What did Donald Trump do today?

He admitted screwing over scientists from blue states out of revenge but said that wasn't "political."

Among the casualties of Trump's assault on federal science programs last year were 624 grants from the Department of Energy that were marked for cancellation. 284 of them were, in fact, canceled. Of those, 283 of them were from states that "had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators.” That language comes from Jeff Novak, a DoE lawyer, in a recent court filing.

In other words, the Trump administration has admitted in open court that it deliberately canceled grants on research into improved energy technologies based on whether or not the recipients were in a blue state.  

But in a comment today, Trump's Department of Energy insisted that refusing all grants from states that didn't give Trump their electoral votes somehow wasn't a political decision: "None of the termination decisions were based on political considerations."

This is just the latest in a string of episodes where Trump has openly punished the states that voted for his opponents—which, collectively, represent more than half of the nation's population and tens of millions of his own supporters. He's all but stopped signing disaster declarations in blue states, and he's trying to shut off Medicaid funding to two blue states whose governors he particularly hates. 

It's not new behavior: at the height of the COVID outbreak in 2020, he threatened to hold off on supplying urgently needed medical equipment unless blue-state governors like "the woman in Michigan" (Gov. Gretchen Whitmer) until they were appropriately "appreciative" of him in public. 

The Trump administration is currently finalizing an administrative rule that would purport to give him the power to cancel any grant that didn't "demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities"—essentially giving Trump a personal veto over any scientific or academic research that he didn't like, regardless of what Americans' representatives in Congress had specified in appropriations bills for that funding.

Why does this matter?

• Punishing the citizens you think of as your enemies is what dictators do.   

• Americans deserve a president who isn't constantly looking to screw over the places where more than half of them live.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He alternated between suing the media, threatening them with violence, and saying he'd tattle on them.

 

Late last night, Trump filed a defamation and libel suit against the New York Times, the book publisher Penguin Randomhouse, and several individuals for $15 billion over their coverage of him during the 2024 election. In essence, Trump's theory of the case is that by reporting unflattering things about him, the defendants not only negatively impacted his chances in the election, but hurt his personal brand, which he claims is worth $100 billion.

Of course, it is not defamation simply to report things that the subject doesn't like—or to endorse one presidential candidate over another, which is another thing Trump claims was somehow defamatory, in spite of it being standard practice going back at least as far as 1860. Reaction from legal scholars to the filing, which is riddled with legal errors, has not been kind. 

Trump has sued several other media companies since returning to office, with the more or less explicit goal of forcing them to accept a token settlement in exchange for influence over their coverage. ABC and CBS have both accepted such settlements to shield their parent companies from Trump actively working against their interests. But others, like the Wall Street Journal—which is owned by the conservative news tycoon Rupert Murdoch, and who can fight on Trump's turf—have called his bluff.

This morning, Trump continued to be in a combative mood with reporters. He snapped at an Australian journalist and accused him of "hurting Australia" by asking a question about the conflict of interest between his businesses and his presidency, and promised to tell on the reporter to the Prime Minister of Australia.

JOHN LYONS: But is it appropriate, President Trump, that a president in office should be engaged in so much business activity?

TRUMP: Well, I'm really not, my kids are running the business.

LYONS: But you are also—

TRUMP: Where are you from?

LYONS: I'm from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

TRUMP: Oh, all right. You're hurting Australia, right—right. In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now. And they want to get along with me. You know, your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I'm going to tell him about you. You set a very bad tone. Jonathan? [To Lyons] You can set a nicer tone. Quiet!

He then outright threatened ABC reporter Jonathan Karl's job and hinted at the kind of stochastic violence he's threatened against his enemies before.

KARL: What do you make of Pam Bondi saying she's going to go after hate speech? A lot of your allies say hate speech is free speech.

TRUMP: We'll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It's hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they'll come after ABC. Well ABC paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech. Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they'll have to go after you. …You should take your beautiful wife tonight and have dinner. You won't be shot. You won't be accosted. You won't even be looked at incorrectly by anybody.

It is not a crime in either the United States or Australia to ask the president a question about his conflicts of interest—or to look at him "incorrectly."

Why does this matter?

• There's no good reason for a president to be this afraid of a free press. 

• Hinting that something bad will happen to a critic (or his "beautiful wife") is what thugs in bad mob movies do.

• Most children grow out of tattletale stuff by about the third grade. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He demanded that his political enemies be prosecuted "right or wrong."

Trump, who a White House aide says has been "on the fucking warpath" as the Epstein scandal widens, continued to lash out at his political opponents today in an overt attempt to change the subject. In particular, he demanded that President Obama and members of his administration be prosecuted for "treason" over their supposed attempts to steal elections: 

TRUMP: Barack Hussein Obama is the ringleader. Hillary Clinton was right there with him, and so was, uh, sleepy Joe Biden, and so was—the rest of them, Comey, Clapper. They tried to rig an election and they got caught. And then they did rig the election in 2020. And then because I knew I won that election by a lot, I did it a 3rd time… but I won that all the same way in 2020.  

In other words, Trump's theory of the case is that Presidents Obama and Biden failed to "rig" the elections against him in 2016 and 2024, but succeeded in doing so in 2020 when Trump himself controlled the executive branch. (In reality, Trump attempted to foment an insurrection against the lawfully elected Biden administration, during which Americans died as Trump supporters attacked the Capitol to stop the certification of the vote.)

Trump has been campaigning on weaponizing the Justice Department against his enemies since the 2016 campaign—and complaining bitterly when investigations were commenced into his actual crimes for nearly as long. But today's remarks were extreme even by that standard: at one point, Trump demanded that Obama be prosecuted purely as revenge: "It's time to start, after what they did to me, and whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people."

If there were any doubt that this was an attempt to distract from the Epstein scandal, Trump himself put it to rest in other remarks, explicitly instructing Republicans to respond to questions about his links to Epstein by talking repeating his claims about Obama.

TRUMP: And remember, don't let them forget—it's so important—Obama cheated on the election. …Obama cheated, and—when they give you all the nonsense—Obama cheated, and his people cheated, but he was there, and you ever hear this, they talk about—if they ever even mention it, they never mention his name. Just the opposite with me, they only mention by name, but they don't mention any of you guys, they don't mention Tom, they don't mention Steve, they don't mention our great speaker, they mention Trump all the time. 

…But remember this, Obama cheated on the election, and we have it cold—hard—blue [sic]—and it's getting more so because the stuff that's coming in is not even believable.

Shortly after Trump's remarks today, still more new evidence linking him to Jeffrey Epstein was uncovered, including the revelation that Epstein was a guest at Trump's second wedding.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents need to be able to have literally any priorities other than their own self-preservation. 

• A president who is too busy trying to deflect from scandals to do anything else is unfit for office on that basis alone. 

• Donald Trump is literally the only person in the last 200 years of American history who has attempted a coup. 

• No matter how many times he tries it, using the power of the state to punish your enemies with phony "investigations" is dictator shit.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got celebrated by two of his favorite people.

Trump celebrated Thanksgiving as he does many holidays—by sarcastically mocking Americans who didn't vote for him. But he also was on the receiving end of well-wishes from two extremely influential men in his life: Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk.

Putin, speaking today to Russian media, called him a "real man" and "intelligent." Trump's fascination with Putin, whose regime has interfered on his behalf in each of the last three presidential elections, is widely known. As Russia's intelligence head put it:

The election campaign is over. To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.

Putin is a former KGB spymaster who has enjoyed forcing Trump into bizarrely submissive demonstrations of loyalty, such as the 2018 press conference in Helsinki, Finland, where he got Trump to say that he trusted Putin's word over that of the U.S. intelligence community—something that horrified virtually every Republican who was asked about it. Trump is also financially reliant on Putin to prop up his ramshackle business empire.

Trump also received holiday greetings from Elon Musk, whose financial backing has proved equally important, and who has been even less restrained about flaunting his influence over Trump since the election. (Trump staffers infuriated by Musk's imposition on the transition have accused him of trying to become "co-president.") Musk sat himself at the head table with Trump and members of his family for Thanksgiving dinner.

Why does this matter?

• It's bad that the President of the United States can be this easily manipulated.

• Russia is a hostile foreign power and does not have the United States' best interests at heart.