HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
HEATHER 12-30
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December 30, 2025
The hallmark of the first year of President Donald J. Trump’s second term has been the attempt of the president and his cronies to dismantle the constitutional system set up by the framers of that document when they established the United States of America. It’s not simply that they have broken the laws. They have acted as if the laws, and the Constitution that underpins them, don’t exist.
As soon as the 2024 election results were clear, billionaire Elon Musk, who had supported Trump’s campaign both through his purchase of Twitter—now X—and with $290 million in cash, posted on social media: “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” Latin for “New World Order.” Although he won with less than 50% of the vote, Trump announced that he had an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” Musk would head a new “Department of Government Efficiency” that Musk vowed would cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget.
Musk and his operatives muscled their way into government offices and gained access to computer systems. With strokes of a keyboard they eliminated jobs and programs, including, as Musk put it, feeding “into the wood chipper” most of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government agency aimed at combating disease and malnutrition around the globe. That dismantling has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, recently concluded that while the Department of Government Efficiency did not actually reduce spending, it did cut almost 10% of federal employees, a key goal of Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025.
And, crucially, it put operatives in virtually all government departments and agencies, where they gained access to privileged information about Americans, including citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants.
Musk and DOGE also established the idea that the unelected officials in the Trump administration could do whatever they wished, without regard to the laws or the Constitution. The Constitution, judicial precedent, and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act all make it very clear that the power of the purse belongs to Congress. As the elected representatives of the American people, only members of the House of Representatives and the Senate can determine how the nation’s money is spent. Then the president must “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Democrats objected to the administration’s dramatic usurpation of the power of Congress, but Republicans did not complain. Most backed the administration’s claims it was eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Although Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, meaning that Trump should have been able to get any legislation he wanted, he continued to try to get around the Constitution by declaring nine “emergencies” that would permit him to act without congressional oversight. This reliance on emergencies reflected the ideas of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings were followed by right-wing leaders, including billionaire Peter Thiel and the man who influenced him, Curtis Yarvin. Schmitt argued that power belongs to the leader who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law.
Trump asserted this view on August 26, claiming “the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in these cities—I can do it.” As now–Vice President J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there’s just power.”
Under these so-called emergencies, Trump launched a tariff war in April, taking from Congress a right the Constitution reserves to it alone. When lawmakers moved to challenge those tariffs, House Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), declared the rest of the session a single day with regard to legislation that could challenge Trump’s declaration of an emergency so that a required number of days could not pass before a vote to end that emergency.
With momentum still seeming to be behind Trump, Republicans delivered an omnibus law in July that put into practice the ideology Republicans had promised for a generation. The measure that Trump called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” extended the 2017 tax cuts that benefited primarily the wealthy and corporations while cutting Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and support for the purchase of healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace. By passing it under the terms of budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered, the Republicans pushed it through without any Democratic votes. In the Senate, three Republicans voted against the bill, requiring Vance to cast the deciding vote.
Meanwhile, administration policies put money into the pockets of the rich, especially Trump, who leveraged tariff discussions to win permissions to build golf courses, invested in cryptocurrency, and received donations to various projects from people with business before the government. When Congress tried to exercise its duty of oversight, administration officials treated the members with contempt, refusing to appear or declining to answer questions, talking over them, or insulting them.
But despite the administration’s attempt to act extraconstitutionally and outside the law, the law began to assert itself. Beginning in February 2024, long before the election, Democratic attorneys general had begun to write lawsuits challenging the executive orders and policies Trump’s appointees had boasted would be coming. Judges began to decide against the administration in those lawsuits at the same time that Americans vocally objected to the dramatic cuts to the civil service, the breaching of privacy laws by DOGE staffers, and the end of government services they had never imagined losing.
Then, in March, the government rendered more than 230 immigrants, mostly Venezuelans and nearly half with legal status in the U.S., to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador after a federal judge told them not to. Among those sent was Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García, whom a judge had ordered not be returned to El Salvador out of concern for his safety. The administration’s consistent refusal to bring Ábrego García back, despite the orders of a federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court, helped to focus anger at the administration.
The slow pace of the law inspired the American people to speak out against the administration. Protests had begun with “Tesla Takedowns” to weaken Musk, and they continued to grow as people watched their public services and government agencies dismantled. On April 5 a coalition of civil rights organizations, women’s rights’ groups, labor unions, and protesters participated in “Hands Off” rallies around the country.
Meanwhile, sweeping deportation raids illustrated that Trump’s promise to deport “the worst of the worst” criminal undocumented immigrants he insisted were raping and murdering U.S. citizens was a lie. Masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol were arresting foreign students who had spoken out against U.S. policy on Israel/Palestine and all the undocumented immigrants they could find. By definition, this meant they were grabbing people who were well integrated into communities. Few had been charged or convicted of crimes.
Trump’s 79th birthday fell on the same day as the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army—June 14—and he planned a military parade around that event in Washington, D.C. Protesters organized their own events that day, announcing they wanted “No Kings” in the United States of America. Trump’s popularity was dropping.
In June, Trump sent federalized National Guard troops to Los Angeles along with Marines, against the wishes of Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom, allegedly to protect federal officials and buildings from violence by those protesting deportation raids. In September, Trump deployed National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, and in October, to Chicago.
Support for Trump’s policies continued to drop. And then, over Labor Day weekend, Trump disappeared for several days. Whatever had happened passed, but the president’s deteriorating health, both physical and mental, was an increasingly major story.
The momentum that had appeared to carry the Trump administration forward had stopped. In October, Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich highlighted that Yarvin thought nothing had gone far enough or fast enough and feared that the “second Trump revolution…is failing. It is failing because it deserves to fail. It is failing because it spends all its time patting itself on the back. It is failing because its true mission, which neither it nor (still less) its supporters understand, is still as far beyond its reach as algebra is beyond a cat.”
On Saturday, October 18, more than seven million people took to the streets in another “No Kings” day to demonstrate their opposition to the Trump administration. On Monday, October 20, Trump began to bulldoze the East Wing of the White House, the People’s House.
With disapproval of the president at near-historic levels, voters in the November elections strongly backed Democrats. They elected Democratic governors in Virginia and New Jersey by double-digit margins, with nearly every district moving away from the Republicans. Voters in New York City and Miami elected Democratic mayors, Miami for the first time in nearly 30 years. They broke Republican supermajorities in the Iowa and Mississippi state senates and, over the entire course of 2025, flipped 21% of the Republican-held seats on ballots during the year.
Meanwhile, the refusal of Attorney General Pam Bondi to release the Epstein files—materials from the FBI’s investigation into the activities of sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein—had created significant pressure on Congress to force the administration’s hand. Many MAGA Republicans had backed Trump in 2024 because of what they thought was a promise to release those files, and yet House speaker Johnson refused to allow the House to vote on a measure requiring their release.
A bipartisan team of representatives launched a discharge petition to bring such a measure to a vote, and they overrode his objection. On November 19, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, requiring the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files to the public no later than December 19. The vote was overwhelming—a significant break of Republicans from Trump.
The administration failed to meet that legal deadline. But even the material that the Department of Justice has released and that has emerged from additional reporting since then offers evidence that Trump was more deeply involved with Epstein and his activities than he has admitted. Just tonight, the Wall Street Journal revealed that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa sent young women to perform massages, manicures, and spa services at Epstein’s nearby house, where Epstein would expose himself and pressure them for sex, and that Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell used the spa to recruit women to give Epstein massages.
On December 22 a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to file a plan to return the men it sent to CECOT or to hold hearings to permit them to challenge their detention, insisting they have the right to due process.
On December 23 the Supreme Court issued a preliminary rejection of Trump’s justification for deploying National Guard troops in Illinois.
As we reach the end of 2025, it appears the law is catching up to an administration that began the year by acting as if the law and the Constitution didn’t exist.
More than that, though, over the course of 2025, the administration’s refusal to recognize the tenets of American democracy has roused the American people to defend that democracy.
It appears that as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when British colonists on the North American continent took the radical step of rejecting the idea not just of King George III but of all kings, and launched the experiment of government based on the rule of law created by the people themselves, the American people are reclaiming that history.
Tuesday, December 30, 2025
Shame on Karoline Leavitt
Shame on Karoline Leavitt
A mother, a mouthpiece, and the choice to protect a predator
Shame on Karoline Leavitt.
Shame on her as a mother. Shame on her as a woman. Shame on her as a human being—someone who has cradled a child in her arms, who knows the trembling fragility of small bodies, the trust in wide, searching eyes. And yet she wakes up each morning and chooses, deliberately, to lie for a man who has hurt women and girls, who has mocked their pain, who has built his empire on cruelty and dares the world to look away.
She shields him, not out of ignorance, but out of calculation, out of allegiance, out of something colder than indifference. She knows. She knows what hands can do, what words can wound, what silence can destroy. And still, she stands beside him, mouth tight, eyes hard, betraying not just strangers, but every mother, every daughter, every child who ever looked to an adult for safety. The stench of her complicity is suffocating. The sound of her silence is a scream.
Just days ago, she announced that she’s pregnant with her second child. A baby girl.
And ever since I heard that, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
The thought keeps looping, tightening, pressing. How does a woman carry a baby girl into this world—feel her growing, feel her shift under her ribs, imagine her face and her softness and her future—and still wake up every morning prepared to lie for a man like this? How do you hold that contradiction in your body and not break?
I’m not asking this as a pundit or a partisan or someone playing politics from a distance. I’m asking it as a mother, from the place in my body where protection settled and never left. From the instinct that snaps you awake in the dark just to make sure your child is still breathing, that hums quietly under everything you do. Once that instinct takes hold, it rearranges you. It makes lying feel wrong in your bones. It makes pretending impossible. It won’t let you look away, even when looking hurts.
And that’s why I can’t look at her without disgust.
I’ve wanted to be a mom for as long as I can remember, which probably sounds a little strange coming from someone who never had a mother of her own. I didn’t grow up wrapped in reliable tenderness—no steady arms to sink into, no affection I could trust would still be there in the morning. Instead, I learned early how to stay alert, how to read a room, how to sense when the air was about to change before anyone said a word. Comfort wasn’t promised; it was something I quietly learned to live without.
I didn’t know what it felt like to be soothed by a mother, to be softened by her presence, to have safety modeled in a way that let your nervous system finally unclench. What I knew instead was vigilance. Waiting. Anticipating. Making myself smaller so I wouldn’t need too much. And somewhere inside all of that, something else took root.
Even as a kid, long before I could’ve explained any of this, I carried a steady pull toward being the person who stayed, the person who didn’t disappear when things got hard or inconvenient or emotionally messy. I didn’t imagine motherhood as perfection or redemption. I felt it as interruption—as the chance to stop something painful midstream and decide it wouldn’t keep passing through me. I wanted to be the place where need wasn’t dangerous, where mistakes didn’t mean abandonment, where someone could rest without bracing.
I was very fortunate in one real way. I had an amazing father. He loved us fiercely. He showed up. He took exquisite care of us. I’m endlessly grateful for that. But he wasn’t my mother, and there are forms of nurture a father can’t approximate, no matter how devoted he is. There are ways tenderness settles into a child that only come from a mother’s presence—or her absence. That absence lived in me.
Motherhood didn’t soften me. It sharpened me. It honed my understanding of right and wrong until the edges were clean and unmistakable, stripped away the gray areas people retreat to when they don’t want to choose. It made lies louder, excuses thinner, euphemisms intolerable. It trained my attention on what matters at the deepest level. It taught me how narrow the distance is between safety and harm, how often danger arrives polished and persuasive, wearing charm or authority like a disguise, and how much devastation is caused not by monsters in the dark but by ordinary adults who decide that doing nothing is easier.
I have two kids. A son who’s sixteen now, watching everything even when he pretends not to. And a daughter who’s twelve, my youngest, still close enough to that tender edge where trust comes easily, where she assumes adults mean what they say and will do what’s right. Loving them rearranged my entire moral landscape. Certain compromises stopped being possible. Certain excuses stopped making sense.
When I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, I cried so hard during the ultrasound that the tech stopped and asked if I was going to be okay. I already knew how to love a child. I already knew how to protect one. What I didn’t know was how to be a mother to a girl, because I’d never known what it felt like to have one. I was terrified and overwhelmed with joy at the same time—scared of failing her at something I’d never been taught, and desperate to learn.
She came into this world with force. The day before my C-section, she flipped herself double-foot down like she already had opinions and no interest in waiting politely. That felt right. I’m raising her to be fierce and empathetic, kind and fearless, honest and human. I’m raising my son to understand that strength without accountability is hollow, that silence is a choice, that looking away doesn’t make you innocent. I’m raising them both to know the difference between what’s easy and what’s right.
And that’s why, when I look at Karoline Leavitt, I feel nothing but revulsion.
She knows. Oh, she knows exactly who Donald Trump is—a man who boasted, with the sick delight of the untouchable, that he could grab women by the vagina at will, because he was a star and that made him a god. She remembers his laughter—sharp, ugly—echoing across the airwaves as he dismissed it all as “locker room talk,” as if sexual assault were harmless banter, as if violation itself were just another joke for men to share, nothing more than a punchline carved into the flesh of women. She knows—don’t you dare doubt it—that this wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was a confession, clear and deliberate, cast into the world without consequence.
She knows that women—brave, battered, trembling—came forward despite the molten cost. She knows what they risked, what it took to face a country hungry to tear them down. She knows a jury listened and heard—yes, heard—and found him liable for sexual abuse. That cannot be erased. She knows that after verdict and verdict, after truth ran bloody in the court, she dared to stand, lips pursed with self-righteousness, and tell the world: Do not believe women. Do not believe survivors. She wielded her voice—her shiny, borrowed authority—to crush the wounded, to shield the predator and keep his secrets safe.
She knows Trump’s name is dragged, again and again, through the filth and shadows beside Jeffrey Epstein—not by accident, not in passing, but day after day, year after year, in the same glittering rooms and on the same private planes with a man who traded children like cattle, who raped the young without pause. She knows—the truth howls in the wind—that credible allegations say Trump raped teenage girls. This isn’t rumor or partisan poison; it is a litany, a record, a procession of women and girls, standing one after another, their pain made public, only to be silenced, spat upon, told to swallow their screaming and disappear.
And still, knowing all of it—knowing the full, stinking scope of his violence, knowing she is carrying a baby girl—she lies. She shields. She lifts the shield to protect a man who destroys women, even as she dares to claim she guards the innocent. She has chosen. She has thrown her lot in with power, with corruption, with the monster himself—and in doing so, she has set flame to the future of every girl she pretends to serve.
Because she knows. She fucking knows. And she does it anyway.
They love to say they protect children. They say it loudly, sanctimoniously. And then they protect predators. They let children starve. They slash aid. They gut funding for pediatric cancer research while bragging about ballrooms and marble and chandeliers. They wrap cruelty in moral language and dare anyone to challenge them. They are not pro-life. That’s a lie.
She won’t disappear—though I suspect this pregnancy will be her soft exit, the cleanest way offstage without ever having to answer for what she’s done. A maternity leave that quietly becomes an escape hatch. A pause that turns into absolution. And then the rebrand will come. She’ll bleach the record, soften the edges, show up somewhere familiar and forgiving—probably on Fox—introduced as reasonable, maternal, patriotic. Just like Kayleigh McEnany. People will eat it up. They always do. They’ll call her devout. They’ll call her wholesome. They’ll pretend none of the damage ever happened.
But she won’t outrun her truth forever.
History is full of women like her.
Women who didn’t just stand near power, but made it palatable. Women who brushed blood off the lapels, who smiled for the cameras, who told the world to calm down, that you were imagining things, that the man in charge wasn’t that bad, that the cruelty had context, that the victims were exaggerating. Women who didn’t pull the trigger but made sure the trigger stayed clean, polished, respectable.
There was Leni Riefenstahl, who wrapped Hitler in light and myth and pageantry and spent the rest of her life pretending she’d only been an artist. There was Jiang Qing, who didn’t just enable Mao’s terror but helped choreograph it. There was Elena Ceaușescu, who ruled alongside her husband while the country starved. There was Imelda Marcos, who smiled in pearls while prisons filled and bodies disappeared.
These women didn’t wield knives. They softened the blade. They gave authoritarianism a human face. They told the world everything was normal while the damage spread quietly, efficiently, permanently.
I hope Karoline Leavitt’s baby girl is healthy. I hope she grows up believed, protected, and safe. I mean that.
But holding that hope doesn’t erase what her mother chose. Because history doesn’t forget women like her.
It records who knew better and chose power anyway. It records who stood guard over predators and called it loyalty. It records the lies, the silences, the moments when saying no would’ve cost something—and who decided instead that the cost belonged to someone else.
One day, her daughter will ask where her mother stood.
And the answer will already be written.
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