HEATHER COX RICHARDSON 12-8

 

December 8, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 09, 2025

Last Wednesday, December 3, a reporter asked President Donald J. Trump if he would release the video of the September 2 strike on a small boat off the coast of Venezuela that killed two survivors of a previous strike that had split their boat, capsized it, and set it on fire. He answered: “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.”

Today, just five days later, a reporter began to ask Trump a question, beginning with the words: “You said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2nd off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegseth announced that….” Trump interrupted her. “I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that.” Turning slightly to make a side comment to someone else, he said: “This is ABC fake news.”

As G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers estimates that 56.1% of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president while only 39.7% approve, and as his agenda appears more unpopular by the day, Trump and his loyalists appear to be trying to cement his power over the United States of America.

On Sunday, Trump appeared to pressure the Supreme Court to let his tariffs stand, despite the fact that the Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to regulate tariffs. Trump’s justification for seizing the power to impose them is the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which permits a president to regulate financial transactions after declaring a national emergency. Trump declared a national economic emergency in April before launching his tariff war.

Observers expect the Supreme Court to hand down a decision about the constitutionality of Trump’s tariffs later this week, and the justices’ questioning during oral arguments suggests they are not inclined to accept Trump’s assumption of such dramatic economic power over the U.S.

Last night, on social media, Trump tried to position tariffs as central to national security, an area where the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court have tended to uphold the president’s authority. He posted, “While the United States has other methods of charging TARIFFS against foreign countries, many of whom have, for YEARS, TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF OUR NATION, the current method of Tariffing before the United States Supreme Court is far more DIRECT, LESS CUMBERSOME, and MUCH FASTER, all ingredients necessary for A STRONG AND DECISIVE NATIONAL SECURITY RESULT. SPEED, POWER, AND CERTAINTY ARE, AT ALL TIMES, IMPORTANT FACTORS IN GETTING THE JOB DONE IN A LASTING AND VICTORIOUS MANNER.”

Trump continued: “I have settled 8 Wars in 10 months because of the rights clearly given to the President of the United States. If countries didn’t think these rights existed, they would have said so, LOUD AND CLEAR! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Last Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC’s Squawk Box that the administration believes it can continue its tariff agenda using different laws even if the Supreme Court strikes down its current policy.

Trump’s tariffs have hit farmers particularly hard, making imported goods like machinery and fertilizer more expensive while destroying the markets for products like corn, soybeans, and wheat to create what economists estimate could be losses of $44 billion in net cash income for farmers from their 2025–2026 crops.

Today Trump announced the administration intends to give farmers one-time payments totalling $12 billion. At an event at the White House, Trump told reporters: “[W]e love our farmers. And as you know, the farmers like me, because, you know, based on, based on voting trends, you could call it voting trends or anything else, but they’re great people.”

Utah County Democratic Party chair Darin Self commented: “The President of the United States unilaterally levied a tax on all of us and is redistributing our taxes to a core segment of his supporters.” “A bailout is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” corn and soybean farmer John Bartman said on a press call for the Democratic National Committee in mid-October. “Government bailouts do not make up for our loss of income. We don’t want a bailout. We want markets for our crops. We want to be able to work hard every year and enjoy the fruits of our labor and know that we did it on our own.”

Administration officials are calling the program the “Farm Bridge Assistance” program, saying it is designed to help farmers until Trump’s economic policies become successful, a promise Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins echoed later in the day when she told Larry Kudlow of the Fox News Channel: “The relief is coming…. It really is a golden age just right around the corner.”

But Trump spent $28 billion bailing out farmers during his first term, during his first trade war with China, without creating a “golden age,” and Matt Grossman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the administration has announced it will not publish an already-delayed October report on wholesale-price inflation, saying it will roll those figures into another delayed report due in November and release them in mid-January. It’s probably safe to assume those numbers will not tell a story the administration likes.

The right-wing justices on the Supreme Court might refuse to support Trump’s bid to take control of the country’s economic system, but in arguments today they appeared poised to give him the power to take control of the modern American government by stacking the independent agencies that do much of the government’s work with officials loyal to him.

In March, Trump fired the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. Since 1935, the Supreme Court has said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Although Trump himself initially appointed Slaughter, he claimed he fired her because her continued service on the independent commission was “inconsistent with [the] Administration’s priorities” and that he had the right to do so under the authority granted to him by Article II of the Constitution despite the fact Congress set up the position in such a way that it would be shielded from presidential politics.

This argument is an attempt to establish the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory the right wing has pushed since the 1980s, when it began to distrust the will of voters as they expressed it through Congress, and thus tried to find ways to assert the power of the president and reduce the power of Congress.

The theory of the unitary executive says that since the president is the head of one of the three independent branches of government—those are the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch—he has sole authority over the executive branch and cannot be reined in by the other two branches. Trump has leaned into this idea since 2019, when he told attendees at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit being held in Washington, D.C.: “I have an Article II, where I have…the right to do whatever I want as president.”

The Supreme Court’s 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision supported Trump’s radical reading of the powers of the president when it took the radical position that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed in the course of official presidential duties. In his second term, Trump has worked to fit his power grabs within the contours of that decision. Now the Supreme Court appears primed to hand him another win by finding the president has complete control over the officers in the executive branch, including the independent agencies established by Congress but which Congress has been placing in the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington.

Representing the government, Solicitor General John Sauer told the court that the president must be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that this political destruction of the independent agencies Congress had established to provide nonpartisan expertise on issues like how to regulate pollutants would hurt the country. “[H]aving a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States,” she said.

Law professor Deborah Pearlstein wrote: “It is really, really hard to get your head around the raw hubris of the majority. They really will be destabilizing the operating structure of the entire U.S. government. Why? Because they believe they have a better idea about how the past century should’ve been done.”

The court should decide the case in June.

But there are signs that Republican lawmakers are finally joining the Democrats to push back against Trump’s quest for power. CNN’s Natasha Bertrand reports that tomorrow, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, will brief the Gang of Eight, presumably on the military strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, especially the strike of September 2. The Gang of Eight is made up of the leaders from both parties in both chambers of Congress, and the chair and ranking member of each chamber’s intelligence committees.

Bertrand also reports that the head of U.S. Southern Command Admiral Alvin Holsey, who will retire two years ahead of schedule on December 12 after disagreements with Hegseth over the strikes, will meet virtually with members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees.

Lawmakers will be voting this week on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that lays out priorities and funding authorization for the Defense Department, funding that is then appropriated in different legislation. When the lawmakers released their final version of the bill on Sunday, they had put into it a measure to withhold 25% of Hegseth’s travel budget until the Defense Department hands over the “unedited video of strikes conducted against designated terrorist organizations in the area of responsibility of the United States Southern Command” to the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

—

PISSANT PATEL

 

ALL IN FAVOR

 

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

If Your Customers Aren’t Brand Ambassadors, You’re Doing It Wrong

As a new business builder, you learn sometimes that it’s not just your competition that stands in your way, but your own customers and their agendas.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

Dec 9, 2025

 

Many years ago, when I was starting my first business helping insurance companies do a better and more accurate job of settling their vehicle loss claims, we began to acquire national brand-name clients. Initially, we would deal only with their local offices or branches, either as a pilot project or because other parts, locations and divisions of the same companies were handled by different managers or administrators. The plan was “land and expand” and we were anxious to grow. But the insurance industry is composed of a million different fiefdoms.  

When you’re an entrepreneur trying to expand your revenues, especially once you’ve demonstrated the real economic value and operational benefits of your products and service, you want to go after the biggest volume opportunities within the given organization. We started our company in Illinois working with State Farm and Allstate, but we knew from the beginning that the home run volume states were California, Texas, and Florida. New York and New Jersey also had great volumes, but they were hyper-regulated and rife with fraud problems. Even back in the 80s when we started, there were only a dozen or so giant insurers that mattered, and everyone knew who they were. State Farm and Allstate were among the top five by any measure, and their claims, volumes and customers were matters of public record. They were the biggest fish in the pond, and you always want to fish where the fish are. If fishing were easy, they’d call it catching.  

In our case, we were delivering—speeding up claims’ operations, eliminating adjuster errors and fraud, and, most importantly, saving the companies serious dollars on each and every claim. Once we started to process large claim volumes, the savings were so substantial that the insurers were actually worried about negative media attention and asked us to change the terminology on our monthly results reports from “savings” to “variances” so it wouldn’t appear to an outside reader that they were shorting their insureds and claimants by settling their claims for less than they were entitled to receive. But by every measurement, using our service was a win-win (more accurate settlements completed more quickly) and we found local supporters and sponsors in all of our customers. We were, however, in for a rude awakening. 
 
We assumed that our local champions would be interested in and excited about our plans to expand to their other offices across the country in the major markets. Expanding the financial benefits we were delivering locally to some of their largest offices would create even larger and more dramatic savings and other efficiencies for their firms. But they weren’t remotely interested in anything other than expanding within their own areas of responsibility and benefiting their own bottom lines. Their bonuses and promotions depend on the results in their own regions and on their own turf. Plus, they loved the service and attention they were getting and didn’t want that diluted by our focusing on our expansion elsewhere. And they made it very clear that going over their heads to pitch the decision makers at the corporate level would be really bad news for us.  
 
So, it was all about Decatur and forget about Dallas. Peoria was fine with them, but Pasadena was a hard pass. As a new business builder, you learn sometimes that it’s not just your competition that stands in your way, but often it’s your own customers and their own agendas as well. It’s easy to find people who will say “no” but difficult to figure out who within any given organization can say “yes.” Our champions often turned out to have cotton in their mouths when their peers from other regions called for references.
 
I encountered another somewhat less obnoxious, but no less costly, version of the problem where the left hand had no clue what the right hand was doing when we worked with a company starting in 2015 called Knowledge Hound that built systems to help large organizations manage and keep track of their own information. CPG companies in particular did countless customer surveys and focus groups over the years and literally didn’t know that some group, division, client or other partner had spent substantial sums of money on research like this and then buried the results in the bottom of someone’s drawer never to be seen again. It wasn’t deceptive; it was just that the various players didn’t understand the immense value that even older behavioral data and time-lapse results could have for ongoing and new projects and products. These businesses didn’t know how to find and employ expensive and important information within their own organizations or how to bridge the data gaps and silos that existed in their own companies.  

It’s going to be very interesting to see how well and how quickly A.I. tools are going to address and remedy this particular kind of problem. It should be one of the most appropriate and easily implemented applications, but the businesses are going to have to understand the critical need to share data and to build small language models of their own rather than getting sucked into costly attempts to boil the ocean with LLMs.
 
Smart companies don’t silo or sequester their information assets; they share them broadly for the greater good. Spreading the word – like lighting one candle from another – doesn’t diminish the first, it just doubles the illumination for all. 

Kushner and Saudis back hostile takeover of Hollywood giant

 

Kushner and Saudis back hostile takeover of Hollywood giant

Jared Kushner is funneling $24 billion from Middle Eastern governments to back a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery—all while advising President Trump on foreign policy.

Judd Legum

, 

Rebecca Crosby

, and 

Noel Sims

Dec 09, 2025

 

On Monday morning, Paramount announced a $77.9 billion hostile takeover offer of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), an American media conglomerate that owns an iconic movie studio, HBO, and other news and entertainment properties. The offer is meant to upend Netflix’s deal to purchase WBD for $72 billion, which WBD accepted last Friday.

Paramount’s press release announcing the offer says that the $40 billion in equity financing will be “backstopped by Ellison Family and RedBird Capital.” The CEO of Paramount is David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the second-wealthiest person in the world. RedBird Capital is an investment fund based in New York. (The rest of the cash for the purchase will be raised as debt from American banks.)

What is not mentioned in the press release is that while the equity financing is “backstopped” by American individuals and entities, the majority of the equity financing — $24 billion — comes from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. That fact is buried on page 42 of a separate SEC filing.

$24 billion is a massive investment by foreign governments on Paramount’s behalf. To put it in perspective, the current value of Paramount is just $15 billion.

Also participating in the deal is Affinity Partners, the private equity firm run by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nearly all of Affinity Partners’ assets come from the same sovereign wealth funds bankrolling the proposed Paramount takeover of WBD. Kushner collects tens of millions in fees from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries annually.

Kushner’s involvement in the deal highlights the ongoing legal and ethical problems with his dual role. On the one hand, Kushner is operating as a high-ranking official representing the Trump administration in the most sensitive foreign policy matters. On the other hand, he is being paid by and partnering with Middle Eastern governments as they seek to expand their political, economic, and cultural interests.

Any acquisition of WBD requires the approval of multiple federal agencies. On Sunday, the day before Paramount’s hostile takeover bid was announced, Trump warned that Netflix’s planned acquisition “could be a problem“ because the combined company would have too much market share. It was a somewhat surprising comment from a president who has not made antitrust a central issue of his presidency. Trump also emphasized that while he would consult “some economists” he would also personally “be involved” in the decision.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s CEO, reportedly “wooed Trump“ at the White House in advance of the company’s WBD offer. Netflix agreed to pay WBD $5.7 billion if the deal did not receive regulatory approval, one of the largest breakup fees ever. This reflected Netflix’s confidence that the deal would win Trump administration approval — at least before Kushner became involved.

A reporter asked Trump on Monday if Kushner’s involvement with Paramount’s deal could influence his views. “I don’t know,” Trump responded. “I’ve never spoken with him about it.”

Paramount is willing to conform to Trump’s ideological agenda

Trump may be more amenable to Paramount’s bid for WBD, because Paramount has a history of bowing to Trump’s political demands, especially since David Ellison became CEO in August.

In September, CBS News announced that it hired a Trump loyalist, Kenneth R. Weinstein, to “receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS” as the company’s new ombudsman. Paramount had promised to create the job to secure approval for its merger with Skydance. Weinstein had no experience with producing or overseeing news coverage and previously was the president of the Hudson Institute, a right-wing think tank. Weinstein has an extensive record of praising Trump, and in July 2024, Weinstein donated $20,000 to a committee supporting Trump’s campaign.

In October, Paramount announced that it was hiring anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News and purchasing Weiss’ The Free Press for a reported $150 million. Weiss, a former New York Times opinion editor and writer, had no experience in broadcast news. In 2021, Weiss founded The Free Press, a right-leaning publication that often criticizes what it deems the “woke” left and efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). A Popular Information review of The Free Press’ articles found that it repeatedly distorted the truth in order to conform to a right-wing ideological agenda.

Larry Ellison is also a close ally of Trump. In 2020, he held a “six-figure-per-person campaign fundraiser” for the president at his California estate, where guests could pay $100,000 to golf and take a photo with Trump or $250,000 to “also participate in a round-table discussion.” He has also dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, sat in on a transition meeting at Mar-a-Lago, and has reportedly met with Trump frequently this year.

The foreign ownership problem

Having foreign governments own such a large stake in a company like WBD — which has sensitive financial information about millions of Americans — creates significant regulatory uncertainty. Such transactions frequently require an additional layer of approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).

In the SEC filing regarding the offer, Paramount claims that it has structured the deal to be outside of CFIUS’s jurisdiction:

Our other outside financing partners (the Public Investment Fund (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), L’imad Holding Company PJSC (Abu Dhabi), Qatar Investment Authority (Qatar) and Affinity Partners (Jared Kushner)) have agreed to forgo any governance rights – including board representation – associated with their non-voting equity investments. Accordingly, the Transaction will not be within CFIUS’s jurisdiction.

It is telling that Affinity Partners, a U.S. company owned by an American, is lumped into this group. Paramount is tacitly acknowledging that Kushner is using Affinity Partners as a vehicle for foreign influence.

But Paramount’s claim that CFIUS no longer has jurisdiction over the deal is false. A company cannot extinguish concerns about foreign ownership simply by nominally giving up governance rights. There are many other ways that entities providing $24 billion in equity investment can influence the operations of a company.

That’s why CFIUS has jurisdiction to investigate the deal between Paramount and WBD to determine what influence the sovereign wealth funds have and whether that influence raises national security concerns.

The creative and economic concerns about Netflix’s takeover bid

Netflix’s bid to buy WBD is also controversial.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised anti-trust concerns about the deal. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), who leads a Senate subcommittee on antitrust, said on X that the deal raised “a lot of antitrust red flags” and that he would hold “an intense antitrust hearing.” Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said that the deal “looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare.” If Netflix were to buy WBD, it would own two of the top three largest streaming services, Netflix and HBO Max. This market power could allow Netflix to raise prices for its subscription services, which are already increasing rapidly.

The Writers Guild of America said the Netflix deal would “eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers, and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers.”

Another issue is the impact that the Netflix purchase could have on movie theaters. Netflix typically does not show its movies in theaters. Netflix’s CEO has said that declines in box office sales show that going to the movie theater is “an outmoded idea” and consumers would prefer to watch movies at home. With WBD films making up roughly a quarter of box office sales in North America, a theater-owner trade group said “the negative impact of this acquisition will impact theaters from the biggest circuits to one-screen independents.” Netflix has said that it would continue showing WBD movies in theaters, although this was met with skepticism from many in the industry.

 

TRUMP LIES ABOUT EVERYTHING - THE HOAXSTER

 

 

  

EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR

 

Garbage, Grievance, and the Gospel of Cruelty

 

Garbage, Grievance, and the Gospel of Cruelty Enduring the bully-in-chief. Again. JoJoFromJerz Dec 8     I’ve spent my whole life learning the language of bullies. Not from books or movies, but from the way my small body learned to brace before my mind even understood the danger. From the way a room could shift, sharpen, turn hostile without a single word spoken. Bullies raised me, shaped me, tried to script my story before I ever got the chance to write it myself. Their fingerprints are pressed into parts of me I’ve spent decades trying to soften. And a few days ago, Trump did what he always does — bullied, demeaned, dehumanized — but this time it hit a place in me I thought had finally gone still. Harsher. Deeper. Like someone pressed a thumb into an old bruise that never fully faded. He spat out two cruelties without blinking — the R-word degrading jab tossed off like a bored reflex, and then, half-asleep in that cabinet room, he still found the energy to call Somalis in America “garbage.” It was the degrading jab that stung first, but it was “garbage” that lodged under my ribs. The way he said it. The way his whole cabinet pounded on the table like rabid animals, cheering as he called American citizens garbage. Mothers. Fathers. Kids who came here chasing the promise this country claims to offer. The sound of that room erupting in approval echoed something I’ve spent a lifetime trying to unlearn. Maybe it landed harder yesterday because it was a Sunday in December — a gray, quiet day when everything in the air felt reflective, and everything inside me felt a little more exposed, a little more tender. Or maybe it’s because my dad came here as a teenager from Lebanon with skin so dark people treated him like he didn’t belong in the country he was desperate to build a life in. It didn’t harden him though. He spent fifty years working for our Department of Defense. He loved this country. He believed in it. He instilled that love and belief in me. But Donald Trump, that evil piece of shit, would probably call him “garbage.” Or maybe it landed so hard because all week I’d watched clip after clip of human beings being dragged out of cars and homes and workplaces — pushed face-first into pavement, pinned, beaten, terrorized by masked men performing his cruelty with their own hands. That kind of brutality doesn’t rinse off. It settles into the part of your spirit where fear and fury and grief knot together. And you start asking yourself how much more a country can absorb before something inside us snaps. And like always, my first responders came roaring up — the jokes, the mocking, the fury disguised as humor because sometimes humor is the only shield I’ve got left. They show up fast, performing triage on the softest parts of me. They’re my armor. They’re the part of me that refuses to let anyone see that I’m hurting. But underneath all that noise — the sarcasm, the sharp edges, the reflex to make pain look like a joke — something quieter was stirring. The deeper ache, the one born in childhood, the one literally etched into my face by the point of a heel at four years old, the one shaped later by seven years spent kneeling beside autistic preschoolers whose humanity deserved reverence, not ridicule… that ache simply waited. Watching. Holding its breath. If I’m being honest, I was crying when I wrote this yesterday. Full-on ugly crying, the kind that blurs the screen and turns every sentence into a guess. It hit me all at once, this wave I’d been trying to outrun. I realized I’d spent the whole week dodging my own reaction to his cruelty — cracking jokes, writing satire, pretending the sting hadn’t reached me. But it had. Deeply. Trauma doesn’t wait until it’s convenient. It arrives when your guard is down, touches the oldest parts of you, and reminds you that healing is never a straight line. Yesterday, I faced it. I let myself cry. I wrote through it. And then I stepped outside and put up my Christmas lights because I needed something warm and steady to tether myself to. Something bright and human and steady. Something that reminded me there’s still light, even on days like that one when everything feels too dark. Because the truth is, bullies have been the recurring architecture of my life. They showed up in classrooms and living rooms, in hallways and courtrooms, in the quiet places where I learned to shrink and the loud ones where I learned to fight. I’ve spent years unlearning the lies they taught me about myself. And I know I’m not alone. So many of you reading this feel that same tightening in your chest when cruelty enters the room. You feel the old bruise wake up. You feel your breath shorten. You’re not imagining it. You’re not weak. You’re not alone. Bullies leave fingerprints time can’t fully lift. And here we are again, enduring a bully who thrives on the harm he inflicts. Every day brings a new target, a new wound, a new attempt to turn living, breathing human beings into objects for ridicule or rage. It’s trauma on top of trauma. It’s a wound reopened every morning. The heaviness isn’t imagined. It’s lived. And by the time you read this, he’ll have already inflicted something new — another blow, another vile insult, another round of state-sanctioned bullying — because that’s the rhythm of life under a man who wakes up every day searching for fresh ways to wound. It sucks living this way. It’s hard. But Nietzsche was right — what doesn’t kill you does make you stronger. Except for bears. Bears will kill you. That part isn’t Nietzsche. That’s just… well… bears. But the joke isn’t enough anymore. Not yesterday. Not today. Because the strength he forces us to build is a strength we never asked for. Maybe it’s the cold. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s the headlines that keep getting darker. Or maybe — let’s be honest — it’s because the evil, idiot, fat-face felon, traitor rapist who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and unleashed his basement-dwelling incel horde on our Capitol is once again sitting his cocktail-sauce-stained, syphilitic, sexual-predator ass behind our Resolute Desk. And now he’s gathered a who’s who of the world’s douchiest degenerates — a Smorgasburg of rapists, convicts, liars, grifters, gaslighters, gropers, and goons — and handed them the power to decide whether our children inherit a country that still works, still heals, still breathes. We’ve faced bullies before. He’s not new. He’s not special. He’s not complicated. He’s the same sad, dangerous pattern in a sloppier suit. And I know bullies. Believe me. I know how they operate. I know how they implode. I know how they fall. My mother didn’t teach me how to sew or braid or bake. She taught me how to read fear. How to dodge blows. How to rise with a lip split open by the pointy end of her high heel when I was four. She taught me how to disappear. And eventually, how to reappear stronger. She was my first bully. My first battlefield. My original why. And when I finally stood up to her, when I took my power back, I thought I’d ended that story forever. But life has a way of introducing you to new bullies — the one at home I didn’t recognize until it was nearly too late, the ones who tried to take my children’s house, the ones who mistook my fear for surrender. Each time, I rebuilt. Each time, I rose. Each time, I learned that endurance isn’t agreement. That surviving doesn’t mean staying silent. That I’m made of more than what they tried to break. And that’s how I know we’re not powerless now. He wants us numb. He wants us drained. He wants us to believe cruelty’s inevitable. Bullies win by collapsing the spirit, not the body. But bullies are beatable. Not because they soften, but because we harden in the right places and stay soft in the ones they can’t reach. And I keep coming back to something I say all the time: the only way out is through, and the only way through is together. I believe that in the place inside me that refuses to go dark. Maybe that makes me naive. Maybe it makes me foolish in a moment that feels unforgiving and bleak. But I don’t care. I don’t give a single shit if hope makes me look naive. I’ve survived too many people who should’ve destroyed me to abandon the belief that most of us are still trying to be decent. Do we have a shocking capacity for cruelty in this country? Yes. It still rattles me. But cruelty isn’t who we are at our core. It’s loud, but it’s not the majority. Most of us still carry an unspoken agreement to choose decency, to show up with kindness, to look out for one another in quiet, everyday ways. Are the Trump cultists ever gonna see the light? No. And honestly, who cares? The ones who cheer for cruelty might drown out a room for a moment, but they’re not the ones carrying this country. They’re not its core. We don’t need them. What we need is each other. We need to let ourselves feel what we feel. Not because we’ve been pretending this isn’t heavy, but because we so rarely give ourselves the grace to admit just how heavy it is. This isolation we feel — it’s not imagined. It’s manufactured. It’s part of the design. We’re not imagining the isolation — it’s the point. That’s how they win: when they make us feel cut off from one another, when the weight corners us into silence, when it convinces us we have to carry it alone. But we’re not alone. We never have been. And that’s our strength. That’s our resistance. That’s the thing they can’t touch. We don’t just endure — we push back. We call out cruelty. We demand more from our leaders, from each other, from ourselves. We insist on decency. We insist on kindness. We insist on a country where everyone matters. It’s not easy, and it never will be. Some days we fall down. Some days we fall apart. And that’s okay. What matters is that we keep getting back up — and we keep showing up for each other. That’s how we move forward. That’s how we hold on to hope. And in the end, that’s how we defeat the bullies — by refusing to stay down, and by refusing to let them define who we are. We define ourselves. Together.