It began, as these things often do, with a hearing that was supposed to be about documents and ended up being about temperament.

The subject was compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The subtext was something more elemental: how the Department of Justice behaves when it is questioned, cornered, and publicly challenged.

The hearing did not pivot on one explosive exchange. It accumulated, scene by scene, until the pattern was difficult to ignore.

The Turn She Would Not Make

One of the most striking exchanges came when Representative Pramila Jayapal asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to turn around and address the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein who were seated directly behind her.

Eleven stood when asked whether the Department had met with them prior to releasing the files. None had.

Jayapal asked Bondi to apologize directly for the harm caused by the release of victims’ names that were later redacted. Bondi declined to turn. She accused lawmakers of “theatrics” and said she would not get in the gutter.

What stayed with many observers was not the statutory argument but the image itself: survivors upright behind her, waiting to be acknowledged, while the request for a simple apology was recast as partisan performance.

The moment distilled the tension of the hearing into a single image.

The Redactions Fight Goes Bipartisan

The hearing was nominally about whether the Department had complied with the transparency law requiring the release of millions of pages with limited redactions.

Democrats argued that the Department improperly released victims’ names while redacting alleged co-conspirators without clear explanation.

What gave the dispute additional weight was that Republican Representative Thomas Massie, who helped push the release law, publicly rebuked Bondi’s handling of the files. He described publishing survivors’ names as “literally the worst thing you could do.”

Bondi responded by accusing Massie of having Trump derangement syndrome and calling him a failed politician.

It is not unusual for members to trade barbs. It is more unusual for the Attorney General to meet a statutory compliance dispute with language more familiar from campaign rallies than committee rooms.

The redactions fight was not merely partisan sparring. It was a rare moment in which members of both parties signaled discomfort with how the Department executed a bipartisan law.

“Washed-Up Loser Lawyer”

At another point in the hearing, Bondi referred to Representative Jamie Raskin as a “washed-up loser lawyer.”

That phrase traveled quickly, not because it was inventive, but because of who said it.

The Attorney General’s power rests less in volume than in restraint. It is an office built on measured language. When the reply sounds like it belongs in a cable news montage, the room tilts, and not in the Department’s favor.

This was not the only heated exchange of the afternoon, but it was the one that crystallized the tonal shift. The hearing no longer sounded like oversight of federal law enforcement. It sounded like a political brawl with statutory citations.

The Search History Moment

Midway through the proceedings, Reuters photographs captured Bondi holding a document titled “Jayapal Pramila Search History.”

Members of Congress later called for an inquiry after discovering that the Department had created records of their research activity while they reviewed the Epstein files.

The image alone was jarring. A search history displayed during a hearing. The implicit message that oversight activity had been catalogued.

Oversight depends on inquiry. Inquiry depends on trust that reviewing documents does not convert into being reviewed. Even if every action fell within technical authority, the optics introduced a new layer of tension between Congress and the Department.

It is the kind of image that travels further than the transcript and settles into the working relationships that make oversight possible.

The Secret Domestic Terrorist List

During questioning, Bondi acknowledged the existence of a secret domestic terrorist list compiled under federal authority. She declined to elaborate.

In another week, that admission might have been the headline. Here, it was one revelation among several.

A government maintaining a secret list is not inherently novel. What made the disclosure notable was its timing. It landed in a hearing already defined by disputes over transparency and oversight.

Opacity layered atop defensiveness rarely calms a room.

The Pattern Beneath the Noise

What made the week unsettling was not any single exchange. Washington can handle raised voices. It has made a tradition of them. It can withstand an insult tossed across a committee table and still reconvene the next morning as if nothing happened. It can even correct a redaction and move on with bureaucratic efficiency.

What it does not handle as quietly is a change in bearing.

Throughout the hearing, criticism of the Department seemed to register less as oversight and more as affront. Questions about compliance drifted into arguments about loyalty. A statutory transparency dispute began to sound, in tone if not in phrasing, like a defense of the president rather than an explanation of departmental judgment.

That shift is not theatrical. It is structural.

The Justice Department is designed to sit slightly apart from the political weather. Not immune to it, but not fully inside it either. Its credibility depends on that small but meaningful separation, the sense that even when members are shouting, the response will arrive in measured language and institutional calm.

This week, that separation felt thinner.

It showed up in the moment with the survivors, in the hesitation to meet the human dimension of a bureaucratic mistake. It showed up in the exchange with Massie, where a statutory compliance question was met with the impatience usually reserved for partisan grandstanding. It showed up when a search history appeared in the Attorney General’s hand, transforming oversight into something that looked uncomfortably reciprocal. And it showed up again in the acknowledgment of a secret list that arrived without the kind of explanation that steadies a room.

None of this dismantled the structure of government. The lights are still on in the building.

But institutions, like small towns, have long memories. They remember how a room felt. They remember whether someone chose explanation over escalation. They remember whether accountability was met with steadiness or with steel.

When the Department begins to sound like one of the combatants instead of the custodian of the rules, even for an afternoon, that memory takes root.

It does not need to be declared. It simply becomes part of the story.

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As if we needed another reminder that the world feels out of balance, the Doomsday Clock moved again this week.

It now sits at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. Scientists pointed to familiar threats: nuclear escalation, climate instability, artificial intelligence outpacing governance, and a global order under visible strain.

None of this comes as a shock. Anyone paying attention can feel it. What the clock does is remove the last layer of denial. It takes a shared sense of disorder and gives it a number. The margin for error is shrinking. The systems meant to absorb shock are under stress.

What’s unsettling is not the warning itself.
It’s how accustomed we’ve become to hearing them.

When culture works, it cuts through that numbness.

Protest art, spoken plainly

Bruce Springsteen is about as close to quintessential Americana as it gets. Highways, unions, small towns, moral reckoning set to guitar. Which is why it mattered that this week, he quietly used that platform to give words to a moment that is still unfolding.

On Sunday, Springsteen released Streets of Minneapolis. He explained it without ceremony:

“I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors, and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.”

This was not a song written with distance or hindsight. It was written inside the moment.

One line lingers:

“There’s a line drawn in the street tonight
And it’s colder than it’s ever been.”

The song does not try to rally a crowd or offer resolution. It does something quieter and more difficult. It fixes the moment in place before it can be softened, reframed, or folded into something more comfortable. It insists that what happened be remembered as it was, not as it will later be explained.

Sometimes protest art is about movement.
Sometimes it is about refusing to let the record be rewritten.

Listen to Streets of Minneapolis here:

Withdrawal as protest

Today, organizers called for a nationwide shutdown.

No work. No school. No shopping.

The call follows unrest in Minnesota and the killing of multiple people by federal agents. Walkouts, store closures, and demonstrations were planned across all fifty states. The demand is specific: halt ICE funding. The method is equally clear: stop participating.

Many people have called for a general strike in recent years. What makes this moment different is how clearly withdrawal has become the most legible form of protest left.

If power is exercised economically, absence becomes a language it still understands.

Ariana Grande amplified the shutdown by sharing organizing information from the University of Minnesota Black Student Union. That detail matters. The message did not originate with celebrities. It moved upward from students and local organizers before spreading outward.

Whether the shutdown succeeds by conventional metrics misses the larger point. The act itself is the signal. Participation is no longer assumed.

When people speak, and when they don’t

More public figures are speaking out. That alone marks a shift.

For years, the safest posture in celebrity culture has been non-position. Statements that acknowledge concern without naming anything concrete. Language polished just enough to register awareness, never enough to absorb risk.

This week, that posture began to separate into clearer categories.

Martha Stewart shared a message from her fourteen-year-old granddaughter describing fear about immigration enforcement, protest being criminalized, and the threat of state violence. Stewart did not present it as activism. She presented it as responsibility, saying she was no longer sure silence was excusable.

Others spoke from different moral vocabularies. Ed Norton framed the moment as a civic emergency. Megan Stalter addressed Christians directly, grounding her argument in theology rather than politics. Olivia Rodrigo named the frustration of watching violence occur without consequence. Glenn Close spoke plainly about institutional collapse and the normalization of cruelty.

And then there was the other response.

In a recent interview, Sydney Sweeney addressed being labeled “MAGA Barbie” online by emphasizing that she does not speak about politics, prefers to focus on her work, and knows what she stands for even if she chooses not to articulate it publicly.

It’s a familiar position. Not endorsement, not opposition. A refusal to engage framed as integrity.

In moments like this, that stance doesn’t disappear into neutrality. It becomes part of the cultural signal. Silence reads less like privacy and more like a choice about where risk belongs.

What’s emerging is not consensus. It’s contrast.

Speaking on unstable ground

Much of this speech is moving through TikTok. At the same time, TikTok itself quietly changed.

The platform is now majority owned by a U.S.-based consortium led by Oracle. A new domestic governing structure oversees operations. The recommendation algorithm is licensed and retrained using U.S. user data. The updated privacy policy expands data collection and formalizes broader moderation authority.

This was never just a business deal. It was about control. About who gets to shape information flows, visibility, and political speech inside the United States.

Within days of the transition, users reported political content stalling at zero views, keywords blocked, and uneven regional reach. TikTok cited technical disruptions.

Intent matters less than capability.

The platform now has the infrastructure to manage dissent at scale precisely as dissent is accelerating. People are still speaking. They are also learning, in real time, which words move and which quietly disappear.

Spectacle without consent

While protest spreads through absence, another kind of attention is being manufactured.

A film about Melania Trump premiered at the newly rebranded Trump Kennedy Center. Official posts described a red carpet event. Images told a different story: a controlled interior space, step-and-repeat walls, and a conspicuously empty room.

Online, the response was blunt.
Is the red carpet in the room with us?

Reports followed of empty theaters and Craigslist posts offering payment to fill seats. Attendance was incentivized. Interest was optional.

This is the opposite of protest culture.

Here, attention is produced regardless of demand. Participation is simulated. Cultural institutions function as stages rather than meeting places. Success is measured internally, not by resonance.

It is spectacle without consent and without risk.

Breaking

Late Thursday, federal agents arrested Don Lemon.

The arrest stems from a protest at a Minnesota church earlier this month. Lemon attended and documented the event as a journalist. Weeks later, he was taken into custody. The charges remain unclear.

The timing matters.

This was not crowd control. It was retroactive enforcement. Observation itself became actionable, not in the moment, but after documentation had already circulated.

By now, the pattern should feel familiar.

What ties this week together is the sense that we are all living slightly downstream of events.

Violence happens. People respond immediately. Songs are written. Protests form. Posts circulate. Then the systems catch up. Platforms quietly change their rules. Institutions stall. Consequences, when they appear, arrive later and unevenly.

By the time explanations surface, the moment has already passed through everyone’s hands.

That lag no longer feels abstract. It feels lived. It feels like something people have learned to expect even as they keep hoping otherwise.

I wrote more about this dynamic in this week’s essay, After the Fact. It looks at what it means to live in a system where power moves first and explanation follows, if it follows at all.

This week didn’t introduce that reality.
It stripped away the last excuses for ignoring it.

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I’m writing this while the city prepares for a snowstorm. The forecast keeps shifting, but the mood doesn’t. Grocery stores are already picked over. Text threads are filling up with contingency plans. Sunday is shaping up to be a stay-inside day.

Snow weekends are good for sorting. You read a little slower. You linger on a few stories instead of skimming everything. You notice which headlines keep resurfacing in your head once the noise dies down.

These are the ones that stayed with me.

Davos, Out Loud

Davos usually wraps hard positions in careful language. This year, that restraint was thinner.

Trump didn’t use the forum to reassure allies or emphasize continuity. He used it to restate a worldview built on pressure; tariffs as leverage, alliances as conditional, access as something to be pushed for rather than shared. It wasn’t presented as a departure from precedent. It was presented as reality.

Mark Carney spoke to the same conditions from a different angle. In his remarks, economic integration wasn’t a stabilizing force but a vulnerability. Trade, finance, and supply chains were described as instruments that can be turned against states that lack collective leverage. His concern wasn’t gradual change, but rupture, and the risk that countries without coordinated power get edged out.

The point wasn’t disagreement. It was that both were describing the same terrain. One treated pressure as a tactic to be used. The other treated it as a force that needed to be confronted. Neither spoke as if this were theoretical.

The tech conversations followed that same logic. Automation and AI weren’t framed as open questions. They were treated as conditions already factored into planning. Job loss came up, but largely as a secondary effect. When Elon Musk spoke about robots outnumbering humans, it sounded less like provocation than timetable.

What stayed mostly out of view was how any of this lands beyond the room. Labor transition, public capacity, political backlash; those questions hovered at the edges but didn’t shape the discussion. The focus stayed on speed, positioning, and who moves first.

Davos matters because it’s where people with influence test what can be said plainly. This year, pressure and displacement no longer needed softening.

What stood out was how normal all of this sounded.

Greenland, as Leverage

Greenland keeps resurfacing because it sits at the intersection of minerals, Arctic shipping routes, and long-term military positioning. As the ice recedes, access matters more, not less.

Much of what’s being discussed builds on existing agreements, especially long-standing U.S.–Denmark defense arrangements. What’s changed is the posture. These frameworks are no longer being treated as shared security measures, but as baseline entitlements that can be expanded, hardened, and reinterpreted.

When Trump talks about “force” in this context, it’s not a threat of invasion. It’s a bargaining tactic. Force here means pressure: trade leverage, NATO commitments, security guarantees, diplomatic strain. It’s about making the cost of refusal feel higher than the cost of compliance.

That’s the real shift. Greenland isn’t being framed as a negotiation between partners. It’s being framed as a problem to be resolved by applying enough weight, over time, until resistance gives way.

2016, as I Remember It

When I think about 2016, I remember how ordinary it felt. Spin classes. Ariana Grande’s “Side to Side.” An internet that didn’t follow you everywhere.

That’s why the current wave of 2016 nostalgia stands out to me. People aren’t reaching back because they think everything was better. They’re reaching back because it felt lighter; less permanent, less monitored, more creative.

What’s harder to sit with is how those memories function now. When old photos resurface, captions get rewritten, and past routines are re-documented, they don’t exist in isolation. They become material. Timelines. Behavioral examples. Clean snapshots of how people once lived, moved, and expressed themselves.

That kind of material is especially valuable to systems trained to recognize patterns in human behavior.

So remembering isn’t just remembering anymore. It’s contribution. The past doesn’t stay put; it gets pulled forward and processed alongside everything else.

Remembering feels harmless. It just isn’t.

ICE, by the Book

This week in Minnesota, ICE detained a five-year-old child along with his father during a routine enforcement action. The child was taken into federal custody and transferred out of state with his parent, far from home, school, and anyone else who could step in.

The official explanation was careful. The child wasn’t “targeted.” Agents followed protocol. Everything happened within the rules.

That framing matters. It narrows the question down to process and shuts down everything else. The issue stops being whether it makes sense to detain a kindergartener and becomes whether the steps were technically allowed.

This is how enforcement insulates itself now. Actions don’t need to be defended if they can be documented. Harm doesn’t need to be addressed if it can be described as incidental. The system isn’t confused about what it’s doing. It’s comfortable doing it.

That’s a shift worth paying attention to.

Leaving Us Behind

I wrote more about this in Leaving Us Behind, which was prompted in part by Mark Carney’s speech at Davos. Not because it offered a solution, but because it describes the problem plainly: economic pressure now moves faster than democratic coordination, and countries that can’t keep pace get boxed out.

You can see that same imbalance elsewhere. In global forums, pressure is discussed as standard practice. In Arctic negotiations, access is treated as a foregone conclusion. In nostalgia that gets fed back into the systems people are trying to step away from. In enforcement that acts first and leaves explanation for later.

Across all of it, outcomes arrive before anyone has much say in them. Decisions get made, structures adjust, and the rest is interpretation.

Snowstorms cut the noise for a moment and make repetition easier to notice.

That’s the file this week. Not what surprised anyone, but what kept coming back.

Stay warm. Take your time with something. The rest will still be there.

There’s a moment that happens sometimes (usually midweek) where you realize you’ve read three separate headlines that would have been unthinkable not that long ago, and your reaction isn’t outrage. It’s fatigue.

A quiet sense that something has shifted, and that everyone involved is counting on you to keep scrolling.

At some point this week, that realization landed while reading about a Nobel Peace Prize being handed to Donald Trump, a president casually floating the idea of canceling elections, and the possible deployment of troops against American protesters.

What stands out isn’t how extreme any of it is. It’s how routine it all sounds.

A Venezuelan opposition leader gave Donald Trump a Nobel Peace Prize

María Corina Machado didn’t nominate Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. She gave him her actual medal.

She traveled to Washington and handed it to Trump at the White House. He accepted it, smiled for the photo, and sent her off with some merch.

Norwegian officials later had to clarify, patiently, that this was not how Nobel Prizes work. Which should not require explanation in 2026.

The moment itself was small and strange, but the instinct behind it wasn’t. Trump remains very comfortable with symbols that carry moral weight, provided they don’t come with responsibility, follow-through, or accountability attached.

The medal didn’t change anything. That was the point.

Trump teased canceling elections

Just kidding! Probably.

Trump floated the idea of canceling elections this week, then immediately retreated into familiar territory. He didn’t say it. He was joking. Everyone is being dramatic.

Legally, no — a president can’t cancel elections.

But legality isn’t what’s being tested here. This is about rehearsal. About putting the sentence into the world and seeing how it sounds. About watching how quickly “that’s impossible” turns into “well, technically…”

Power doesn’t always move by acting. Sometimes it moves by letting the idea settle, just long enough to see who blinks.

Trump threatened the Insurrection Act

After ICE shootings sparked protests in Minnesota, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, a law meant for extraordinary circumstances that is increasingly being discussed as a ready option.

Legal experts immediately warned it would be an abuse of power, state leaders objected, and civil liberties groups raised alarms.

The Insurrection Act doesn’t de-escalate situations like this. It escalates them. But escalation has become a language of its own; one that doesn’t require follow-through to be effective. Sometimes the message is simply that force is available, and restraint is optional.

NSPM-7

This deserves revisiting.

Back in September, Trump issued NSPM-7, a national security memo framed around “domestic terrorism.” It didn’t announce new powers. It didn’t need to. It quietly rearranged existing ones and pointed them in a new direction.

Suddenly, activism starts getting described as “radicalization,” nonprofits as “networks,” and donors as “facilitators.”

Nothing dramatic happens. There are no mass arrests. No sweeping announcements. Just investigations, audits, task forces; the slow conversion of civic participation into something that carries risk.

This is how change happens now. Not loudly, but administratively.

Which is worth sitting with, because the people most excited by this moment aren’t the ones waving flags or shouting slogans. They’re the ones who love process. Who love paperwork. Who love the quiet authority of forms, memos, and interagency task forces.

Authoritarianism doesn’t always show up in costume. Sometimes it shows up as admin.

And somewhere in all of this (the surveillance, the task forces, the expanding federal reach into civic life), the self-described anti–big government crowd has gone remarkably quiet.

One thing worth reading this week

If all of this feels connected, it’s because it is.

I wrote more about this pattern, how the law slowly stops functioning as protection and starts functioning as control, in this week’s essay:

It’s about how systems don’t flip overnight. They test. They adjust. They learn what they can get away with.

By the time it feels obvious, the groundwork is usually already done.

I was hoping the start of 2026 might bring a little breathing room. Instead, it felt like we were dropped right back into the deep end.

Pressure campaigns. Immigration raids. Foreign policy moves that would normally take months of debate, rolled out in days. Not much explanation, not much pause, just one announcement after another.

When everything is happening at once, it gets harder to tell which moments are supposed to stop you cold. But a few things this week really should have.

Renee Nicole Good

This week, a woman was killed by ICE in Minneapolis.

I hate how easily that becomes just another line on a screen. Another thing we’re expected to absorb and move past between meetings, errands, and notifications.

Someone is gone. A family is wrecked. And the system will call it enforcement, as if that makes it acceptable.

Watching the video of Renee Nicole Good shook me to my core. She was shot by an ICE officer while trying to drive away. There is no moment in that footage where lethal force looks justified. Fear, confusion, panic, bad judgment, maybe. But not a death sentence.

No free society is supposed to work this way.

What makes it worse is that video evidence now contradicts the initial explanation from the Department of Homeland Security. DHS called the incident “domestic terrorism.” Trump claimed the agent had been run over. The footage shows the officer firing into her car and walking away uninjured.

The officer who fired the shots has now been identified as Jonathan Ross, a deportation officer based out of the St. Paul field office, previously involved in another high-risk vehicle incident. Minnesota officials say they are being denied access to evidence, with the FBI running the investigation without state partners.

And then there is the response. People immediately started reframing her as dangerous. As someone who must have done something to deserve it. Treating flight itself as proof of guilt.

Trump leaned into that framing almost immediately, defending the officer and treating the killing as justified force rather than a fatal escalation by the state. That kind of rhetoric does not just defend one decision. It teaches people what kind of power is acceptable.

What scares me isn’t only the violence. It’s how quickly we’re being trained to treat this as normal, as inevitable, as the cost of doing politics a certain way.

We are not supposed to get used to people dying in our name.

And this is not an isolated incident. ICE has shot at multiple people over the past year, including bystanders and people trying to flee. That is not maintaining order. That is escalation.

Venezuela, and Who Controls the Money

Also on Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told a room full of investors at a Goldman Sachs energy conference that the United States will take control of all Venezuelan oil for the foreseeable future. PBS later reported that administration officials told lawmakers the money from those oil sales would be placed in U.S.-controlled bank accounts outside the Treasury, described as similar to offshore accounts.

The day before, Trump was even more direct. He said the money would be “controlled by me.”

So, in plain terms: pressure on a foreign government, seizure of its primary resource, then executive control over where that money is allowed to move, with no vote from Congress on how any of it gets used.

Is that legal? Technically, they can route this through sanctions law. Treasury blocks the funds, then selectively approves where the money is allowed to go. On paper, it is not “federal spending.” In practice, it functions like a shadow budget, steered through financial permissions instead of legislation. This is what I was trying to name in The Technate Without a Name.

And what’s maybe the strangest part is how casually all of this was presented. Nothing to see here. Just a dramatic expansion of executive control over another country’s economy.

Walking Away From the World

At the same time, the U.S. is pulling back from large parts of the international system.

This week, the Trump administration moved to withdraw the United States from 66 international organizations, including 31 tied to the United Nations and 35 non-UN bodies. This is not just culture agencies. It includes core climate treaty structures like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and scientific bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Other affected groups focus on migration, labor, violent extremism prevention, biodiversity, and technical cooperation; areas the administration has labeled wasteful, redundant, or “contrary to U.S. interests.”

This follows a broader pattern: the U.S. has already exited the World Health Organization, the Human Rights Council, and UNESCO under this administration, and is now dismantling participation in major climate, humanitarian, and governance frameworks.

None of this is flashy. But it reshapes how the U.S. engages globally: fewer partnerships, more transactions, fewer shared rules, more unilateral leverage. The strategy now isn’t to build consensus across nations, it’s to pick and choose what the U.S. stays in based on whether it feels useful in a given moment; a logic that prizes unilateral control over shared responsibility.

It’s not “retreat.” It’s a different model of power. And this shift in how power is exercised doesn’t stay in Washington. It shows up in statehouses, in campaigns, and in who is suddenly under pressure.

Minnesota as a Test Case

Minnesota is not just part of this story. It is a political focus.

Governor Tim Walz has announced he will not seek re-election. Senator Amy Klobuchar is openly considering a run for governor. And all of this is happening as Trump and his allies continue to single out the state around immigration, fraud, and social services, turning Minnesota into a stand-in for national culture-war politics.

Not because it is uniquely broken, but because it is politically useful.

Klobuchar is feared by Republicans because she wins statewide and holds independents in a moment when that coalition is getting harder to keep together. A run for governor would not be about climbing the ladder. It would be about locking down a state that is being actively targeted and making sure federal pressure campaigns do not turn into long-term political realignment.

But keeping her in Washington carries a different kind of risk. It means Democrats leave a vulnerable state exposed while continuing with national leadership structures that are slow to respond, hesitant to escalate, and increasingly outpaced by an executive branch that is comfortable acting first and sorting out legality later.

So the trade-off is real. Do you send one of your strongest statewide figures back home to defend the ground, or keep her in D.C., where the problem is bigger but the tools are weaker?

That tension is playing out across the country. Minnesota just happens to be where the collision between federal power and state politics is becoming impossible to ignore. And that is what national dysfunction looks like when it stops being theoretical and starts shaping who runs, who governs, and who absorbs the consequences.

The Technate Without a Name

Earlier this week I wrote about how American power is being exercised less through laws and negotiations, and more through administrative systems that move money, people, and resources with very little public debate.

Or, put more simply: less politics, more management. Less argument, more process.

This week did not challenge that idea. It made it easier to recognize.

Venezuela did not feel like a foreign policy crisis. It felt like an operational decision about resources and money. Minneapolis did not feel like a tragic anomaly. It felt like what happens when enforcement becomes the organizing principle instead of accountability.

Not chaos. Control. And control rarely arrives with speeches or announcements. It shows up quietly, through procedures, executive authority, financial workarounds, and language that keeps lowering the bar for what we’re told is normal.

The unsettling part is not just what’s changing. It’s how quickly it’s changing.

If you feel disoriented by that, you’re not wrong. Our nervous systems are built to notice when rules shift too fast, when familiar guardrails start disappearing, when things that used to require debate start happening by default.

You are not overreacting to that feeling.

But what’s happening around us is not normal either.

That is what this week felt like.

New Year’s Eve was with family. New Year’s Day with friends. There’s a supermoon coming this weekend. And here we are at the first Friday of 2026.

I’m not in a rush to assign meaning to the year yet. Early days are better for noticing. Still, the first week has a way of revealing habits and priorities before anyone has time to smooth them out. This one offered a few moments worth paying attention to.

A mayor sworn in underground

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City inside the long-closed City Hall subway station, one of the system’s original stops that has been sealed off from daily use for decades.

It was an unusual setting, but it didn’t feel like a stunt.

In his first remarks, Mamdani called the station “a testament to the importance of public transit to the vitality, the health, and the legacy of our city.” He used the moment to announce his first major appointment, naming Mike Flynn as transportation commissioner. That mattered, especially for a mayor who ran on free buses and affordability as concrete policy rather than symbolism. The setting reinforced the point without needing to explain it.

Mamdani also took the oath on a Quran, becoming the first mayor in New York City history to do so. It was presented simply, as fact, not flourish.

Inauguration above ground

Later that morning, on New Year’s Day, Mamdani was inaugurated again, this time above ground on the steps of City Hall.

The tone shifted, but the message didn’t.

In his inaugural address, Mamdani rejected the idea that the moment should be used to lower expectations. He pledged to govern audaciously and made clear he had no intention of diluting his politics to reassure skeptics. Affordability, housing, and transit were framed as questions of public obligation rather than political branding. Whether or not you agree with him, the throughline was unmistakable. This administration intends to be clear about what it believes.

Meanwhile, the outgoing mayor logged on

At nearly the same time, Eric Adams marked the new year by posting a video on X with the caption, “Happy New Year! Here is to an unforgettable, badass, no bullshit 2026.”

In the video, Adams described government as slow and broken, complained about people throwing sand in the gears, and framed what comes next as “the fun part,” promising more to come exclusively on X in the days and weeks ahead. Earlier in the week, he also floated the idea of fighting antisemitism with cryptocurrency after leaving office.

It didn’t read as a closing chapter so much as a soft launch. The contrast between the two moments was difficult to miss.

A quiet federal pause

President Trump announced he is dropping, for now, his push to keep National Guard troops stationed in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles. The decision follows legal challenges and court setbacks, but it also marks a pause in an approach that has leaned heavily on visibility and force.

Whether this signals restraint or recalibration remains to be seen.

Culture keeps its own schedule

Bad Bunny made history this week, becoming the first Spanish-language artist nominated simultaneously for Album, Song, and Record of the Year at the Grammys. It felt less like a breakthrough and more like a delayed acknowledgment of what audiences have already embraced.

At the same time, a wave of creative works entered the public domain in 2026, including early Gershwin compositions and Betty Boop. These works now sit outside private ownership, open to reinterpretation and reuse at a moment when cultural access elsewhere continues to narrow.

Power on the ballot

Twenty-six states will elect secretaries of state this year. These races rarely attract sustained attention, but they now sit at the crux of election administration and legitimacy. The consequences of this cycle will extend well beyond November.

Offshore

While all of this unfolded, St. Barths hosted the largest superyacht gathering in its history. More than two hundred superyachts anchored for New Year’s Eve, forming a floating concentration of wealth that seemed largely detached from the concerns animating the rest of the week.

It’s not a metaphor. It’s just another fact worth noting.

I keep thinking about how quickly moments pass once the calendar flips. That impulse is what led me to write Ending the Year Without Letting It Disappear, this week’s essay.

It’s about attention, about power, and about resisting the urge to move on before understanding what just happened.

That feels like a good place to stop for the first Friday of 2026.

More soon.

Politics now runs on two parallel tracks, and most weeks we’re encouraged to watch the wrong one. The loud track gets the cameras, the clips, the outrage cycles, and the discourse. The other one moves more slowly, mostly through memos, funding decisions, board votes, and timing. The Friday Files is for that second track, and for the moments where the two collide.

Here is what mattered this week.

Trump’s Speech

Trump’s prime-time address landed with all the subtlety of a man who has learned that volume can substitute for coherence. There was no real effort to persuade anyone outside the existing base, no attempt to explain policy choices or offer reassurance on the economy. The speech relied instead on repetition, grievance, and familiar falsehoods delivered with confidence.

The ending, an angry shout of “Merry Christmas,” was less a seasonal flourish than a reminder of how performance now functions in American politics. It was not meant to unify or clarify. It was intended to signal dominance and maintain attention in place. Even Republicans quietly admitted it did little to calm voters who are worried about costs and stability. That was never the goal. The spectacle itself does the work.

The Epstein Files

This week also brought another announcement about the release of Epstein-related documents. Hundreds of thousands of pages, we are told, will be made public in batches, over time, with redactions.

This is the kind of transparency that looks impressive in a headline and accomplishes very little in practice. The pacing ensures that no single moment produces clarity, accountability, or sustained focus. Information arrives slowly, stripped of context, and spread thin enough that it becomes difficult to assemble into anything meaningful before attention drifts elsewhere.

Nothing is being hidden outright. It is simply being released in a way that blunts its impact. Delay does not have to deny justice to weaken it. It only has to exhaust the people waiting.

Erika Kirk and the Mechanics of Inheritance

Erika Kirk endorsed JD Vance for president in 2028 this week, framing the decision in personal terms while executing a thoroughly institutional move. Endorsements at this level are not symbolic gestures. They transfer donor relationships, organizing infrastructure, and a degree of media legitimacy that would otherwise take years to build.

What makes the coverage effective is also what makes it limiting. Much of it centers on Kirk’s personal story, which narrows the frame and softens the analysis. Grief discourages interrogation. Questions about the political project she now helps carry forward are treated as impolite rather than necessary. The result is continuity without scrutiny, influence preserved without a full accounting of its aims or effects.

This is not unusual. It is how movements endure, not by reinventing themselves, but by carefully managing how their leadership transitions are narrated.

Melania, Framed and Lit

The trailer for the Melania documentary arrived with all the hallmarks of a prestige project designed to say very little while looking expensive doing it. The film promises access, intimacy, and an inside view, but only on carefully controlled terms, backed by Amazon’s considerable resources and distributed through a platform owned by Jeff Bezos, who now occupies a familiar position in American public life as both cultural gatekeeper and political actor.

What stands out most is what is absent. There is no real engagement with politics, no reckoning with history, no acknowledgment of consequence. Distance is styled as dignity. Silence is recast as mystery. The viewer is invited to admire restraint without ever asking what that restraint has made possible.

The choice of director sharpens the point. The project is helmed by Brett Ratner, whose return to prominence comes despite longstanding sexual assault allegations. That detail has largely traveled as a footnote, if it has traveled at all. Cultural prestige, it turns out, has a remarkable capacity to smooth reputations on all sides.

This is not accidental. High-gloss aesthetics have become a reliable way to reintroduce political figures while bypassing uncomfortable questions, especially when the distribution platform has little interest in provoking them. Visibility without responsibility remains the safest position in public life.

HHS and the Decisions That Do Not Trend

While attention stayed fixed on speeches and trailers, Health and Human Services moved forward with cuts to children’s health grants and restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors.

These decisions affect trans youth, pediatric providers, and families who already navigate limited access to care. They arrived quietly, with minimal coverage, because administrative changes rarely compete well with spectacle. There were no dramatic announcements, no visuals built for circulation, just policy shifts with lasting consequences.

This is where much of the real work of harm now occurs, not through grand declarations, but through procedural adjustments that rely on inattention to succeed.

The Kennedy Center and the Question of Ownership

Trump’s hand-picked board voted to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to include his name, despite clear legal questions and immediate backlash from members of the Kennedy family. Federal law designates the Center as a memorial to JFK, and a board vote alone does not override that.

Whether the name change ultimately holds is less important than the instinct behind it. Public institutions are increasingly treated as extensions of personal brand. Cultural landmarks become sites for legacy building rather than shared civic space. Objections are framed as emotional or partisan, rather than as reasonable resistance to the privatization of public memory.

This is not about taste or decorum. It is about who is allowed to claim ownership over institutions meant to belong to the public.

A Note on Faces

Across all of this, a simpler dynamic keeps reappearing. Public attention is steered toward faces, expressions, posture, and tone, while outcomes and decisions recede into the background. Faces circulate easily. Policy does not. Affect moves faster than explanation, and the media environment rewards whatever can travel quickly.

None of this requires secret coordination. It follows directly from incentives that have been built, reinforced, and normalized over time.

Let Your Face Tell the Story came out of paying attention to that imbalance and refusing to treat it as neutral.

These were the stories that shaped the week, whether they were framed that way or not.
Now you’re caught up.

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This wasn’t a week of breaking news so much as a week of reveals. Small shifts. Quiet signals. Fonts changed. Political challengers emerged. Scripture echoed through congressional hearing rooms. Presidents who resent artists took center stage at arts institutions. None of it stood alone, but together, it added up to something familiar. Power clarifying its tastes, its boundaries, and who it thinks gets to cross them.

Calibri Is Cancelled (and Not for the Reasons You Think)

When it comes to sans serifs, I’ve always been a Garamond guy, but this week the State Department reminded us that even fonts aren’t neutral anymore. The decision to ditch Calibri and return to Times New Roman was framed as a cost-saving, common-sense reset. But fonts don’t drain budgets. They signal values.

Calibri was designed to be modern, neutral, and bureaucratic. Times New Roman carries authority by inheritance (the look of permanence, hierarchy, and legacy). The message wasn’t about efficiency. It was about aesthetics as ideology. Governance as nostalgia. A reminder that even design choices are now being conscripted into the culture war.

That same instinct showed up closer to home in New York politics, but from the opposite direction.

No More Vibes, Just Spine

Brad Lander’s NY-10 rollout wasn’t flashy. It was disciplined. And more importantly, the left didn’t scatter around it. It consolidated. Quickly. The challenge to Dan Goldman doesn’t feel like a vanity run or an internet fever dream; it feels like a test of whether incumbency without moral clarity still holds. There’s a confidence emerging here, rooted in the belief that silence is no longer a governing strategy.

Which brings us to NY-15.

Ritchie on the Clock

The race for NY-15 is officially real. Amanda Septimo. Mike Blake. Dalourny Nemorin. Different backgrounds, different styles, same underlying question: what does representation mean right now? This isn’t about ideological purity tests. It’s about whether proximity to power has replaced accountability to people living with higher rents, higher grocery bills, and a foreign policy that feels increasingly untethered from their consent. The volume of challengers isn’t the story. The urgency is.

Broadway, meanwhile, offered a different kind of retreat.

Broadway Can’t Handle Friction

The Queen of Versailles is closing early, which led the discourse to cancel culture and Kristin Chenoweth’s comments about Charlie Kirk. But the more uncomfortable truth is structural. Broadway has rebuilt itself as a luxury product: high ticket prices, thin margins, and no tolerance for controversy. In that ecosystem, any friction becomes existential. Not because audiences can’t handle complexity, but because producers can’t afford it. This isn’t censorship. It’s risk aversion disguised as moral panic.

That tension between culture and control was on full display at the Kennedy Center Honors.

High Culture, Low Pretense

Donald Trump hosted an event meant to celebrate artistic excellence while openly critiquing “woke” culture and reshaping the institution’s leadership in his image. The honorees were real. The performances sincere. But the subtext was ownership. Who gets to define American culture? Who gets invited into its temples? High culture no longer pretends to be above politics; it’s being actively disciplined in real time.

As if Broadway and the Kennedy Center weren’t warning enough, Hollywood spent the week making the fine print a bit more obvious.

Silicon Valley Wants Your Stories (Not You)

Disney announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI. The deal will allow users to generate video using Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters through Sora. Mickey Mouse. Ariel. Darth Vader. Now all promptable and infinitely reproducible. This is being framed, of course, as “expanding creativity” to “meeting audiences where they are.” But this isn’t about imagination. It’s about control.

Hollywood isn’t becoming more creative; it’s becoming more efficient. Studios aren’t investing in artists, they’re investing in systems that turn intellectual property into endlessly recyclable content. A pipeline where human creativity becomes training data, and the output belongs to whoever owns the server.

At the same time, the media landscape continues to shrink. Paramount and Netflix circling Warner Bros. Discovery. Trump is weighing in on the future of CNN as if it were a zoning dispute. Fewer companies, fewer gatekeepers.

This is the same logic playing out everywhere else this week: art flattened into product, culture stripped of unpredictability, institutions reshaped to reward obedience over imagination. Broadway can’t afford controversy. The Kennedy Center can’t feign neutrality. Hollywood doesn’t want artists, it wants assets.

The culture war isn’t just about what’s “woke.” It’s about who gets to create, and who gets replaced.

And then there was Kristi Noem.

The Power of Christ Compels You (Apparently)

During a House hearing, protesters interrupted Noem’s testimony by shouting, “The power of Christ compels you!” (a line lifted straight from The Exorcist). Theatrical? Yes. But also perfectly on theme. Noem, tasked with defending an immigration regime built on cruelty, was met with a moral language her movement routinely weaponizes but refuses to live by.

Moments later, the hearing gave way to something colder. When pressed on deportations, Noem claimed her department had not deported U.S. military veterans: only to be confronted with the live testimony of a Purple Heart recipient who had, in fact, been deported to South Korea under her watch. She refused to acknowledge him at first. It was less of an awkward exchange and more of a moral indictment delivered via iPad. Yet, facts have a way of breaking through the spectacle.

Taken together, none of this is random. Fonts. Campaigns. Broadway closures. Congressional hearings that start like exorcisms. Art institutions folded into political theater. This is what it looks like when the fight over culture becomes the fight over legitimacy itself.

Which is why this week’s essay felt unavoidable.

The Escape Is Over

I wrote about Miami, Georgia, and the end of political escapism. About how voters aren’t shifting ideologically so much as materially. Rent. Insurance. Food. The cost of staying alive has become the loudest political argument in the room.

If you missed it, it’s here.

And if you didn’t: thank you for reading, sharing, and staying Outspoken.

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I turned 38 this week and had a genuinely great birthday. Which means I am well-rested, well-fed, and fully prepared to talk about the week’s quiet power moves with clarity. Just sharp facts and sass this morning.

Here’s what I think actually mattered.

Zillow Pulled Climate Risk From Listings

Zillow quietly removed detailed climate and flood risk data from many home listings. This is being framed as a technical change, but we know this is a market intervention.

For places like the East Bronx, where flooding is not theoretical but a seasonal occurrence, this is a direct hit on consumer protection. Climate risk isn’t just about future storms. It shapes insurance rates, mortgage viability, property values, displacement, and municipal burden. When you erase that information from the buying process, you don’t make the risk go away. You just shift it onto the people with the least room to absorb surprise.

Less data is not neutral. It is a policy choice.

Amazon’s Data Centers and the Cancer Cluster

In rural Oregon, communities near Amazon-linked data centers are seeing spikes in rare cancers and miscarriages tied to nitrate-contaminated drinking water. Data centers consume enormous amounts of water. That water cycles back through agricultural systems. The nitrates concentrate, and then people get sick.

Amazon says its footprint is minimal. Residents say their wells are not.

The cloud is not invisible. It is made of concrete, pipelines, and wastewater, and it’s seeping into someone else’s backyard.

New York Just Declared Algorithmic Pricing a Disclosure Issue

New York passed the first law requiring companies to disclose when your price is set by algorithm using your personal data. If a robot decides you can be charged more, it now has to admit it.

The law was shaped by Assembly Member Emerita Torres, and it’s about to set off a national fight. For years, companies have quietly adjusted prices based on behavior, device type, zip code, and browsing history. Not supply and demand, but rather surveillance and leverage.

This is what late-stage capitalism looks like when the mask slips: the receipt tells you the truth.

Netflix Is About to Own Hollywood

Netflix is moving to acquire Warner Bros. and HBO. Paramount made a play. Regulators will pretend to be surprised, but Wall Street is already celebrating.

If this goes through, one company controls production, distribution, and the deepest legacy catalog in American entertainment. That means creatives lose leverage, the workers lose stability, and audiences lose competition.

“Synergy” is just a polite word for fewer bosses with more power.

The U.S. Institute of Peace Is Now the Trump Institute of Peace

Yes, really. The U.S. Institute of Peace has been renamed after Donald Trump. A diplomacy and conflict-resolution institution now branded like a luxury golf course.

Renaming is not cosmetic. This is ownership language. It’s how power signals permanence without passing new laws.

The Healthcare Cliff Is Still on the Calendar

Senate Democrats are trying to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies covering 24 million people. If they fail, premiums jump immediately, and millions risk losing coverage at the new year.

This isn’t a philosophical debate. It’s a billing cycle. Healthcare in America is still a subscription service with abrupt cancellation terms.

I don’t find anything radical about wanting to keep your doctor.

Power Is Still Tilting the Rules

The Supreme Court allowed Texas to proceed with a congressional map widely criticized as racially discriminatory. At the same time, billion-dollar Trump-aligned “gifts” are being sold as philanthropy instead of what they function as: long-term political infrastructure.

If maps decide representation then money decides access. Well, both are being redrawn in real time.

Democracy doesn’t disappear anymore. It gets slowly rezoned.

A Birthday Note, With Good Energy

Thirty-eight feels good. The week was busy. The food was good. The sweets were better. Which is exactly why the clarity matters. These stories aren’t abstract. They show up in mortgage paperwork, medical bills, water quality reports, shopping carts, and ballot lines.

Power today is quiet, technical, branded, and very measured about it. Which is why it’s worth pointing at it directly.

See you next Friday.

America is doing that thing again where it insists two opposite things are true at the same time and asks everyone to politely nod along.

On one hand, a Thanksgiving dinner that now costs nearly ten percent more than last year. Onions up fifty-six percent. Cranberry sauce up twenty-two percent. Spiral hams up nearly fifty percent. Even canned creamed corn climbing more than twenty percent. On the other, corporate press releases, think-tank blogs, and official talking points assuring us that everything is actually cheaper, more abundant, and historically affordable if you just look at the right spreadsheet.

Most families are not looking at spreadsheets. They are looking at their grocery receipts.

Polling shows nearly two-thirds of Americans are stressed about Thanksgiving costs. More than a third are buying fewer items. A quarter are hosting smaller gatherings. More than one in ten are skipping the holiday entirely. Food pantries in New York City are reporting the highest usage on record, with many visitors holding one or more jobs. This is what “abundance” looks like right now. Working people quietly recalibrating tradition.

Meanwhile, the White House keeps pointing to Walmart’s four-dollar-per-person Thanksgiving meal as proof that inflation has been conquered. What they do not say is that the kit contains fewer items, more generic substitutions, and a redesigned basket that quietly lowers standards rather than prices. It is not cheaper food. It is a smaller holiday.

Beneath all of it are the structural drivers no one wants to dwell on in a soundbite. Avian flu wiping out flocks. Tariffs inflating fertilizer, steel, and imported inputs. Immigrant labor shortages leaving crops unharvested. Trade policy whiplash cascading through every aisle of the store. Prices rise because systems are strained.

And yet, online spending on Thanksgiving is expected to rise again this year, with billions pushed through digital checkout lanes in a single day. More people shopping. Fewer dollars per cart. Steeper discounts. Thinner margins. Consumers are not celebrating abundance. They are shopping under pressure.

The consumer research firms say it plainly. Circana finds that while nearly all Thanksgiving meals are still eaten at home, people are stretching their budgets harder than at any point in recent memory, facing food prices more than thirty percent higher than in 2019 without matching wage growth. Young adults expect to buy less than any other age group. People are outsourcing more side dishes not as a luxury, but because ingredients have become unpredictable. Even the rituals around the meal are shifting. More food is coming from quick-service counters. More baking is happening at home because store-bought desserts are becoming a splurge. What looks like tradition on the surface is, underneath, a series of quiet economic workarounds. This is not excess. It is adaptation.

Now enter the propaganda.

This week, the Cato Institute declared that Thanksgiving 2025 is the most affordable on record, pointing to Farm Bureau averages and rising median wages as proof that the system is working. Their framework quietly swaps lived cost for abstract ratios. Median weekly earnings versus a hypothetical dinner price that many regions cannot actually access. Brand substitution disappears. Transportation costs flatten. Geographic price differences blur. Credit card dependence is treated as neutral.

It is a familiar move, shift the measurement, and declare victory.

Cato even acknowledges in the fine print that produce prices are surging, labor shortages are driven in part by immigration crackdowns, fertilizer and equipment costs are tariff-inflated, and trade uncertainty is crushing farm stability. Then it returns, without irony, to gratitude. Be thankful for abundance. Be thankful for markets. Be thankful for the spreadsheet. This is not an analysis. It is narrative laundering.

The lived reality is visible everywhere else. Consumers are trading name brands for generics. Delaying purchases. Downsizing gatherings. Skipping travel. Showing up at food pantries for the first time in their lives. Even as online sales surge, consumer confidence is near historic lows and household financial stress is hardening into a permanent condition.

What we are watching is not abundance. It is managed scarcity wrapped in the aesthetics of plenty.

As Black Friday arrives, not everyone is playing along. Grassroots groups are calling for consumer boycotts of major retailers. No Target. No Amazon. No Home Depot. Some people are skipping the mall entirely. Others are redirecting what they would have spent to local businesses or mutual aid. The quiet message underneath is simple: if the economy is going to lean on our wallets this hard, some people are finally learning how to close them.

This is where the story lands this week. On one side, the machinery of consumption begging to be fed. On the other, a growing number of Americans choosing not to participate in the ritual at all.

The spreadsheets insist we are richer. The checkout lines say otherwise. And the boycotts suggest something new is starting to form beneath the surface.

TLDR

Thanksgiving dinner is nearly ten percent more expensive than last year, families are shrinking their gatherings, food pantry use is at record highs, and major retailers are quietly downsizing what counts as a “cheap” holiday meal. At the same time, online sales are surging and think tanks are insisting this is the most affordable Thanksgiving in history if you ignore where people live, what they actually buy, and how they pay for it. Beneath the spreadsheets, consumers are trading brands for generics, baking at home to save money, and stretching every tradition thinner. And now, as Black Friday arrives, a growing number of people are opting out entirely through boycotts and redirects to local spending. The contradiction is the moment: record spending layered over record strain. The receipts are telling a different story.

No matter how much Botox Jeff Bezos pumps into that forehead, today is one of those days when even America’s most powerful men cannot hide the sweat.

Let’s start with Trump. The man who spent months calling Zohran Mamdani a “fake communist” is suddenly in the Oval Office patting him on the arm like they are starring in a Bosom Buddies reboot. He is praising him, smiling, launching into a whole “We’re New Yorkers!” routine. It is not diplomacy. It is camouflage. The Epstein files are about to hit daylight, and Trump is out here filming wholesome content to soften the blow.

Right on cue, Jeff Bezos’ newly MAGA-fied Washington Post publishes an editorial begging Americans not to get too excited about the Epstein files. They called it “old news” and “not in the public interest,” which is billionaire code for: these documents are uncomfortably close to someone at my country club. They even praised the lone Republican who voted to bury the whole thing. Subtle as a Cybertruck.

Botox freezes the muscles, but it does not freeze panic.

And the panic is obvious.

Because while all this is happening, the economy is being run like a vibes-based startup. The government shutdown got so bad that the BLS canceled the October inflation report entirely. The Fed is flying blind, and Trump is hovering like a man watching someone else assemble IKEA furniture.

This is what it looks like when power starts spiraling.

Hug the people you spent months trashing.

Publish essays arguing the public should not know anything.

Demand the Fed fix an economy you ran over with that Cybertruck.

Botox can freeze a face. Panic still shows in the eyes.

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