Things are coming to a head in Ukraine. You’ve probably heard that Trump gave Ukraine a 28-point “peace plan” and warned that if Ukraine didn’t accept, the U.S. would withdraw all support. I’ve been looking at this “plan,” and it’s a bad joke. It was “negotiated” by Trump’s real-estate buddy Steve Witkoff, with input from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. No one in Europe or in the U.S. Congress was consulted about this. And also note that today Trump is saying that the plan isn’t necessarily the “final offer,” which probably means the rest of the world got back to him with a big HELL NO.

I’m going to quote a lot of people here, starting with Heather Cox Richardson.

The plan appears to have been leaked to Barak Ravid of Axios by Kirill Dmitriev, a top ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and reports say it was worked out by Dmitriev and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff. Ukrainian representatives and representatives from Europe were not included. Laura Kelly of The Hill reported on Wednesday that Congress was blindsided by the proposal, …

…The plan gives Crimea and most of the territory in Ukraine’s four eastern oblasts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk to Russia, and it limits the size of the Ukrainian military.

It erases any and all accountability for the Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, including well-documented rape, torture, and murder. It says: “All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.”

It calls for $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to be invested in rebuilding and developing Ukraine. Since the regions that need reconstruction are the ones Russia would be taking, this means that Russian assets would go back to Russia. The deal says that Europe, which was not consulted, will unfreeze Russian assets and itself add another $100 billion to the reconstruction fund. The plan says the U.S. “will receive 50 percent of the profits from this venture,” which appears to mean that Europe will foot the bill for the reconstruction of Ukraine—Russia, if the plan goes through—and the U.S. and Russia will split the proceeds.

The plan asserts that “Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy,” with sanctions lifted and an invitation to rejoin the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of countries with advanced economies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the European Union—that meets every year to discuss global issues. Russia was excluded from the group after it invaded Ukraine in 2014, and Putin has wanted back in.

According to the plan, Russia and “[t]he US will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”

The plan requires Ukraine to amend its constitution to reject membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It says “[a] dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the US, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.”

Not only does this agreement sell out Ukraine and Europe for the benefit of Russia—which attacked Ukraine—it explicitly separates the U.S. from NATO, a long-time goal of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

Sorry for the long quote, but that’s as good a summation as I could find. I especially like the part about Europe paying for reconstruction and Russia and the U.S. splitting the proceeds.

Now, let’s go to Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic.

The 28-point peace plan that the United States and Russia want to impose on Ukraine and Europe is misnamed. It is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else.

The plan was negotiated by Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer with no historical, geographical, or cultural knowledge of Russia or Ukraine, and Kirill Dmitriev, who heads Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and spends most of his time making business deals. The revelation of their plan this week shocked European leaders, who are now paying almost all of the military costs of the war, as well as the Ukrainians, who were not sure whether to take this latest plan seriously until they were told to agree to it by Thanksgiving or lose all further U.S. support. Even if the plan falls apart, this arrogant and confusing ultimatum, coming only days after the State Department authorized the sale of anti-missile technology to Ukraine, will do permanent damage to America’s reputation as a reliable ally, not only in Europe but around the world.

Again, TACO Trump today announced this plan wasn’t necessarily the final offer. He must have felt some scorching blowback from Europe.

Applebaum goes on to describe how the details of the plan would leave Ukraine vulnerable to another Russian invasion in the future. The plan mentions “security guarantees” without spelling out what they are. And, of course, there is no reason to believe Trump would abide by them, anyway.

Why is the Trump White House pushing Ukraine to accept a Russian plan that paves the way for another war? The document offers some hints, declaring that the U.S. would also somehow take charge of the $100 billion in frozen Russian assets, for example, supposedly to invest this money in Ukraine and receive “50% of the profits from this venture.” Europeans, whose banks actually hold most of these assets, would receive nothing. European taxpayers, who currently provide almost all of the military and humanitarian support to Ukraine, are nevertheless expected to contribute $100 billion to Ukraine’s reconstruction.

Yep, sounds like a deal Trump’s people would think up. The plan also vaguely describes future business ventures between the U.S. and Russia.

Other details of the business negotiations carried out by Witkoff and Dmitriev remain secret. Ukrainians and Europeans, who would pay the military and economic price for this plan, deserve to know them. Above all, American citizens should be asking for the details of any business negotiations now under way. This plan has been proposed, in our name, as a part of U.S. foreign policy. But it would not serve our economic or security interests. So whose interests would it serve? Which U.S. companies and which oligarchs would benefit? Are Trump’s family members and political supporters among them? The arrangements on offer should be public knowledge before any kind of deal is signed.

I’m sure the Trump family has already worked out a plan for steering a lot of those “proceeds” into Trump family pockets. Otherwise, what’s the point? See also A DMZ for Ukraine by Simon Shuster and Jonathan Lamire at The Atlantic. Setting up a DMZ between east and west Ukraine is part of the plan, too.

My impression is that Europe is scrambling to be sure this plan is, um, seriously amended. See G20 Leaders Push Back on U.S. Peace Plan for Ukraine by John Eligon and Michael Schwirtz in The New York Times.

 In a joint statement adopted Saturday the leaders of 11 nations — including Germany, France, Britain, Japan and Canada — and the European Union said the 28-point plan included “important elements that will be essential for a just and lasting peace.”

But they also made clear that they took issue with provisions of the plan that would strip Ukraine of territory and limit the size of its armed forces.

“What is at stake is Ukrainian sovereignty and European security,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Saturday, adding that European countries would work with the Ukrainians over the next two days to create a plan for the way forward.

This is setting up a contest with the U.S. and Russia on one side and all of America’s allies on the other. What could go wrong? And what would happen if Ukraine just says no?

Considering also Trump’s lame duck status, IMO there’s a possibility that if this mess were signed, the Senate might refuse to ratify it (per the Constitution, Article II. Section 2. paragraph 2). Actually, it says here “The Senate does not ratify treaties. Following consideration by the Committee on Foreign Relations, the Senate either approves or rejects a resolution of ratification. If the resolution passes, then ratification takes place when the instruments of ratification are formally exchanged between the United States and the foreign power(s).” Okay.

The “ranking members” on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations have already put out a statement expressing disagreement with the plan. As for the Republicans, some of the Senate’s GOP Russia hawks are not happy with this plan. But those Russia hawks are somehow not on the Senate foreign relations committee. So perhaps that’s a long shot.

It’s been a while since I’ve read Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. Friedman says that Trump is now the winner of a peace prize — the Neville Chamberlain peace prize.

To all the gentlemen who delivered this turkey to Moscow, I can offer only one piece of advice: Be under no illusions. Neither Fox News nor the White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt will be writing the history of this deal. If you force it upon Ukraine as it is, every one of your names will live in infamy alongside that of Chamberlain, who is remembered today for only one thing.

I say this is a disservice to Chamberlain. Chamberlain may have been naive and misguided, but his failed bid for “peace in our time” at least didn’t attempt to make a financial profit from the “peace.”

… if this plan is forced on Ukraine as is, we will need to add a new verb to the diplomatic lexicon: “Trumped” — to be sold out by an American president, for reasons none of his citizens understand (but surely there are reasons). And history will never forget the men who did it — Donald Trump, Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, Dan Driscoll — for their shame will be everlasting.

I think Friedman is against it.

Anyway– this plan is awful. There’s nothing more to say about it. I hope it falls through.

Update: This is interesting. From Politico —

U.S. lawmakers attempted Saturday to reverse days of confusion around a leaked peace plan for Ukraine, saying Secretary of State Marco Rubio assured them the document does not represent the Trump administration’s position.

Rubio called the bipartisan delegation to the Halifax International Security Forum on Saturday afternoon, they said, while en route to Geneva for talks with Ukrainian officials. He described the plan as a Russian proposal, they said, and not a U.S. initiative.

“He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). “It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan. It is a proposal that was received, and as an intermediary, we have made arrangements to share it — and we did not release it. It was leaked.”’

Sounds like Little Marco is trying to wash his hands of this mess. I did read somewhere that the text of the agreement clearly was originally written in Russian and translated into English. So Rubio might be telling the truth here. But Trump smacked Ukraine with this plan as if it were his.

The Trump-Mamdani meeting is over, and apparently nothing bad happened. I’m saying somebody slipped Trump some Valium before the meeting.

You may have missed it, but recently the Department of Defense invaded Mexico.  This was allegedly an accident. On Monday or thereabouts Mexican naval personnel found a bunch of DoJ contractors posting signs on a Mexican beach declaring the area — roughly twelve miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border — to be U.S. Department of Defense property and restricted. It turns out the contractors were lost, or at least that’s what they said. They took their signs down and marched back across the border.

However, the story as reported in Mexico News Daily makes it sound more like a deliberate provocation.

Playa Bagdad is located where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico. The river, which originates in south-central Colorado in the United States and is called the Río Bravo on the Mexican side, forms the border between the two countries for a long stretch. 

Reports of unidentified men arriving at the beach by boat to install signs prompted the response from Mexico’s Naval Ministry (Semar). 

The signs reportedly stated in Spanish and English that the area was Department of Defense property and a “Restricted Area” by order of “the commander.” They also said that “unauthorized entry is prohibited,” as are photography or drawings, and stated, “If you are found here, you may be detained and searched.” 

Sheinbaum said her government was communicating with U.S. authorities in order to get an explanation.

“First, the consulate was consulted, then the embassy,” she said. “They hadn’t issued an official report, so the signs were removed. Later, a U.S. government agency stated that a company had indeed been hired to put them up.” 

Trump has been pushing Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to allow U.S. troops on Mexican soil to go after drug cartels. President Sheinbaum says no way. But the official excuse from the DoJ is that the contractors were lost and didn’t realize they were in Mexico.

Anything is possible, frankly. This story has been reported, but I’m just now noticing it. There’s no much other news it kind of got lost. In normal times it would have been a big deal.

But during the Trump Administration, it’s normal. We keep hearing that, about all kinds of news stories — if this had happened with any other President … Lawrence O’Donnell opened his show last night pointing out that if any other president had called for members of Congress to be executed there would have been massive banner headlines across the country. But in the Trump Administration, it’s just Thursday. What will it take for the media to begin to treat Trump just as they’ve treated any other president?

And then there’s this. This is a screen grab from the Memeorandum news aggregate site.

Yesterday swastikas and nooses were no longer hate symbols. Oops! today they’re hate symbols. Why was this even an issue? Incompetence abounds.

It feels as if the entire Right is beginning to flail around. See Philip Bump at MSNow.

Unlike most past chief executives, Trump’s power depends on strict loyalty from congressional Republicans. He’s pushed — and flown past — traditional boundaries of presidential power largely because Congress won’t do anything about it. No more than a handful of Republicans tried to hold him to account when he stoked a violent attack on the results of the 2020 presidential contest. You think they’re going to vote to impeach because he’s stealing their authority to raise and spend revenue?

That loyalty has depended on the perception that Trump holds enormous power; specifically, power over the Republican electorate. But Epstein is not the only issue on which Trump has faced headwinds of late: As inflation and prices remain high, he has struggled to convince Americans there are no affordability issues. His suggestion last week that skilled immigrants are necessary workers roiled his MAGA base.

Trump’s polling numbers are dropping like a rock. He’s deeply underwater on every issue. His brilliant initiatives keep failing. Even a lot of the MAGA influencers who helped Trump win in 2024 are questioning his competence.  And we are just under a year to the midterms. I believe we’ve reached the point at which Republican legislators facing re-election next year are thinking hard about how much space they may need between themselves and their dear leader.

Update: MTG is resigning from Congress.

I understand the Epstein files bill was passed in the Senate and sent to Trump already. He has said he will sign it. There’s a report at Reuters that I can’t read because it’s behind a paywall, but I understand it says that today the White House was lobbying senators to slow-walk the vote. They didn’t. So now we will see if and what the DoJ releases. Maybe. If Trump gets around to signing the bill. Trump’s girl Pam says she will release the files within thirty days. Lots of redacting still to do, I guess.

See Politico, ‘Democrats are going to come to regret this’: After Epstein vote, Trump ready to attack. Trump assumes that he can damage the Democratic party by releasing the names of Democrats mentioned in the files. What Trump — and most wingnuts — never seem to notice is that Dems are not the knee-jerk loyalists that righties tend to be. Remember Senator Al Franken? It wasn’t attacks from Republicans that pushed him to resign. (And I still think the Democrats who pushed him overreacted.) So Larry Summers has now been shamed into withdrawing from the public. I am not losing sleep over it.

Another Democrat — Stacey Plaskett, a non-voting delegate to the House from the U.S. Virgin Islands —  texted with Epstein in 2019 during an Oversight hearing. It is alleged he was trying to influence what questions she might ask. I haven’t seen a transcript of the texts. Yesterday a vote in the House to censure Plaskett failed. A handful of Republicans must have decided she hadn’t actually done anything worth censuring.

And see Jennifer Rubin, Trump Is in Full Retreat.

Meanwhile, Trump’s redistricting plot is blowing up in his face.  And it’s his own fault. I wrote yesterday that a federal court has blocked Texas from using their newly gerrymandered maps in the 2026 midterms because Trump’s third-tier lawyers were stupid enough to admit in public documents that the gerrymandering should be based on race. The map might still be reinstated on appeal. But the map was drawn in the assumption that Texas Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 are permanently aligned with MAGA. And it’s very possible they aren’t. Also, the Indiana legislature has failed to vote to redraw its maps. Gerrymandering efforts in Kansas and New Hampshire appear to be on hold. And a state court judge in Utah rejected the Republican redrawn map. See Greg Sargent at The New Republic, Trump’s Plot to Rig 2026 Is Falling Apart, and Boy Is He Mad About It.

Trump’s case against James Comey also is hanging by a thread. See Ella Lee at The Hill:

The Justice Department on Wednesday admitted that the operative indictment against former FBI Director James Comey was never presented to the full grand jury — a procedural error defense attorneys say should bar the prosecution.  

The admission came under sharp questioning from U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, after several judges overseeing parts of the case had raised concerns about the government’s presentation and an apparent discrepancy in the grand jury record.  

Instead of presenting a new indictment to the full panel after it rejected one of the counts, interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan gave the grand jury’s foreperson an updated version — not seen by the other grand jurors — to sign. 

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, is visiting Washington DC. This is ghastly.

“things happen”; sometimes people are just randomly dismembered with bone saws. especially journalists who ask me mean questions.

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— Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat.bsky.social) November 18, 2025 at 12:55 PM

Things do happen, yes. See also Trump Family’s Business Ties to Saudi Arabia Raise Ethics Worries in the New York Times. The headline understates the situation. Trump is just using the presidency to maximize advantages for his financial interests. He’s blatant about it.

The House passed the Epstein files bill, 427-1. The lone “no” vote was from Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA). Needless to say, this is all transparency theater. The DoJ is not about to release anything that incriminates Donald Trump.

Also today, a federal court blocked the Texas gerrymandering from being used in the 2026 midterms. There’s time for an appeal, of course. Update: See more on this decision by Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

The Supreme Court, as is well known, has created subconstitutional rules that essentially makes discrimination against disfavored minorities legal unless the public official responsible is dumb enough to admit it in legal documents. Because Trump has been systematically firing all of the competent lawyers in the Department of Justice, this is exactly what they did:

Ironically, the Republicans are challenging the California gerrymander on the grounds that it is racially biased. Unfortunately for them, California’s lawyers aren’t that stupid

What has me most worried right now is that Republicans in both the House and Senate are going full speed ahead on Trump’s half-assed suggestion that instead of Affordable Care Act subsidies, people should just get money to put into health savings accounts. Do I need to explain to y’all why this won’t work? It’ll work well enough for people with lots of money, of course, which makes it the ideal Republican plan. See Ryan Cooper, Republicans Will Never Find a Health Care Replacement, at The American Prospect.

Regarding Trump’s so-called flipflop regarding the Epstein files — apparently he was informed that the House will pass the bill ordering a release of the files. So, he “magnanimously” said the House should go ahead and vote to release the files. He could have just ordered them released, of course. The only reason there needs to be a vote is him.

The bill still has to pass in the Senate. If it does, Trump will have prepared an excuse to veto the bill, or at least stuff it in a drawer and not sign it. For example, he could cite the ongoing investigation he ordered last week into Epstein’s relationships with Democrats. (And I’m sure if there were anything really juicy in them about anyone Trump doesn’t like it would have been leaked already.) See also David Kurtz at TPM.

There’s just been a development in the James Comey case. Last week the judge in the case complained that the grand jury records he was given appeared to be incomplete. As I understand it, this throws the indictment itself into doubt. You’ll remember the indictment was obtained by the possibly not properly appointed lawyer Lindsey Halligan, who had no prior experience with grand juries. She could have messed up in some way that would get the indictment thrown out of court.  Halligan and Pam Bondi insist the grand jury records given to the court are complete. But apparently the judge doesn’t believe them.

This morning the judge issued an order saying that the complete grand jury records must be given to him today.

ORDERED that, by 3:00 p.m. on November 17, 2025, the Clerk of Court shall make available to the defense all grand jury materials filed on the docket under seal by the government (ECF 179); and it is further ORDERED that the government shall, no later than 5:00 p.m. on November 17, 2025, produce to the defense the complete audio recording of the grand jury proceedings; and it is further ORDERED that the Clerk of Court shall file on the public docket the version of the Memorandum Opinion containing narrow redactions of grand jury material; and it is further ORDERED that the Clerk of Court shall maintain the unredacted version of the Memorandum Opinion under seal until further order of the Court as to James B. Comey, Jr. Signed by Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick on 11/17/2025. (jlan) (Entered: 11/17/2025)

So we’ll see what happens. I think the Comey case is doomed.

Stuff to read — Timothy Snyder, The Grift Bubble

Paul Krugman, The Plutocrats Who Cried “Commie”. It turns out nobody is fleeing New York because Zohran Mamdani was elected.

Michael Embrich, Rolling Stone, Trump Is Turning the Screws on Vets So the Rich Can Get Richer

At The Atlantic, Adam Serwer reminds us that “A key tenet of the cult of personality around Trump was the belief that his second presidency would result in the Epstein documents revealing a secret cabal of Democratic pedophiles.” And during the campaign he seemed to promise to release the files. But when the files were demanded they suddenly became hard to find, and then Trump decided the whole Epstein controversy was a hoax. (The President Who Cried ‘Hoax’)

Well, today we get a two-for-one.

President Trump on Friday doubled down on his assertion that all this controversy about Jeffrey Epstein is a “hoax” cooked up by Democrats to distract from their “disastrous” policies and the government shutdown. And he also threatened to order up his own investigations into Epstein’s ties with prominent Democrats.

Ongoing investigations might give him an excuse to not release the files.

Anyway, Trump’s most loyal influencers and media bobbleheads (see, for example, Megyn Kelly) have been trying hard to downplay the Epstein episode on Trump’s behalf. But at least a portion of Trump’s culties aren’t letting it go.  See Philip Bump at MSNBC, The Epstein files sinkhole widening under Trump. Once Trump was in the White House again and in a position to release the files, he didn’t. “Polling has repeatedly shown that this incongruity has created a schism in his support,” Bump writes.

Now that the House discharge petition has been signed, Speaker Johnson has promised a vote on releasing the files next week. If this bill passes it goes to the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to end cloture and get voted on, thanks to the filibuster rule. But there is a lot of speculation that there are enough Republicans in both the Senate and House who will break with Trump to pass the thing. Chris Hayes discussed this last night.

As one guy on MSNBC admitted, the record of who voted for what is going to last a lot longer than the Trump Administration. Those who don’t vote to release the files risk spending what’s left of their political careers being challenged to explain why they tried to protect pedophiles. So there’s another schism among Republicans in the making.

And of course, there’s always the possibility that the Trump Administration will refuse to comply.

But Epstein is not the only source of disaffection on the Right. See America First? Some Trump Supporters Worry That’s No Longer the Case. by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Tyler Pager at The New York Times.

President Trump has been dining with Wall Street bigwigs. He has embarked on an opulent revamp of the White House at a time when Americans are struggling to pay their bills. He has expressed support for granting visas to skilled foreigners to take jobs in the United States. He approved a $20 billion bailout for Argentina, helping a foreign government and wealthy investors at a moment when the U.S. government was shut down.

For a president who returned to office promising to avoid foreign entanglements, make life more affordable and ensure that available jobs go to American citizens, it has been a significant departure from the expectations of his loyal base. And it is starting to open a rift with his supporters who were counting on a more aggressively populist agenda.

I understand that through his whole life Trump has always wanted to be accepted into New York’s social elite, the people with old money who give summer parties in their mansions in the Hamptons. I’ve only read about them, but I understand that’s what they do. Anyway, Trump was always some nobody from Queens to them. They don’t accept him because he’s crude and loud and doesn’t know how to dress or behave or use the right fork. But now he thinks he can do one better; be accepted among the global elite who supposedly control everything. You know, the people he promised to expose and destroy. Oops! But he’s not about to destroy them (assuming he could) if he’s got a shot at being one of them.

And he hasn’t been helping himself by declaring that his economy is great and that the prices of groceries and gas and everything have gone down, when they haven’t.

See also Trump Is Losing His Grip on MAGA by Hugh Cameron at Newsweek.

Reeling over the farmer furor that has met his plan to import Argentine beef, and now from Democratic victories in last week’s off-cycle elections, Trump is facing friendly fire over perceived pivots on immigration, the state of the economy and the latest episode of the long-running Epstein saga that has dogged his second administration’s every step.

Many of these tensions came to a head in an interview with Laura Ingraham that aired on Monday, during which the Fox News host challenged the president on offering 600,000 visas to Chinese students and his unexpected praise for the H-1B visa program, characterizing these as decidedly anti-MAGA stances.

Observers quoted in this article admit that Trump will never lose his core support. But the MAGA core support is only a small part of the Republican base. And a lot of people who supported Trump last year are not die-hard MAGA. And they are questioning what MAGA even means and what the Trumpified Republican party even is.

Can Trump distract his way out of the hole he’s in? He can try, but I don’t think so. He’s become increasingly dysfunctional. See Quit “sane-washing” Donald Trump by Brian Karem at Salon. A sample:

Try to make sense of this gibberish from a recent appearance at the American Business Forum on Nov. 7. “For generations,” he said, “Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa.” Later he corrected himself to say South America, which isn’t a country but a continent. South Africa has never been a communist country — but there was apartheid and Elon Musk.

Then Trump insulted New York, but said the city was good when he came to Washington — and then someone got their hair done “very expensively” and is now teaching at Harvard. 

There was also this tangent during his speech to military leaders at Quantico on Sept. 30: “. . . That you couldn’t get people to join the armed forces, and by the way, the police also, fire department, and I always put the fire department because they’re great. They’re great. And I got 95% of their vote…and they’re great in our inner cities. It’s a big part of war now. It’s a big part of war. And the fire department goes up in ladders and, you know, people shooting at them…they’re up on these ladders. It goes way up to the sky.”

At some point the Supreme Court could find his tariffs unconstitutional, which would actually be good for the economy but will throw Trump into a tailspin. And at some point, more Epstein files could be released, and then we’ll learn what he’s been so desperate to keep hidden. Trump wants to start a war with Venezuela, and I don’t think Americans will rally around him if he does.  But even without those things, I don’t see him reversing the slow downward spiral he’s in now.

House Democrats just released a small batch of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, and they discuss Trump. A lot. In one, to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein called Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked.” He continued, “[name of victim redacted] spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. Police chief. etc. im 75 % there.” This was dated April 11, 2011. Trump was talking about running for president at the time, but I don’t believe he made any attempt to organize a campaign that year.

Maxwell replied, “I’ve been thinking about that.”

In 2011 Epstein was a free man, thanks to the non-prosecution agreement he’d gotten from Alex Acosta, and he’d settled a bunch of civil suits from victims. (See timeline.) In the email he appeared to be wondering why Trump hadn’t yet been accused or sued. Good question.

In another email, to Michael Wolff in 2019, Epstein said of Trump “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.” To stop poaching young women employees from Mar-a-Lago? And isn’t this telling us that Maxwell lied to Todd Blanche to get nicer gail time at Club Fed in Texas? See also Malcolm Ferguson at The New Republic.

Trump’s poll numbers keep getting worse. At some point at least a few Republicans will have second thoughts about protecting him.  And I predict there will be ketchup on the walls of what’s left of the White House tonight.

See also Big Coverup Exposed in Bogus Mortgage Fraud Cases by Kavid Kurtz at TPM. It’s a bit convoluted, But here’s an executive summary:

Internal government watchdogs who were looking into the origins of the bogus mortgage fraud claims emanating from the Trump administration were fired en masse, but not before the acting inspector general for the FHFA managed to turn over what appears to be exculpatory evidence to federal prosecutors in the James case.

However, Letitia James says her legal defense team never got this exculpatory evidence. So there’s that, too.

This was the scene in Philadelphia, November 11, 1918, when the Armistice was announced. It’s a reminder that terrible times do end, somehow. (Source)

Paul Waldman writes that while The Cave was not an optimum ending to the shutdown, the backlash from the base will be good for the Democratic Party in the long run. “It may not be much comfort for those bitter about what they see as a needless surrender,” he writes. “But there’s at least a chance that we’ll look back at this moment as a key turning point, one that produced a Democratic Party less willing to live on its knees.”

Something I should have seen coming: Republicans demand tougher abortion restrictions to extend Obamacare funds.

At TPM, Layla A. Jones writes about the $50 billion “rural hospital fund” that was added to the Big Ugly Bill to placate legislators from rural states. The fund was supposed to make money available to keep rural hospitals open in spite of the loss of Medicaid funds. But now it turns out that under Trump Administration restrictions, the fund will be useless for what it’s supposed to do. Hospitals are allowed to use only 15 percent of funds they receive to cover unpaid-for services. Instead, the funds are supposed to be used for things like staff recruitment and retention and promoting preventative care.

The $50 billion wasn’t really enough to keep all rural hospitals open, anyway, and now it’s money down the drain.

In the meantime, more than 300 rural hospitals are immediately at risk of closure, and more than 1,000 are at risk in general as of October 2025, according to an analysis by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform’s rural hospitals initiative. More than 75% of the hospitals in either category are in states that went for Trump in the 2024 presidential election. 

There must be some kind of defect in the Republican brain that doesn’t allow them to grasp why U.S. healthcare isn’t working. Seriously, the reason they can’t come up with  workable reforms to the system is that, in their minds, the problem is that Medicare, Medicaid, etc., drains too much money out of the federal budget. So their “solutions” are always ways to dump the cost back on patients, employers, and the for-profit insurance industry. They cannot look at the problem holistically to understand how nationalized system could drive down costs for everybody and deliver better health care with less aggravation. You know, the way all the other countries do it.

Today a Utah judge struck down a new Republican gerrymandered district map. A few years ago Utah voters passed an initiative that amended the state Constitution to ban partisan gerrymandering. I guess that slipped the Utah GOP’s mind.

But that takes us to the ongoing gerrymandering fight. I’ve seen a lot of commentary over the past few days that say the Republicans are being idiots for basing their redistricting on the 2024 election results, as they are doing. Last week’s election results were a pretty good indicator that the 2024 results were an outlier, not a permanent realignment. It may be that Trump’s 2024 support from Latino’s hasn’t completely collapsed everywhere, as they did last week. But if last week’s trends continue, the midterm results in many places — like Texas — may be very different from what Trump expects.

See Off-year election losses spark Republican concerns about redistricting at NBC News. It makes no predictions and cautions that there are too many variables to know for certain how the redistricting will work out in next year’s midterms. Still, Republicans should be worried.

But two other Republicans close to the White House told NBC News that there are growing concerns in the party that the political war is not going as planned — that the juice may not have been worth the squeeze and could, in a nightmare scenario, result in a net gain for Democrats. And within broader GOP circles, misgivings about the strategy heightened last week after California voters overwhelmingly approved Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts in a manner that Democrats hope will flip five House seats in their direction.

This is interesting:

In recent days, aides have presented Trump with three scenarios for the overall outcome of the redistricting fight, none of which include Republicans losing seats when all the maps are finalized, according to the GOP strategist familiar with the White House approach. The variables include how the Supreme Court rules on an upcoming case about the Voting Rights Act, which impedes states from diluting the voting power of minorities, and whether courts will block Democratic plans in California and Virginia.

The strategist said there was a “bad-luck Republicans, good-luck Democrats” scenario, which would result in “basically a wash of seats” but with some Republican-held seats in red states becoming more secure than they are now.

The two other scenarios, the person said, would result in Republicans picking up between five and nine seats, and a third, best-case scenario would see the GOP pick up seats “into double digits substantially.”

So he’s not being told the whole thing could blow up in his orange face. I suspect there are many things no one tells him, actually, and not just about voting patterns.

So there’s a Senate deal to end the filibuster. The reaction to this from the Dem side of the political spectrum ranges from red-hot furious to meh, it’s not so bad. It could have been worse.

Steve Benen explains where we are right now.

Is the shutdown over?

Not yet. The Sunday-night vote in the Senate was a procedural vote to advance a bill intended to end the shutdown. It received 60 votes, but the underlying legislation still needs to pass.

Who caved?

In addition to Cortez Masto, Fetterman and King, who’ve consistently voted with Republicans to end the shutdown, five other Senate Democrats sided with the GOP on the procedural vote: Dick Durbin of Illinois, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Jackie Rosen of Nevada and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. (Durbin and Shaheen, it’s worth noting for context, are retiring at the end of their current terms.) Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, meanwhile, voted with most Democrats against the package.

Did they get anything in exchange for their votes?

Not much. The deal, to the extent that it can fairly be described as such, includes three full-year appropriations bills to fund some federal departments through the end of the fiscal year and money to fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It also reverses Donald Trump’s shutdown layoffs (also known as “reduction in force” notifications, or RIFs).

Republicans promised Dems a vote on extending the expiring ACA subsidies. When? Soon. And then Charlie Brown will get to kick the football. Speaker Johnson has signaled his support for the deal, so if the Senate passes it the House surely will also.

Here is Josh Marshall’s positive spin:

There was a legitimate party rebellion after the March debacle. Democratic voters demanded fight. When the time came, Democrats fought. They held out for 40 days, the longest shutdown standoff in history. They put health care at the center of the national political conversation and inflicted a lot of damage on Trump. At 40 days they could no longer hold their caucus together. And we got this.

That’s a sea change in how the party functions in Congress. And that’s a big deal. Many people see it as some kind of epic disaster and are making all the standard threats about not voting or not contributing or whatever. That’s just not what I see. It’s a big change in the direction of the fight we need in the years to come that just didn’t go far enough. Yet.

That may not be much consociation — yes, they’re lame, but maybe they’re not as lame as they used to be — but I’m taking it for now. Staying angry is too exhausting.

Also, soo.

The December vote on Obamacare funding is basically a fake one. But it will show yet again how absolutely determined Republicans are to make people’s health care costs go through the roof. The upshot of the shutdown is that Democrats now own the affordability issue, and they’ve focused it on health care coverage, which Republicans want to make more expensive or take away altogether. That vote keeps it there. So will the huge price hikes millions will be feeling by December. Also, if I’m understanding the deal right this continuing resolution goes through January. So there’s another bite of the apple in just a couple of months.

The fact that a lot of today’s angry commentaries are blaming Chuck Schumer doesn’t bother me much, either. Chuck is up for re-election in 2028. But even if he gets another term, maybe he’ll lose his leadership position. We can hope.

Meanwhile, Trump for some reason has felt emboldened to call for repealing Obamacare entirely. I doubt most Senate Republicans want to go down that road again, especially not right now. But Trump posted this …

…thereby hanging a big sign on himself that says I DON’T KNOW HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS. But a group of senators immediately jumped in and proposed legislation to simply give the insurance subsidies to the people.

“I’m writing the bill right now,” [Sen. Rick] Scott posted in a response to Trump’s suggestion. “We must stop taxpayer money from going to insurance companies and instead give it directly to Americans in HSA-style accounts and let them buy the health care they want. This will increase competition & drive down costs.”

Here in Real World Land, most medical care providers wo4n’t accept you as a patient if you don’t have proof of insurance. And that was true long before there was Obamacare. And Rick Scott, of all people, should know that.

… he co-founded Columbia Hospital Corporation. Columbia later merged with another corporation to form Columbia/HCA, which eventually became the nation’s largest for-profit health care company. Scott was pressured to resign as chief executive of Columbia/HCA in 1997. During his tenure as chief executive, the company defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs. The U.S. Department of Justice won 14 felony convictions against the company, which was fined $1.7 billion in what was at the time the largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history. Following his departure from Columbia/HCA, Scott became a venture capitalist and pursued other business interests.

Scott also knows that the relatively piddly amount of money most people could accumulate in an HSA, even with subsidies, wouldn’t begin to touch the cost of cancer treatments or surgery or childbirth or any number of real-world medical problems people have all the time. But I don’t think Scott’s bill has a prayer to pass without killing the filibuster — possibly not even then — and I’m sure he knows that, too.

On a happier note, the Supreme Court rejected an opportunity to oveturn its earlier decision on same-sex married.

Yesterday the Senate voted down a war resolution, led by Dem Sen. Tim Kaine, intended “to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities within or against Venezuela, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force.” The only Republicans who voted with the Dems were Rand Paul (a co-sponsor) and Lisa Murkowski.

Today, thanks to reporting by the Associated Press, we know more about the men who have been killed at great expense by the awesome might of the U.S. military.

One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.

The men had little in common beyond their Venezuelan seaside hometowns and the fact all four were among the more than 60 people killed since early September when the U.S. military began attacking boats that the Trump administration alleges were smuggling drugs. President Donald Trump and top U.S. officials have alleged the craft were being operated by narco-terrorists and cartel members bound with deadly drugs for American communities. …

… In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.

Most of the nine men were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.

Further, the “open-hulled fishing skiffs” were bound for “nearby Trinidad and other islands,” not the United States.

Yes, these are the dangerous “narco-terrorists.” If any of these boats had been bound for the U.S., I’m sure the Coast Guard could have taken care of the problem in conventional ways. Instead, the Trump Administration has chosen the path of “extra-judicial executions” that violates international law and wastes taxpayer dollars dropping bombs. Not to mention deploying an aircraft carrier, multiple destroyers, and an amphibious ready group with over 4,500 personnel, plus a special operations vessel, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, Marine helicopters, Ospreys, and fighter jets in the Caribbean to menace Venezuela. I can’t even begin to guess how much all this is costing taxpayers.

I’m sure it will amuse you to learn that this morning the Trump Administration asked a court to block another judge’s order to distribute the full November SNAP benefits. So Trump didn’t get the message the voters sent this week.

Update: Today the appeals court refused to block the other judge’s order. The Regime has appealed to the Supreme Court, asking SCOTUS to block the order by 9 p.m. tonight.

This is by Susan Glasser at The New Yorker:

Was this the week that America finally started clapping back at Donald Trump? Actions trigger reactions; we all know that. Yet, remarkably, Trump has spent the first nine months back in the White House plowing forward as if, channelling Lenin, there was all mush and no steel to meet his advance. Only a man who truly feared no political consequences could have chosen to hold a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago estate on the weekend before important off-year elections and amid a federal-government shutdown that is causing millions of poor Americans to wait indefinitely for monthly food assistance. In the face of such evident political malpractice, many wondered whether a video of the event, which showed a scantily clad woman gyrating in an oversized Martini glass, was an A.I.-generated stunt to make Trump look bad. But, no, it was real. He is actually that brazen.

This is as much as I could read before I hit the paywall. But does Trump really fear no political consequences? I can’t say that he really didn’t care about the results of Tuesday’s election. He’s been trying to influence the New York City mayoral race in various ways, from endorsing Andrew Cuomo to threatening to withhold federal funds from the city if Zohran Mamdani. Knowing New Yorkers, this probably helped Zohran Mamdani. Trump spoke up about several of the other races also. Plus if he didn’t care about next year’s midterms, he wouldn’t be pushing so hard for Republican state redistricting.

He did learn a new magic word — affordability — on Tuesday night.

So if he just uses his magic word enough, voters will still love him. Got it. But he’s not going to do anything differently.

And it may be that he genuinely doesn’t understand that the economy isn’t better than it was last year. He’s got plenty of money. The stock market has been doing great, right? What else is there to know? (But this week the stock market has been wobbly. It may be the AI bubble is deflating. Stay tuned.)

Trump’s political success mostly comes from his mob-boss aggression combined with a grifter’s instinct for saying what his marks want to hear. He’s still got the first attribute, but I believe the second one is failing him. And even if he could use the right words, his declaration that the prices of groceries are way down isn’t going to override people’s experience buying groceries. Which tells us prices aren’t down. But I don’t think he grasps that. Reality is supposed to be whatever he says it is.

So he’s not going to stop being the Great Gatsby/Marie Antoinette president even as the job market dries up and prices continue to inflate. And I’m sure all the flight cancellations before the holiday season aren’t helping him, either.

It’s possible that if Trump could pivot to paying attention to his actual job, bring down the cost of living, and stop being such a princess, his approval ratings would go back up. But I don’t think he’s capable of doing that. And I don’t think he appreciates how the public perceives his personal extravagances when everyone else is in belt-tightening mode.

The number crunchers are still looking at voting patterns from Tuesday night. And they’re telling us that the demographic groups that flipped to Trump in 2024 all flipped the other way this week. See The 2024 Trump “realignment” is already over for a good overview.

Also, too:  See DOJ Admits to Republicans That Epstein Files Are Even Worse for Trump by Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling at The New Republic.  One suspects that whatever is being held back could absolutely destroy Trump politically. And it will come out eventually. Maybe not before the Trump Era has ended, but it will come out. There will be no rehabilitation for him.