WHY THE SUSIE WILES STORY WILL CHANGE NOTHING

You might have expected the Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles to cause friction in Trump World and harm the administration overall. But I regret to say that the Trumpers are responding shrewdly. Rachael Bade, a former Politico journalist, writes on her Substack:

Within hours, the long tail of Wiles’ power and deep relationships across Trump World whipped into a rescue mission. Without so much as a summons, longtime allies from the campaign trail and others inside her orbit cleared their schedules and showed up at the White House to ask how they could help, I’m told from multiple sources. During a huddle in the West Wing, a fire crackling in Wiles’ office, they set to work on a damage-control plan to push back on the story as unfair — and activated the entire Cabinet.

All day, MAGA figures and Cabinet secretaries alike took to social media to defend Wiles and deride the story as a “hit piece” with “cherry-picked” quotes taken out of context....

“That’s called circling the motherfucking wagons,” as one Wiles loyalist and Trump ally told me tonight. “If you look at the reaction on the Hill, if you look at MAGA World and all the people who rallied behind her in a period of eight hours, it shows the depth of loyalty to the president. It shows the depths of loyalty to the chief of staff.”

For example:

Hilarious. The WH had all the Cabinet members simultaneously put out statements supporting Susie Wiles after the Vanity Fair article came out.

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— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) December 16, 2025 at 12:34 PM

Wiles, a seasoned political operator, is pretending she was snookered.

Lady with obvious daddy issues who is wily as fuck pretends she was snookered by an all powerful magazine writer. Hey, Susie: It’s 2025 and you have been the main handmaiden to your boss dad’s heinous war against the media. As if you are a victim.

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— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher.bsky.social) December 16, 2025 at 7:42 PM

That will be persuasive to the only voters Trump and his aides care about: the base. They think literally every story they don't like is 100% fabricated, so they'll believe that there was some "context" in which the things Wiles said didn't have the plain meanings they obviously had.

There's another reason this won't have an impact:

Trump and Vance literally said they agreed with Wiles, Musk has acknowledged his ketamine habit, and Vought probably thinks Wiles was complimenting him.

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— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) December 17, 2025 at 8:36 AM

Trump addressed the "alcoholic's personality" assertion in a phone conversation with a New York Post reporter:

“No, she meant that I’m — you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” Trump said, a teetotaler who has frequently cited the 1981 death of his older brother Fred at age 42 of an alcohol-induced heart attack as the main impetus for his abstinence.

Vance copped to conspiratorialism in a speech yesterday afternoon.

"But, conspiracy theorist. Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true," he [said] as the crowd cheered and applauded. "And by the way, Susie and I have joked in private and in public about that for a long time."

And we know Musk has no shame about his drug use, nor does Vought have any shame about his extremism. In fact, one of the main reasons the White House doesn't see this as damaging is clearly the fact that Wiles accused the administration of doing things and believing things the rest of us think are unconscionable, but Republicans don't. Trump freed even the most violent January 6 rioters? Trump's base loves that! Trump is leaving hundreds of thousands of people to die by shuttering USAID programs? The base thinks it's a good thing when non-Europeans from countries that are seen as shitholes die painfully! Compassion? Soft power? Who cares! And so on.

And finally, the president is presumably fine with the story because Wiles made her deference to him clear:

“There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”

As did Vance:

Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”

Sure, she said he doesn't understand the details of what his administration is doing. On USAID:

“The president doesn’t know and never will,” she told me. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”

But Trump is proud of his ignorance. He believes he has such a superior brain that he makes better decisions without knowing what he's talking about than other presidents have made after learning the facts.

So, sadly, the White House is shrugging this off. The voters Trump and his people care about will be unfazed. The rest of us are horrified, but the White House doesn't care what we think and never will.

SUSIE WILES IS A UVALDE COP

Vanity Fair has published a two-part story based on interviews with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. The Trump White House is full of absolute monsters -- the president himself as well as Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Robert Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem, among others -- and it's generally conceded that Wiles is not one of those monsters. But like many of the other non-sociopaths who fill out the administration -- think Marco Rubio, for instance -- she won't choose morals or principles when they conflict with her ambition. She might have twinges of conscience, and they might explain why she's been talking to the author of the Vanity Fair piece, Chris Whipple, since the 2024 campaign. Or it might be that she wants to resign soon -- presidential chiefs of staff don't usually stay in the job very long -- and use this controversial profile as a pitch for a high-dollar memoir deal or a lucrative, low-stress TV gig.

In any case, she's never acted on any of her qualms about Trump in a serious way. If this profile is how she lets the world know that she thinks the Trump administration has done some reprehensible things, then she's a Uvalde cop, someone who dithered while bad things were done, apparently determined to save her own neck. She portrays this as a matter of job philosophy, according to J.D. Vance:

Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”

So she expresses her qualms, then shrugs and goes back to work.

... Trump issued pardons to almost everyone convicted in the bloody January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, in which nine people ultimately died and 150 were injured. Even rioters who’d beaten cops within an inch of their lives were set free. (Fourteen people convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted.)

Did she ever ask the president, “ ‘Wait a minute, do you really want to pardon all 1,500 January 6 convicts, or should we be more selective?’”

“I did exactly that,” Wiles replied. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’ ” (Trump has said his FBI investigators were “corrupt” and part of a “deep state.”) But Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated. Wiles explained: “In every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.) “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”

You can argue that this wasn't a good enough reason for Wiles to fall on her sword -- no one was directly harmed by these pardons. That's not the case with the administration's assault on USAID, and Wiles knew that.

[Elon] Musk triggered the first true crisis of the Trump presidency and an early test for Wiles. Trump’s chief was shocked when the SpaceX founder eviscerated USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”

In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.” ...

Wiles says she called Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalls telling him. At first, Wiles didn’t grasp the effect that slashing USAID programs would have on humanitarian aid. “I didn’t know a lot about the extent of their grant making.” But with immunizations halted in Africa, lives would be lost. Soon she was getting frantic calls from relief agency heads and former government officials with a dire message: Thousands of lives were in the balance.

So she knew.

But Musk forged ahead—all throttle, no brake. “Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”

Some rational people would have wanted to fight harder or disassociate themselves from an administration that was about to leave hundreds of thousands of people to die. Wiles chose to be a Uvalde cop.

She's not alone. The father of one of the programs Musk gutted effectively did nothing.

The shuttering of USAID crippled the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The antiretroviral program, launched with $15 billion by George W. Bush in 2003, was credited with preventing millions of deaths. It depended on USAID grants....

Bush himself had gotten wind of the gutting of PEPFAR. He called Rubio to express alarm, according to a former aide close to Bush.

I want you to read this quote about George W. Bush closely. I hope it infuriates you as much as it infuriates me. I've highlighted that parts that are particularly enraging:

“He’s been appalled by Trump from the beginning and he’s determined not to weigh in,” the aide said. But Musk’s attack on one of his legacy achievements was too much. Bush, said that person, “cares deeply about the PEPFAR program. That and Wounded Warriors are the two things where he will weigh in, not publicly, but with intention.”

Lives were in the balance, and Bush cared -- but it would have been unseemly for him to express that concern publicly. It's just not done! Trump is a fellow Republican, and one mustn't stir up trouble within the party, even if thousands of lives are at stake, and even if your words as a former president of the United States would carry great weight.

Reading this now is especially appalling because it comes at a time when a few Republicans are finally challenging Trump on some issues, at some personal risk. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Indiana state legislators are receiving death threats, but they're acting. Wiles did nothing. Bush did nothing.

Even Peter Baker of The New York Times can see Wiles's spinelessness.

President Trump’s chief of staff said she tried to get him to end his “score settling” against political enemies after 90 days in office, but acknowledged that the administration’s still ongoing push for prosecutions has been fueled in part by the president’s desire for retribution.

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

... Ms. Wiles confided in Mr. Whipple in March that she had told Mr. Trump that his presidency was not supposed to be a retribution tour.

“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” she said then. When that did not happen by August, she told Mr. Whipple that “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour” but said that he was aiming at people who did “bad things” in coming after him. “In some cases, it may look like retribution,” she said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”

If this ends with Susie Wiles resigning and getting a cushy, high-paying cable-news commentator job while she works on a seven-figure memoir, that's another failure of our political culture. She had power. She didn't use it. She could have fought the administration's psychopaths. In real time, like the cops in Uvalde, she just allowed them to keep hurting people.

IN HIS RESPONSE TO ROB REINER'S DEATH, TRUMP IS JUST EXPRESSING THE VIEWS OF HIS BASE

You've probably seen Donald Trump's repulsive Truth Social response to the death of Rob Reiner and his wife:

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!

Trump adds his usual narcissism and a desperate attempt to convince us, yet again, that we're living through an era of peace and prosperity, but apart from that, his meanspiritedness reflects the viewpoint of his angry base, which has been told for decade that Democrats and liberals are unspeakably evil and the cause of all misery and suffering in America. You can see that by going to the comments in response to stories about the Reiners' deaths on right-wing sites.

At Fox News, the commenters pat themselves on the back for not being haters while ... being haters:

Although he would never do the same for me based on who I voted for, and would probably in fact, wish me dead... rest in peace. Hopefully you don’t carry that weird anger to the pearly gates. They aren’t a fan of that I hear.

****

It sounds like there may be irony in Reiner's presumed death and his politics. We'll see. Regardless, I have never rooted for or cheered anyone's death and never will. I will admit Joe Biden has really pushed that resolve.

****

If he was a conservative the liberals would be cheering in the streets ... they’ve already proven that. That’s one difference between us and them. RIP Mr Reiner.

****

Dont wish death upon anyone but he has been quite hateful the last 10-15 years....if roles were reversed I can easily imagine the comments on her by progressives and liberals against the other side. RIP you deserve peace after all that hate.

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Didn’t hear from the Hollywood crowd after the murder of two American patriots in Syriia yet everyone is so devastated about Reiner and his wife. our priorities are definitely misguided.

Having said that may they all rest in peace.

****

After reading many of the comments here, I want to say that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is mind blowing.

Almost every comment here is sad by this, loved him as a director and not his politics.

If he had been a Republican, the left would be happy he was dead.

****

He did give us ' This Is Spinal Tap ' and ' When Harry Met Sally'. Unfortunately his TDS overwhelmed him.

****

Unfortunately, the torment he felt under Trump may be nothing compared to what he is currently experiencing.

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Unlike liberals who would be joyful at this news if Mr. Reiner were a conservative. I find it extremely sad that a tragedy such as this has happened to the Reiner family. No one deserves to have this happen to them and I pray for both Mr. and Mrs. Reiner as well as the Reiner family. Hopefully they will be allowed to mourn in peace.

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It would be easy for me to make a terrible comment about another TDS sufferer here. But I will not stoop to this level. So I will just say that to his relatives, I'm sorry for your loss.

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I do not wish ill on others, even if Reiner himself would not/did not behave the same way towards conservatives, it doesn't do any good to spread hate.

The commenters responding to Breitbart's story largely dispense with the self-congratulation and go straight to the hate, some of them focusing on reports that the Reiners may have been stabbed by their son, who has struggled with substance abuse:

Trump will get the blame for sinking the son's drug supply.

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Rob R pushed so much of this stuff on society. We didn’t want him to pass away like this, nor his wife, but it’s the way Rob R would have wanted it.

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Was absolutely pisses me off, both of them what liked the dems solution: muslims all over the place, chinese buying land near our military bases, somolis in Minneapolis ripping us taxpayers off for billions.
Ya that is thee solution to getting rid of Trump.

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He was always running his mouth about Trump being a dictator but never said a world about rampant crime in California caused by his buddy Newscum.

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Democrats have no solutions only chaos.

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I have said for years that if open season was declared on drug dealers and they were executed on site, and left at the curb for the trash collectors that within six months there wouldn't be a drug dealer anywhere to be found. Trump is trying to eradicate the supply/suppliers, yet democrats want him to leave them alone. Who are the bad guys? DEMOCRATS.

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It is amazing to me the Democrats are violently defending letting drug dealers and criminal narco terrorists and gangs into our country. And that they are even a party any more when they are defending these people. But I guess this is proof that we aren't fighting people, but forces of darkness. Because even the stupidest people don't want chaos, crime, and enemy gangs who deal in prostitution, r*pe trafficking and drugs from third world countries to tear their homes and neighborhoods apart.

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Democraps know this creates chaos. That’s why they promote it along with their other favorite bad for society stuff.

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I guess you have to have sympathy for the parent. But I know a flaming lib that lost his middle aged son to Fentanyl. But he'd scream about blowing up the drug boats. Just people who shouldn't be in charge of anything.

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Guess he should have spent less time crying about Trump and more time trying to get his son into rehab.

****

Alleged celebrities with drug addled children are now looking over their shoulders.
Hey, it takes a village.

****

Democrats are violent, psychotic filth and should not be allowed near sharp objects or guns. Don't turn your back to them. Never, ever let them near the children.

****

WE NEED ACROSS THE BOARD COMMON SENSE LIBERAL CONTROL LAWS.

One commenter assumes the son was trans:

Because of his Radical Left TDS, he programmed and groomed a "tran" kid who probably received psychotic drugs and went full mental and took Reiner's life and his wife. Radical Liberalism is a disease!

Another is appalled at the possibility that the White House press corps might ask Trump to comment on the Reiners' deaths:

Next WH press corp question: "Are you sorry Rob Reiner was murdered?" Don't be stunned when it comes. I still remember them asking if Trump was sorry the South lost the Civil War. They should simply have been thrown out, and I don't remember what outfit asked it, but they should NEVER have been let a toe over the threshold ever again.

Well, not to worry -- Trump already told us what's in his repulsive heart. And much of his base is no better.

(Updated:) THE FOX NEWS SITE HAS AN NBA PLAYER'S TAKE ON THE SYDNEY SHOOTING, BUT NOT THE NAME OF THE HERO WHO DISARMED A GUNMAN

The lead story at the Fox News website right now is the story that leads the news all over the world: the shooting at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, which killed at least 12 people. Authorities are treating the massacre as an act of anti-Semitic terrorism.

There was a moment of heroism in the midst of all this carnage: an unarmed bystander rushed one of the shooters and disarmed him.

AUSTRALIAN HERO TOOK GUN OFF SHOOTER

TERROR ATTACK SYDNEY AT LEAST TEN DEAD

AUSTRALIAN HERO TOOK DOWN GUNMAN pic.twitter.com/mK6AODVct5

— Victor Ohaka (@OhakaVictor) December 14, 2025

The man who did this -- and who took gunfire in the process -- has been identified as a Muslim immigrant named Ahmed al Ahmed, the owner of a fruit shop in Sutherland. You'll find his name in stories from The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, and even Murdoch-owned outlets such as News.com.au and the New York Post. His identity has been known for several hours. This was posted five hours ago:



But so far at least, his name is nowhere to be found on the Fox News site. It appears nowhere in Fox's main story on the massacre. Fox has posted video of the takedown, but the hero isn't named.

Fox did, however, manage to rush this story onto the front page:

NBA champion calls on officials to 'publicly hang' Australian terrorists after attack at Hanukkah event

NBA champion Andrew Bogut reacted to the terror attack in Australia that left at least a dozen dead and nearly 30 others injured on Sunday at a Hanukkah celebration.

Bogut suggested that X was being censored in the Bondi Beach area of Sydney. He also called for the hanging of the shooters if they were still alive.

"X being heavily sensored (sic) amidst this shooting in Bondi, Australia," Bogut wrote on X. "Have to have the main stream media version events rather than live feeds just in case the truth gets out without any spin.

"RIP to the people caught up in this BS. Publicly hang the shooters if still alive."

Bogut added, "Thinking you can vote your way out of this mess is beyond naive......."

Priorities....

*****

UPDATE: Fox wises up -- the lead headline on the Fox site is now

WATCH: Muslim man risks life to disarm suspect during deadly terror attack at Hanukkah event

I've been poking around the right-o-sphere. This man is being praised even at some of the most Islamophobic sites. I guess it took a while to decide it was safe to praise a Muslim, but Fox finally came around.

Now let's see if Breitbart can do the same. One of its front-page headlines is "WATCH: HERO DISARMS JIHADIST," but the linked story includes just a clip with footage of the takedown, and no identification of the man responsible. A separate story, "Watch: Heroic Bystander Tackles, Disarms Terrorist Gunman at Bondi Beach," has been up for hours, but hasn't been updated with the hero's name.

*****

UPDATE: I'm complaining about Fox and Breitbart, but Kevin Kruse notes that The New York Times isn't identifying the hero in Sydney either:

This is the entire piece, last updated a half hour ago. They never give the name of the bystander, Ahmed el Ahmed, and they never note that he’s Muslim. Other outlets have done so, but not the NYT.

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) December 14, 2025 at 4:36 PM

(Ironically, Bret Stephens names Ahmed al-Ahmed in the first paragraph of an otherwise awful column titled "Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like," which flatly blames Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese and pro-Palestinian demonstrators worldwide for the massacre.)

Meanwhile, Elon Musk's Grok goes one step further, citing a fake story that identifies the hero as a white IT guy named Edward Crabtree.

This is fucking grim. Somebody invented a white guy, an "IT professional" named Edward Crabtree, who stopped the Bondi shooting and spread it all over the internet, which was picked up by AI agents and slop aggregation sites. The real hero is a fruit stand owner named Ahmed el Ahmed.

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— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) December 14, 2025 at 3:02 PM

The man who killed the terrorist his name is not Ahmed, his name is Edward Crabtree.
So don't be fooled by any Jihadi, there is no such thing as a good Muslim or a bad Muslim, they are just Muslims.#bondibeach pic.twitter.com/O5v5BOdpJN

— Ankit Ji ꪜ (@AnkitJi429886) December 14, 2025

Site that was spreading the lie that the person who stopped one of the shooters in the horrific attack in #BondiBeach is named Edward Crabtree instead of Ahmed Al Ahmad was registered today in Iceland

Informing people to stop the spread of this fake news pic.twitter.com/tiNb5NBrbg

— Eels 💚 (@eelsinmyhandle) December 14, 2025

REPUBLICANS ARE SELLING THE NON-WAR HARDER THAN THE WAR

The New York Times links the seized Venezuelan oil tanker to Cuba:

The oil tanker seized by the United States off the coast of Venezuela this week was part of the Venezuelan government’s effort to support Cuba....

The tanker, which is called Skipper, left Venezuela on Dec. 4, carrying nearly two million barrels of the country’s heavy crude.... The ship’s destination was listed as the Cuban port of Matanzas....

Two days after its departure, Skipper offloaded a small fraction of its oil, an estimated 50,000 barrels, to another ship, called Neptune 6, which then headed north toward Cuba.... After the transfer, Skipper headed east, toward Asia, with the vast majority of its oil on board....

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, have for decades sent oil to Cuba at highly subsidized prices....

In return, the Cuban government over the years has sent tens of thousands of medics, sports instructors and, increasingly, security professionals on assignments to Venezuela....

In recent years, however ... [m]ost of the oil allocated for Cuba has instead been resold to China, with the money providing badly needed hard currency for the Cuban government....

I was just having a conversation about this on Bluesky with a skeptic:

I have no idea whether it’s true or not but I know that the paper of Judith Miller aluminum tubes, Clinton email servers, Benghazi, etc is not good at vetting leaks from their Republican contacts and pass everything they share as fact. They are helping us get into another conflict. Caveat emptor

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— *it* is happening here (@realworldrj.bsky.social) December 13, 2025 at 7:29 AM

Yeah, although it's not 2002. Normie Americans don't want to overthrow the Cuban government. They can't even name the current Cuban president. (Hell, I had to look it up.)

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) December 13, 2025 at 7:55 AM

the campaign to convince normie Americans will involve horror stories about babies being pulled out of incubators in Havana, Cubans in hazmat suits packaging fentanyl and shipping them to ‘murica stealth nuclear subs, and worst of all, Havana docs performing sex change surgeries on white kids

— *it* is happening here (@realworldrj.bsky.social) December 13, 2025 at 8:09 AM

Obviously, the Trump administration wants regime change in Venezuela, with an interest in seizing the oil and rare earth minerals. In addition, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and acting national security adviser, stupidly thinks that the fall of the Venezuelan regime will take the Cuban regime down with it, even though schemes that end with "... and then the people will rise up and topple the government from within!" never work.

But the administration and Republican propagandists aren't really doing the kind of sales job you'd expect if they want to persuade Americans to back a regime-change war or two in this hemisphere. We're being told that drugs are coming into America by boat, but we're not being sold on the war with the kind of melodrama rj describes above.

The Republican propaganda effort that actually resembles what rj describes is the one against a country we don't seem to be planning to invade: Somalia. Go to the Fox News website at any given time and the lead story is likely to be about the fraud case involving Somali-Americans in Minnesota. Here's the lead story at the Fox front page right now:

The Treasury Department is reportedly ratcheting up investigations of this. The dean of Republican propagandists, Chris Rufo, says that this was a money-laundering operation for the terrorist group Al-Shabaab. And here come the dubious whistleblowers....

American Greatness has just published this credulity-straining story:

A TSA whistleblower has come forward to say she routinely witnessed Somalian immigrants flying out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport carrying suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars of cash and fake passports.

“It seemed so lackadaisical that these people could get through the airport with all that cash,” the former TSA agent told Alpha News reporter Liz Collin, this week. “Time after time after time. It wasn’t a one time thing.” ...

“I saw suitcases with millions of dollars in cash and the couriers were always Somali men traveling in pairs,” the former TSA agent said.

She added that it “really blew her mind” because they were always able to get through the checkpoints.

“Typically, what would happen is a law enforcement officer would come, check their credentials,” she told Collin, adding that it wouldn’t be too difficult to identify them now because there is a paper trail of their travels, as well as surveillance video.

“Their I.D.s were always documented and probably their plane tickets as well,” she explained. “So there is a trail of that out there.”

The whistleblower estimated that in the five years she was a TSA agent at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport at least “a billion dollars went through the airport.”

It's legal to carry large amounts of cash into and out of U.S. airports if you're flying internationally -- but you have to declare more than $10,000 in cash. The whistleblower seems to believe that all you need is a proper ID and a valid ticket and you're good to go. If she worked for TSA, you'd think she'd know about the reporting requirements.

Maybe all these people had the proper documentation. Maybe there's A Conspiracy So Vast and the law enforcement officers who checked these travelers' bona fides were all in on the plot.

Or maybe this never happened.

And that passport story sounds hinky, too:

The former agent said in one instance, a Somali man has a carry on bag “filled with brand new passports,” lamenting that “he was allowed to go through the checkpoint.”

I know that every right-winger who reads this story or watches the video thinks at this point, "Well, law enforcement knew that was illegal, but the travelers were Somalis, and the officers didn't want to be politically incorrect." But that's not how anything actually works.

This is the kind of propaganda you'd expect in the run-up to a war -- but I don't think we're going to war with Somalia. It's just the likes of Chris Rufo doing what they always do: looking for ways to make Democrats (in this case, Governor Tim Walz and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar) look like absurdly tolerant freaks who want to subject Real Americans to deranged cultural ideas. Tolerance of Somalis is the new tolerance of trans people, which was the new tolerance of DEI. Republicans can't sell voters on their actual policies, a problem that's only getting worse in this era of Trump tariffs and the possible collapse of Obamacare, so they need to sell the idea that Democrats are destroying America.

And, of course, all this pleases Trump. I don't know the exact reason he's fixated on Somalia lately. Maybe top Republican message-crafters identified the fraud scandal as an excellent propaganda opportunity, then sold the idea to Trump. Or maybe it all started with him -- he utterly despises Black people, especially Black women, and especially women who aren't deferential to him. Ilhan Omar talks smack to him and is a Muslim from Africa who covers her head. I can't imagine that he could hate anyone more.

So we have a likely war against Venezuela that's barely being sold to Americans (as a result, Americans oppose it by a 70%-30% margin, according to a recent CBS poll), and we have a non-war being sold like a war, because the fight Republicans care about most is the one with fellow Americans who don't agree with them.

YOU MEAN THE ECONOMY ISN'T BETTER NOW THAT WE PUNISHED THE SCAPEGOAT?

For his podcast yesterday, Greg Sargent of The New Republic interviewed Will Saletan of The Bulwark. Here's Saletan trying to understand President Trump's poor poll numbers:

Saletan: ... So Greg, earlier you were reading from Trump’s Truth Social post where he talks about... complains about not getting credit for what he’s done on the economy. The other issue where he has complained a lot lately about not getting credit is immigration. He said, “I want to talk about immigration, but my staff won’t let me. They say, ‘Nobody cares about it.’” So the problem for Trump is that he did cut off people coming across the border. And instead of getting credit for that, Americans are like, Okay, what’s the next problem? That went away.

So he’s not getting the affirmative credit that he used to get from people who were really pissed off about that issue. But instead, what’s happening is the ICE raids are triggering all the negative reaction. Americans are seeing what it looks like when you send masked people out to pick people off the street in vans and take them away and ship them to foreign torture prisons, right? And this is not what they had in mind.

What Trump said in his speech in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, on Tusday was this:

Ten months ago, we inherited the worst border in the history of the world and now we have the strongest border in the history of our country. We've never had a border this -- And people don't talk about -- you notice, they don't talk about it. When I ran -- when I was running it was the biggest thing. And before I was running, that's all they talked about, the border, the border, the border and now I fixed it, nobody wants to talk about it. Even my people, they say, sir, don't put it in your speech.

Why, because nobody cares about the border. You fix -- No, but you know how bad that is? Because they forget what you did.

This is actually a riff Trump used in his 2024 campaign speeches -- see, for instance, this January 2024 speech in Las Vagas, or a March speech in Ohio. In those speeches, Trump said he closed the border so thoroughly in his first term that he was told nobody wanted to talk about it during the 2020 campaign, but in 2024 it was an issue again. Now he's grumpy because, he says, he's done such a great job no one wants to talk about it again.

But that's not how presidential accomplishments usually work. In 2012, Barack Obama fans had no problem cheering on the assertion that General Motors was alive and bin Laden was dead. So why the gloom about Trump's actions on immigration?

On the subject of the economy, we know why no one wants to give Trump credit: because the economy sucks. The Trump lament Sargent quotes earlier in the interview is from a Truth Social post:

When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country? When will people understand what is happening? When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?

He won't get credit, obviously, because the economy is awful. But why isn't the immigration crackdown making more people happy, when polls predicted strong support for a crackdown?

Maybe it's because the administration's tactics are brutal and disruptive -- but it could also be because many Americans thought that a crackdown on immigrants would be a key component of an economic turnaround. I think many of them thought they'd feel richer and less economically stressed as a result of the arrests and deportations.

According to the right's anti-immigration narrative, the targeted immigrants are all criminals and parasites. The ones who aren't rapists, psycho killers, and drug kingpins are bloodsuckers living on welfare (and getting benefits citizens don't get). But the administration's arrests have focused on workers; they're taking place at Home Depots, not welfare offices. I think many Americans thought a wave of deportations would improve the economic conditions of ordinary citizens automatically, because they've been told for years that all these people do is take, take, take. For reasons they don't understand, it's not working out that way.

Trump will keep promising paradise on earth as a result of his policies, and most voters will continue to be disappointed. Sadly, he might still retain the loyalty of 40% of the voting public, judging from the polls. But his simple redemies aren't working, and everyone else knows it now.

ANOTHER OPTION YOU COULD HAVE EXERCISED WAS SHUTTING THE FUCK UP

Two members of the House who are hoping to win statewide elections next year are introducing bills clearly meant to impress voters in the tough primaries they're facing. Guess which of these House members is being fragged by members of her own party? I'll give you a hint: One is a Democrat and one is a Republican.

The Republican is Nancy Mace, who wants to be governor of South Carolina and appears to be in a tough fight for the Republican nomination. She went to Fox News (of course) to announce her bill:

A new bill could see part of the national capital renamed after slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, introduced three months after his assassination.

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., is introducing legislation to rename the area that until recently had been known as Black Lives Matter Plaza, she first told Fox News Digital.

"Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization that wants to defund the police and take your speech away," Mace argued. "And what I want to do on the three-month anniversary of Charlie Kirk's political assassination is celebrate him and the First Amendment and freedom of speech by renaming the plaza after him."

(Yes, she signed on to the Jeffrey Epstein discharge petition when most Republicans wouldn't, but "Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization"? Seriously? I think we can all put away our "Nancy Mace, Welcome to the Resistance" signs.)

Mace is one of four candidates who appear to be in contention for the gubernatorial nomination, yet I don't see any of the others questioning her decision to do this. Nor do I see any fellow House members attacking her, even though they'd have a point if they said their caucus has more important things to think about right now, like the looming crisis in healthcare affordability, which at least a handful of Republicans would like to address.

But, of course, praising Charlie Kirk and attacking Black Lives Matter is excellent politics in the GOP, and probably won't hurt Mace if she makes it to the general election, even though her state is more than 25% Black.

On the other hand, fellow Democrats are attacking Michigan congresswoman Haley Stevens, who's running for a Senate seat, because of this:

One of Democrats' most fraught internal fights of the year resurfaced Wednesday after Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) introduced articles of impeachment against HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

... House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told Axios he hasn't taken a look at Stevens' measure, adding: "You know what I'm focused on? Making sure that the American people don't have their health care ripped away from them."

... "Do the math," said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), who told Axios he has had constituents suggest "we impeach every [Cabinet] secretary."

Said a senior House Democrat: "None of these folks have come to us to figure out what's the comms plan, how do we organize members around it, how do we get some Republicans to do it?"

... "You can't swing a cat without hitting an impeachable offense in this administration, but having that amount to anything productive and be a good use of our time in this Congress is a totally different question," said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.).

"It's just deeply distracting and unproductive to make that our priority in this moment. ... Enjoy your media cycle."

Stevens is not my favorite Democrat in the Michigan Senate primary. She's much less progressive than her main opponents, state senator Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed, a Bernie-ite former public health official, and thus is Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand's preferred candidate. But it should be the official position of the Democratic Party that Kennedy is unfit to serve and deserves impeachment. Every Democrat should co-sponsor this resolution, even if it's going nowhere, just to send a message.

I understand why so many people in D.C. are afraid to take Kennedy on: they think he brings with him a genuinely swing-y voting bloc of quackery-curious suburban voters. But a respect for human life requires decent people to take sides. Did I mention that measles is running rampant in South Carolina right now? In a better world, Nancy Mace would co-sponsor the Stevens impeachment resolution.

I understand that many Democrats think impeachment demands are pointless and futile. But if you're a Democrat who believes this and a reporter asks you for a comment, make the choice not to attack a fellow Democrat. Don't give Axios the opportunity to run an "Infighting Erupts" headline while the Daily Wire says, "House Dem Files Articles Of Impeachment Against RFK Jr. And Even Her Own Party Is Trashing Her." Just shut the fuck up.