Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
November 28, 2025
November 28, 2025
As Trump’s popularity continues to drop, the MAGA coalition shows signs of cracking, and Trump’s mental acuity slips, there is a frantic feel to the administration, as if Trump’s people are trying to grab all they can, while they can.
A source has told The Telegraph that Trump is sending special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to Moscow to offer Russia’s president Vladimir Putin U.S. recognition of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and most of the other four eastern oblasts of Ukraine: Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. This is the territory covered in the “Mariupol Plan” in which Russian operatives told Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, they would help Trump win the election in exchange for his looking the other way as Russia took control of the region.
Ten days ago, Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios reported on a 28-point plan that the U.S. was allegedly working on to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. Quickly, though, it became clear that the plan was actually a Russian plan that offered Russia everything it wanted—including giving Crimea and most of the four oblasts to Russia while forbidding Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and limiting the size of its military—and offered Ukraine virtually nothing. Trump was demanding that Ukraine sign onto the plan by Thanksgiving.
Then it turned out that the U.S. State Department had had nothing to do with the plan; it appeared to be the work of Witkoff, Kushner, and Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who is under U.S. sanctions.
Meanwhile, according to Dan De Luce, Courtney Kube, and Abigail Williams of NBC News, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll delivered the plan to Ukraine and warned Ukrainian leaders they were losing the war and must settle. Diplomatic negotiations are not a normal role for a U.S. Army secretary, who is the top civilian official within the U.S. Department of Defense, responsible for manpower, personnel, equipment, finances, and so on in the U.S. Army. Driscoll is a close ally of Vice President J.D. Vance and seems to be gaining power as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth loses it.
Neither Ukrainians nor Europeans had been consulted on the plan, and their leaders worked frantically to shift U.S. support back toward Ukraine, consistent with Washington’s formal position. Over the course of last week, Jeanna Smialek, Christopher F. Schuetze, and Lara Jakes of the New York Times reported, European and Ukrainian leaders persuaded Secretary of State Marco Rubio to include European nations and Ukraine in negotiations.
Then, on Tuesday, November 25, 2025, Bloomberg published the transcript of an October 14 phone call between Witkoff and Russian foreign-policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, in which Witkoff acknowledged that a peace deal would involve Ukrainian land concessions and coached Ushakov on how to flatter Trump to get the peace deal the men wanted. It also published a transcript of an October 29 call between Ushakov and Dmitriev in which Dmitriev told Ushakov that a U.S. “peace” plan would be as close “as possible” to Russia’s demands. It is unclear who leaked the recordings to Bloomberg, but Shaun Walker of The Guardian reported speculation that the leak came from a source in U.S. intelligence who opposed the U.S. push to reward Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
The Independent reports that Putin is refusing to give up any of his demands for an end to the war, although Russia’s central bank has begun to sell gold reserves to shore up its faltering economy. Putin told reporters in Kyrgyzstan that Russia will continue to attack Ukraine “until the last Ukrainian dies” in order to gain control of Ukraine’s industrial east.
A source told The Telegraph that the Trump administration is ready to make its own deal to recognize Russia’s control of that region. “It’s increasingly clear the Americans don’t care about the European position,” a source told The Telegraph. “They say the Europeans can do whatever they want.” Russia said it assumes it is negotiating with the U.S. alone.
Tonight, Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report that Witkoff, Kushner, and Dmitriev designed their plan to bypass U.S. national security officials and create opportunities for U.S. businessmen to win multibillion-dollar deals to develop energy and rare-earth minerals in Russia, Ukraine, and the Arctic. “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals,” the journalists report, “Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”
Meanwhile, for the past day, Trump’s social media account has been posting screeds against immigrants, using the Wednesday shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard stationed in Washington, D.C., as justification. As Joyce White Vance noted, a court ruled on November 20 that the deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia was illegal but stayed the order ending it until December 11 to permit the government to appeal.
On Wednesday a suspect identified as Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal shot Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, who died from her injuries, and Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, who is critically injured, Lakanwal was also shot, but his injuries are reportedly not life threatening. Lakanwal worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan, then came to the U.S. in 2021 as part of the evacuation and resettlement of Afghans after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan. Lakanwal was granted asylum in the U.S. earlier this year.
Last night—Thanksgiving—at 11:25 p.m., Trump’s social media account posted an image of an airplane packed with refugees from Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrew and the Afghan military collapsed in August 2021. The U.S. exit came from a February 29, 2020, agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, but not the Afghan government, during the first Trump administration known as the Doha Agreement, or the “Agreement for bringing Peace to Afghanistan.” The U.S. promised to secure the release of 5,000 of the Taliban’s fighters imprisoned by the Afghan government and to withdraw U.S. troops by May 2021 in exchange for the Taliban promising to stop killing U.S. soldiers.
When he took office, President Joe Biden extended the deadline until August 31 but did not reverse Trump’s commitment. As the U.S. pulled out the final 2,500 troops Trump had left in the country, the Afghan army collapsed.
Disregarding both Trump’s own part in the exit from Afghanistan and Trump’s own administration’s vetting of Lakanwal for asylum, Trump’s social media post blamed “Joe Biden and his Thugs” for “the horrendous airlift from Afghanistan.” It claimed that “[h]undreds of thousands of people poured into our Country totally unvetted and unchecked,” and said: “We will fix it.”
Just one minute after linking the shooting to Biden’s policies, Trump’s social media account continued: “A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the World, for being ‘Politically Correct,’ and just plain STUPID, when it comes to Immigration.”
What followed was a screed that sounded like it was written by white nationalist Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who is on a crusade to expel immigrants from the U.S. It was divided into two posts, with what seemed designed to be the second post published a minute before what looked like it was supposed to be the first.
In reverse order, then, the account claimed, falsely, that most immigrants are “from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels,” and that they are supported extravagantly by taxes paid by U.S. citizens. It blamed refugees for the nation’s “[f]ailed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits,” and used a slur to describe Minnesota governor Tim Walz, claiming he has done nothing to get rid of his state’s Somalian refugees.
The next post blamed immigration policy for eroding the U.S. standard of living, and announced a dramatic purge of immigrants from the country: “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
The idea of stripping some of the country’s 24.5 million naturalized citizens of their citizenship changes the nature of what it means to be an American. As Faiza Patel and Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center noted last month, from 1990 to 2017 only about 11 people a year lost their citizenship, usually for having hidden serious criminal activity or human rights violations in applying for citizenship. In contrast, observers today note that when Hitler came to power in 1933, the German government began to strip Jews, as well as Roma and political opponents, of their German citizenship, paving the way for the confiscation of their property, their rights, and eventually their lives.
Trump’s social media post went on: “These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”
On Tuesday, lawmakers said the counterterrorism division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has opened an investigation into the six lawmakers who made a video reminding service members that they must refuse unlawful orders and that the lawmakers would stand behind them as they did so. Trump loyalists have turned their statement on its head, insisting that since Trump has never given an unlawful order, their video encouraged service members to disregard lawful orders and thus was “sedition” punishable by death.
Today, Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Hegseth told a Joint Special Operations commander overseeing an attack on a small vessel carrying 11 people on September 2 to “kill everybody.” A missile strike shattered the boat and set it afire, but two men survived. A second strike fulfilled Hegseth’s order. According to Horton and Nakashima, the commander, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, said “the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” In a report, the Joint Special Operations Command said the second strike was not to kill survivors, but to remove a navigation hazard.
Former military lawyer Todd Huntley, who advised special operations forces for seven years, told the Washington Post journalists that the strikes against civilians amount to murder because the U.S. is not at war, while even during wartime, killing those who cannot fight back is a war crime.
Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA), a Marine Corps veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said: “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.” Hegseth dismissed the story as “fake news.”
The administration justifies its strikes on the Venezuelan boats by claiming to fight “narcoterrorism,” but today Trump announced a full pardon for former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty last year by an American jury of conspiring to import 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. He was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. Trump announced the pardon on social media, writing “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”
Tonight, Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported that Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and the committee’s top Democrat, Jack Reed (D-RI), issued a statement saying: “The Committee is aware of recent news reports—and the Department of Defense’s initial response—regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. The Committee has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
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Notes:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/19/ukraine-peace-plan-trump-russia-witkoff
Foreign Office by Michael Weiss“He Must Have Got This From K.”Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images…Read more8 days ago · 397 likes · 39 comments · Foreign Officehttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/27/world/europe/europe-ukraine-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/us/politics/ukraine-russia-peace-talks-daniel-driscoll.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/top-trump-aide-coached-russians-214543842.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/25/trump-envoy-on-russia-ukraine-peace-deal
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/us/politics/witkoff-leaked-transcript-deference-russia.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/26/who-leaked-steve-witkoff-call-kremlin-trump-analysis
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/11/28/trump-thanksgiving-post-slur/87506151007/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/11/28/trump-thanksgiving-post-slur/87506151007/
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llglrd/2019670401/2019670401.pdf
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-inquiry-six-democrats-illegal-orders-video/#
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/world/americas/trump-pardon-honduras-hernandez.html
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-u-s-peace-business-ties-4db9b290
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November 27, 2025
November 26, 2025
November 26, 2025
Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday…but not for the reasons we generally remember.
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.
In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.
And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.
Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year, Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to wreck the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
In 1863, November’s last Thursday fell on the 26th. On November 19, Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He reached back to the Declaration of Independence for the principles on which he called for Americans to rebuild the severed nation:
”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln urged the crowd to take up the torch those who fought at Gettysburg had laid down. He called for them to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
And in 1865, at least, they won.
Happy Thanksgiving.
—
November 25, 2025
November 25, 2025
Last week, a poll conducted for Global EV Alliance, made up of electric vehicle driver associations around the world, found that 52% of Americans would avoid buying a Tesla for political reasons.
Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk pumped more than $290 million into electing President Donald J. Trump and supporting the Republicans in 2024. After taking office, Trump named Musk to head the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a group that slashed through government programs and fired civil servants.
In response, protesters organized “Tesla Takedowns,” gathering at Tesla dealerships to urge people not to buy the vehicles. The protests spread internationally. In March, Trump advertised Teslas on the South Lawn of the White House to try to help slumping sales, to no avail.
In September, consumers flexed their muscle over parent company Disney’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talk show on ABC after pressure from Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr over Kimmel’s comments following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. About three million subscribers canceled Disney+ in September, while Hulu, which Disney owns, lost 4.1 million. Monthly cancellations previously had averaged 1.2 million and 1.9 million, respectively. While not all of those cancellations could be chalked up to consumer anger over Kimmel’s suspension—Disney subscription prices went up at around the same time—Kimmel was back on the air in five days.
Every day, I am struck by all the ways in which we are reliving the 1890s.
In that era too, consumers organized, using their buying power to affect politics. As the first general secretary of the National Consumers League, Florence Kelley, put it: “To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have responsibility.”
After the Civil War, an economic boom in the North combined with the loss of young men in the war to make education more accessible to young white women. By 1870, girls made up the majority of high school graduates. Fewer than 2% of college-age Americans went to college; women made up 21% of that group. Away from the confines of home, these privileged young women studied social problems and the means of addressing them while they developed friendships with like-minded classmates.
In the mid-1880s, those women began to experiment with using their talents and newfound friendships to repair the nation’s social fabric that had been torn by urbanization and industrialization. To recreate a web of social responsibility in the growing industrial cities, young middle-class women moved into ethnic working-class neighborhoods to minister to the people living there. Jane Addams, who opened Chicago’s Hull-House with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, rejected the idea of a nation divided by haves and have-nots. She believed that all individuals were fundamentally interconnected. “Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal,” Addams later wrote.
The people who lived in these “settlement houses” dedicated themselves to filing down the sharp edges of industrialization, with its tenement housing, low wages, long hours, child labor, and disease, along with polluted air and water and unregulated food. They turned their education to addressing the immediate problems in front of them, collecting statistics to build a larger picture of the social costs of industrialization, and lobbying government officials and businessmen to improve the condition of workers, especially women and children.
They soon discovered a different lever for change.
In the midterm election of 1890, politicians recognized the power of women to swing the vote for or against a political party. When Republicans got shellacked, their leaders blamed women, who were increasingly the family shoppers, for urging their husbands to vote against the party that had forced through the McKinley Tariff of that year, raising tariff rates and thus raising consumer prices. Thomas Reed, the Republican speaker of the House, complained the party had been defeated by “the Shopping Woman.”
Historian Kathy Peiss notes that between 1885 and 1910, the six women’s magazines known as the “big six” were founded, including Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, and Good Housekeeping. By 1895, advertisements were strategically placed near recipes throughout the magazines, and brand names were scattered through their stories, a recognition of women’s role as shoppers.
Increasingly, reform-minded women were turning to women’s roles as consumers to reshape American industrialism. They came to believe that the “ultimate responsibility” for poor conditions “lodge[s] in the consumer.” Leveraging the power of consumption could force employers to pay higher wages, establish better conditions, and protect workers. In 1891, Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose brother Robert Gould Shaw had commanded Black soldiers in the Massachusetts 54th in the 1863 Second Battle of Fort Wagner, helped to form the Consumer’s League of the City of New York (CLCNY), patterned after a similar English organization, to rally consumers to support better conditions for the workers who made the goods they bought.
In 1899, Lowell and Jane Addams founded the National Consumers League, with Florence Kelley at its head. The organization worked to combat child labor and poor working conditions and, in an era when milk was commonly adulterated with chalk and formaldehyde and candies were decorated with lead paint, lobbied for government regulation of food and drugs.
Today, the relationship between consumption and reform has taken on heightened meaning after the Tesla and the Disney boycotts. The day after Thanksgiving is the start of the holiday shopping season, and like their predecessors of a century ago, reformers are focusing on consumers’ power to push back on the policies of the Trump administration, launching a campaign they call “We Ain’t Buying It.” “We aren’t just consumers; we’re community builders,” their website says. “We’re driving the change we want to see, and demanding respect.”
As Joy-Ann Reid put it in an Instagram video: “Dear retailers who’ve decided you don’t like diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you really love ICE and you have no problem with them busting into your establishments to drag people away: Here’s the thing. We ain’t buying it. I mean, for real, for real, we ain’t buyin’ it.”
She explained: “We’re gonna spend our money with businesses who actually respect our dollars, respect our communities, and respect our diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are going to buy from people who respect immigrants, who respect immigrants’ rights, and respect freedom and liberty. We are going to buy from establishments that respect our right to vote and our right to live in a free society. And if you ain’t that, we ain’t buying it.”
“Let’s show them our power,” she told listeners. “Let’s show them what we can do together.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/elon-musk-2024-election-spending-millions
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/trump-musk-tesla-white-house-showroom-buys-car-rcna195905
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/18/jimmy-kimmel-protest-disney-abc-burbank
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/business/media/disney-subscription-cancellations-kimmel.html
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/jimmy-kimmel-returns-late-night-disney-tuesday-1236525670/
https://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol1no1/peiss-text.html
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (The Macmillan Company, 1912), at: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/addams/hullhouse/hullhouse.html, p. 227.
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November 24, 2025
November 24, 2025
U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie of South Carolina today dismissed the indictments of former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that President Donald J. Trump’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid.
Trump had demanded the indictment of the two. When he was FBI director, Comey had refused to drop an investigation into Trump’s then–national security advisor Mike Flynn, who had lied to the FBI about his conversations with a Russian operative before Trump took office. James had successfully sued Trump, several of his children, and the Trump Organization for fraud, and when the interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Seibert, said there was not enough evidence to indict them, Trump forced him out of office and replaced him with Halligan, a former insurance lawyer and Trump aide.
Within days, Halligan obtained a grand jury indictment for Comey, charging him with lying to Congress, and another for James, charging her with alleged mortgage fraud. As David Kurtz points out in Talking Points Memo, the indictments were widely understood to be targeted prosecutions of those Trump considered enemies.
By law, after a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney leaves the job, the attorney general can appoint an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days. If the position still has not been filled, the right to make another interim appointment goes to the district court, which has sole authority over the position until the Senate confirms a president’s nominee. This provision prevents a president from making an end run around the Senate’s duty to advise and consent by making consecutive 120-day appointments.
The Trump administration attempted to thwart this law. Trump appointed Seibert the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on January 21, and as the 120-day deadline approached, he nominated Seibert for the position. The district judges voted unanimously to keep Siebert on as the interim U.S. attorney as his nomination proceeded. But then Siebert declined to prosecute Comey and James, and Trump forced him out, pushing Attorney General Pam Bondi to put Halligan into his place as a new interim appointment.
Today, Currie found that Halligan’s appointment violated not only the law, but also the appointment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which requires the president to obtain the “advice and consent of the Senate” for such appointments. That unlawful appointment means that all of Halligan’s actions undertaken as a U.S. attorney are invalid. Because she was the only prosecutor to sign off on the Comey and James prosecutions, they, too, are invalid.
Currie wrote that if the indictments were to stand, “the Government could send any private citizen off the street—attorney or not—into the grand jury room to secure an indictment so long as the Attorney General gives her approval after the fact. That cannot be the law.”
After the judge’s decision, Comey posted a video saying that while the case mattered to him personally, “it matters most because a message has to be sent that the president of the United States cannot use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies. I don’t care what your politics are. You have to see that as fundamentally un-American and a threat to the rule of law that keeps all of us free.” He called for Americans to “stand up and show the fools who would frighten us, who would divide us, that we’re made of stronger stuff, that we believe in the rule of law, that we believe in the importance of doing things by the law.”
Attorney General Bondi said the government will “be taking all available legal action, including an immediate appeal.”
Shut down by the courts, Trump is turning to military justice to enforce his will.
Since six lawmakers released a video last week reminding servicemembers that they must refuse to carry out unlawful orders, Trump and his loyalists have continued to insist that such a reminder is “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR… punishable by DEATH!”
Their argument appears to be that by reiterating the law, the lawmakers implied that Trump has issued unlawful orders and therefore that they made troops question their orders and thus directly attacked the chain of command. It’s a convoluted argument, one that administration officials are using to claim that the lawmakers’ reminder that troops must not obey an unlawful order is actually encouragement not to obey lawful orders.
Administration officials insist that the lawmakers’ video is an attack on Trump because all of his orders have been lawful, although lawyers, lawmakers, and military personnel have expressed concerns about the legality of the administration’s deadly strikes on civilians in small boats near Venezuela.
This morning, the administration escalated its attacks on the lawmakers. The social media account of the “Department of War” posted that the department is investigating Captain Mark Kelly, a retired Navy officer who is now a Democratic senator from Arizona and who participated in the video, after “serious allegations of misconduct.” It suggested that Kelly, a retired Navy officer, could be recalled to active duty “for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.”
Turning to military tribunals harks back to QAnon, a conspiracy theory that took off in 2017. It maintained Trump was leading a fight against an international ring of pedophiles that he would bring to justice through military tribunals. As recently as during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump called for those he perceives to be his enemies to be prosecuted in military tribunals, saying, for example, that former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) was “guilty of treason” because she participated in the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s social media page has been reposting QAnon sayings.
Attacking Kelly appeals to Trump’s base, but it was impetuous. As law professor John Pfaff noted: “There’s clearly no adult in the room to say ‘wait, maybe don’t go after the charismatic war hero turned literal astronaut who ran [for office] after his wife was a victim of political violence.’” On social media, a post circulated showing a picture of Kelly in his dress uniform juxtaposed with a photograph of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth guzzling from a bottle; the caption compared Kelly’s “shirt covered with medals” with Hegseth’s “shirt covered with booze.”
Kelly punched back. He posted on Facebook: “When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired—which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.
“In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.
“Secretary Hegseth’s tweet is the first I heard of this. I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death.
“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”
In a conversation with MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow, Kelly was less formal: “I’ve had a missile blow up next to my airplane,” he told her. “I’ve been…nearly shot down multiple times. I’ve flown a rocket ship into space four times, built by the lowest bidder, and my wife Gabby Giffords, meeting with her constituents, shot in the head. Six people killed around her. A horrific thing. She spent six months in the hospital. We know what political violence is, and we know what causes it, too…. The statements that Donald Trump made… incite others…. He should be careful with his words. But I’m not going to be silenced here…. I’m going to show up for work every day, support the Constitution, do my job, hold this administration accountable, hold this president accountable when he is out of line. That’s the responsibility of every U.S. senator and every member of Congress. He’s not going to silence us.”
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Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/20/nx-s1-5547837/us-attorney-virginia-resigns-letitia-james-probe
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/us/politics/erik-siebert-comey-letitia-james.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/24/halligan-dismissed-james-comey-cases-00667735
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/us/politics/trump-liz-cheney-treason-jail.html
https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-qanon.html
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November 23, 2025
November 23, 2025
“Do I understand correctly that there is now a dispute within the administration about whether this ‘peace plan’ was written by Russians or Americans?” foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum asked last night on social media.
Applebaum was referring to confusion over a 28-point plan for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine reported by Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios last week. After the plan was leaked, apparently to Ravid by Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who is under U.S. sanctions, Vice President J.D. Vance came out strongly in support of it.
But as scholar of strategic studies Phillips P. OBrien noted in Phillips’s Newsletter, once it became widely known that the plan was written by the Russians, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to back away from it, posting on social media on Wednesday that “[e]nding a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas. And achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict.”
And yet, by Friday, Trump said he expected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to sign onto the plan by Thanksgiving: next Thursday, November 27. Former senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool. Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests.”
Yesterday a group of senators, foreign affairs specialists gathered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the Halifax International Security Forum, told reporters they had spoken to Rubio about the plan. Senator Angus King (I-ME) said Rubio had told them that the document “was not the administration’s position” but rather “a wish list of the Russians.” Senator Mike Rounds (R-SC) said: “This administration was not responsible for this release in its current form.” He added: “I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” Rounds said. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan.”
But then a spokesperson for the State Department, Tommy Pigott, called the senators’ account of the origins of the plan “blatantly false,” and Rubio abruptly switched course, posting on social media that in fact the U.S. had written the plan.
Anton La Guardia, diplomatic editor at The Economist, posted: “State Department is backpedalling on Rubio’s backpedal. If for a moment you thought the grown-ups were back in charge, think again. We’re still in the circus. ‘Unbelievable,’ mutters one [of the] disbelieving senators.”
Later that day, Erin Banco and Gram Slattery of Reuters reported that the proposal had come out of a meeting in Miami between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Dmitriev, who leads one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds. They reported that senior officials in the State Department and on the National Security Council were not briefed about the plan.
This morning, Bill Kristol of The Bulwark reported rumors that Vice President J.D. Vance was “key to US embrace of Russia plan on Ukraine, Rubio (and even Trump) out of the loop.” He posted that relations between Vance and Rubio are “awful” and that Rubio did, in fact, tell the senators what they said he did.
Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, posted: “Foreign nations now have to deal with rival factions of the U.S. government who keep major policy initiatives secret from each other and some of which work with foreign powers as the succession battle for 2028 begins, is how one diplomat put it.”
The elections of 2026 and 2028 are clearly on Republicans’ minds as polls show Trump’s policies to be increasingly unpopular.
On Friday, Trump met at the White House with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Although Trump had previously called Mamdani a “communist lunatic” and a “stupid person” and had threatened to withhold federal funding from New York City if Mamdani won, the meeting was friendly. Trump, who has seemed warm and affable since snarling “Quiet, Piggy!” to a reporter on Air Force One on November 14, praised the mayor-elect and said he’d “feel very comfortable” living in New York City after Mamdani takes the reins.
Trump’s friendly banter with Mamdani appeared a way to acknowledge voters’ frustration with the economy. During his campaign, Mamdani promised to address those economic frustrations. Trump told reporters: “We agree on a lot more than I thought. I want him to do a great job, and we’ll help him do a great job.” This embrace of a politician MAGA Republicans had attacked as a communist left Trump’s supporters unsure how to respond.
On Friday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced she is resigning from Congress. Her last day will be January 5, 2026, days after she secures her congressional pension. In her four-page announcement, she maintained she was frustrated that those like her, who she said represent “the common American people,” cannot get their measures passed because “the Political Industrial Complex of both Political Parties” ignores them in favor of “[c]orporate and global interests.”
She blamed Trump for forcing her out of Congress, saying: “I have too much self respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms. And in turn, be expected to defend the President against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me.”
Greene appears to be shifting to fit into a post-Trump future. “When the common American people finally realize and understand that the Political Industrial Complex of both parties is ripping this country apart, that not one elected leader like me is able to stop Washington’s machine from gradually destroying our country, and instead the reality is that they, common Americans, The People, possess the real power over Washington,” she wrote, “then I’ll be here by their side to rebuild it.”
Another scandal coming from the Cabinet will not help the administration dig out from its cratering popularity.
Just after midnight Friday night, the former fiancé of the journalist who had a romantic relationship with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped another installment of his version of the saga. It included a graphic pornographic poem that would have ended a cabinet member’s career in any normal administration. The ex-fiancé said other poems he had found were even more explicit.
This revelation came the day after Kennedy acknowledged that he had personally told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change information on the CDC website to say the claim that vaccines do not cause autism is not “evidence-based.” As Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times notes, Kennedy admits that studies have shown no link between vaccines and autism, but he wanted the change because there are still other studies to be done. As Stolberg wrote, “He said he is not saying vaccines cause autism; he is simply saying there is no proof that they don’t.”
Kennedy is neither a doctor nor a scholar of public health, and Stolberg notes that “[i]t is highly unusual for a health secretary to personally order a change to scientific guidance.”
In order to get support for his cabinet nomination, Kennedy promised Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, that he would not remove from the CDC website a statement saying that vaccines do not cause autism. That statement is still at the top of the “Autism and Vaccines” page of the CDC website, but now it has an asterisk keyed to a footnote saying it had not been removed because of Kennedy’s promise to Cassidy, and the text of the page says that “studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
Today, CNN’s Jake Tapper said to Cassidy: “He lied to you.” Cassidy answered: “Well, first let me say, what is most important to the American people, speaking as a physician, vaccines are safe. As has been pointed out, it’s actually not disputed. It’s actually quite well proven that vaccines are not associated with autism. There’s a fringe out there that thinks so, but they’re quite a fringe. President Trump agrees that vaccines are safe.”
Cassidy tried to suggest that focusing on Kennedy’s lie was “titillating” but that Americans needed to move on. Tapper answered: “This isn’t about titillation. This is about the fact that you are the chairman of the health committee and you voted to confirm somebody that by all accounts from the medical and scientific community and his own family…is actually making America less healthy.”
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Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/19/ukraine-peace-plan-trump-russia-witkoff
Foreign Office by Michael Weiss“He Must Have Got This From K.”Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images…Read more3 days ago · 254 likes · 27 comments · Foreign Officehttps://okmagazine.com/p/robert-f-ken...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/us/politics/rfk-jr-cdc-vaccines-autism-website.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/11/23/trump-maga-congress-greene-gop/
Phillips’s NewsletterWeekend Update #160: The US Becomes A Mouthpiece To Pass On Putin's DemandsPhillips’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…Read morea day ago · 371 likes · 92 comments · Phillips P. OBrienhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/11/21/trump-mamdani-oval-office/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/21/epstein-mbs-khashoggi-inflation-quiet-piggy/
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