Dispatches January 2026

MIKE JOHNSON TOUTS $901 BILLION MILITARY BUDGET PLAN AFTER GUTTING MEDICAID, SNAP. Republican congressional leaders unveiled a sprawling military policy bill Dec. 7 that would authorize $901 billion in US military spending for the coming fiscal year, just months after GOP lawmakers and President Donald Trump pushed through the largest-ever cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams.org (12/8).

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who aggressively pushed cuts to Medicaid by peddling false claims of large-scale fraud, touted the 3,086-page National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as legislation that would “ensure our military forces remain the most lethal in the world.”

The bill, a compromise between House and Senate versions of the annual legislation, would authorize $8 billion more in US military spending than Trump asked for in his 2026 budget request.

If passed, the 2026 NDAA would pump billions of dollars more into the Pentagon, a cesspool of the kinds of waste, fraud, and abuse that Johnson and other Republicans claim to be targeting when they cut safety net programs, stripping health insurance and food aid from millions. The Pentagon has never passed an independent audit and continues to have “significant fraud exposure,” the Government Accountability Office said earlier this year.

Final passage of the NDAA would push total military spending authorized by Congress this year above $1 trillion, including the $150 billion in Pentagon funds included in the Trump-GOP budget law enacted over the summer.

In November, as Common Dreams reported, a coalition of watchdog and anti-war groups implored Congress not to approve any funding above the originally requested $892.6 billion, warning that additional money for the Pentagon would enable the Trump administration’s lawless use of the military in US streets and overseas.

The groups also noted that “the surge in Pentagon spending stands in sharp contrast to the drastic cuts in healthcare and food assistance programs imposed by the reconciliation package.”

“At such a time,” they wrote in a letter to lawmakers, “bipartisan agreement to provide additional funds to the Pentagon would deliver a cruel message to the American public, one out of step with Democratic messaging over healthcare, reconciliation, and the shutdown.”

DEMOCRATIC GOVS 2026 MESSAGE HITS TRUMP’S SORE SPOT. Meeting in Arizona Dec. 6-7, Democratic governors said they would continue to push policies meant to address the issue of affordability. The Democrats renewed focus on the key issue comes while President Donald Trump has falsely described affordability as a phony issue made up by his political opponents, Oliver Willis noted at DailyKos.org (12/8).

The Democratic Governors Association held their meeting after a successful campaign cycle in 2025, where their candidates in states like Virginia and New Jersey won while making affordability central to their campaigns.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, chair of the DGA, told those in attendance, “We have to be laser focused on people’s everyday concerns and how hard life is right now for the American people. He added that the gubernatorial races in Georgia, Iowa, and Nevada would be the top three races the organization would focus on flipping during the 2026 election cycle. 

The Democratic focus on the issue stands in stark contrast from Trump, who has been dismissive of the issue.

“There’s this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about—affordability. They just say the word, it doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” Trump said. He also claimed affordability is a “con job” and a “Democrat[ic] scam.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson has a similar point of view to Trump. Asked by a reporter the previous week if Republicans are doing enough to address the issue, Johnson said the public should simply “relax” and that “it’s gonna be fine.”

The public disagrees with Trump and Johnson.

A recent poll from Politico/Public First found that Americans generally say the current problems with affordability are Trump’s responsibility. Even 37% of voters who backed Trump blame him for the economy’s current crisis. 

After campaigning last year on lowering prices, Republicans have failed to do anything to address the issue. Conservative ideology runs directly opposed to the notion of using the government to fix or ease these problems, presenting a huge obstacle to Republican action.

In fact, the key piece of Republican legislation passed since Trump took office—the “Big Beautiful Bill”—has caused more problems. Cutting funding for vital programs like Medicaid and curtailing Affordable Care Act subsidies increases costs instead of cutting them.

Trump’s tariff policies also hurt the U.S. economy by raising prices for middle- and working-class families, leading to reduced spending and job cuts.

In Tennessee, Republicans saw more evidence that ignoring the affordability problem is a political loser. While the party held on to their seat in the special election for the state’s 7th District last Tuesday, the Republican candidate trailed Trump’s performance in 2024 by 13 percentage points, which encourages Democrats heading toward the midterm elections.

Trump can continue to argue that affordability is a myth, but voter anger is very real and aimed directly at the GOP.

REPORT TRACKS TRUMP ‘WAR ON FREE SPEECH,’ URGES SYSTEMIC RESISTANCE. The US advocacy group Free Press on Dec. 8 released a report examining how President Trump and “his political enablers have worked to undermine and chill the most basic freedoms protected under the First Amendment” since the Republican returned to the Oval Office in January, and Free Press called on all Americans to fight back, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams.org (12/8).

For “Chokehold: Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance,” Free Press analyzed “more than 500 reports of verbal threats, executive orders, presidential memoranda, statements from the White House, actions by regulators and agencies, military and law enforcement deployment and activities, litigation, removal of website language on .gov websites, removal of official history and information at national parks and museums, and discontinued data collection by the federal government.”

“While the US government has made efforts throughout this nation’s history to censor people’s expression and association—be it the exercise of freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress—the Trump administration’s incessant attacks on even the most tentatively oppositional speech are uniquely aggressive, pervasive, and escalating,” the report states.

The five recurring attack methods that Free Press identified are: making threats of retribution against would-be opponents; emboldening regulators to exact penalties; supercharging the militarized police state; leveraging heavyweight corporate capitulation; and ignoring facts, removing information, rewriting history, and lying on the record.

“Trump’s censorship playbook is responsible for the administration’s central retaliatory ethos and inspires a set of strategies that loyal actors in government use to silence dissent and chill free expression,” said the report’s author, Free Press senior counsel Nora Benavidez, in a statement. “This playbook is to lie, distort reality for the public, and deploy a cadre of henchmen to carry out Trump’s threats of reprisal.”

Free Press compiled a timeline of “nearly 200 of the most potent examples,” including Trump’s blanket pardon for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists shortly after beginning his second term, the White House taking control of the presidential press pool in February, the president’s alarming speech to the US Department of Justice in March, and the administration blocking the Associated Press from the Oval Office in April over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

In May, Trump, among other things, signed an executive order to defund National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service. In June, he deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles. In July, he sued Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over reporting on the president’s ties to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In August, he deployed the National Guard in Washington, DC.

In September, under pressure from Brendan Carr, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, ABC temporarily suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. In October, the Pentagon’s new press policy—which journalists across the political spectrum refused to sign—took effect (The New York Times, which faces a defamation lawsuit from Trump, sued over it in early December). In November, Trump threatened to sue the BBC over its documentary about Jan. 6, 2021.

The administration has also targeted foreign scholars and journalists for criticizing US policy, from federal support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to the president’s pursuit of mass deportations. The report stresses that “no one is safe from attack in Trump’s quest to control the message, though the administration targets the press most of all.”

The publication also pushes back against “Trump’s claims that he’s protecting people and defending free speech,” and acknowledges that “the administration’s censorial tactics are amassing tremendous resistance across political and geographic lines, with a majority of people worried about the government’s attacks on free speech.”

Benavidez emphasized that “if only one person speaks out against injustice, their speech is notable, but it is also more vulnerable to attack and subversion under this administration.”

“If more people speak out against injustice, the collective drumbeat can more easily withstand government reprisals,” she continued. “Democracies erode little by little; would-be dictators need to scare only some of us, and the rest will follow. The very reason we must speak out together is so we can leverage our collective power.

LEAKED MEMO SHOWS PAM BONDI WANTS LIST OF ‘DOMESTIC TERRORISM’ GROUPS WHO EXPRESS ‘ANTI-AMERICAN SENTIMENT.’ A leaked memo written by US Attorney General Pam Bondi directs the Department of Justice to compile a list of potential “domestic terrorism” organizations that espouse “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment,” Brad Reed noted at CommonDreams.org  (12/7)

The memo, which was obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein, expands upon National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by President Trump in late September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

The new Bondi memo instructs law enforcement agencies to refer “suspected” domestic terrorism cases to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), which will then undertake an “exhaustive investigation contemplated by NSPM-7” that will incorporate “a focused strategy to root out all culpable participants—including organizers and funders—in all domestic terrorism activities.”

The memo identifies the “domestic terrorism threat” as organizations that use “violence or the threat of violence” to advance political goals such as “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”

Commenting on the significance of the memo, Klippenstein criticized mainstream media organizations for largely ignoring the implications of NSPM-7, which was drafted and signed in the wake of the Sept. 10 murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

“For months, major media outlets have largely blown off the story of NSPM-7, thinking it was all just Trump bluster and too crazy to be serious,” he wrote. “But a memo like this one shows you that the administration is absolutely taking this seriously—even if the media are not—and is actively working to operationalize NSPM-7.”

Klippenstein also warned that NSPM-7 appeared to be the start of a new “war on terrorism,” but “only this time, millions of Americans like you and I could be the target.”

GROUPS URGE CONGRESS TO IMPOSE MORATORIUM ON NEW AI DATA CENTERS. Environmental and economic justice advocates alike have been sounding the alarm for months regarding the Trump administration’s push to built massive data centers to support artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency in communities across the United States—regardless of local opposition—and on Dec. 8 Congress heard from a coalition of more than 200 groups demanding action to stop what they called “one of the biggest environmental and social threats of our generation,” Julia Conley noted at CommonDreams.org (12/8)

Led by Food and Water Watch (FWW), which originally demanded a moratorium on new AI data centers in October, more than 230 organizations have signed a letter warning that thus far, Congress has failed to take action to stop the rapid expansion despite the fact that “the harms of data center growth are increasingly well-established, and they are massive.”

The national and state groups, including Greenpeace USA, Oil Change International, and the Nebraska-based Save Rural America, pointed to a number of harms associated with the expansion of data centers in places including rural Michigan, Wisconsin, and northern Virginia.

They warned that pushing the build-out onto communities—many of which have protested the approval of the centers to no avail—will lead to:

• Enormous electricity consumption, with a tripling of data centers in the next five years projected to result in the facilities consuming as much electricity as about 30 million households;

• Unsustainable water consumption, with those data centers requiring the amount of water normally used by 18.5 million households, just for cooling the computer servers;

• The worsening of the climate emergency, with 56% of the energy used to power data centers sourced from planet-heating fossil fuels;

• Surging electricity costs for people living in the vicinity of energy-sucking data centers; and

• Skyrocketing job losses as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs are projected to become obsolete due to the growth of AI and companies’ investments in the technology, even as corporations report they’re not seeing a significant positive impact on their bottom lines.

“The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate, and water security,” the groups told Congress. “We urge you to join our call for a national moratorium on new data centers until adequate regulations can be enacted to fully protect our communities, our families, our environment, and our health from the runaway damage this industry is already inflicting.”

The groups noted that electricity costs have risen 21.3% since 2021, a rate that “drastically” outpaces inflation, driven by the “rapid build-out of data centers.”

As CNBC reported in November, residential utility bills rose 6% in August compared with last summer, and though price increases can be due to a host of reasons, electricity prices rose “much faster than the national average” this year in states with high concentrations of data centers. Consumers in Virginia paid 13% more, while those in Illinois paid 16% more and people in Ohio saw their costs go up 12%.

SENATE GOP SENDS TRUMP BILL HANDING ARCTIC REFUGE TO BIG OIL. Climate campaigners, conservationists, and Indigenous people vowed to keep defending the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after US Senate Republicans on Dec. 4 sent legislation that would restart fossil fuel leasing in ANWR’s Coastal Plain to President Donald Trump’s desk, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams (12/4).

All Republicans present except Sen. Susan Collins of Maine supported House Joint Resolution 131. The 49-45 vote came after three Democrats—Reps. Jim Costa (Calif.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), and Vicente Gonzalez (Texas)—joined all GOP House members but Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.) in advancing the bill in November.

If Big Oil-backed Trump signs the joint resolution of disapproval, as expected, it will nullify the Biden administration’s December 2024 efforts to protect over 1 million acres of land in Alaska from planet-wrecking oil and gas exploration.

“Simply put, the Arctic refuge is the crown jewel of the American National Wildlife Refuge System,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) said in a Dec. 3 floor speech against the measure, noting that the area is “home to hundreds of iconic wildlife species.”

“The Arctic refuge is also deeply connected to the traditions and daily life of the people who have lived there for thousands of years,” the senator continued, ripping “the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on public lands.”

Heinrich’s speech was welcomed by groups including the Alaska Wilderness League, League of Conservation Voters, and Defenders of Wildlife, whose vice president of government relations, Robert Dewey, also blasted lawmakers’ use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal the refuge’s protections.

“Once again, oil and gas development is taking precedence over science-based solutions for conserving wildlife and mitigating climate change. In these instances, the use of the CRA accomplishes nothing meaningful and instead harms iconic species such as polar bears, caribou, wolves, and migratory birds,” Dewey said after the vote. “In addition to threatening wildlife, severe regulatory disruption in Alaska is the inevitable result of targeted rollbacks in one of America’s most ecologically critical regions.”

‘SOMEBODY’S GETTING RICH’: SENATOR SUGGESTS TRUMP PARDON SPREE IS YET ANOTHER GRIFT A Democratic US senator suggested during a television appearance Dec. 3 that President Trump’s flurry of pardons for fraudsters and other white-collar criminals—from disgraced politicians to former corporate executives—is yet another cash grab concocted by the president’s inner circle and lobbyists with ties to the White House, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (12/4).

“My sense is that somebody is getting rich, ultimately,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes shortly after Trump pardoned a former entertainment venue executive who was indicted by the president’s own Justice Department over the summer.

“There is a cabal of administration officials and MAGA-friendly lobbyists that are in league together,” Murphy continued. “They all huddle together at these elite restaurants and clubs in Washington, DC, and they likely hatch deals in which, if somebody pays a MAGA-affiliated lobbyist a couple hundred thousand dollars, then maybe you’ll be able to get a pardon.”

“There’s clearly a whole group of people around him that are making millions of dollars, and they’re handing out favors to folks in the form of pardons in order to make sure that they get their pockets lined,” the senator added. “That’s just, like, bread and butter corruption.”

Since the start of his second term, Trump has used his pardon power to rescue well-connected executives and political allies from accountability, invariably claiming—without evidence—that the Biden administration manufactured the charges.

Many of those pardoned have been accused or convicted of white-collar crimes; “fraud” appears 57 times on the Justice Department page listing the names and offenses of those who have received clemency from the president this year.

Trump’s willingness to unthinkingly pardon fraudsters has spawned a lucrative business for lobbyists and consultants linked to the administration. NBC News reported earlier this year that “two people directly familiar with proposals to lobbying firms said they knew of a client’s offer of $5 million to help get a case to Trump.”

Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, reportedly had a lobbyist working to secure his pardon, which came in late October.

“I don’t know who he is,” Trump said when asked about the decision, adding that “a lot of people asked me” to pardon Zhao, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to “failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program.”

Trump also made history with what’s believed to be the nation’s first-ever presidential pardon of a corporation: HDR Global Trading, the owner and operator of crypto exchange BitMEX. The company was sentenced earlier this year to a $100 million fine for violating anti-money laundering laws.

The watchdog group Public Citizen estimates that the Trump administration has halted or dropped more than 160 corporate enforcement cases since the start of the president’s second term.

“Corporate pardons are just one of the ways that Trump is replacing democracy and rule of law with authoritarian power and rule by personal favor,” Murphy wrote in his report. “If we are going to save our democracy, we need to act now.”

IN TRUMP ECONOMY HOLIDAY SPENDING PLUMMETS AND LAYOFFS HIT HIGHEST LEVEL SINCE COVID PANDEMIC. A new batch of data is offering more evidence that the US economy was in rough shape heading into the holidays, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (12/4).

The latest Economic Confidence Index released by Gallup on Dec. 4 found that Americans’ confidence in the economy has fallen by seven points over the previous month, and stood at its lowest level in more than a year.

Overall, Gallup found that just 21% of Americans currently describe the economy as excellent or good, while 40% describe it as poor. The outlook for the near future also looks grim, as more than two-thirds of Americans surveyed said the economy is currently getting worse.

This deteriorating economic confidence is weighing on Americans’ holiday shopping plans, as Gallup found that planned holiday spending expenditures have “plummeted” from just over $1,000 in October to $778 in November. The decline in spending expectations also occurred across all income groups, although it was particularly steep among low-income households, which slashed their estimated holiday spending by an average of $267.

Gallup noted that while it’s common for shoppers to trim their spending plans the closer it gets to the holidays, the drop between October and November this year was the biggest it has ever recorded, even “surpassing the $185 drop seen during the 2008 global financial crisis.”

The Gallup survey was not the only troubling economic data to drop on Thursday, as outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas released its latest report showing that hiring in the US has slowed to its lowest level in the last 15 years, while layoffs now total their highest level since 2020, when the country was at the peak of the Covid-19 global pandemic.

The data on layoffs came just one day after global payroll processing firm ADP estimated that the US economy lost 32,000 jobs in November, with small businesses shouldering by far the most job losses.

President Donald Trump, who had dismissed concerns Americans might have about affordability as a “Democrat scam,” has reportedly decided to hit the road in an effort to convince voters that they’ve never had it so good.

According to Axios, Trump will start touring the country to tout his administration’s economic policies, and he is expected to “aggressively push back against criticism over the cost of everyday essentials—an issue that helped propel him to victory over Kamala Harris last year.”

However, a new poll published by Politico Dec. 4 shows that Trump may have an uphill climb selling his economy even to his own voters.

Overall, the poll found that 37% of voters who backed Trump last year now say that the cost of living crisis is the worst they have experienced in their lifetimes, while only 24% of 2024 Trump voters say that the cost of living crisis at the moment is “not bad.”

The poll also found that Trump’s efforts to blame former President Joe Biden for the current state of the economy aren’t flying, as 46% of voters say that Trump is most to blame for the current state of the economy, compared to 29% of voters who put the primary blame on Biden.

IN FOX’S BIZARRO WORLD, HUGE LAYOFFS MEAN ‘GOOD NEWS’ FOR TRUMP. Following a report that showed a spike in layoff announcements, a Fox Business reporter said it could be “good news” for President Trump, Oliver Willis noted at Daily Kos (12/4).

The consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas released a report on Thursday, revealing that companies have announced 1.17 million layoffs in 2025, the most in a single year since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. For about 8,000 of those layoffs, Trump’s tariffs have been cited as the reason for job cuts.

Despite the dire economic sign—one of many in recent days—Fox Business reporter Grady Trimble saw an upside for Trump while discussing the new report with pro-Trump anchor Stuart Varney.

“This signifies the cooling job market that we’ve seen for some time now, Stu, but it could be good news for the president in the end because he wants the Fed to cut rates and this jobs data increases the chances of that happening next week,” Trimble said.

The Fox News spin (Fox Business is owned by Fox News) comes as a series of economic indicators show weakness under Trump after years of improvement under former President Joe Biden.

On Dec. 3, payroll processor ADP’s November report showed a total 32,000 drop in private-sector jobs for the month, with 120,000 jobs lost for small businesses. Two days before that, the Institute for Supply Management said the manufacturing industry has lost jobs for nine consecutive months this year.

In response to the bad economic news and ongoing concerns about affordability, Trump falsely said on Dec. 2 that the entire issue was a “fake narrative,” “scam,” and “con job by the Democrats.”

Fox’s overly optimistic reporting is in line with the network’s attempt to prop up the sagging Trump presidency.

For instance, after Trump failed to do much of what he said he would do in the first 100 days of his presidency, Fox ran a list of supposed accomplishments. Among them were nonsensical issues like ending federal support for paper straws, eliminating production of the penny, and establishing a “White House Faith Office.” Those topics were a far cry from lowering grocery prices and ending the Russia-Ukraine war, which Trump had said he would do.

Fox has spent the first year of Trump’s return to office inventing a cringe-inducing parade of excuses and justifications for his failures and shortcomings. In that context, a surge in layoffs can easily count as “good news.”

Congress Must Stop Trump's Terrorism

 War Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered murder on the high seas as part of his effort to implement Donald Trump’s ambition to invade Venezuela, and only Congress can stop them. Not that congressional leaders will stand up to Trump.

U.S. surveillance aircraft followed a boat, which special operations force believed carried illegal drugs in the Caribbean Sea on Sept. 2, when Hegseth, who was watching from the Pentagon, gave a spoken directive, two people with direct knowledge of the operation told the Washington Post. “The order was to kill them all,” one of them said. 

A missile struck the vessel and ignited a blaze from bow to stern. Special Ops commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed for minutes, but as the smoke cleared, they were surprised that two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. The Special Ops commander, Admiral Frank Bradley, ordered a second strike to finish the job, and the two men were blown apart in the water.

It was the first salvo of the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere, who Trump considers “narco-terrorists” who are subject to lethal targeting. But experts on the laws of war have said the lethal campaign, which has killed at least 83 people in 23 attacks so far, is unlawful and may expose Americans directly involved in the attacks to prosecution. 

The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat to the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has argued, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign, speaking to the Post.

Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said “Ongoing operations to dismantle narcoterrorism and to protect the Homeland from deadly drugs have been a resounding success,” but that leaves a number of questions Pentagon officials won’t address, such as why a motor boat carrying perhaps a ton of cocaine needed a crew of 11 people and actually was headed to Suriname, which is southeast of Venezuela and usually is on the drug traffickers’ route to Europe. Blowing up the boats and killing the passengers also eliminates evidence and the opportunity for investigators to gain testimony on who else was involved in the trafficking. The U.S. Coast Guard manages to seize drug vessels in territorial waters without casualties.

The protocols were changed after the strike to emphasize rescuing suspected smugglers if they survived strikes, the Post reported. It is unclear who directed the change in protocol.

In an Oct. 16 strike in the Atlantic Ocean that killed two, another two men were captured and repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador without charges. In a series of strikes on four boats in the eastern Pacific on Oct. 27 that killed 14 men, one apparent survivor was left to the Mexican coast guard to retrieve. The body was never found.

Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) has formally introduced articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for “murder” and “conspiracy to murder” in the extrajudicial execution of the two survivors in the Sept. 2 boat bombings.

“He gave direct, unlawful orders to kill every single person on a civilian boat from Venezuela, violating the Defense Department’s Law of War Manual,” Thanedar said. But House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is not inclined to push the issue of impeachment, saying it’s almost impossible that articles would reach the House floor with a Republican majority.

“Republicans will never allow articles of impeachment to be brought to the floor of the House of Representatives, and we know that’s the case,” he said. “Donald Trump will order them not to do it.”

But Trump ordered Republicans not to call for release of the Epstein files — until it became inevitable. Now five Republicans could join Democrats to force an impeachment vote, and some have expressed dissatisfaction with the White House’s answers.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which launched an investigation into the strikes, said Dec. 4 that “members are very concerned” about the accuracy of the information being shared with Congress. Turner previously said if Hegseth indeed ordered the execution of survivors, “that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act.” Turner should get a chance to vote on whether extrajudicial executions on the high seas are grounds for impeachment, and it’s worth Democrats’ time to put Republicans on the record on whether they approve summary executions.

Trump also paused immigration applications from 19 Third World countries, with a Dec. 2 tirade falsely portraying Somali Americans living in Minnesota  as layabouts who sponge up welfare money.

He singled out U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a refugee from Somalia, as being “garbage,” and added that “her friends are garbage.”

In an op-ed published Dec. 4 in The New York Times, Omar defended her community against false stereotypes spouted by Trump.

“He fails to realize how deeply Somali Americans love this country,” she wrote. “We are doctors, teachers, police officers, and elected leaders working to make our country better. Over 90% of Somalis living in my home state, Minnesota, are American citizens by birth or naturalization.”

In a social media post, Omar characterized the president’s remarks about her as clear evidence that he’s unwell.

“His obsession with me is creepy,” Omar wrote. "I hope he gets the help he desperately needs."

Circulation Comes Back Home

The Progressive Populist has restored circulation processing in our own offices after the company that handled our circulation customer service in North Hollywood, Calif., abruptly went out of business in late November. We got the data back from Stark Services before they shut down, but if you have received a renewal reminder, please return the renewal form with a check or your credit card information to The Progressive Populist, PO Box 487, Storm Lake, IA 50588 instead of the address in California, or call us at 1-800-205-7067 to charge the renewal fee to your credit card. You also can renew online at Populist.com.

Thanks for sticking with us, and you can help us shore up our financial reserves in these turbulent times, so we can keep The Progressive Populist affordable for readers with limited funds, by sending a check to The Progressive Populist, PO Box 487, Storm Lake, IA 50588 or calling in a contribution by credit card. — JMC

From the January issue of The Progressive Populist.

Why Do Farmers Vote Republican?

 

Why do farmers vote Republican?:

President Harry Truman said that any farmer who voted Republican "ought to have his head examined." Currently, a lot of them are about to go bust. Their devotion to Trump is being severely tested.

Farmers are facing financial struggles due to high input costs, low commodity prices, and falling prices for crops due to trade wars, tariffs and market shifts.These pressures have led to increased  bankruptcies within farming communities throughout the country, decreasing the likelihood that family farms will be passed from generation to generation.

Still, many of them express a mindless devotion to Trump. Why?

Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite

Just Another Trump Thug

 

Just another Trump Thug:

Without a doubt Kash Patel's tenure as head of the FBI has been chaotic.

Not surprising.

Before his nomination, he'd never spent a day working in the FBI and was not familiar with the bureau or its traditions .

He'd never spent time in the military or served in the DOJ. He had no experience leading a governmental agency the size of the FBI.

The list goes on and once in office he started firing agents who'd worked on investigations into Trump's many scandals. He instead started using the office to investigate perceived enemies of Trump.

Former attorney general Bill Barr thought he was a terrible choice.

Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite

A War of His Own Making

 

A War of his own making:

Trump wants a war with Venezuela and is willing to throw anyone under the bus to make it happen.That includes Navy personnel like Admiral Bradley and quite possibly Defense Secretary Hegseth.

Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite

Dispatches December 2025

 TRUMP-GOP STONEWALLING SHOWS THEY’RE ‘ABSOLUTELY COMMITTED TO RAISING YOUR COSTS,’ SEN. MURPHY SAYS. US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said the GOP’s rejection of Democrats’ compromise proposal to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits for a year in exchange for reopening the federal government shows the Republican Party is “absolutely committed to raising your costs.”

“Republicans are refusing to negotiate,” Murphy said in a video posted to social media Nov. 8, arguing that President Donald Trump and the GOP’s continued stonewalling is “further confirmation” that Republicans are uninterested in preventing disastrous premium increases, Jake Johnson noted at Common Dreams (11/8).

“They are willing to keep the government shut down, they are so determined to make you pay more for healthcare,” the senator added.

More than 20 million Americans who purchase health insurance on the ACA marketplace receive enhanced tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year if Congress doesn’t act. So far, the Republican leadership in the Senate has only offered to hold a vote on the ACA subsidies, with no guarantee of the outcome, in exchange for Democratic votes to reopen the government.

People across the country are already seeing their premiums surge, and if the subsidies are allowed to lapse, costs are expected to rise further and millions will likely go uninsured.

“Clearly, the GOP didn’t learn their lesson after the shellacking they got in Tuesday’s elections,” said Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse. “They would rather keep the government shut down, depriving Americans of their paychecks and food assistance, than let working families keep the healthcare tax credits they need to afford lifesaving coverage. Good luck explaining that to the American people.”

In a post to his social media platform on Saturday, Trump made clear that he remains opposed to extending the ACA tax credits, calling on Republicans to instead send money that would have been used for the subsidies “directly to the people so that they can purchase their own, much better healthcare.”

Trump provided no details on how such a plan would work. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who was at the center of the largest healthcare fraud case in US history, declared that he is “writing the bill now,” suggesting that the funds would go to “HSA-style accounts.”

Democrats immediately panned the idea.

“This is, unsurprisingly, nonsensical,” said Murphy. “Is he suggesting eliminating health insurance and giving people a few thousand dollars instead? And then when they get a cancer diagnosis they just go bankrupt? He is so unserious. That’s why we are shut down and Americans know it.”

Polling data released Thursday by the health policy group KFF showed that nearly three-quarters of the US public wants Congress to extend the ACA subsidies

“More than half (55%) of those who purchase their own health insurance say Democrats should refuse to approve a budget that does not include an extension for ACA subsidies,” KFF found. “Notably, past KFF polls have shown that nearly half of adults enrolled in ACA marketplace plans identify as Republican or lean Republican.”

TRUMP HEALTHCARE PAYMENT PROPOSAL SPARKS FRESH MEDICARE FOR ALL DEMANDS TO FIX ‘BROKEN’ HEALTHCARE SYSTEM. As the government appears poised to reopen, with Republicans having successfully avoided concessions on their goal of eliminating Affordable Care Act tax credits, President Donald Trump has proposed his own solution to the looming explosion in health insurance costs, Stephen Prager noted at Common Dreams (11/10).

By agreeing to reopen the government without a deal, Democrats have given up their main leverage to force Republicans to extend the credits set to expire at the end of the year. If this happens, over 22 million Americans are expected to see their monthly insurance premiums more than double. As enrollment data for next year shows, Americans are already seeing skyrocketing healthcare costs, not just for ACA recipients but for everyone.

While Republicans successfully strong-armed their opposition into caving by using the shutdown to turn the screws on government workers and food stamp recipients, they still have to weather the political fallout of the coming healthcare apocalypse. A poll released Nov. 6 by KFF found that 74% of Americans—half of whom are self-identified Republicans—want to see the credits extended. Three-quarters also say they’d blame either Trump or Republicans in Congress if they weren’t.

On Truth Social Nov. 8, as a shutdown deal appeared likely, Trump proposed his own idea:

“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over. In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare.”

Trump is correct that under the current scheme, Americans don’t actually receive money directly. But experts warn that while there’s a visceral populist logic to his proposal, the flaws of replacing those annual subsidies with a one-time payment become obvious with the barest of scrutiny, especially when it is paired with a proposal to fully repeal the ACA.

“You have to read between the lines here to imagine what President Trump is proposing,” said Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at KFF. “It sounds like it could be a plan for health accounts that could be used for insurance that doesn’t cover preexisting conditions, which could create a death spiral in ACA plans that do.”

One of the Senate’s most prominent proponents of eliminating the ACA and other parts of the social safety net, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), said he was “writing the bill right now,” and clarified that it would indeed involve “HSA-style accounts” for Americans in place of subsidized insurance.

On Nov. 9, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) noted that this was just a reheating of the “same old, tired proposal of repealing the Affordable Care Act, giving people a benefit in the form of a health savings account, but allowing insurance companies once again to cancel policies and refuse to write policies for people who have preexisting health conditions.”

HSAs were a key component of the Republicans’ failed 2017 plan to “repeal and replace” the ACA, which many critics pointed out would allow insurers to skyrocket the costs of insurance for those dealing with preexisting conditions.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who sits on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), called Trump’s new plan “unsurprisingly nonsensical.”

“Is he suggesting eliminating health insurance and giving people a few thousand dollars instead?” Murphy asked. “And then when they get a cancer diagnosis, they just go bankrupt?”

But while many Democrats decried yet another effort to dismantle the ACA, some progressives pointed out that health insurance costs, and healthcare costs more generally, have still exploded under Obamacare, which — despite introducing new guardrails — still leaves profit-driven insurance intact and requires all Americans to purchase it.

“Yes, Mr. President: You’re right. We do have ‘the worst healthcare’ of any major country,” replied Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the HELP committee’s ranking member, who has long decried the profiteering of insurance companies. “Despite spending twice as much per capita, we are the only major country not to guarantee health care to all as a human right. The solution: Medicare for All.”

WORST MASTERMINDS OF TRUMP’S ATTEMPTED COUP GET PARDONS. President Trump preemptively pardoned more than 75 people who helped him try to steal the 2020 election, Emily Singer noted at Daily Kos (11/10). This included disgraced ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and disbarred right-wing lawyer John Eastman—the one who came up with the legal strategy to help Trump overturn the election results.

The 77 pardons — announced by Trump’s moronic and corrupt pardon attorney Ed Martin — were symbolic, as none of the people are facing federal charges for their disgraceful attempt to serve as so-called “alternate electors” to the Electoral College so Trump could steal then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

However, it’s indicative of Trump’s belief that people who support him are above the law—essentially granting them carte blanche to commit crimes as they won’t face punishment for doing so.

Martin announced the pardons by listing then in a thread on X, where he had previously said, “no MAGA left behind.”

Aside from Giuliani and Eastman, the pardons also include:

• Sidney Powell, the lunatic former member of Trump’s legal team who stood alongside Giuliani in an insane news conference after Trump’s 2020 loss in which she claimed a dead Venezuelan dictator conspired with voting machine companies to steal the election from Trump. Her deranged rantings got her sued for millions from the voting machine companies she defamed. 

• Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff who helped coordinate the effort to steal the election.

• And Boris Epshteyn, a Trump ally who currently serves as a special adviser to Trump who aided Giuliani in the fake elector scheme.

The pardons are the latest in Trump’s efforts to reward law-breaking and corrupt Republicans.

On Nov. 7, Trump pardoned former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, who was serving 36 months in federal prison on fraud charges. Trump also commuted the sentence of expelled New York GOP Rep. George Santos, releasing the fraudster from prison years before his sentence was set to expire. And he pardoned billionaire crypto Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who does business with Trump’s sons.

Those are on top of the pardons of hundreds of insurrectionists who either pleaded guilty to, were convicted of, or were set to face trial for their role in the riots at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A number of those criminals have committed more crimes since Trump’s act of clemency.

An even more horrendous pardon could also be on the way. Congressional Democrats say that convicted felon Ghislaine Maxwell is seeking a commutation of her 20-year prison sentence for her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sick child sex trafficking operation.

House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) released documents of Maxwell’s commutation application, and warned Trump against granting her clemency, NBC News reported on Monday.

“You should not grant any form of clemency to this convicted and unrepentant sex offender,” Raskin wrote in a letter to Trump, ABC News reported. “Your Administration should not be providing her with room service, with puppies to play with, with federal law enforcement officials waiting on her every need, or with any special treatment or institutional privilege at all.”

HEGSETH SAYS 6 MORE MEN KILLED IN LATEST BOAT BOMBINGS. Six people were killed Nov. 9 in US military strikes on what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed were boats smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, bringing the total death toll from all such reported attacks to at least 76 since early September, Brett Wilkins noted at Common Dreams (11/10).

“Yesterday, at the direction of President [Donald] Trump, two lethal kinetic strikes were conducted on two vessels operated by designated terrorist organizations. These vessels were known by our intelligence to be associated with illicit narcotics smuggling, were carrying narcotics, and were transiting along a known narco-trafficking transit route in the eastern Pacific,” Hegseth said Nov. 10 on social media without providing evidence to support his claim.

“Both strikes were conducted in international waters and three male narco-terrorists were aboard each vessel. All six were killed,” he added. “No US forces were harmed. Under President Trump, we are protecting the homeland and killing these cartel terrorists who wish to harm our country and its people.”

The Nov. 9 attacks raised the death toll in the Trump administration’s nine-week campaign to at least 76 people in 19 attacks in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The US strikes have come amid Trump’s deployment of warships and thousands of troops off the coast of Venezuela and follow the president’s approval of covert CIA action and threats to attack inside the oil-rich country.

The previous week, Republicans in the US Senate rejected a bipartisan war powers resolution aimed at stopping the Trump administration from continuing its bombing of alleged drug boats or attacking Venezuela without lawmakers’ assent, as required by law.

Trump administration officials have admitted that they aren’t attempting to identify people aboard boats before or after bombing them. Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) recently told CNN that Pentagon officials briefed her “that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes.”

Jacobs also said that the administration is not making any effort to imprison survivors of the strikes or prosecute them, “because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden.”

In the past, drug trafficking in the Caribbean and Pacific has been treated by the US government as a law enforcement issue, with the Coast Guard and other agencies sometimes intercepting boats and arresting those on board if evidence was found, granting them a day in court.

Leaders in Venezuela, Colombia, and other nations; United Nations officials; human rights groups; and Democratic US lawmakers are among those who have condemned the boat bombings as extrajudicial assassination, murder, and war crimes.

STARVING THE POOR IS TOO MUCH FUN FOR TRUMP TO GIVE UP. President Trump really doesn’t want poor people to eat, Emily Singer noted at Daily Kos (11/10).

An appeals court on Nov. 10 ruled that even though the government is shut down, Trump and his administration have to pay out Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits—better known as food stamps—to the over 40 million Americans who rely on the program to feed themselves and their families.

But Trump immediately notified the Supreme Court that it would be filing an appeal, hoping to stop benefits from going out to hungry people until the government reopens, which is expected to happen soon.

That comes after the Trump administration told states over the weekend that they had to reverse any attempts to fund SNAP benefits or else risk adverse consequences.

“To the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized. Accordingly, States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025,” Patrick A. Penn, a deputy undersecretary of the Agriculture Department, wrote in a memo to states. “Failure to comply with this memorandum may result in USDA taking various actions, including cancellation of the Federal share of State administrative costs and holding States liable for any overissuances that result from the noncompliance.”

Obstinately refusing to pay out food stamps is so evil it’s hard to put into words.

“Trump is doing this because he is a bad person,” Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said at a press conference last week when Trump was fighting court orders to pay SNAP benefits. “He’s weaponizing hunger and trying to rip food away from more than 40 million Americans, including 16 million children, for sadistic political leverage. How dare he?” 

It’s also politically idiotic.

The courts had given Trump a good out when they ordered him to pay food stamp benefits.

Trump appealing those rulings because he didn’t want to pay SNAP benefits makes him directly responsible for millions of people going hungry—including millions of Trump’s own voters who rely on food stamps.

And it seems the public agrees. Trump’s approval rating has declined dramatically since he began to hold poor people hostage by refusing to fund food stamps until the government reopened.

“It seems very likely that threatening SNAP benefits was the primary cause of the big downshift in Trump’s approval ratings beginning ~3 weeks ago,” polling analyst Nate Silver wrote, referring to the date when Trump’s secretary of agriculture announced the administration would not be funding food stamp benefits during the shutdown.

Trump’s approval rating now stands at a dismal 40.2%, according to FiftyPlusOne’s polling average.

That’s about a 2-percentage-point decline since early October, and such high disapproval of Trump’s agenda could cause an electoral wipeout for Republicans next November—as it did last week in a spate of off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and California.

“The Oligarchs Never Change,” progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote in a post on X. “Marie-Antoinette: Let Them Eat Cake. Donald Trump: Let Them Starve.”

TRUMP DOJ GIVES GOOGLE ANTITRUST WIN AFTER TECH GIANT’S BALLROOM DONATION. The US Justice Department has reportedly given the tech behemoth Alphabet a green light to acquire the cybersecurity firm Wiz after it was revealed that the Google parent company donated to President Donald Trump’s $300 million ballroom project, Jake Johnson noted at Common Dreams (11/6)

The merger deal is valued at over $30 billion and would mark Alphabet’s largest acquisition to date, even as the company faces antitrust cases at the state and federal level. Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport announced the Justice Department’s decision on Nov. 6 at an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal.

The DOJ approval came after Bloomberg reported in June that the Justice Department’s antitrust arm was reviewing whether Alphabet’s acquisition of Wiz would illegally undermine competition. The following month, the Justice Department ousted two of its top antitrust officials amid internal conflict over shady corporate settlement deals.

Lee Hepner, an antitrust attorney and senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project, called the DOJ’s clearing of Alphabet’s Wiz acquisition “the kind of blunt corruption that most won’t notice.”

Hepner observed that news of the approval came shortly after the White House released a list of individuals and corporations that have pumped money into Trump’s gaudy ballroom project. Google—which also donated to Trump’s inauguration—was one of the prominent names on the list, alongside Amazon, Apple and other major corporations.

Google is reportedly funneling $22 million to the ballroom project.

“These giant corporations aren’t funding the Trump ballroom debacle out of a sense of civic pride,” Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said earlier in the week. “They have massive interests before the federal government and they undoubtedly hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration.”

“Millions to fund Trump’s architectural whims are nothing compared to the billions at stake in procurement, regulatory, and enforcement decisions,” he added.

According to a Public Citizen report published Nov. 2, two-thirds of the 24 known corporate donors to Trump’s ballroom project—including Google—are beneficiaries of recent government contracts.

‘MEGA-LAYOFFS’ UNDER TRUMP AS CORPORATIONS HAVE CUT 1 MILLION JOBS THIS YEAR—MOST SINCE 2003. The US labor market, which in recent months had ground nearly to a halt, now appears to be entering a downward spiral, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (11/6).

As reported by the Washington Post on Thursday, new data from corporate outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that employers in October announced 153,000 job cuts, which marked the highest number of layoffs in that month since October 2003.

Total announced job cuts in 2025 have now reached 1.1 million, a number that the Post describes as a “recession-like” level comparable to the steep job cuts announced in the wake of the dotcom bust of the early 2000s, the global financial crisis of 2008, and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

John Challenger, the CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told the Post that the huge number of October layoffs showed the economy was entering “new territory.”

“We haven’t seen mega-layoffs of the size that are being discussed now—48,000 from UPS, potentially 30,000 from Amazon—since 2020 and before that, since the recession of 2009,” he explained. “When you see companies making cuts of this size, it does signal a real shift in direction.”

CNBC noted that the Challenger report found that the tech sector is currently being hardest hit by the layoffs, and it said that the adoption of artificial intelligence was a significant driver of job cuts.

“Some industries are correcting after the hiring boom of the pandemic, but this comes as AI adoption, softening consumer and corporate spending, and rising costs drive belt-tightening and hiring freezes,” the report said. “Those laid off now are finding it harder to quickly secure new roles, which could further loosen the labor market.”

With the backing of Big Tech investors, President Donald Trump has pushed to prevent states from regulating AI, over the objections of labor groups and progressive lawmakers. Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned that without strong regulation, tech billionaires’ investments in AI will likely “increase their wealth and power exponentially” while wiping out “tens of millions” of jobs.

According to Bloomberg, however, AI adoption is just one factor in companies’ decision to enact mass layoffs, as some firms have also cited the need to protect their profit margins from the impacts of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which have raised prices for a wide variety of products and materials.

Democratic lawmakers were quick to seize on the news of mass layoffs as evidence that Trump is sending the US economy into a ditch.

“Trump put billionaires in charge of everything,” remarked Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) in a social media post. “It’s a disaster.”

“Trump inherited the fastest growing economy in the [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development], fastest reduction in inflation, record job creation,” said Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.). “Dumb tariffs, racist immigration policies, attacks on the rule of law and termination of congressionally mandated programs did this.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), meanwhile, simply wrote that “Trump’s economy suuuuucks.”