What did Donald Trump do today?

He backtracked on whether he'd ordered a war crime.

The Washington Post reported last week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had ordered a second strike to kill survivors of an initial attack on what the Trump administration claims was a Venezuelan drug-smuggling boat. 

Killing helpless survivors of an attack on a ship is never, ever permitted under U.S. or international law. Ordering or taking part in such an attack is either murder or a war crime. This is not a matter of opinion or legal interpretation: the current, governing edition of the Department of Defense's Law of War Manual makes this clear in exactly these terms and demands that officers refuse any such order:

18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations. The
requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.

Trump, for his part, has spent much of the past two weeks furious that six Democratic members of Congress with military and intelligence background posted a video saying as much, at one point calling for their deaths before later denying (or forgetting) that he'd done so.

The problem for the Trump administration is not just that Trump has apparently authorized—or been powerless to stop—the murder of defenseless survivors, but that there are Republicans in Congress who care more about respect for the law of warfare than protecting Trump, and are in a position to join Democrats in launching a real investigation.

That may explain why, after several days of claiming otherwise, Trump and his officials are now saying no such authorization was given. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One this evening, Trump reversed course and said that he "wouldn't have wanted that — not a second strike" and promised to "look into" it. In practice, since Trump is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, that can only mean finding someone in the military chain of command to take the blame if it becomes politically necessary.

Trump also said that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had assured him that no such order had been given. But even if Trump hadn't issued an illegal order to kill survivors himself, Hegseth—a "terminal major" in the Minnesota Army National Guard before his appointment—has already developed a habit of ignoring what he's supposedly been told to do by the White House.

Hegseth's contribution to the discourse today was to post a cartoon meme showing a children's book character blowing up "narco terrorists."

Why does this matter?

• Nobody who respects or understands the United States military ever jokes about war crimes. 

• Trump is ultimately responsible for any crimes committed here and cannot be trusted to "look into" how guilty he is. 

• A president who refuses to take responsibility for issuing illegal orders is throwing the military under the bus.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He rattled the saber for a war against Venezuela that even he doesn't seem to know why it should be fought.

Trump took a few minutes from his six-day Thanksgiving weekend to, in so many words, threaten to blow up civilian passenger planes in Venezuelan airspace.

This is roughly as legal, and as dangerous, as if Venezuela had "closed" the airspace around Atlanta.

Trump still has not articulated a reason why he wants to start a war with Venezuela, other than references to drug smuggling. Very little of the illegal drugs Americans consume come from Venezuela—even ignoring the fact that domestic or legitimately imported prescription drugs are a major part of the problem. (The specific drug Trump invariably mentions, fentanyl, doesn't come from Venezuela at all.) 

Even if drugs were the official reason, Trump's decision yesterday to pardon one of the biggest narcotraffickers in the region's history, for no reason he was willing to state out loud, makes it hard to believe that's what he cares about.

A war with Venezuela could jeopardize the government of Nicolas Maduro, its authoritarian president who is generally hostile to the United States, and who is one of the few world leaders who talks about Trump the way Trump talks about everyone else. But decapitating the government wouldn't guarantee it would be replaced by a friendlier one, and would undoubtedly cause massive disruption and loss of life within the country.

If there is a specific rationale in Trump's mind, it may be his cripplingly low polling. Under normal circumstances, presidents sometimes see a "patriotic rally" at the start of hostilities with another country. But one of the few things that polls lower than Trump himself is starting a military conflict with Venezuela.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents should be both willing and able to say why they want to use the U.S. military to attack another country. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He pardoned and politically endorsed an actual honest-to-God South American narcostate kingpin.

Since early September, Trump has ordered airstrikes on 21 different boats in the Caribbean, killing an estimated 83 people. The only justification Trump has offered is his claim that all of the boats he's ordered destroyed were Venezuelans transporting drugs. In fact, he's made the preposterous claim that each boat destroyed somehow saves 25,000 American lives from a drug overdose. (About 82,000 Americans die annually from overdoses, and many of those are from prescription drugs. More to the point, very few of the drugs Americans overdose on from come from Venezuela.) 

Trump has refused to show the American public, or its representatives in Congress, any evidence as to how or if he knew the boats he destroyed were carrying drugs. From the start, these attacks appeared to be illegal, and either a war crime or simple murder. It is not legal under any theory of international law to kill people simply for smuggling drugs, even if they were actually doing that. When nations are obeying the rule of law, actual smuggling vessels are interdicted by navies or national coast authorities.

Today, however, reporting sourced to people inside the military chain of command revealed that Trump and his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had issued specific orders to kill survivors of the attacks. So-called "double-tap" strikes against targets that are now completely helpless are flatly illegal. The implication from the sources was that Trump's interests are best served if there are no survivors because if there were, they could undermine his administration's claims that they were engaged in smuggling. (There's already circumstantial evidence to that effect. The first boat Trump attacked was carrying 11 people, which makes very little sense in the context of smuggling drugs.)

That supposed commitment to stopping the drug trade is the backdrop for a pardon Trump announced today, for Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. Hernández was convicted in American federal court of drug trafficking and sentenced to 45 years in prison. The evidence prosecutors introduced showed that Hernández had taken millions of dollars in bribes from the infamous Sinaloa cartel, using his government role to shield them from arrest and prosecution.

The trafficking that Hernández was charged with—which is far less than the amount actually suspected—was 400 tons of cocaine—or, as the DOJ put it at the time of his conviction, about 4.5 billion doses. 

 

But in his message announcing the pardon, Trump claimed (without evidence) that Hernández had been, "according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly." Trump also endorsed a Hernández protege, Nasry Asfura, in the upcoming Honduran elections.  

 

In other words, Trump is simultaneously ordering facially illegal airstrikes on Venezuelan citizens to fight drug smuggling, while pardoning and lending political support to an actual drug kingpin.

Why does this matter?

• This is the last person in the universe you'd pardon if you cared about drug trafficking. 

• This makes a complete mockery of American law enforcement. 

• If there were a reason other than corruption for this pardon, we'd be hearing about it.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He whipsawed between excitement at a politically exploitable tragedy and fury that people noticed what he was doing. 

At a brief mid-vacation press availability today, Trump had an exchange with a reporter regarding the fatal shooting of two West Virginia National Guard troops in Washington. One of them, Sarah Beckstrom, died today. The suspected shooter is an Afghan national who had worked with American forces during the war and been vetted by Trump's own DHS and FBI and granted asylum during his second term.

Sarah Beckstrom, WV National Guard

 

The reporter asked why, given all that, Trump was trying to shift blame to the Biden administration. Trump started by calling her stupid three times, and then became increasingly agitated, repeating himself and stumbling over words while veering off topic into unrelated tangents related to the war in Afghanistan. One of these was his belief that controlling Bagram Air Force Base—which he himself explicitly surrendered to the extremist Taliban leadership of that country, along with everything else—would somehow give him power over China's nuclear weapons program. 

NANCY CORDES, CBS: A question about this tragic shooting in Washington DC. US officials say that the suspect worked very closely with the CIA in Afghanistan for years, that he was vetted, and the vetting came up clean—

TRUMP: He went — he went cuckoo? He went nuts. And that happens, too, it happens too often with these people, you see them. Look. This is how they come in, this is how the, they're standing on top of each other in a — that's an airplane. There is no vetting or anything, they came in unvetted. And we have a lot of others in this country, we're gonna get them out, but they go cuckoo, something happens to them.

CORDES: Actually,  your DOJ IG just reported this year that there was thorough vetting by DHS and by the FBI of these Afghans who were brought into the US, so why do you blame the Biden administration—

TRUMP: Because they let 'em in. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? Because they came into — on a plane — along with thousands of other people that shouldn't be here, and you're just asking questions because you're a stupid person.  And — we — there's a law passed that it's almost impossible not to — to get 'em out. You can't get 'em out once they come in. And they came in , and they were unvetted, unchecked, there were many of 'em, and they came in on big planes, and it was disgraceful. And if you look, you'll see there as a law passed, makes it almost impossible not to let 'em in, not to — certify them, so to speak, uh, once they come in. And they came  in, and they shouldn'ta come in, and frankly the whole thing was a mess, the whole — Afghanistan situation was a mess, we should, it shoulda never taken place, if we're going to go out, and we woulda gone out, because I had everyone ready to go we woulda gone out with strength and dignity and precision, and we woulda left from Bagram [AFB], and we woulda kept Bagram by the way because of its very close relationship with China, where they make their missiles. But when you let the people come in by the thousands and thousands and thousands, uh, they made a terrible mistake.

The Trump administration rolled out a series of collective punishments for other Afghans living in the United States within hours after the shooting yesterday, and seems to have been waiting for an event like that to roll them out. 

Late this evening, Trump posted an explicitly racist screed to social media claiming that almost all immigrants—explicitly including the 25 million naturalized American citizens born elsewhere, a number that includes two of this three wives—were criminals or insane, and threatened to take away their citizenship (which he has no legal power to do). Trump appears to genuinely believe that "asylum-seekers" has something to do with mental health, in the sense of "insane asylum."

Immigrants of every kind—permanent residents, naturalized citizens, undocumented workers, refugees, and asylum-seekers—commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born American citizens.

Asked whether he'd attend the funeral of Sarah Beckstrom, the WV National Guard member who was killed in the attack, Trump responded noncommitally and immediately began bragging about the size of his 2024 election victory in that state.
 

Why does this matter?

• Collective punishment is Nazi shit. 

• Exploiting the tragic death of a 20-year-old woman he himself put in harm's way for political gain is low even for Trump.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got very upset that people are noticing he's having trouble staying awake.

Trump (or someone posting as him) was up bright and early this morning, but in a foul mood. The cause was a New York Times article from yesterday about the visible decline of the 79-year-old's health and ability to make it through even his relaxed idea of a full day's work. 

 

The article, written by Katie Rogers, discussed Trump's frequent struggles to stay awake, even in situations where he knows he is the center of attention. It noted that the average time of Trump's earliest public appearances in a given day has crept later and later in the day, to an average of 12:08 p.m., up from 10:31 a.m. in 2017. Even in the early days of his first term, when he was a comparatively youthful 71, Trump often built what his aides called "executive time" into his schedule—unstructured time he'd spent in the residence, watching TV or napping. (In the current term, Trump's detailed schedule is kept secret from the public entirely.)

Rogers' piece also addressed some of the unanswered questions about Trump's physical health, such as why he was given an MRI at his most recent physical. Trump claims not to know the reason, or even what part of his body was being imaged, something that is almost impossible to believe since MRIs are never given as a matter of routine. But it is at least possible that it's related to the monthly intravenous he is apparently receiving. Some drugs administered in that way and on that schedule, such as the Alzheimer's drug Leqembi, require MRI monitoring.

Much of Trump's 288-word rant was a rehash of his usual up-is-down claims about his success: prices that are going up are actually going down, the economy that literally 1% of Americans are optimistic about is great, he's personally ended nonexistent "wars," and so forth. But he also returned to some favorite and equally plausible brags about his health, among them that he "aced" a "COMPREHENSIVE COGNITIVE TEST" that was in reality a dementia screening exam that asks the patient to identify pictures of zoo animals and do single-digit arithmetic problems in their head.

Trump, who recently snapped "Quiet, piggy!" at a female reporter who was asking about why he was stonewalling on his promise to release the government's files on Jeffrey Epstein, also called the NYT's Katie Rogers "ugly inside and out." He declared the paper itself, not for the first time, to be an "ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE." 

The next week won't do much to burnish Trump's image as an energetic go-getter. He escaped the White House yesterday to start a six-day vacation, and has exactly one item—a late afternoon phone call—on his schedule between now and next Monday.

Why does this matter?

• A president who was actually mentally competent and physically healthy enough to do the job wouldn't be so worried about this kind of thing.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He pardoned two turkeys and, as it turns out, an unknown number of real human criminals.

Today, Trump took part in the White House tradition, "pardoning" two turkeys from the upcoming Thanksgiving feast. He used the occasion to make jokes at the expense of people like Gov. J.B. Pritzker he regards as political threats, but also victims of human rights abuses and the refugees he illegally deported to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador. 

Bizarrely, but not entirely unexpectedly, he also took a swing at Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Standing in what used to be the Rose Garden, which the former First Lady designed, he insisted that attendees would be standing in mud if he hadn't paved it over (and if he'd chosen to hold an outdoor event in the rain in a literal garden). 

"Joking" aside, there was other news on the pardon front today. As a rule, Trump has issued pardons to three kinds of people: those who can pay him for it, those who have committed the exact crimes he himself is known or suspected to have committed, and those whose crimes were done on his behalf. Earlier this month, Trump issued what was supposed to be a mostly ceremonial pardon for people in that last category: the loyalists who presented themselves—falsely—as the legitimate electors from states Trump claimed to have won. 

But the language of the pardon now appears to be so broad that it may cover everyone who committed any crime related to elections in 2020—and the first criminal defendant in such a case is using it in court. That defendant, Matthew Laiss, voted for Trump twice in two different states. (He was caught because, contrary to Trump's wild claims about mail-in voting, it is very easy to determine when someone votes twice in two different jurisdictions.)

In other words, in pardoning members of his inner circle who committed a very specific kind of crime in an attempt to keep Trump in power in spite of having lost the election—a kind of "voter fraud" he strongly approves of—he may have also unintentionally pardoned an unknown number of other people who committed the rare but more garden-variety form of illegal voting. That kind of voter fraud is extremely rare, accounting for less than one vote in a million, according to one study, but Trump routinely tries to get people to believe that the 2020 election he lost involved millions of such illegal ballots.

This is the second time this month alone that Trump has gotten confused over what he was doing with pardons. That may explain why he has been trying to claim that it was his predecessor, President Joe Biden, who didn't know what pardons he was signing. 

Why does this matter?

• Needing to believe that other people have the cognitive issues you yourself are struggling with is called projection, and it's not a sign of good mental health. 

• This isn't the sort of thing that would ever happen in a competently run administration. 

• Giving your supporters a license to commit crimes is what dictators do.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He announced his plan to keep the ACA pretty much the way it was, and then unannounced the announcement.

Attentive readers of the news today could have been forgiven for thinking—briefly—that Trump was going to announce a "healthcare plan." Reporting that broke over the weekend said that Trump's plan would essentially restore the Affordable Care Act to the way it was before he refused to renew the subsidies that make it affordable to the 45 million Americans who use it. That was the key sticking point of the enormously protracted government shutdown that ended earlier this month.

Although Democrats didn't force Trump to agree to restore the subsidies then, it became clear that Trump could not afford the political fallout that would come with forcing millions of Americans off of their healthcare plans. Without those subsidies, the average premium is expected to more than double, with Americans in the rural areas that voted heavily for Trump bearing the worst increases of all. 

In recent weeks, Trump had floated a few half-hearted trial balloons for a workaround that didn't involve admitting the status quo of the ACA needed to be maintained, including one in which Americans would get a small stimulus check and then be expected to somehow individually "negotiate" with insurance companies. (Trump touted this idea by noting that it would make Americans "feel like entrepreneurs.")

In other words, Donald Trump shut down the federal government for a record six weeks—causing enormous disruption to government operations, food insecurity, air travel disruptions, and countless other problems—in order to avoid having to do what he now apparently intends to do just two weeks later. 

It's still not entirely clear whether any of this will come to pass. Today's announcement was abruptly canceled, supposedly because of objections from Republicans in Congress, although it may also have been a stalling tactic.

Regardless of when or if Trump manages to actually release the alleged plan, the damage will have been done. Faced with insurance that is suddenly completely unaffordable, many Americans are simply being forced to go without it, risking financial ruin if they actually need healthcare in the coming year. For Americans looking to maintain their coverage after December 31, the open enrollment period ends on December 15th.

Why does this matter?

• Americans being able to keep and afford their healthcare is more important than Donald Trump saving face. 

• It's usually a good idea to know what your policy is and whether you're going to implement it before announcing your policy.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He accidentally confirmed that military officers don't have to follow any illegal orders he might want to give.

Trump once again spent most of the day online, and devoted most of his posting energy to a subject that has been infuriating him all week: the simple fact that he cannot make anyone follow an illegal order. Last week, six Democratic members of Congress who are veterans of the armed forces or intelligence services posted a video reminding federal agents and servicemembers that they have a right and a duty to refuse to obey any illegal orders.

At least 25 of Trump's 44 posts today dealt with the subject, although some of those were duplicates, with Trump reposting the same content over and over. As usual, he railed against the "TRAITORS" who had "COMMITTED A CRIME OF SERIOUS PROPORTION [sic]" and repeated claims that it was "SEDITION" to claim that he couldn't give any order he wanted, laws be damned. 

One of the posts was a picture of a plaque. Trump didn't identify it, but it's an unimpeachable source on how the professional United States military regards its duty to the Constitution and the law. It's from a monument on the grounds of the United States Military Academy in West Point:

The whole thing is pretty damning to Trump's claims that he has the dictator's absolute authority to discard the oath American troops take to the Constitution, but let's take a closer look at one sentence in particular:

It's not clear how Trump found the image, which has been circulating online for at least a day now—but exclusively posted by people who actually read it, and understood that it refutes Trump's claims.

Why does this matter?

• It is still not illegal to say "you don't have to do illegal things." 

• A great way to signal that you intend to give illegal orders that the American military won't want to obey is to get this upset when someone points out the military won't obey illegal orders.

• The United States Armed Forces are bound by their oath and honor to serve the people of the United States and the Constitution, not Donald Trump. 

• There were more important things for a president to do today than rant and self-soothe on the internet—but apparently there was nothing more important to Donald Trump.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got very confused about certain numbers.

All that is known of Trump's public schedule today was a tour by helicopter of some golf courses at Andrews Air Force Base, which he did in the company of former champion and course designer Jack Nicklaus. But he was active on social media, and in a way that was unnervingly disconnected from reality even by his own standards.

Two posts from his private microblogging site sum it up. In the first, Trump asserted that "I HAVE JUST GOTTEN THE HIGHEST POLL NUMBERS OF MY 'POLITICAL CAREER.'" This is, to be blunt, pretty much the opposite of the truth. In reality, his approval rating has been dragged down into the thirties by the enormous resistance he's faced over his stonewalling on the Epstein investigation, the shutdown, the inflation caused by his trade war, and the backlash over his immigration enforcement. 

 

This is one of those situations where it is difficult to tell if Trump is deliberately lying about his popularity or simply unable to accept reality, but he has claimed to be at record highs in the polls when the reality is just the opposite again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again over the course of his presidency. 

If he isn't lying, then Trump probably isn't entirely to blame for not knowing how badly Americans have soured on him. His staff carefully filters out news that they think will upset him, which includes bad polling numbers, and substitutes printouts of carefully curated articles that flatter him.

In a second post, he claimed that his tariffs had brought in "TRILLIONS" of dollars in revenue. Since American consumers pay those tariffs in the form of higher prices, it's just as well that this is also a lie. In reality, the United States is on track to collect under $30 billion a month, or perhaps $350 billion per year, in the apparently unlikely event that Trump's tariff decrees remain in force.

"Trillions" is increasingly a word that Trump throws into conversations almost at random. He's made several claims recently about having secured "trillions" of dollars in foreign investments, even when (as with the recent example of Saudi Arabia) the "trillions" he's imagining are more than the entire economic output of the country in question.

Then again, Trump may also be growing even more confused about what a "tariff" is, because in the same post he accused conservative Republican donors Leonard Leo and Charles Koch of having "ripped off the United States of America for years through the use of their own Tariffs," something that makes absolutely no sense as Leo and Koch are private citizens.

Why does this matter?

• Past a certain point, it doesn't matter whether a president is lying or delusional.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He presented Ukraine with an ultimatum for a "peace deal" that Russia wrote.

Although he bragged on the campaign trail that he'd be able to do it on "day one," Trump has completely failed to broker a peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine—in spite of all but switching the United States' side in the middle of the war. Today, he offered Ukraine yet another ultimatum, demanding that its government accept a 28-point plan by next Thursday or have the United States completely withdraw its military support.

The "new" plan is much like Trump's last few attempts to broker a deal. Like those previous proposals, it gives the Putin regime all of the portions of Ukraine it's seized through force, and then some. It forces Ukraine to stand down its army, enters it into an exploitative agreement with the United States for the extraction of mineral resources, and forces it to supply Russia with electricity. It also richly rewards both the Russian state and the Putin regime with the end of sanctions and readmission into the G8 group of nations. And, as with the previous proposals, it concedes more to Russia than Russia has been able to take by force or threat.

In summary, it amounts to a complete surrender by Ukraine in all but name. For obvious reasons, the Putin regime is delighted by it, and has said so publicly.

There is one new twist to Trump's latest plan, however—or at least one that hadn't been noticed in previous drafts: it was apparently written directly by Russians. The English-language draft shows clear evidence of having been translated directly (and awkwardly) from a Russian-language original—even though, supposedly, the U.S. State Department and Trump's dubiously qualified personal envoy Steve Witkoff were the ones brokering the deal. 

If that had been the case, it would have been written in standard English first and then translated into Ukrainian and Russian. Pressed on the point, the White House admitted that the text had been written with the "help" of Russian envoy Kirill Dimitriev—and no Ukrainian counterpart.

In other words, Trump is pressuring Ukraine to accept its "mediation" to end the war by restating Russia's demands. 

Trump is financially and politically beholden to the Putin regime. But Americans outside of the Trump White House overwhelmingly favor continuing support for Ukraine.

Why does this matter?

• American foreign policy should reflect what Americans want, not what Vladimir Putin wants. 

• A president who is compromised in any way by a hostile foreign power is not fit to serve. 

• Betraying an ally like this is disgraceful.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He made an empty threat to have his political enemies killed.

Earlier this week, six Democratic members of Congress who have served in the military or intelligence services posted a video. They reminded servicemembers that they have sworn an oath requiring them to refuse to obey unlawful orders, and urged them to "stand up" for themselves and the Constitution. 

As a legal matter, this is correct: anyone serving in the United States military or as a federal agent not only may refuse an illegal order, but is committing a crime if they don't.

The video didn't mention Trump by name, but it's clear he was its target. One of the first things Trump did on returning to office was to purge the senior officers who serve as the military's legal branch and strip the chain of command of any ability to advise on the legality of his actions. These have included threats to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against American citizens directly—something a JAG officer would likely say was illegal, as no part of the country is in open rebellion against the government. 

Trump, who dodged the Vietnam War draft, has also made attempts—not to say particularly successful ones—to demand the personal loyalty of the military leadership. American military personnel swear an oath to the Constitution, not the president or Trump personally.

Trump, who is a convicted felon, responded to the video this morning on his private social media network by calling it "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" among other threats. He also reposted followers who urged him to have the Senators and Representatives in the video killed.

It is not sedition, or in any way illegal, to accurately summarize the Uniform Code of Military Justice that Trump is sworn to uphold. It is sedition to "conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States… or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States," although in the January 6th case against Trump, he was indicted under slightly different charges. (Those charges remain "live" against Trump if he leaves office for any reason, although he would probably have to be re-indicted.)

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), one of the lawmakers in the video, responded later in the day to Trump's threats.

Why does this matter?

• There's a reason the United States military doesn't accept "I was just following orders" as an excuse for breaking the law. 

• Making empty threats to kill people who oppose him just makes Trump look weak. 

• The United States Armed Forces are bound by their oath and honor to serve the people of the United States and the Constitution, not Donald Trump.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He bragged about crippling one of the United States' biggest export industries. 

Trump has been reeling from the political blowback of his trade war, as prices continue to rise for consumers while the job market comes to a standstill. It's impossible to put a precise amount on just how much inflation went up in October, because Trump's record-long shutdown caused an unrecoverable delay in the collection of data and will never be released. This is the first time in its history that the federal government has failed to publish that benchmark survey. But suffice it to say, Americans who can't demand literal gold bars from foreign dignitaries are angry, and it's putting Trump in a dangerous position.

In an apparent attempt to combat that, the Trump White House put out a document titled "Good News You May Have Missed." It tries to put a good spin on the new Trump economy, for example by claiming that tax refunds will be going up in the coming year. This is actually true, but not for a reason that will make most Americans happy. When the tax rates change, as they did this year, it takes a few months for new income withholding to rates to kick in. In other words, the non-wealthy Americans who won't see any real tax savings from Trump's tax bill will get bigger refunds next year because too much of their income is being withheld this year.

But the most surprising bit of "good news" that Trump touts in the document is that foreign student enrollments are down 17%.

This is unambiguously terrible news for universities, the American students who attend them, and the industries that rely on the students they produce. Having international students attend American schools is a potent form of soft power, allowing for American influence to spread into the commercial and government leadership of the rest of the world. 

But more importantly, it's also an enormous financial windfall for the United States. American colleges and universities are the envy of the world, attracting wealthy and talented students who pay, either out of pocket or through subsidies from their home governments, the top tuition rates that subsidize American students. Virtually no foreign students receive domestic scholarships. 

Importantly, they don't take opportunities away from American students, because universities have more capacity as a result of the revenue they bring in.

That revenue is, or was, enormous. Noncitizen students bring in $44 billion dollars and create some 378,000 American jobs—and that's a conservative estimate that doesn't take into account the money that international students spend outside of universities. Given that relatively few Americans study overseas, that means the educational sector is running possibly the biggest trade surplus in the whole American economy. 

 

Trump loathes American universities, or at least pretends to, and has made academia a political target during his second term. But Americans themselves actually like the education sector, and they certainly like the medical and scientific research it supports, which Trump has slashed since returning to office.

The White House has not offered any further explanation as to why Trump causing a sudden multi-billion dollar shortfall in one of the most important American industries is "Good News."

Why does this matter?

• Crippling a major portion of the economy is nothing to brag about.  

• Even by Trump standards, scaring away customers who pay top dollar is a stupid business plan. 

• Americans are nowhere near as anti-immigrant or stupid as Donald Trump wants to think they are.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said it was rude to ask his "guest" Mohammed bin Salman about the murder he's implicated in.

Trump met today with Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince and de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. MBS, as he is often known, orchestrated the torture and murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist and American permanent resident. Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen by birth, had written columns critical of the Saudi ruling family. He was murdered at the Saudi embassy in Turkey, where he'd been lured on a pretext, and tortured. After he died, his body was dismembered and smuggled.

American and Turkish intelligence agencies quickly linked bin Salman to the murder and identified him as the person who had ordered and overseen it. Trump, who was privy to this information long before it became public, deliberately lied about the status of the investigation to protect the Saudi regime. When details began to come out, Trump ran interference for them by saying he believed their preposterous cover story that the 59-year-old Khashoggi started a fight with more than a dozen men and then dying of unrelated causes.

During a press availability, bin Salman was inevitably asked by a reporter about the Khashoggi murder. Trump interrupted and said this:

You're mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen. But he knew nothing about it. You don't have to embarrass our guest.

It's certainly true that "a lot of people" didn't like Khashoggi—like, for example, Mohammed bin Salman, who had him tortured and killed. But that is why the reporter asked hin Salman about him.

Trump is financially beholden to the Saudi ruling family. As WTDT put it in 2018:

Trump has already allowed himself to be compromised by the Saudi government. His faltering U.S. hotels have been propped up by Saudi government patronage, and the Saudi royal family bailed him out on several occasions during the 1990s. Trump himself admitted the conflict of interest on the campaign trail in 2015: “They [Saudis] buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.” 

Later in the day, Trump tried to suggest that other Americans would benefit from association with MBS too, claiming that "he's investing one trillion dollars into the United States." This is a lie, as it always is when Trump makes this kind of claim: a trillion dollars is roughly the entire economic output of Saudi Arabia. 

Why does this matter?

• A billionaire who can still be bought is just hopelessly corrupt. 

• No amount of money is worth the integrity of the United States of America. 

• There's nothing more American than exercising freedom of speech to question the actions of a dictator, "guest" or otherwise.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He forgot he was president in 2020.

Trump continued to rage at Republicans in Indiana's state government today, still furious that they are unwilling to gerrymander the state's Congressional map to try to force one more Republican into office. 

As this site discussed yesterday, there is a good reason for the state party's hesitation: gerrymanders can become disasters for the party in power when there is a surge of votes for the other side—as is likely to happen in the 2026 midterms—because they mean the leading party wins each of its districts by fewer votes. That means that "safe" seats can suddenly become losses that wouldn't otherwise have happened. 

This is what Trump said specifically, in a post to his private microblogging site:

I will be strongly endorsing against any State Senator or House member from the Great State of Indiana that votes against the Republican Party, and our Nation, by not allowing for Redistricting for Congressional seats in the United States House of Representatives as every other State in our Nation is doing, Republican or Democrat. Democrats are trying to steal our seats everywhere, and we're not going to let this happen! This all began back with the Rigged Census. We must keep the Majority at all costs! Republicans must fight back!

Trump is referring here to the 2020 Census, the results of which were used to determine Congressional maps starting in 2022. Most of the actual counting took place in the calendar year 2020, but planning is on a ten-year cycle that kicked into high gear in early 2019. The count concluded on October 16, 2020.

In other words, the "Rigged Census" was conducted in its entirety during Donald Trump's presidential term, which lasted from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021. 

Trump also personally appointed the Director of the Census for the critical period, Stephen Dillingham, in 2018. Dillingham, a Trump loyalist, resigned on President Biden's first day in office amid accusations that he and a raft of other partisan Trump appointees had tried to rush the final tabulations before they were ready so that Trump, in the final days of his term, would be able to issue orders excluding immigrants from the official count. (Immigrants, documented and otherwise, are part of the count by law.) 

This is not the first time Trump has gotten confused about when his first term was. Just last month, he tried to blame the January 6 riots on the "BIDEN FBI," even though the purpose of the attack on the Capitol that Trump himself incited was to prevent Joe Biden from becoming President. The Director of the FBI at the time, Christopher Wray, was Trump's handpicked appointee. And, of course, he's whined for years about the "RIGGED 2020 ELECTION," when—again—Trump himself was the head of state.

Neither Trump nor the White House has commented on what he meant by keeping a Republican majority in the House "at all costs."

Why does this matter?

• It's very, very bad if a president isn't capable of remembering basic facts about his first term. 

• In a democracy, the only thing that needs to be protected "at all costs" is the right of the people to choose their own representatives.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got a Republican state legislator in Indiana swatted for not doing as he was told.

Trump's party got an absolute drubbing in the elections held a few weeks ago, with Republicans losing everything from Georgia public utility commissions to Pennsylvania state Supreme Court seats to Mississippi state house races, to say nothing of key statewide races in Virginia and New Jersey. Despite Trump's protestations that they only lost because he wasn't on the ballot, it was clear that voters were making their extreme displeasure with his second term felt before it was even nine months old. 

That is why the government of Indiana, which is entirely controlled by Republicans, decided not to follow in the footsteps of Texas and a few other states who redrew their Congressional district maps in a deliberately unfair—but probably technically legal—way to try to avoid a Republican wipeout in 2026. Trump has been demanding this for months, as he is extremely unpopular and the incumbent president's party almost always loses many seats in midterm elections. Democrats only need to win three seats nationwide to regain control of the House of Representatives.

Right now, Indiana has 7 Republicans in Congress and 2 Democrats. It would be possible to redraw the maps to make an 8-1 margin likely, which is what Trump is demanding the state legislature do. But there's a catch: gerrymanders work by diluting the votes for the party in control in the districts they want to win. This can be done with a fair amount of precision, but when voters turn strongly against one party, those weaker districts become much more vulnerable, and the majority party can actually lose seats instead.

In other words, Indiana's Republican state legislators no longer trust that Trump won't drag them down with him, even though the most vulnerable Indiana Republican currently in Congress is in a seat his party normally wins by 8 percent. 

Trump responded today with a furious rant on his private microblogging website, calling out a Republican state senator by name.

 

Within an hour, someone had "swatted" Sen. Greg Goode. "Swatting" means to call in a false report of violence in an attempt to convince police to force entry into a person's home. It is extremely dangerous and has led to deaths of both targets and police.

Drawing attention to people in this way, in the knowledge that someone among perhaps millions of followers will try to threaten or hurt them, is called stochastic terrorism. Trump has a great deal of experience with it, and while he hasn't always used it against Republicans, there have been exceptions.
 

Why does this matter?

• Trying to make elections meaningless before they even happen is what dictators do. 

• Americans are supposed to choose their leaders, not the other way around.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He double-pardoned at January 6th attacker for crimes unrelated to January 6th—or at least someone did.

Daniel Edwin Wilson was convicted in 2024 of illegal firearm possession. That crime was unrelated to his participation in the January 6th insurrection attempting to keep Trump in power in defiance of the 2020 election results. Wilson was also charged and convicted for his role in that attack. Trump's blanket pardon of all the attackers erased that conviction, but not the totally unrelated gun charge. 

The White House acknowledged today that Trump issued a second pardon for Wilson, supposedly on the theory that he never would have been caught committing one crime if he hadn't been investigated for the other. This is not how the law works for anyone other than people trying to overthrow the government on Trump's behalf: if police respond to a noise complaint and find an assault in progress, they don't have to ignore it because it wasn't the specific crime they were expecting to uncover.

Wilson was one of a long list of January 6th criminals blanket-pardoned by Trump who quickly committed other crimes.

It's not actually clear when or if Trump signed the pardon, which is dated Friday. Trump was recently caught using an autopen to sign pardons (and possibly other documents), which the White House belatedly tried to blame on a website glitch. There's nothing illegal or improper about signing documents that way: presidents, including Trump, can and do use autopens for ceremonial documents like pardons without it affecting their validity. 

But Trump has been trying for months to deflect concerns about his own cognitive struggles by spinning stories of President Joe Biden's supposed incapacity concealed by use of the autopen. Trump, who has allowed his appointees like Elon Musk and Stephen Miller to wield the powers of the presidency almost without limit, does not like the suggestion that he's not really in charge of his own White House. (Trump spent today golfing.)

There's no real reason to believe Trump would have objected to Wilson being pardoned, but it's genuinely unclear if he knew that he or someone acting on his behalf had done it. Trump supposedly granted a pardon to the corrupt cryptocurrency CEO Changpeng Zhao on October 23, but a few days later said he had no idea who Zhao was. 

Why does this matter?

• Accusing your political enemies of your own failings or weaknesses is called projection, and it's not a sign of good mental health. 

• Letting your political supporters commit crimes with impunity is what dictators do.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He continued his meltdown over the latest Epstein revelations.

For someone who is absolutely desperate for people to stop talking about his connections to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump couldn't seem to stop doing it himself today. 

He began by demanding, in a social media post, that his Attorney General and former defense lawyer Pam Bondi investigate Bill Clinton's connection to Epstein, as well as certain other prominent political enemies of his. Bondi immediately agreed, also via social media. (Attorneys general have gone to prison for this kind of thing.) 

This isn't the first time that Trump has tried to deflect from his own sex-related scandals by bringing up Clinton. But embarrassing the former president (who did indeed know Epstein, but didn't regard Epstein as his "closest friend") may not be the real aim here. Having an "investigation" into Clinton or anyone else would give Trump the tissue-thin excuse that he could not release the DOJ's files because they were being used in an active investigation.

Later, he posted a rant on social media "un-endorsing" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Targeting Taylor Greene is shocking as a political matter: the far-right conspiracy theorist was one of Trump's most devoted surrogates and is very much aligned with the core of the MAGA base. Trump's rant, which was emotional even by his standards, didn't explicitly mention Epstein, but Taylor Greene spelled it out in her response:

 

The 26,000 Epstein documents that the House Oversight Committee released haven't been fully analyzed yet, but two things are clear. One is that Donald Trump's name appears far more often than any other person's. The other is that Epstein was saying as early as 2011, in private conversations with his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, that he knew Trump knew about his criminal activities. 

In fact, Epstein seemed to believe that Trump was the person who had informed law enforcement and gotten him arrested for the first round of criminal charges in 2008. (Epstein was free in 2011 because the local District Attorney at the time, Alex Acosta, gave Epstein an almost unbelievably lenient plea deal. Trump later appointed Acosta as Secretary of Labor during his first term.) 

In other words, Epstein was so sure that Trump knew and could give details about his sexual predation on children that he was "75 percent" sure that Trump had been the one to turn him in. But, of course, Trump wasn't the informant—or he'd have mentioned it and provided proof by now to escape the scandal altogether. 

Finally, Trump was asked once again about Ghislaine Maxwell, who is enjoying a much more comfortable prison experience at a resort-style minimum security camp after teasing that she would testify on Trump's behalf. He once again refused to rule out a pardon for her, something that is almost completely inexplicable given what she was convicted of, unless she has some degree of leverage. In fact, leverage over then-candidate Trump is exactly what Epstein believed he and Maxwell had in a 2016 e-mail exchange with journalist Michael Wolff that was also released this week.

Why does this matter?

• There is absolutely no way to square any of this behavior with Trump not being involved in some way that would at least cost him his presidency. 

• Even if Trump were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing with respect to Epstein's child sex trafficking operation, the President of the United States can't be melting down every day over these kinds of things. 

• Using law enforcement as a weapon against your enemies and a shield for yourself is what a dictator does.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He promoted a self-described "Nazi" and sexual harasser.

Paul Ingrassia was supposed to be Trump's nominee to head the Office of Special Counsel, the agency that—under normal circumstances—acts as a watchdog against abuses in the executive branch. But Ingrassia quickly proved so toxic that even Senate Republicans signaled that they'd vote against his confirmation, and his nomination was pulled. 

The reason, other than the 30-year-old's lack of experience, was that Ingrassia was under investigation for an incident in which he canceled a female subordinate's hotel room during a business trip in order to force her to share a room with him. (A Trump spokesperson insisted that the woman, who withdrew her complaint under pressure, had "misunderstood" what Ingrassia was trying to do by making her share a room with him.) It was also revealed that he'd had said on a text message that Martin Luther King, Jr. deserved to be "tossed in the seventh circle of Hell," made racist jokes about "Chinamen and Indians," and that Ingrassia had described himself as having "a bit of a Nazi streak." That was apparently not a joke: Ingrassia promoted Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier. (Trump himself has met with Fuentes.)

Ingrassia had been expected to quietly leave the Trump administration, where he had been working in the Department of Homeland Security. (He also had a sideline doing favors for his former client, accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate, a celebrity Trump supporter.) But today, Ingrassia announced that he'd been promoted to a different job: deputy counsel at the General Services Administration. 

Trump did not face questions about Ingrassia's promotion today during his one very brief appearance in front of reporters, because they were shouting questions instead about the revelations in yesterday's release of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein's texts and e-mails. Trump refused to respond as White House staff desperately tried to clear reporters from the room.

 

Why does this matter?

• It's extremely bad when promoting a racist and creepy sexual predator who describes himself as a Nazi isn't the biggest scandal of a president's day. 

• It actually matters whether the government is staffed by competent, qualified professionals or loyalists who happen to have done terrible things the president can relate to.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He had a very, very bad day on the Epstein front.

For Trump, one of the fringe benefits to shutting the federal government down for a record 43 days was that he was able to pressure Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) to keep the House adjourned, and therefore to refuse to seat duly elected Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-NM). Grijalva, who was finally sworn in today, promptly became the last signature needed on a petition to force the House to take up a bill that would require the release of the Justice Department's massive troves of information on the sex trafficking ring run by Trump's friend and confidant Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump responded by launching a furious pressure campaign against the few Republicans who have signed the petition, including dragging Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) into the White House Situation Room. Most Americans are more familiar with the Situation Room as the place where then-President Obama and his cabinet observed the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, but there was one obvious advantage for Trump to try to force Boebert to withdraw her signature there: in that high-security environment, it would have been impossible for her to record what he said.

The other major development was the release of 20,000 Epstein e-mails and text messages obtained by the House Oversight Committee. These documents are not organized, and analysis has been ongoing all day, but they are shockingly damning for Trump. In the messages—many of which predate Trump's political career—Epstein discusses, among other things:

• how Trump "knew about the girls"
• Epstein's involvement in a complex real estate transaction in 2008 that amounted to a money laundering operation in which the Russian government sent about $100M to Trump 
• Trump spending "hours" at Epstein's house with one of his trafficking victims in particular 
• his admiration for Trump's ability to weather scandals, but also his concern over Trump's mental stability 
• how he helped the Putin regime manipulate Trump 

It will probably be weeks before the full picture of Trump's involvement in Epstein's life and activities that emerges from these documents is clear. 

Virtually all of the White House's comment came from press secretary Karolina Leavitt, who gamely insisted that e-mails in which Epstein and Maxwell discussed the fact of Trump's knowledge of their operation showed only that he "did nothing wrong." 

Trump himself did wade into the fray, but only on social media, safely away from reporters who might shout questions. He once again called Epstein and Maxwell's massive sex trafficking ring, for which both were criminally convicted, a "hoax." Trump also demanded that everyone stop talking about it—or, in his words, that there be "no deflections to Epstein."

In related news, Epstein's co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell is reportedly planning to ask Trump to commute her sentence. After Trump sent his former defense lawyer to "interview" her about the extent of his relationship with Epstein, Maxwell was moved to a resort-style minimum security prison where she has been getting, among other perks, custom meals and access to puppies in training to become service dogs.

Trump has repeatedly refused all invitations to condemn Maxwell, who may be the only living witness who can testify to whether or how much he was involved in Epstein's trafficking ring. Instead, he has only said that he "wishes her well."

Why does this matter?

• Victims have died because of the horrible things Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did to them. 

• It is hard to imagine how Trump could act any guiltier. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He celebrated Veterans Day by threatening to send US troops into Chicago to fight a real estate bubble.

Just before 1 A.M. on Veterans Day, Trump posted this to his private microblogging website:

First of all, there is no "Miracle Mile Shopping Center." Well, actually, there are four, but none of them are in Chicago. (This is a common error in Trump world, which once held a press conference at a landscaping business because it had gotten it confused with Philadelphia's Four Seasons Hotel.) 

 

Trump probably meant the "Magnificent Mile," which is not a shopping center, but the part of Michigan Avenue between E. Lake Shore Dr. and the river best known for its upscale shopping and dining.

More to the point, violent crime is extremely low in that area, which is heavily patrolled by the Chicago PD. 

The real reason that there are high vacancy rates is that rents on commercial real estate is sky-high, as landlords try to maximize profit. For example, one of the business that have moved out of their Michigan Avenue digs recently is the H&M clothing store—but it moved to a smaller location two blocks away, still on the Magnificent Mile, because its new landlords refused to renew the lease. H&M moved into the space vacated by an Apple store, which itself moved to another Michigan Avenue location just a few blocks away.

Trump regularly lies about crime in the United States, which is still historically low and has been declining in recent years. But he's also wrong about the business trajectory of the Magnificent Mile: its vacancy rate is already dropping as market forces (and a gloomy economic outlook) drop rents into a range businesses are willing to pay.

In other words, Trump—who owns a hotel several hundred feet from the Magnificent Mile—is proposing to once again deploy American troops against American citizens, but this time because a real estate bubble that would affect him personally might be about to deflate.

It's not clear who Trump was demanding to "CALL IN THE TROOPS, FAST," because he is the only person who could order that. But he couldn't do so legally unless there was an actual rebellion or insurrection, and businesses choosing not to pay too much for a lease probably doesn't count.

Why does this matter?

• A president who had even the slightest bit of respect for Americans or the Americans who serve in the military wouldn't try to pit them against each other.