The POTUS is now raging against affordability, which is a new word he discovered less than a month ago. Here is Chris Hayes a couple of days after the November 7 elections.

The stuff about affordability is in the first three minutes or so, but the whole segment is worth watching.

On November 12 the White House released this video proclaiming that Trump is making America affordable again.

Sure he is. That same day Trump signed the bill that ended the shutdown. During the televised signing he accused the Democrats of wanting to give trillions of dollars to illegal aliens and promised affordability. So he’s all on board with this new affordability craze, I guess.

But no more. Now he’s big mad at affordability. Yesterday he called the word a “hoax” and a “Democrat con job.”

If you listen, you can pick up that he thinks inflation was last year’s problem that he has already solved and nobody is giving him credit for it. Because he won the election last year by a lot! So everything is fine now! See also Rachel Cohen at NJ.com, Trump just trashed his most major issue: ‘Worst messaging from a politician in history’.

In other news, the Republican won the special election in Tennessee but the margin looks uncomfortably slim to Republicans. “Tonight is a sign that 2026 is going to be a bitch of an election cycle,” said one House Republican.

The White House is also threatening to withhold SNAP money from states that refuse to share personal information about the people receiving the money — mostly blue states, obviously.

There’s more, as always, but that’s all I can deal with at the moment.

Trump went on a marathon “truthing” spree last night, posting over 160 times. “Most of the posts involved sharing MAGA-friendly content from right-wing sources including Fox News, YouTuber Benny Johnson, and broadcasters Scott Jennings and Alex Jones,” says Daily Beast. Among the choicer “truths” is that Michelle Obama was in charge of Joe Biden’s auto-pen. Trump shared a lot of videos targeting his many political “enemies” — Gavin Newsom, Tim Walz, Nancy Pelosi, James Comey, etc.  To me, this reveals obsessive, seething rage and a whole lot of insecurity.

Last week the New York Times published an article that pushed Trump over the edge, according to several reports. In Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office, Katie Rogers and Dylan Freedman write that Trump works hard to “project round-the-clock energy, virility and physical stamina.” But, they note that he keeps shorter working hours and lighter meeting schedules than he used to, plus he’s been caught falling asleep in public several times recently. Many news outlets reported that Trump raged and fumed and lost it over the report. Right-wing outlets ran puffery about what an exceptional physical specimen Trump is, of course.

But then see The Bubble-Wrapped President by Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic. Whatever his physical status, he is extraordinarily isolated even by presidential standards. For example, he’s making international trips but not seeing much of his own country.

I looked at Trump’s travel schedule from the fall of 2017, the first year of his initial term, to compare it with this fall’s, and I was surprised by the drop-off. Back then, he traveled into the country more than a dozen times from September to November to talk with energy workers in North Dakota, rally support in Alabama for a Senate candidate, and explain his agenda directly to his supporters. During that same stretch this year, he barely traveled at all. This fall, he’s ventured beyond the Washington, D.C., metro area; his New Jersey golf club; and Florida, the home of Mar-a-Lago, only five times. Four of those domestic trips were to New York, including three to hang out with rich friends in luxury boxes at sporting events. The other was to attend United Nations meetings, but he stayed only one night, compared with five in 2017. The fifth trip was to Arizona, to attend Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.

After the Big, Ugly Bill passed, people close to him tried to get Trump on the road to do some rallies or other personal appearances around the country to sell the thing. He just never got around to it. He was asked to make appearances with some of the candidates who lost in last month’s elections. He did a couple of virtual appearances but wouldn’t travel.  His media consumption is mostly right-wing outlets that say good things about him, and the people who work for him in the White House are all brown-nosers. He’s cut himself off from just about everybody else. Including his own voters, out there in flyover country. And this is significant, because it means it’s very unlikely he’ll do anything to win support back. This may be a sign of flagging energy, or it may just be that now that he’s in charge he’s just going to do what he wants to do, nyah nyah nyah. Or both.

See also David Graham, Trump Seizes Back the Spotlight (That may not be the boon he thinks it is), also at The Atlantic. The things he is doing to get attention aren’t making him look good. And we still don’t know what’s going to happen with the Epstein files. But I suspect that those anticipating Transparency At Last will be disappointed.

One big way the Trumpers miscalculated since the beginning of this term is in the optics they want to promote. Trump seems to have believed people would think videos of mass military roundups of brown people would be cool. Mostly, they don’t. Remember when his thing was to show lots of brown people being loaded onto big military planes? That fell apart. Then somebody must have thought it would look cool to send Ice Barbie  to El Salvador to pose with the prisoners. “Cringy” is probably a better word.

In September Ice agents rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters onto an ordinary Chicago apartment building to terrorize the residents. Somebody must have thought that would look cool. The White House claimed that a Venezuelan gang had taken over the building. But the raid resulted in no criminal charges. I’m sure the die-hard Trump base eats this stuff up, and the low-information crowd may barely know this is happening. But I doubt the whopping majority of Americans are favorably impressed.

And now it’s the boat strikes. Even people who are dumb enough to believe there’s some legitimate purpose to the strikes may not want to look at them. Trump/Miller/Hegseth and whoever else is behind this may think videos of bombing boats are cool. That’s only reason I can think of for not just relying on the Coast Guard.

The most recent example of prepubescent “humor” coming out of the White House, Pete Hegseth posted an image of a children’s book character destroying boats.

He did this after the Wall Street Journal published the “second strike” article, mind you. What is he trying to say? That killing people is just good, innocent fun? People are selling T-shirts with that image on them, btw. And the publisher of the Franklin the Turtle books is, justifiably, furious. I hope the publisher sues.

Update: Do see Paul Waldman at The Cross Section, A Few Bad Men, who is making a lot of these same points.

Bottom line, though, the executive branch is being run by a pack of sociopaths. They have all the judgment and sensibilities of spoiled 8-year-old boys. And Trump’s poll numbers continue to slip. He’s fallen into late-term Richard Nixon territory.

Tonight we’ll learn if Republicans can hang on to their House seat for Tennessee’s 7th congressional district. I’m making no predictions. But a close Republican win should make the GOP pretty nervous, since Trump won it by 22 points last year. And the polls are all very close.

Regarding the heinous “second” boat bombing that killed two men clinging to their sinking boat, as reported in WaPo — Pentagon Pete forcefully denied giving an order to “kill them all” as WaPo reported. And yesterday Trump said he believed Pentagon Pete. But this afternoon White House press secretary and minion of tribulation Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Hegseth ordered the second strike.

Julia Manchester writes for The Hill, “Leavitt told reporters at the White House press briefing that Hegseth authorized Adm. Frank Bradley to carry out the second strike, which reportedly killed two people who were hanging onto the burning vessel after an initial strike.” Further,

“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have made it clear that presidentially designated narco-terrorist groups are subject to lethal targeting in accordance with the laws of war. With respect to the strikes in question on September 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Adm. Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,” Leavitt said. 

“Adm. Bradley worked well within his authority and the law to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated,” she continued. “This administration has designated these narco-terrorists as foreign terrorist organizations. The president has the right to take them out if they are threatening the United States of America, if they are bringing illegal narcotics that are killing our citizens at a record rate, which is what they are doing.” 

I believe most people who know anything about “the law” are saying that Trump’s boat strikes are not even close to being legal. I still say that if any suspicious boat enters U.S. territorial waters, let the Coast Guard take care of it. They’re pretty good at that, I understand.

But was there a decision to throw Pete under the bus? Or are they setting up Adm. Frank Bradley to take the fall? Or both?  Hmmm.

Update: And the answer is — they’re offering up Admiral Bradley as their sacrificial lamb. The newest version of what went down out of the White House is that it was Admiral Bradley and not Hegseth who was responsible for the second strike order. Hegseth had merely “authorized” him.

Another follow up is from David Dayen at The American Prospect. In Marco Rubio’s Sales Pitch: War in Venezuela, Dayen addresses the “Why Venezuela?” question.

While you were shoving the last of your Thanksgiving leftovers into the microwave, another war was being furnished, not by a media mogul or corporate titan—though certainly some defense contractors are counting up future bonuses inside their mansions in Northern Virginia. No, the secretary of state has been ginning up this conflict, and while the concept of a war for oil is more emotionally satisfying and probably a side benefit of the imminent incursion into Venezuela, the more appropriate way of thinking about it is a war for Marco Rubio’s right-wing South Florida exile friends.

I’d read in several sources that regime change in Venezuela has been a priority for Rubio for some time. And I don’t think Rubio is all that concerned about the oil.

Trump was reportedly not buying the pitch until Rubio related it to something the president’s terminally 1980s brain recognizes: the war on drugs. Vaporizing alleged drug boats through summary executions, including what appears to be a patently illegal order of a second strike, has a visceral appeal for Trump. The inconvenient problem is that almost no fentanyl is produced in Venezuela, but fortunately for Rubio, Trump doesn’t read past the first page of the briefing book, and also doesn’t read that page either.

Sounds about right.

This is from the Wall Street Journal, republished elsewhere —

Three powerful businessmen—two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine.

But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.

At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.”

Dmitriev was pushing a plan for U.S. companies to tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic. There were no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve, Dmitriev had argued for months: Their rival space industries, which raced one another during the Cold War, could even pursue a joint mission to Mars with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

the apt title for this is “Make Money, Not War.”

For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.

Dmitriev, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, had found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.

The two businessmen shared President Trump’s long-held approach to geopolitics. If generations of diplomats viewed the post-Soviet challenges of Eastern Europe as a Gordian knot to be painstakingly unraveled, the president envisioned an easy fix: The borders matter less than the business. In the 1980s, he had offered to personally negotiate a swift end to the Cold War while building what he told Soviet diplomats would be a Trump Tower across the treet from the Kremlin, with their Communist regime as a business partner.

And then a bit later it says,

A question for history will be whether Putin entertained this approach in the interest of ending the war, or as a ploy to pacify the U.S. while prolonging a conflict he believes is his place in history to slowly, ineluctably win.

I have read that Putin is no genius, but it doesn’t take a lot to be smarter than Trump. I’ve said before that Trump assumes all kinds of messy conflicts and problems could be easily solved because he doesn’t understand them. It was obvious in his first term that he has absolutely no concept of, for example, strategic alliances. Like NATO. He just sees a cost drain, not the purpose. That goes along with his abysmal ignorance of history. It has been credibly reported that when he visited the Pearl Harbor memorial someone had to explain to him what happened there. Most American boys his age spent their childhoods listening to their dads talk about the war and playing at being combat soldiers with their buddies in their back yards. Somehow, he seems to have missed that. Trump’s only drivers are power, money, and racism. That seems to be all he’s got.

And don’t miss All the President’s Millions: how the Trumps are turning the presidency into riches by Tom Burgess at The Guardian.

Pentagon Pete is in trouble for something reported by WaPo:

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

What’s remarkable to me is that even Republicans in Congress are getting concerned about the boat bombings.

A top Republican and Democrats in Congress suggested on Sunday that American military officials might have committed a war crime in President Trump’s offensive against boats in the Caribbean after a news report said that during one such attack, a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors. …

… “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” Representative Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio and a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.

The lawmakers’ comments came after top Republicans and Democrats on the two congressional committees overseeing the Pentagon vowed over the weekend to increase their scrutiny of U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean after the report. Mr. Turner said the article had only sharpened lawmakers’ already grave questions about the operation.

“There are very serious concerns in Congress about the attacks on the so-called drug boats down in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the legal justification that’s been provided,” he said. “But this is completely outside of anything that’s been discussed with Congress, and there is an ongoing investigation.”

The investigations by both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees are the sharpest scrutiny to date by Congress of Mr. Trump’s escalating military offensive, undertaken without congressional approval or consultation, which he says is aimed at taking out drug traffickers.

They constitute a notable step by Republican lawmakers who have spent much of the year deferring to Mr. Trump and refraining from exercising oversight of his actions.

And it is all so unnecessary. There’s nothing going on that the Coast Guard couldn’t handle in the usual manner. But maybe some of the Republicans are realizing they need to start being legislators.

I hope everyone had a lovely visit with family and a good Thanksgiving dinner. I certainly did. Now, back to work …

One of the first news stories I saw this morning had Trump announcing that his land invasion of Venezuela will start “very soon.” Oh, goodie. The headlines aren’t using the word “invasion,” of course. It’s an “action” against “drug trafficking networks.” But the bottom line is that Trump intends to order the U.S. military to do something within some other nation’s sovereign territory without that nation’s agreement. Maybe the something is bombing raids rather than boots on the ground, but IMO hat’s an invasion. And the Trump Administration wants us all to know that the Commander in Chief is not bound by some old war powers law that requires him to get permission from Congress to do, you know, war stuff.

It’s still not absolutely clear to me why Trump is so obsessed with Venezuela. I understand there are other Latin American countries with more drug smuggling rings, notably Mexico Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru. Everything with Trump is personal. Did Nicolás Maduro call Trump a bad name?

Complicating Trump’s plans, it appears Putin is standing with Venezuela. The Times of India reports today that “At the 19th session of the Russian-Venezuelan intergovernmental commission, Moscow reaffirmed its support for Venezuela’s sovereignty and strengthened its strategic partnership with Caracas.”

About the second thing I noticed this morning was Paul Krugman’s new substack, Getting Ready to Party Like It’s 2008. In brief, a Trump appointee to the Federal Reserve is working to weaken banking regulations to allow riskier financial moves, similar to what caused the financial meltdown in 2008. And there are members of Congress — including some Democrats — promoting the wider use and loose regulation of crypto.  Between that and widespread concerns that the stock market is being propped up by a tech bubble, this is no time to be bullish.

Meanwhile, Trump is so delusional that he’s been musing that his wonderful tariffs will enable us to eliminate income taxes.

On the plus side, Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 36 percent. How low can he go? And see also …

Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, The Great MAGA Crac-up Has Begun

Paul Waldman, Public Notice, Why MAGA Is Coming Apart at the Seams

Trump is not acting as if he knows his own political jeopardy. Maybe that’s because he only knows one way to act. Maybe that’s because he honestly doesn’t know, or refuses to accept, how much his political base is cracking. In any event I can’t imagine he’s going to do anything that would substantially bring his approval back up.

Getting back to Venezuela, if he does bomb or otherwise assault the sovereign territory of Venezuela, it’s predicted this will cost him some support even of the MAGA die-hards. His promise to avoid getting entangled in foreign military misadventures was a major reason a lot of the low-information Right supported him. It’s a reason right up there with releasing the Epstein files.

Regarding the shooting in DC and the tragic death of Specialist Sara Beckstrom of the West Virginia National Guard, I agree with Josh Marshall —

Two National Guard are in critical condition after having been shot in Washington DC. These were West Virginia Guard. True to form, Pentagon Pete thumped his chest and declared he would send 500 more Guard to DC.  And I see that Trump has ordered that the 500 troops be deployed.

And I’m just hearing that the suspect is a 29-year-old Afghan national. He was shot while being apprehended, but is still alive, We don’t know a whole lot yet.  See also Keystone Kash Vows to Track Down National Guard Shooter Already in Hospital.

Pentagon Pete has more testosterone than sense. And I’m not sure if there’s a word for the stew of personality disorders that motivate Trump. There was no point in the Guard being in DC other than Trump showing off that he’s the Big Bad Commander in Chief who doesn’t like “Democrat” cities. Trump uses troops as if they were his personal dancing monkeys. Those Guard should have been at home anticipating a turkey dinner. These troops are yanked away from home and put in danger for no other reason that to give Trump a power rush and serve his political ends. Sending 500 more Guard to DC is an emotional reaction, not a rational one.

Speaking of illegal orders — earlier this week a federal judge blocked Trump’s National Guard deployment to DC. But he gave Trump time to appeal.

Given the pack of incompetent losers who will be in charge of investigating this incident at the federal level, I expect it to get ugly.

Anyway — this is what I was going to post. I’ll be spending tomorrow with my children and grandchildren, and even better, I don’t have to cook. Enjoy your day.

Trump loses again:

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. [See update below — Marco Rubio is telling people it was entirely proposed by Russia.] 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.