like another ICE officer shouted “fucking bitch” at Renée Good’s dead body after shooting her in the chest and head.

The feds immediately went into spin mode. DHS leaked a photo of the man’s gun to Fox News to make it clear that he had been armed, even though he never touched the gun, because Second Amendment supporters really only support the right to concealed carry for “resisting” a hypothetical Democratic-run government, not a Republican one. Stephen Miller called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin” who tried to murder ICE agents, I suppose with the deadly cell phone he was holding.

Here’s the reality of who Pretti was, from those who knew him:

The Department of Homeland Security said it will be “investigating” Pretti’s murder instead of the FBI, to ensure a full and clean cover-up, because the FBI apparently still has a few employees left who care about actual justice. One FBI agent recently resigned after being instructed to drop the investigation into Renée Good’s murder and to investigate Good instead.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is demanding that ICE get its “thousands of violent, untrained officers” the fuck out of Minnesota before more people have to die. And Attorney General Pam Bondi is basically saying the killings will continue until Minnesota hands over its [checks notes] VOTER ROLLS, lest anyone forget what this government-sponsored terrorism is ultimately about. They’re punishing Minnesota for voting against Trump, threatening other cities and states that voted blue, and using violent government intimidation to suppress votes in the midterms.

But I’ve seen these video from several angles, and I think this incident will be even harder for Trump to spin than the Good videos. They can’t use the “deranged lesbian” angle and appeal to their supporters’ misogyny and bigotry here; this was an outdoorsy white dude with no criminal record who spent his life caring for sick veterans. The blatant extrajudicial killings are getting harder for them to defend, and the Minnesotans resisting ICE only appear to be multiplying in negative-45-degree wind chill.

Alex Pretti led a life of service and died heroically while protecting a woman from the American Gestapo. His death shouldn’t be in vain.

Trump floated canceling November’s midterm elections in an interview with Reuters this week, in a discussion about how he’s going to lose them. “It's some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms,” Trump said, adding that he has accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.”

It’s very new for Trump to acknowledge how unpopular he is and how badly he and the Republicans are losing. Just three weeks ago, he claimed all the polls showing his tanking approval numbers were fake and that the “real” polls show two-thirds of the country loving his presidency. “The polls are rigged even more than the writers,” he wrote on Truth Social on December 30. “The real number is 64%, and why not, our Country is ‘hotter’ than ever before.” (Only true in the climate change sense.)

In reality, Trump’s poll numbers are in the toilet on every single issue, including immigration and the economy, which used to be his best issues. Only 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how he’s handling the economy, per an Associated Press poll released Friday, and his approval on immigration has dropped from 49% to 38% since last March. It’s alarming that more than a third of the country see ICE murdering women in the streets and tear gassing 6-month-old babies and think, this is what I voted for, but some people are just incapable of empathy and critical thought.

When asked about Trump’s comments about canceling the midterms on Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters he was joking. “He was saying ‘we’re doing such a great job… maybe we should just keep rolling.’ But he was speaking facetiously,” she said.

The joke wasn’t funny, so let’s check on the job he’s doing. We’re less than three weeks into the new year and an untrained, hastily recruited secret police—essentially, masked Proud Boys on government welfare—is literally terrorizing the country. In addition to murdering Renee Good and gassing infants, they’ve permanently blinded two protesters, disappeared three Native Americans, dragged a disabled woman through her car window on her way to a doctor’s appointment and killed four men in ICE detention.

Trump is also alienating our (former) NATO allies to try and bully them into giving us Greenland, sending Canada into the arms of China, and charging $1 billion per head for a seat on his “Board of Peace” for Gaza, which intends to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and turn the land into a Trump resort. Meanwhile, RFK Jr. has flipped the food pyramid upside down, defunded Alzheimers and cancer research, brought back the measles, is trying to run horrific Tuskegee-style medical experiments on African babies, and is pushing a video campaign for drinking whole milk that looks like a horror film about 19th-century children in a basement.

Trump’s bizarre priorities this term, undoubtedly driven by psychopath Stephen Miller, are not really popular with anyone. They’re both highly motivating to the Democratic base and depressing to the Republican base, per a new CNN poll, which shows that while Dems have a 5-point edge on the generic ballot, “among those who say they’re deeply motivated to vote, that advantage expands to a massive 16 points.” Only 29% of Independents approve of Trump’s job performance, which may be the most glaring warning sign for him ahead of November.

And because some people really seem to think that Trump can just invoke the Insurrection Act or declare Martial Law and cancel the midterms: There’s no world in which that happens, for several reasons. A full 10% of the House of Representatives have announced they’re not running for reelection, putting a record number of seats up for grabs in November. This means that if you were to “cancel” the elections, those seats would just remain open and those districts unrepresented. Trump can’t just shrink the size of Congress on whim. And the members of Congress who are running for reelection undoubtedly would not go along with just giving up their seats and going unpaid this year because the president is afraid of getting impeached.

Also, elections are run by the states, and some of these midterm elections include state-level races, like the governorship. Trump would have to convince every single state board of elections to cancel all their races and refuse to elect anyone this year. That’s not within the realm of possibility.

Instead, here’s what he and Republicans are doing or are likely going to do:

• Station ICE and potentially the military around polling places in contentious districts and heavily non-white districts to intimidate voters. He will frame it as ICE making sure that “illegals” aren’t voting, which they already do not. And he will encourage ICE to be violent toward anyone brown or with an accent, demand identification and cause as much chaos as possible to deter people from showing up at the polls.

• Fuck with election certification, mail-in voting and ballot counting across the country, thanks to a very bad new Supreme Court decision this week that allows any political candidate to challenge election laws before voting or counting starts

• Gerrymander the hell out of as many states as possible, starting with Texas, to squeeze out as many new seats for Trump as they can

• Claim election fraud by the Democrats no matter what happens

It’s important for democracy-minded folks not to get distracted by the “if we even have any more elections” and start thinking proactively about how to get people to the polls safety and confidently amid certain ICE fuckery. Because the state-sponsored violence is going to get worse over the next nine months, by design. They are trying to become such raging cartoon monsters that they terrify U.S. citizens into giving up and staying home. And I’m starting to talk about this in January, because otherwise the hopelessness of sitting around watching this country turn into 1939 Germany would be too much for me to bear.

…

On that note, a streaming recommendation, because we need joy and dissociation in order to sustain our resolve: I binged Ponies this weekend in two days and loved it. It’s a funny, suspenseful, surprisingly hot Peacock series about two women in 1970s Moscow who become spies to try and figure out what really happened to their dead spy husbands. Haley Lu Richardson and Emilia Clarke are excellent in it, and watching their friendship chemistry develop is really the best part of the show.

If you want more streaming recommendations for me, sound off in the comments!

The two days since an ICE agent executed a 37-year-old American citizen and mother named Renee Good, point blank, for no apparent reason in Minneapolis after she dropped her 6-year-old child off at school have been some of the most horrifying I’ve ever experienced on the internet. Anyone who saw video footage of the incident from literally any angle—aside from the sped-up or otherwise AI-altered videos circulating via disinformation agents on places like X—would come to the same conclusion about what took place here:

• Good, along with her wife and dog, had stopped at a neighborhood ICE raid to support their neighbors

• ICE agents barked conflicting orders at Good, both to leave the scene and to get out of her car

• Good chose to leave, turning her wheels away from the ICE agent and accelerating at about 2 mph away from the scene (ICE are not police officers; they only have the power to stop, detain and arrest people they suspect of being in the US illegally)

• The agent reached over the hood of her car and shot her once in the face through the front windshield, then twice more in face through the driver’s side window as she tried to get away

An unarmed woman breaking no laws and harming no one was brutally murdered by the state. It shouldn’t matter that she was a loving mother and wife, a poet, and had only a glove box full of stuffed animals and a dog when she was shot to death in her car, though those things are all true: She was a real, human, empathetic woman who died trying to stand up for her immigrant neighbors against government tyranny and torture.

Still, it’s hard to overlook the optics here. ICE has shot at least eight other people since September whose murders hardly registered with most Americans, but now the Trump administration has executed in broad daylight a white, Christian, American woman who was literally named “Good.” I thought, perhaps naively, that this woman’s murder by the state would be one that we could all resoundingly protest, both the left and right, and one that might finally wake people up to the violent authoritarianism of ICE and Trump administration. And to some extent, that is happening: Support for abolishing ICE just hit an all-time high in a poll taken the day of Good’s shooting, and the mainstream media (including the Bezos-owned Washington Post) pretty much accused ICE of cold-blooded murder across the board along with some elected Democrats who managed to locate their spines.

But the administration decided to lie about the incident and blame Good for her own murder, which in turn emboldened all the right-wing internet freaks to really yank back the curtain on the misogyny underpinning their movement. It started with Fox News personalities like Jesse Watters zeroing in on the fact that Good is divorced and a lesbian, which makes her the kind of woman in their eyes who had it coming. (Nevermind that Watters also has children from a previous marriage. He left his wife for a 24-year-old colleague whom he wooed by deflating her tires after work so she’d be forced to accept a ride home from him.)

And then alt-right men with tens of thousands of followers on X started just openly suggesting that they thought Good deserved to die for being the kind of woman they find annoying, or the kind who wouldn’t sleep with them or otherwise socially rejected them. One user prompted Grok to generate an image of Good’s freshly murdered corpse in a bikini, which Grok did.

The narrative slowly shifted from, “This is a tragedy but she should’ve obeyed the officers,” to “Good was a lesbian commie activist who should’ve kept her mouth shut and been at home with her kids.”

And while some in the administration were still trying to pretend that the officer who murdered Good did so in self-defense, that he genuinely feared for his life as she supposedly tried to “ram him” with her vehicle, a right-wing news site released cell phone video footage today that puts that entire narrative to rest and exposes Good’s killer as just another guy who hates women. Here’s the video, which is difficult to watch:

You can clearly see her being “Minnesota nice” to the man who shoots her and even smiling at him, with her dog in the back seat, seconds before he kills her. “That’s fine,” she says in her final words to the ICE agent, using a mom’s high pitch. “I’m not mad at you.”

Good’s wife, filming with a cell phone, taunts him a bit from a distance about the fact that ICE changes their license plates every morning, which must have pissed him off. Then he shoots Good in the face three times as she tries to drive away from him, right in front of her wife, and says, “Fuckin’ bitch.”

I find myself thinking about a piece I read back in 2012 about the Republican war on contraception, called “Big Babies”:

All Big Babies know in their hearts that their own confusion and impotence are someone else’s fault. Usually someone who can be feminized — government employees, teachers, African Americans — but often someone genuinely, biologically female. The Nanny is government reimagined in one way, as a frustrating mother (mother who won’t give baby the breast when baby demands, mother who has a life or will of her own, mother who works outside the home — in short, any mother who isn’t baby’s exclusive possession). But the ultimate target for Big Baby’s rage is the Adult Woman.

There is no possible scenario in which that armed ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, feared for his life while interacting with an unarmed, 37-year-old mom in a van with her dog. He hated that woman—she and her wife were “fuckin’ bitches,” just like all the other women he’s known in his life who’ve rejected him and made him feel small. He murdered her because he wanted to and because he could, despite being a tiny, pathetic little man with a gun.

Happy new year, readers, to the extent that the new year is a happy occasion at all so far. I spent my first New Year’s Eve in Rio de Janeiro this year, where most of the city wears white and gathers for an incredible fireworks display on the beach at Copacabana, and the summer weather is so scorching and humid that even your glasses fog up and sweat.

It was surreal to watch Mamdani’s inauguration from here, which looked even more freezing compared to my current situation but still had me tearing up with hope and pride for the city1. And it was even more surreal to rub my eyes awake this morning to the news the U.S. had just kidnapped the president of Venezuela overnight—right next door to Brasil, where I still am for a few more days—for a bunch of made up, nonsensical reasons. (Plus the real but very bad reasons, which I’ll get to below.)

Indeed, U.S. forces dragged Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from their beds in Caracas in the middle of the night and flew them out of the country in an extraordinary act of regime change. This was blatantly illegal: Trump had not only refused to run this by Congress, but he also didn’t even bother to tell them he was essentially declaring war on Venezuela without their authorization. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, though not a single person in this administration cares about how things are supposed to work.

And today, Pam Bondi announced that we’ve indicted the Maduros on a variety of word salad charges: “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices, and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States.”

Firstly, Pam, “machineguns” is two separate words, and you cannot indict a foreign head of state for having guns in his own country. That particular charge is so mindnumbingly stupid it makes me want to cry.

Secondly, how are you going to spend months blaming the entire U.S. fentanyl crisis on Venezuela—including bombing random fishing boats and labeling fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” to pre-justify your war— then drop a list of actual indictments against the country that doesn’t even include fentanyl at all, but instead mentions “cocaine importation conspiracy”? Venezuela does produce cocaine, but it mostly exports it to Europe, which is certainly not a reason for us to kidnap a president in the middle of the night and indict him in New York. Also, Trump definitely doesn’t give a shit about coke lords: He pardoned a different Latin American cocaine kingpin just a few weeks ago—former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández—who had smuggled 400 tons of narcotics into the U.S. and reportedly boasted at one meeting with drug dealers that “together they were going to shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” per U.S. prosecutors.

This brings us to the real reasons we are attacking Venezuela. One, which the administration has not even thinly veiled, is to steal their oil. Trump told Fox News today that we’re going to be “strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry going forward, after he posted a few weeks ago that the country had “stolen” our oil in the 1970s by nationalizing its own reserves that American oil companies had been exploiting. The U.S. military threat to Venezuela will “only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us,” he wrote on December 17. This is Iraq 2.0, although accusing a country of stealing its own oil and land from us is pretty unhinged, even by American imperialist standards.

Secondly, Stephen Miller openly wants to use a real war with Venezuela to justify fast-tracking all of his illegal, unconscionable deportations of Venezuelans to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador and other countries where they’re not even from. Expect him to soon start conflating all Latinos with “Venezuelans” as part of this plan.

Miller’s thirst for war, in particular, is ironic, given his tweet from just before the 2024 election claiming that Kamala Harris was a hawk who would start a bunch of unnecessary wars that would lead to WWIII.

The third reason we’re bombing Venezuela is that Trump is a cornered sewer rat whose power and popularity are tanking; the 2026 midterms are expected to go very poorly for him and perhaps end with a Democratic Congress that would impeach him; and starting wars is a common way for desperate authoritarians to stay in office beyond their terms. Outgoing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who did spend a lot of time with Trump before the two recently turned on each other, came out and said as much in her New York Times profile last week: “In my opinion,” Greene predicted, “we’re going to see more war. Because what do you do when you really lose power, when you become a lame duck? How do you cling to power? You go to war.”

Now, it is also true that Maduro was a horrible dictator responsible for much death and suffering in Venezuela—but the Trump administration did not kidnap Maduro with any kind of plan in place for a transition to peace and democracy in the region. Rather, this move is just going to generate mass chaos and violence and further empower the cartels. It normalizes large countries like Russia and China invading and pillaging smaller countries for their oil, sparking global instability. And it certainly lays bare our loss of representative democracy in the United States, as Congress just continues to roll over and play dead while the sundowning madman in the Oval Office runs roughshod over the planet.

Trump ran as the peace president, as hard as that may have been for any normal person to believe, and continues to bill himself that way. He was elected on a literal promise to end wars, not to start them. He nominated himself for the Nobel Peace Prize, and when they denied him that, FIFA stepped up and gave him a peace prize just to glaze his ass. But it hasn’t even been a full year into his administration, and Trump has already threatened to annex Greenland and Canada and bomb Iran, has fueled Russia’s bloody war on Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and has now literally started a war for oil in Venezuela. This, all while building himself a “drone-proof” ballroom with bulletproof glass that he claimed, rather ominously, that he has realized will be the site of the next inauguration.

I don’t know where the hell Congress is right now. I’m seeing Democratic senators posting threads on social media criticizing last night’s unauthorized coup, but I’m not seeing any plans or threats beyond strongly worded letters. Our New Year’s resolution as a country must be to elect a new group of people who are willing to impeach and remove this psychotic president and stand up to this entire reckless, incompetent administration. Anything else would be nothing short of a murder-suicide.

I love the Kennedy Center Honors. My dad always records it when I come home for Christmas, and my parents and I look forward to watching it together every year. Heart’s tribute cover of “Stairway to Heaven” at the 2012 ceremony, which featured the late John Bonham’s son Jason on drums and brought actual members of Led Zeppelin to tears in their seats, moved me so much that I’ve probably watched the YouTube video and made other people watch it with me at least 20 times since it aired. My friends are probably nodding and sighing while reading this, because I’ve actually made groups of them put on that video at parties.

My point is, while there is a lot to be offended about these days, I have been unreasonably offended by his assault on the Kennedy Center, which was built as a tribute to President JFK and has never until now been used as a political football. In February, Trump abruptly fired the center’s board and installed himself as chair, mumbling some excuse about the center’s decision to host drag shows. He then hand-picked all new members of the board, including second lady Usha Vance, Fox News hosts Maria Bartiromo and Laura Ingraham, and word-vomiting White House chief of staff Susie Wiles—not exactly the kind of bipartisan group of art-lovers meant to preserve the center’s profound cultural legacy. And as Kennedy Center ticket sales plummeted by half, Trump decided also to personally select this year’s honorees based solely on how much they like Trump and declared that he will be hosting the show himself, because his narcissism truly knows no bounds.

The honorees this year, by the way, include George Strait, Sly Stallone, Gene Simmons, and Gloria Gaynor, several of whom (ahem, the men) looked like wax figures of themselves in the White House recently. (And yes, Gaynor is MAGA.)

This brings us to today, when Karoline Leavitt announced out of the blue that the Kennedy Center board has “unanimously” voted to rename the building the Trump-Kennedy Center to soothe our despot’s ego. Here’s her post, which presents this all as a total surprise that Trump had nothing to do with:

First of all, congratulating President Kennedy, who is dead, about his legacy being shat upon by a fascist clown is insane.

Secondly, this is illegal. Congress did not give the board the authority to change the name of the Kennedy Center. Much like the “Gulf of America” and the “Department of War,” this is a fake name that none of us are obligated to use just because Trump cut down some willow trees around the building and claimed he improved it.

Thirdly, the vote was apparently not unanimous. An hour after Leavitt’s announcement, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio member of the board, spoke up on X and Bluesky about having been muted on the call and during the vote:

Is there anything more on the nose for this administration than literally muting a Black woman so that they can claim the vote was unanimous to rename a beloved culture and arts institution after an openly white supremacist president?

I’m taking a moment to be sad about this. There are obviously far more hideous things happening at the moment, like our looming invasion of Venezuela on behalf of oil companies and the dismantling of the world’s preeminent climate change research center in Colorado. But watching Trump scoot his slimy ass all over the arts, on top of all the other indignities and assaults on our constitutional rights, has me downright homicidal this holiday season. And watching him fall on his face and garner the worst ratings in the history of the Kennedy Center Honors will only slightly make me feel better.

Today brought a succession of political developments so delicious that I felt compelled to drop in here and catalog them for your evening reading pleasure, despite being so down and out with “Flu A” right now that I had to get an inhaler and lidocaine gargle from urgent care today.

I really do feel like hell, so I’m going to keep this Nightcap brief and bullet pointed:

1. Indiana Republicans have resoundingly rejected a new redistricting map, despite intense, mob-boss-style pressure from President Trump, that would have given Trump two new House seats by replacing the current 7(R)-2(D) map with a 9-0 map for Republicans. Trump carried the state by 19 points last year, but his approval numbers are currently underwater there, so he was essentially trying to strong-arm the state into eliminating Democratic participation altogether rather than having to face the voters in the midterms. Here are a couple of the tweets today from Trump’s allies trying to bully Indiana Republicans into passing the map (I can’t believe Don Jr.’s threat to come to the state didn’t work):

Well J.D., they chose a side: By a vote of 31 to 19, including one Republican senator who has a daughter with Down syndrome and who said he’d be voting no due to Trump repeatedly using the R-slur, Indiana rejected this antidemocratic gerrymander.

A clear sign of Trump losing his grip on his own party.

2. Trump’s DOJ has failed to indict New York Attorney General Tish James for a THIRD TIME on allegations of mortgage fraud. After a federal judge dismissed the case last month, two separate grand juries in Virginia have now declined to re-indict James, which marks a really embarrassing end to Trump’s revenge tour against a Black woman who successfully prosecuted him.

3. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the immigrant whom the Trump administration mistakenly sent to a prison camp in El Salvador because of an “administrative error,” was ordered released from immigration detention today and plans to reunite with his wife and kid in Maryland.

4. The House passed the Protect America’s Workforce Act (H.R. 2550) today, which would restore collective bargaining rights to 1 million federal workers by reversing President Trump’s union-busting March executive order. The bill passed 231-195 with bipartisan support, and per the AFL-CIO, it is the first time the House has voted to overturn a Trump executive order this term.

5. Trump’s poll numbers reached record lows today, crashing out most notably on immigration and the economy, which used to be his strongest issues. Only 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, down from 40% in March, which is the lowest from his first or second term. He’s at 36% approval overall, which is pretty dismal for a president. And despite repeatedly claiming that he’s seeing record high approval ratings—whether or not because his team is shielding him from the real numbers—Trump finally appeared to be aware of the death drop today:

In short, Trump is weak. This regime is weak. They’re flailing and they’re losing, while trying to smash and destroy as many things as they can on the way out. It doesn’t mean the left can take the midterms for granted, but it means the midterms are still very much in play.

Apologies for the brief lapse in posts. After hosting my first Thanksgiving in Brooklyn, I spent a very heavy week helping my partner move his life in New York back to Brasil. It’s not an easy move for either of us, and it’s happening at least in small part because of this country’s hard turn towards fascism and the Trump administration’s nauseating war on immigrants.

I’m including this rare bit about my personal life here only to underscore how surreal it feels, while having to watch the person I love pack up his home in my neighborhood after ten years here, to read stories like this one in the Washington Post today about White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt having fully betrayed her own Brasilian immigrant relative to keep up appearances for the regime. I keep thinking that somewhere, deep down, at least the women in this administration must have a tiny bit of humanity clanking around in there that we can appeal to as the situation gets more dire, and then Karoline throws her own nephew’s mother under the bus.

In case you missed it, ICE detained Bruna Ferreira, the 33-year-old mother of Leavitt’s nephew/godson who’s spent most of her life in the U.S., in Massachusetts a few weeks ago. Leavitt claimed that she was estranged from Ferreira and supported the arrest, releasing a statement that called Ferreira a “criminal” with a previous arrest for “battery.” But Ferreira’s lawyer says the White House is lying about her battery charge, and in a new video interview from an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, Ferreira said Leavitt was like a “little sister” to her and painted a very different picture of their relationship than Leavitt described.

“I asked Karoline to be godmother over my only sister. I made a mistake there, in trusting,” Ferreira said. “Why they’re creating this narrative is beyond my wildest imagination.”

Ferreira says she signed off on her son’s trip to the White House Easter egg hunt this spring and “moved mountains” to get him to Karoline’s wedding earlier this year. She was apparently hanging out with Karoline’s parents just a couple weeks before her arrest.

Of course, we know why the White House is creating this narrative: because Karoline can’t be the mouthpiece for Trump’s inhumane immigration policy while showing even an ounce of human emotion toward an immigrant in her own family. No cracks in the matrix.

This level of callousness is especially helpful, I reckon, when you’re being asked about Pete Hegseth openly doing war crimes on civilians in the Caribbean. Hegseth ordered the military to kill everyone aboard a boat that was suspected (suspected!) of carrying drugs. The boat, it turns out, was not even headed towards the U.S.—it was moving south to Suriname. But nevermind all that; Pete was out for blood that day. He wanted to blow up some Latino dudes in the sea. So he ordered a lethal strike on the boat. And after destroying the boat, a couple of men who survived were struggling for their lives on pieces of smoldering wreckage in the sea, and we (the United States) went back and murdered those flailing men, too.

All of this is flagrantly illegal, by national and international standards. So much so that Congress demanded to investigate and see video of the attack, which made one person nearly vomit, per the Atlantic:

Republicans, meanwhile, have been trotting out Senator Tom Cotton to defend our “double-tap” strike on a boat that may or may not have been carrying drugs to an entirely different country, because Cotton has never witnessed a murder of brown people that he couldn’t love.

I do not believe the administration is winning hearts and minds on this one; the war crime is simply too obvious. So obvious that Cotton slipped and called Trump “President Bush” while talking about it on Sunday shows today, Hegseth is facing mounting, bipartisan scrutiny, and Leavitt herself is struggling to find the right spin to defend the strikes. Lately, she appears to be trying to protect Hegseth by blaming the order for the second strike on a lower admiral.

But if we zoom out a little, the details of this particular strike don’t matter. ICE is hiring racist thugs who are barely literate and can’t pass an open-book test to harass men without any criminal history while they’re literally repairing roofs damaged by hurricanes in New Orleans. Trump said of Somali immigrants, generally, at a cabinet meeting this week, “We don’t want ’em in our country.” Spouses of U.S. citizens are showing up at their green card interviews and leaving in handcuffs. We’re murdering random men in the Caribbean for being alleged “narco-terrorists,” while the president pardons an actual cocaine kingpin who ruled Honduras.

The situation is clear: We are living under an explicitly neo-Nazi administration. Our current government, including many “democratically” elected members of the House and Senate, is full of bloodthirsty psychopaths who want to purge the United States of non-white people. They don’t mind doing so violently; some of them even enjoy it. And there is no red line for them in terms of authoritarian overreach, or we would have already crossed it.

I’m going to pivot to midterms coverage after this post, including detailing how the administration is trying to fuck next year’s elections and how we can fight it. But I think the first step is being able to acknowledge the extent of what’s happening.

It’s been one week since Rep. Lauren Boebert rejected Trump in the Situation Room when he begged her to pull her name off the Epstein petition, and the wheels have now fully come off. The House passed a bill today forcing the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files, openly sticking it to Trump, and the Senate then passed the bill unanimously and faster than I’ve ever seen the Senate do anything.

Trump appears to have lost control of his party, to the point where he’s had to start pretending in the last few days that he’s actually fine with House Republicans voting to release the Epstein files because he was going to lose nearly the entire caucus either way. “I DON’T CARE!,” he wrote in caps about it, like someone who definitely doesn’t care.

Of course, this was not a change of heart on Trump’s part; he could have released the files at any point on his own if he wanted to, but has instead instead engaged in a strangely obvious cover-up that’s lost even the furthest-right edgelords in his party. This was an admission of weakness and a change of strategy: Trump had the Department of Justice open a new investigation into Democrats who may have been involved with Epstein, giving the DOJ cover to say that even if Congress passes a bill demanding they release the files, they can’t now because there’s an ongoing investigation. Anything to be able to cherry-pick what eventually dribbles out of the Justice Department and make sure it has zero Republican names on it.

But Trump has already lost the public on the Epstein issue—most Americans believe he was at least aware of his best friend’s rampant sexual abuse of teens, and 38% think he participated—and his presidency is sliding into lame duck territory after the blue wave election earlier this month, which may be why he’s spent the past few days lashing out in increasingly desperate ways. Last night on Air Force One, Bloomberg White House reporter Catherine Lucey started to ask him a follow-up question about why he’d opposed releasing the Epstein files if there was nothing incriminating about him in there. Trump pointed a finger in her face and snarled, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

A White House official defended the comment today in a statement to MSNOW: “This reporter behaved in an inappropriate and unprofessional way towards her colleagues on the plane. If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take.”

No one seems to be able to produce any evidence, anecdotally or otherwise, of this reporter being “inappropriate” on the plane. But I do think that the president should probably not shout “QUIET, PIGGY” at a woman who’s asking him about the Epstein files while trying to make the case that he’s actually a good guy who did not abuse any girls mentioned therein. Or really for any reason.

As I mentioned, the House did pass the bill today forcing the release of the Epstein files with the names of the victims redacted. The vote was nearly unanimous, with only one nay vote from Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), the asshole from Louisiana who calls SNAP recipients crackheads. Speaker Mike Johnson seemed pretty upset and alarmed by the vote, insisting that when the bill move to the Senate, the Republicans up there please do something about the part where lots of men’s names will be exposed.

I will admit that I fully expected the Senate to take up a more careful, toothless version of what the House passed, if they agreed to vote on it at all. Instead, they passed the thing immediately and unanimously today, with zero changes, like a hot potato. Senate Republicans did not want an individually recorded voice vote, which is cowardly but does make sense. And now the bill moves to Trump’s desk, where he has indicated that he will sign it.

No one should be naive enough to expect that this means the DoJ will now dump a trove of documents that incriminate Trump. Anything we see will be cherry-picked, filtered, scrubbed, redacted—and anyway, my fascination with today’s vote has very little to do with the actual Epstein files being released. We’ve seen enough; we know who Trump is. He’s already been held civilly liable for sexual abuse and accused by roughly two dozen women of sexual assault and harassment. We saw the birthday card he drew for Epstein with the prepubescent girl. He does crimes and corruption out in the open. There’s nothing the DOJ will release at this point that will suddenly give Republicans the votes to impeach and remove him if that hasn’t already happened.

That said, I am glad for Epstein’s survivors, many of whom tearfully begged Congress in a press conference outside the Capitol today to do this, that this one move finally happened toward transparency and in their favor. Assuming Trump signs the bill, I’m glad we can put this looming “Epstein files” vote behind us. And I am cautiously optimistic to see Trump start to lose his grip on House and Senate Republicans. (And Trump-appointed judges, one of whom just knocked down his big Texas redistricting plan.) He took a blow today, and there’s definitely some blood in the water.

During my Jezebel years, we all had “favorite” (derogatory) members of Congress that we’d want to claim writing the piece about when something related to that person came up. Mine was Rep. Lauren Boebert, the gun-loving racist from Colorado who became a grandmother at 36 and was caught giving a hand-job at a local musical theater production of Beetlejuice. I’m obsessed with how cartoonishly awful she is: She owned a gun-themed restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, called Shooters Grill, where the servers openly carried firearms; she once defended her sex pest husband, who exposed himself to a teenager in a bowling alley, by claiming the girl “begged” for it. Here’s just a sampling of stupid but true headlines I got to write about Lauren in the wake of her fondling debacle, so you can get a sense of my bird-brained fascination with this woman:

• Lauren Boebert Says She Didn’t Take Birth Control Because It’s ‘Cheaper to Have a Kid’

• Ex-Wrestler Takes 2nd DNA Test to Confirm He’s Not Lauren Boebert’s Father

• Lauren Boebert’s Neighbors Called 911 on Her ‘Drunk’ Husband for Running Over Their Mailbox, Making Threats

• Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls Lauren Boebert a ‘Nasty Little Bitch’

I hadn’t heard about much Lauren recently, aside from this past Halloween, when she and her boyfriend dressed up as a Mexican woman and an ICE agent in what ABC News described as a “racially charged costume” that “sparked backlash.” (She finally divorced the sex pest husband.) So you can imagine my delight when Boebert was thrust to the forefront of the national conversation today once again……because the president of the United States is literally begging her, as an emergency last resort, to save his ass from a forced vote on the release of the Epstein files.

Backing up a bit, one under-covered aspect of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history was House Speaker Mike Johnson refusing for seven weeks to swear in Arizona Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D), who won a special election in September to replace her late father, and who would be the 218th and final signature on a discharge petition that would force a House vote demanding release of the Epstein files. Senate Democrats finally caved this week and made a horrible deal with Republicans to reopen the government, which basically gave them nothing besides some “promised” future vote on health care subsidies—and, of course, their 218th vote on that petition.

Today, in a strategy/timing decision I don’t entirely understand—perhaps to distract from the horrific press the party is getting from the Senate shutdown cave?—House Oversight Democrats decided to release a trove of new damning emails they’d subpeonaed from Epstein’s estate, which do look quite bad for Trump. These emails include:

• Epstein telling author Michael Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls” in a 2019 email

• Epstein writing, “I know how dirty donald is,” in a 2018 email about Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen agreeing to cooperate in a federal investigation of Trump

• Epstein writing to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011, “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is trump.”

• Epstein writing that one redacted child victim of his “spent hours at my house with” Trump

Now, does any of this really tell us anything new about Trump’s involvement with Epstein? No; we saw the birthday card, and we saw Trump move Ghislaine Maxwell into a luxury spa prison in exchange for her saying he didn’t molest girls. But does it drive Trump insane that we are talking about Epstein again after he has tried so desperately to shut the topic down and frame it as a hoax? Yes. And so the White House went into panic mode today trying to stop the Democrats from passing their discharge petition tomorrow, now that Grijalva has finally been sworn in. And that effort zeroed in on two Republican congresswomen whose names are on the petition: Boebert and Nancy Mace of South Carolina. Trump called Boebert personally, and the White House summoned her to the Situation Room to meet with “top Justice Department and F.B.I. officials,” including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, according to the New York Times.

Hilariously, Boebert is already an unhinged conspiracy theorist, and when you invite someone like her to the Situation Room to demand that she help cover up for a literal ring of billionaire pedophiles, it only makes her paranoid ass want to report the incident to QAnon himself. Even a broken clock is right twice a day:

Mace, an equally batshit congresswoman who once put her wrist in a sling to try to convince the world that a “pro-trans man” injured her by shaking her hand, has also reportedly ignored the White House’s attempts to convert her. So it appears Democrats do have the votes, with the help of these Republicans:

To be clear, this does not mean that the files are going to be released. Even if the Senate voted yes on releasing them and Trump declined to veto, there is no chance in hell that Trump’s DOJ hasn’t already redacted the hell out of those files or disappeared them to the extent that nothing too damning about Trump would ever come out. I believe Trump is desperate to block this discharge petition because he doesn’t want Republicans in the Senate to be forced to vote on record about whether to cover up the Epstein files, and he doesn’t want this conversation dragged on or legitimized any further. This discharge petition further backs him into a corner and removes his control of the whole narrative, and we know that a narcissist backed into a corner will behave in increasing alarming ways.

I also think it’s important to see the forest for the trees here: The question is not whether or not there’s some kind of smoking gun in the Epstein files that can “end” Trump right now, or how any of this plays out electorally. The moral rot at the center of the White House, the justice system, and Congress is being exposed more and more clearly every day as this drags on. We are talking about pedophilia and sex trafficking being perpetrated, or at the very least least enabled, by the most powerful people in the country, and representatives we elected bending over backwards to cover it up.

It’s a great time to start paying attention to who exactly is calling for justice and transparency in this moment, who is really quiet, and who is telling you to shut up and look the other way. Because when a party is so grotesquely decayed that it finds itself on the wrong side of Lauren Boebert, ethically speaking, it suggests a level of corruption and complicity that is far deeper than anyone realizes.