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Tag: Stephen Miller

  • The Bad Bunny Super Bowl 2026 Controversy, Explained

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    When asked why the NFL chose Bad Bunny at an October 22, 2025, press conference, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell answered, “He’s one of the leading and most popular entertainers in the world. That’s what we try to achieve. It’s an important stage for us. It’s an important element to the entertainment value. It’s carefully thought through.”

    Goodell added that the NFL is not going to cancel Bad Bunny’s performance due to the backlash.

    “I’m not sure we’ve ever selected an artist where we didn’t have some blowback or criticism,” he said. “It’s pretty hard to do when you have hundreds of millions of people that are watching. But we’re confident it’s going to be a great show.”

    Clearly, the NFL didn’t hire Bad Bunny by accident, and executives knew there would be some right-wing backlash. As Wired’s Anna Lagos put it, this was “a calculated business move and a continuation of its strategy to rejuvenate and diversify its audience.” Lagos explained:

    The league is aware that its traditional viewership base is aging. Attracting younger audiences and the growing Hispanic market is a business imperative. Bad Bunny, the most-listened-to artist on Spotify worldwide from 2020 to 2022, represents the key to accessing that global market.

    The NFL’s partnership with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, launched in 2019, was designed to do just that: inject cultural relevance into the halftime show, an event that had become predictable and artistically safe. Kendrick Lamar’s acclaimed and politically charged performance in 2024, which used American symbolism to deliver a blunt critique of racism, demonstrated that the NFL is willing to take calculated risks if the result is cultural relevance and global conversation.

    By choosing Bad Bunny, the NFL not only secures a global superstar, but also aligns itself with a narrative of inclusion and representation.

    Jay-Z defended Bad Bunny to a TMZ photographer who asked on October 27, 2025, “Why are people hating on him?” Hov responded, “They love him. Don’t let them fool you.”

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    Margaret Hartmann

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  • Top Trump officials’ reversal on Minneapolis shooting: Policy change or damage control?

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    Minneapolis — Key Republicans in the Trump administration are retreating from their blanket defense of Border Patrol agents who fatally shot a U.S. citizen Saturday on a Minneapolis street, part of a larger effort by the White House to turn down the temperature after the killing provoked widespread outrage.

    But it remains unclear whether the tamping down of Republican rhetoric is just damage control after the shooting, or whether it will usher in a more fundamental scaling back of President Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown in American cities from Los Angeles to Chicago.

    In Minneapolis, there were few signs of a reduction in force on the streets, where tensions have been high since the shooting.

    On Wednesday morning, protesters gathered outside the federal Whipple Building, the epicenter of immigration activity in the city, as a steady stream of federal agents entered and exited.

    “Traitor!” one woman yelled out to a car driven by masked agents.

    “Murderers!” a man said.

    As Richi Mead, dressed in a neon vest that labeled him as a peaceful observer (“DON’T SHOOT”), tracked federal vehicles coming in and out, he said he did not believe there had been a reduction in the number of federal immigration agents in his city. The rate of cars he saw Wednesday, he said, was “business as usual.”

    “They’ve entrenched themselves here,” he said of federal agents. “There’s no end to this — and there’s no end to Minnesotans showing up.”

    As a growing number of Republicans have joined Democrats to protest Alex Pretti’s killing and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faces increasing criticism, Trump has expressed a desire to “de-escalate a little bit.”

    Senior officials — such as Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security advisor — have backtracked on their initial defense of the federal agents who fired the fatal shots.

    Just a few hours after Border Patrol agents shot the 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse Saturday in Minneapolis, Miller said on X: “An assassin tried to murder federal agents.”

    But that statement, along with others made by Noem, were contradicted by cellphone videos showing Pretti was holding a phone, not a gun, when federal agents shoved him to the ground and shot him.

    On Tuesday, Miller issued a statement to CNN acknowledging that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents may have deviated from protocol before the fatal shooting. The White House had provided “clear guidance” to the Department of Homeland Security on how to handle protesters, or “disruptors,” Miller said.

    “We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” Miller said.

    A White House spokesperson said that Miller was referring to general guidance given to Immigration and Customs Enforcement that extra personnel sent to Minnesota for force protection “should be used … to create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disruptors.”

    Officials will examine why additional force-protection assets may not have been present to support the operation, the spokesperson said.

    On Wednesday, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson disclosed that two Border Patrol agents involved in the shooting had been placed on administrative leave Saturday.

    But top Republicans in the White House have yet to announce any major rollback of their aggressive immigration enforcement tactics.

    Kevin R. Johnson, a professor who specializes in immigration law at UC Davis, said it was too early to determine whether senior Trump officials are rethinking federal tactics or whether the shooting of Pretti will lead the president to scale back his immigration agenda.

    “We have seen a de-escalation in the last 24 hours, at least,” Johnson said. “But whether it’s going to stay with us, or be gone in 24 hours, it’s hard to say. I think it’ll stay around at least till the midterms.”

    After hearing Trump and Miller use harsh language for so long to refer to undocumented immigrants, Johnson said, it was impossible to predict how long a de-escalation of rhetoric would last.

    “They shift gears like they’re first-time drivers,” Johnson said of Trump’s senior officials. “They’re all over the place.”

    On Wednesday morning, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, who was visiting Minnesota, announced that 16 people whom she dubbed “rioters” were arrested and charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement officers.

    “We expect more arrests to come,” Bondi said on X. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: NOTHING will stop President Trump and this Department of Justice from enforcing the law.”

    Outside the Whipple Building in Minneapolis, it was hard to tell what, if anything, had changed. Hennepin County sheriff’s deputies continued to provide security in the area. Demonstrators still showed up across the street. Encrypted neighborhood group chats continued to circulate information about possible sightings of immigration agents.

    Before noon, one chat advised that observers were needed at an address where Homeland Security agents “have person trapped in home who went back to house for documentation.”

    Lucas Guttentag, a professor of law at Stanford University who specializes in immigration, said senior Trump administration officials appeared to be admitting things have gone too far and “killing people in the street is unacceptable.”

    “But that’s a low bar; the fundamental policy hasn’t changed,” he said, noting that the administration did not appear to be changing its policy on illegal detention, terminating people’s status or racial profiling. “This is a tactical retreat, but not a change of policy.”

    Still, even as arrests continued, Johnson said it was a positive sign that Miller and Noem had turned down their rhetoric on Pretti’s killing, and that border policy advisor Tom Homan had met with the Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.

    “That’s what we need here: some communication and some discussion in an effort to bring down the temperature,” Johnson said. “Because it’s not surprising to me that when you have people at the highest levels, including the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, talking in harsh terms, then you have ICE officers on the ground engaging in very aggressive, maybe illegal tactics.”

    Johnson said he would like to see the Trump administration withdraw some ICE officers from Minneapolis. Beyond that, he said the administration should ramp up its training of federal immigration agents and rethink roving patrols that targeted people, regardless of their legal status, based on their skin color.

    “That tactic has terrorized communities,” he said.

    Johnson was skeptical that the move to apparently oust Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino and bring in Homan to lead the Minnesota operation would change much.

    “He’s a relatively aggressive immigration enforcement type as well,” Johnson said of Homan. “If he’s your peacemaker, it’s unclear to me whether he’s really going to make peace.”

    As Christine Hebl, 45, dropped off a handwritten note at a memorial erected at the site in south Minneapolis where Pretti was killed, she said she doubted that bringing Homan to Minnesota would lead to a reduction in immigration enforcement.

    The only change she had noticed so far had been an expansion outward toward the suburbs north of Minneapolis.

    “It’s a PR stunt in my mind,” she said. “I think that it’s going to continue or even potentially worsen. You cannot believe a single word that comes out of this regime’s mouths. It’s going to continue and I’m scared — I’m really scared.”

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    Jenny Jarvie, Andrea Castillo

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  • Katie Miller thinks classical liberalism is woke leftism. She’s wrong.

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    Katie Miller is a conservative podcaster and former spokesperson for the Trump administration. She was briefly involved with the Department of Government Efficiency, but left government employment to work for Elon Musk full time. In August 2025, she quit that job too, and launched her own podcast, The Katie Miller Podcast. She is married to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.

    One would hope that an individual who has spent so much time in close proximity to high-ranking conservative political figures—and who is married to the avatar of a very particular brand of conservatism, New Right populism/nativism—might be able to properly define classical liberalism, an extremely well-known philosophy that undergirds the entire American project.

    Alas, Katie Miller recently issued a warning on X that betrayed a fundamental ignorance about classical liberalism: She is conflating it with leftism, and for good measure, wokeness.

    The post in question was an attack on Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, an AI company. Miller expressed concern about Olah’s stated commitment to “the principles of classical liberal democracy.”

    “If this is what they say publicly, this is how their AI model is programmed,” she wrote. “Woke and deeply leftist ideology is what they want you to rely upon.”

    She is clearly saying that “classical liberal democracy” and “woke and deeply leftist ideology” are one and the same. They are not.

    Classical liberalism is the forerunner of modern libertarianism: It is a philosophy that emphasizes individual rights, including civil rights and property rights. Classically liberal thinkers such as John Locke helped establish the notion that government should be accountable to the people. Economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo used classical liberalism as a guiding principle when arguing in favor of free markets and free trade. In the realm of government, the political leaders associated with classical liberalism and laissez faire economic policies are people such as former President Calvin Coolidge, former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Argentinian President Javier Milei. Note that these figures are not exactly defined by their love of wokeness. To the extent that “wokeness” is even a coherent set of views, it emphasizes collective rights for various identity groups instead of the individual-rights framework of classical liberalism.

    Leftists tend to agree with classical liberals and even most conservatives on some broad principles, like the notion that people should elect their leaders. But modern liberals, progressives, and leftists tend to disagree sharply with classical liberals and libertarians on economics: They want much more government regulation, taxation, and centralized government control of the economy. On these issues, leftism bears a closer resemblance to the version of conservatism advocated by Stephen Miller—who supports tariffs and extreme restrictions on immigrant labor—than it does to classical liberalism.

    Katie Miller’s former boss, Musk, seems to understand this much better than she does. In a reply on X on March 8, 2024, he wrote: “I believe in liberalism in the sense [of] supporting freedom of thought and action, but modern liberalism is the opposite of that.” In other words, he was drawing a distinction between the classical liberalism of, say, America’s Founding Fathers and the modern liberalism of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

    Stephen Miller frequently talks in apocalyptic terms about threats to Western civilization. Given this, one might hope that the Miller household could easily provide the name of Western civilization’s defining political philosophy. Hint: It’s classical liberal democracy.

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    Robby Soave

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  • I Can’t Believe This Is What Is Getting Right Wing Weirdos Mad About ‘Starfleet Academy’

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    Starfleet Academy, as with any new entry to the Star Trek canon—especially those that were hated upon release only to eventually become diehard favorites of the fandom—courts its fair share of controversy when it comes to its approach to the broader series. Some of this is in its nature as a successor to Star Trek: Discovery, a series that weathered its own fair share of controversies over the years. Some of this is the intention of the show itself, which occasionally seems to delight in its young adult perspective, allowing it the chance to bite its proverbial thumb at the franchise’s authority, almost enticing detractors into an argument.

    But some of it is because people are very stupid, and sometimes, when those stupid people just happen to have the ear of the Trump administration and right-wing grifts are more culturally lucrative than ever, even the most minor and surprising of flashpoints can become the latest volley in the culture war.

    Such has been the case since Starfleet Academy‘s first two episodes aired late last week, when, above all the noise of the pros and cons discussed about its premiere, one complaint rose above all thanks to it being platformed by none other than White House advisor and noted ghoul Stephen Miller. The issue Miller seemingly took umbrage to? There’s some gosh-darned glasses in this Star Trek show.

    The foofaraw began when Miller took to Twitter to quote-tweet a clip of the series from an account named “End Wokeness” (likely thing for him to do), which featured a scene from the premiere of Holly Hunter’s captain, Nahla Ake, wearing a pair of thickly rimmed spectacles as she talks to her first officer, Lura Thok (Gina Yashere), and another member of the academy’s senior staff, Lieutenant Rourke (Tricia Black).

    Miller was initially vague about just what had annoyed him particularly about the scene—perhaps the dialogue, perhaps that it featured multiple women talking among themselves, who can say—but he described it as tragic, imploring that Paramount, now owned by Trump ally David Ellison, should “save” the franchise by relinquishing all creative control to William Shatner.

    Shatner’s social media account (it’s long been debated over who exactly runs the account for the actor) replied to Miller in turn and seemingly revealed Miller’s supposed tragedy was Hunter’s choice of eyewear. “The fact that they have not cure Hyperopia by the 32rd Century is an abysmal oversight on the writers,” Shatner’s post read in part. “Also Paramount needs to up the budget because I’m sure that a well oiled organization like Starfleet in the distant future could afford more than one pair of glasses for at least this hyperopic bridge crew.”

    It seems Miller ignored that Shatner’s post was clearly dripping with sarcasm, as he both reposted it and then directly responded with another quote tweet lambasting Kirk’s death in Generations as the downfall of all Star Trek. But he didn’t dispute Shatner’s insinuation that the so-called “wokeness” on display was to do with the existence of glasses in 32nd-century society.

    Obviously, to anyone who’s actually watched and engaged with Star Trek at any point in the last 60 years, part of the reason for Shatner’s sarcasm is that Kirk himself is just one of multiple characters that have been depicted across reams of Star Trek material as wearing glasses. Although various treatments for impaired vision exist in Star Trek‘s technological future, glasses were still worn in the 23rd century—an Enterprise transporter technician is seen wearing them in the original show’s pilot episode “The Cage” (and seen again when the pilot’s footage was repurposed for the two-parter “The Menagerie”), as are several other members of the Enterprise crew in The Animated Series. 

    Kirk himself famously wears reading glasses in The Wrath of Khan, citing that he was personally allergic to Retinax V, a commonplace medical drug used to correct vision. More recently, prior to Starfleet Academy giving them to Captain Ake, Jean-Luc Picard wore reading glasses in Picard‘s third season, and Discovery gave us David Cronenberg’s Kovich, who wore glasses as a fashion statement rather than out of necessity, which could also be the case for Ake (although we do see her wearing them to read too). Other eyewear has also been seen throughout the franchise, from sunglasses to, of course, Geordi LaForge’s visor in The Next Generation.

    © Paramount

    But none of this is the actual point of the right-wing grift, just like it’s never the point whenever one of these particular controversies bubbles up to the surface of pop culture toxicity. We’ve seen this cycle across countless films and TV shows that have gained the ire of being declared “woke” by their detractors, a feigned shock designed to generate a cycle of outrage and social media chatter among their acolytes. The point isn’t a lack of awareness or knowledge, or that their minds will be changed if they get a fandom wikia page shoved in their ignorant faces. It’s in the posting, the generation of that hate and attention, before they move on to whatever the next controversy can be, like the vultures they are.

    Stephen Miller probably doesn’t actually care about someone wearing glasses in Star Trek. He appears to have moved on, looking at his Twitter—where he’s now busy seemingly nodding towards another Star franchise, invoking The Mandalorian‘s “this is the way” slogan over a plan by Tennessee Republicans to persecute immigrants. Maybe he’ll come back to whine about something else Starfleet Academy does in the future. But it won’t be the show that’s the point; it’ll be because it’s just something he and his ilk in right-wing circles can try to turn into another round of artificial backlash among the slings and arrows of the culture war.

    Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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    James Whitbrook

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  • What is Greenland’s status under international law?

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    After capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and saying the U.S. was taking control of the South American country, President Donald Trump and others in his administration suggested that Greenland could be the next U.S. target.

    The day the U.S. took Maduro into custody to face U.S. drug-trafficking charges, Katie Miller, wife of senior White House aide Stephen Miller, posted on X a map of Greenland overlaid with the U.S. flag. “Soon,” the caption said. 

    The next day, CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked Stephen Miller about Greenland. It’s geographically the world’s largest island — about five times the size of California — and has about 56,000 residents. Denmark colonized it centuries ago, and later incorporated it into Denmark. 

    Miller said the Trump administration’s longstanding policy is that “Greenland should be part of the United States.” 

    When Tapper asked whether the administration would rule out military action, Miller said, “The real question is: By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim? What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark?”

    White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told PolitiFact that Trump is “confident Greenlanders would be better served if protected by the United States from modern threats in the Arctic region.” 

    We asked experts about the history of the Denmark-Greenland relationship and Greenland’s status under international law. They agreed Greenland’s status as part of Denmark is rock solid and that any attempt to take over Greenland would flout international law.

    What the Trump administration has floated

    U.S. officials have repeatedly expressed interest in controlling Greenland, which is located between the United States and Europe. The naval corridor between Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom, called the “GIUK Gap,” is a strategic channel in the Arctic because it is a main transit route for Europe, the Americas and Russia. Greenland also has potentially valuable mineral deposits.

    “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,” Trump told reporters Jan. 4 aboard Air Force One. 

    Two days later, the White House issued a statement that Greenland is “vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region” and that Trump and his team are “discussing a range of options” which could include utilizing the U.S. military.

    If the United States did attempt to seize Greenland, it is unlikely to face military resistance, wrote Ivo Daalder, who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama.

    “Taking Greenland won’t be difficult,” Daalder wrote Jan. 6. “Its population of 50,000 won’t be able offer much resistance, nor will Denmark want to enter a fight it cannot win.” (Miller said something similar in his interview with Tapper: “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”)

    Daalder warned, though, that such U.S. military action could damage the credibility of NATO, the mutual defense pact the U.S. has led for decades. 

    “To suggest that American security in the Arctic requires that it owns Greenland implicitly indicates that the NATO security commitment is hollow and insufficient for its security,” Daalder wrote. “That’s hardly a reassuring message to the other 31 NATO members, many of whom face far more immediate threats than the United States.”

    What is the basis of Denmark’s claim to Greenland? 

    Denmark’s colonization of Greenland dates to the 1720s. In 1933, an international court settled a territorial dispute between Denmark and Norway, ruling that as of July 1931, Denmark “possessed a valid title to the sovereignty over all Greenland.” 

    In 1940, after Germany invaded Denmark, the U.S. assumed responsibility for Greenland’s defense and established a military presence on the island that remains today. 

    But Greenland has not been a colony for more than three-quarters of a century, said Diane Marie Amann, a University of Georgia emerita law professor.

    After World War II, colonialism “was decidedly rejected in the United Nations charter,” said Tom Ginsburg, a University of Chicago international law professor. 

    After the 1945 approval of the United Nations charter — the organization’s founding document and the foundation of much of international law — Denmark incorporated Greenland through a constitutional amendment and gave it representation in the Danish Parliament in 1953. Denmark told the United Nations that any colonial-type status had ended, and the United Nations General Assembly accepted this change in November 1954, said Greg Fox, a Wayne State University law professor. The United States voted to accept the new status.

    Since then, Greenland has, incrementally but consistently, moved toward greater autonomy. 

    Greenlandic political activists successfully pushed for and achieved home rule in 1979, which established its parliament. Today, Greenland is a district within the sovereign state of Denmark, Amann said, with two elected representatives in Denmark’s parliament. These representatives have full voting rights — greater authority than the U.S. gives congressional delegates for its territories such as Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands.

    In 2008, Greenlanders voted 76% to 24% in favor of expanding the island’s autonomous status, in a non-binding referendum. This led to a 2009 law that recognized Greenlanders as a distinct people, as well as making Greenlandic the island’s official language and granting Greenland power over its mineral resources.

    A satellite photo highlighting Greenland, as well as Iceland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. (NASA/public domain)

    What is Greenland’s status under international law?

    The 2009 law established that the Greenlandic people have the power to pursue independence from Denmark if they choose. To date, they have not done so.

    While Danish law gives Greenland substantial local control, “That doesn’t mean that Greenland is any less a part of Denmark for international law purposes,” Fox said. “Because Greenland is fully incorporated into Denmark, it means that under international law, Denmark can both represent Greenland’s interests and people to other countries and can assert its rights if other countries cause it harm.”

    Fox compared Greenland’s status within Denmark to Michigan’s or Ohio’s within the U.S. “The U.S. represents their interests and the interests of their people to the rest of the international community,” he said. Denmark’s sovereignty “covers all its territory, including Greenland,” Fox said.

    The United Nations’ charter, to which the U.S. is a signatory, says members must refrain from threatening or using force “against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Amann said this means that “no other country may assist or secure such a secession, whether by the actual use of military force or by threatening to use such force.” 

    If Greenland “wanted Denmark to transfer them to the United States, they might be able to request that,” Ginsburg said. “But that’s not the situation now.”

    U.S. history of recognizing Denmark’s authority over Greenland

    The U.S. has recognized Denmark’s “territorial sovereignty” over Greenland on multiple occasions, beyond the 1953 United Nations vote: 

    • The United States’ purchase of the Danish West Indies — now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands — included a 1917 agreement with Denmark that mentioned Greenland. Then-Secretary of State Robert Lansing said the U.S. government “will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.” 

    • In 1946, the U.S. under President Harry Truman formally proposed buying Greenland. Denmark declined to sell. 

    • In 1951, the U.S. signed a Greenland-related defense agreement with Denmark, which it updated in 2004. The agreement, which affirmed and outlined the American military’s presence, said in its first paragraph that Greenland’s status had changed “from colony to that of an equal part of the Kingdom of Denmark.”

    Collectively, the existence of these treaties “means the United States believed (Denmark) was the country with authority over Greenland,” Fox said.

    PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

    RELATED: Fact-checking Donald Trump on promised U.S. oil company investment in Venezuela

    RELATED: What are the charges against Venezuela’s Maduro? How can the US indict foreign politicians?

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  • U.S. NATO allies say

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    European leaders released a joint statement Tuesday, outlining the importance of Arctic security, but stressing that “Greenland belongs to its people,” hours after White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller said it was “the formal position of the U.S. government that Greenland should be part of the U.S.”

    Miller also said, in an interview Monday with CNN, that the United States, “is the power of NATO. For the U.S. to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously Greenland should be part of the U.S.”

    “NATO has made clear that the Arctic region is a priority and European Allies are stepping up. We and many other Allies have increased our presence, activities and investments, to keep the Arctic safe and to deter adversaries,” the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the U.K. and Greenland said in their joint statement on Tuesday.

    “Security in the Arctic must therefore be achieved collectively, in conjunction with NATO allies including the United States, by upholding the principles of the U.N. Charter, including sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders. These are universal principles, and we will not stop defending them. The United States is an essential partner in this endeavor, as a NATO ally and through the defense agreement between the Kingdom of Denmark and the United States of 1951,” the U.S. allies said.

    “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.”

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  • Denmark prime minister calls on Trump to

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    The prime minister of Denmark on Sunday called on President Trump to “stop the threats” about taking over Greenland after the U.S. president reiterated his wish to take over the Danish territory.

    Since returning to White House a year ago, Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that making Greenland part of the United States would serve U.S. national security interests, given its strategic location in the Arctic. Greenland is also rich in key critical minerals used in high-tech sectors.

    Trump’s latest comments on Greenland

    In an interview with The Atlantic magazine published Sunday, Mr. Trump reiterated his wish to take over Greenland.

    “We do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense,” he told the magazine.

    His comments came a day after the U.S. military captured former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife during an overnight raid in Caracas. This raised concern in Denmark that the same could happen in Greenland, a Danish territory.

    Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a statement on Sunday that it makes “absolutely no sense to talk about the need for the United States to take over Greenland.”

    “The U.S. has no right to annex any of the three nations in the Danish kingdom,” she said, adding: “I would therefore strongly urge the U.S. stop the threats against a historically close ally and against another country and another people, who have very clearly said that they are not for sale.”

    In December, Mr. Trump named Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland, drawing renewed criticism from Denmark and Greenland.

    Denmark reacts after Katie Miller’s social media post

    And on Saturday, the wife of one of Mr. Trump’s most influential aides fanned the criticism when she posted a social media picture of Greenland painted in the colors of the United States flag.

    Katie Miller — wife of Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — put the contentiously altered image of the Danish autonomous territory on her X feed late Saturday, hours after the U.S. military operation against Venezuela.

    Her post had a single word above it: “SOON.”

    In response, Denmark’s ambassador to the U.S., Jesper Moeller Soerensen, reacted on Sunday with his own post saying “we expect full respect for the territorial integrity” of Denmark, above a link to Katie Miller’s image.

    “We are close allies and should continue to work together as such,” Soerensen said of Denmark’s relationship with the U.S. He added that both countries “work together to ensure security in the Arctic” and his “significantly boosted its Arctic security efforts” in 2025, an example of how it takes their “joint security seriously.”

    Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen also responded on social media, calling Miller’s post “disrespectful” but adding that it “doesn’t change anything” about his country’s independence.

    “Our country is not for sale and our future is not determined by social media posts,” Nielsen said in a statement translated from Greenlandic. “We are a democratic society with autonomy, free elections and strong institutions. Our position is clearly rooted in international law and in internationally recognized agreements. It stands.”

    Stephen Miller is widely seen as the architect of much of Mr. Trump’s policies, guiding the president on his hardline immigration policies and domestic agenda. Katie Miller was deputy press secretary under Mr. Trump at the Department of Homeland Security during his first term.

    She later worked as communications director for then-Vice President Mike Pence and also acted as his press secretary.

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  • Christopher Anderson On His White House Photos

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    The White House isn’t just the home of the sitting president of the United States—it’s also known as the people’s house, a symbol of democracy at work. Vanity Fair‘s Chris Whipple took readers inside the building and the inner workings of a half-dozen of Donald Trump‘s closest advisors, interviewing chief of staff Susie Wiles several times throughout the first months of Trump’s second term, and speaking to Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance, and others in a bombshell two-part feature.

    Whipple has discussed his reporting process for the story, and now, here’s Anderson in conversation with VF, taking us behind the scenes of the assignment that he almost turned down. And, to answer the question on everyone’s mind right away, Anderson says of those ultra-tight shots, “No, they’re not cropped versions. I’m standing very, very close.”

    Vanity Fair: What compelled you to take this assignment for Vanity Fair?
    Christopher Anderson: I wasn’t eager to accept the assignment at first. My roots are in journalism, I have done a lot of political work over the years and photographed a lot of politicians from the last administrations, from George Bush to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, even Bill Clinton. But a lot of what I do now is photograph celebrities. And I assumed incorrectly that the ask was for me to show up and be a celebrity photographer for this administration. And my journalistic DNA would not sit comfortably with this idea. So I thought, at first, I’m not gonna accept. Jennifer Pastore, the global creative director of Vanity Fair, and I had a long discussion about this, and she persuaded me that wearing my celebrity photographer hat was not why they were coming to me. That the qualification for this job was to come as a journalist, to bring a certain sense of clear-eyed observation and even skepticism. And that would come with a certain challenge and in my opinion, I felt an enormous responsibility in doing that. So that very much aligned with what my history is, what my roots have been in, it’s an historical moment, so I want to be there.

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    Kahina Sekkaï

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  • Behind The Scenes of Vanity Fair’s Revelatory White House Report

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    Now that the article is out, are you surprised by how it has been received/commented on? By the public and by the administration?

    I’m pleased by the overwhelmingly favorable public reaction to the story–and not at all bothered by the administration’s response. They’ve failed to challenge a single assertion or quotation from the piece. That’s because they know it’s rock solid.

    Do you think this is the last bit of significant access, and subsequent output, any journalist will ever get from this administration? Or do you think that them “closing their doors” to such an extent would create more problems than weathering an occasionally problematic article?

    My access to Susie Wiles was extraordinary and rare–and a decision made by her rather that any kind of White House policy. The Trump administration hasn’t made a habit of talking to mainstream media reporters and I don’t think that’s going to change.

    If you revisited this story a year from now, what thread would you most want to follow further?

    I’d want to pursue many threads–retribution, Epstein, Venezuela, the midterms, and many more!

    How frustrating is it to have off the record information in interviews like this? I can only imagine there are times you think “wow, people really deserve to know this,” but can’t share it.

    Actually, most of the explosive revelations from the interviews were made by Susie Wiles on the record. Pretty amazing, no?

    Did Wiles ever make a compelling case that Trump was ever unfairly or irrationally maligned?

    No, she never made a case for Trump’s unfair portrayal by the press. She simply asserted that it was true.

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    Eve Batey

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  • Mark Zuckerberg’s nonprofit cuts ties with the immigration advocacy group he co-founded

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    Behold Mark Zuckerberg: man of principle. Witness the Meta CEO’s dedication to the most high-minded of causes: “currying favor with whoever’s in charge.” In 2013, when Barack Obama was president, Zuckerberg co-founded FWD.us, a pro-immigration advocacy group. For years, he vocally supported providing paths to citizenship for “the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.” Now, in 2025, with Donald Trump back in power and pushing draconian immigration policies, Zuckerberg’s philanthropy organization has officially cut ties with the group. Who says Big Tech executives don’t stand for anything?

    On Friday, Bloomberg reported on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) severing its ties with FWD.us. Zuckerberg’s group provided no funding to the advocacy group for the first time this year. Up to that point, over half of the roughly $400 million donated to the nonprofit since 2013 had come from CZI.

    In addition, CZI’s chief of staff, Jordan Fox, resigned from the FWD.us board. No one else at CZI will fill the vacant slot, another first for the pro-immigration and justice reform advocacy group.

    In a statement to Engadget, a spokesperson for CZI said the change had been in the works for several years. “Nearly five years ago, we shared that we were focusing on our core work in science, education, and supporting our local communities,” the spokesperson said. “As part of that transition, we committed foundational funding to FWD.us to continue their bipartisan work. We have fulfilled that financial commitment and wound down our social advocacy funding.” She added that the couple’s Biohub initiative is currently their “primary philanthropy.”

    Mark Zuckerberg listens attentively to Stephen Miller at Trump’s January inauguration (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI via Getty Images)

    In late 2024, Zuckerberg met with Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who reacts to brown-skinned humans being sent to foreign gulags the way my dog responds to a juicy steak. Among other topics during the exchange, Miller reportedly questioned Zuckerberg’s ties to FWD.us.

    Apparently, his words resonated with Zuckerberg’s principles. In January, before Trump was sworn in for his second term, Meta unleashed an overhaul that reads like a Miller wishlist. The company ended its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. That same month, it ditched third-party fact-checkers, calling them “too politically biased.” It also changed its policies to allow for “insulting language” on topics of immigration and LGBTQ+ issues. The company even added Trump backer Dana White to its board.

    It fits a broader pattern of Big Tech bending the knee to Trump.

    “We’re in the middle of a pretty rapidly changing policy and regulatory landscape that views any policy that might advantage any one group of people over another as something that is unlawful,” Zuckerberg told the New York Times in January. “Because of that, we and every other institution out there are going to need to adjust.”

    “We now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning and that will defend our values and interests abroad,” Zuckerberg said in a January investor call. “I am optimistic about the progress and innovation that this can unlock, so this is going to be a big year.”

    What a big year indeed.

    NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA - DECEMBER 5: U.S. Chief Border Patrol Agent, Gregory Bovino and other agents conduct an immigration enforcement operation in a neighborhood on December 5, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana This comes on the third day of the operation in Louisiana, 'Catahoula Crunch,' launched by the Department of Homeland Security as a part of an immigration crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the United States. (Photo by Ryan Murphy/Getty Images)

    US Chief Border Patrol Agent, Gregory Bovino and masked ICE agents in New Orleans (Ryan Murphy via Getty Images)

    Now witness the contrasting words of one of Zuckerberg’s chief rivals in Silicon Valley. “When you meet these [immigrant] children who are really talented, and they’ve grown up in America, and they really don’t know any other country besides that, but they don’t have the opportunities that we all enjoy, it’s really heartbreaking, right?” the tech executive said. “That seems like it’s one of the biggest civil rights issues of our time.”

    That “rival,” of course, was Obama-era Mark Zuckerberg in 2013.

    Despite the funding setback, thanks to our principled hero, FWD.us will press forward. “We’re thankful to our donors, past and present, and so grateful to the many new donors who have stepped up in the past few years — and particularly the influx of new supporters we have seen this year,” FWD.us President Todd Schulte said in a statement. “This allows us to fight for immigrants under attack today and to build a better approach to immigration and criminal justice reform for many, many years to come.”

    Update, December 19, 2025, 1:19PM PT: This story was updated to include a statement from a spokesperson for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

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    Will Shanklin

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  • Do ICE officers have ‘federal immunity’?

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    Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents they are legally protected from prosecution and local officials cannot arrest them.

    Fox News host Will Cain questioned Miller during an Oct. 24 interview. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Cain said, “talked about interfering with, arresting, ICE agents in Illinois.”

    Cain asked Miller under what federal authority the Trump administration could arrest Pritzker if the governor tried to arrest ICE agents.

    “To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties,” Miller said. “And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony.”

    Miller said his answer applied to any local or state official “who conspires or engages in activity that unlawfully impedes federal law enforcement conducting their duties.” 

    The day before Miller’s comments Pritzker signed an executive order establishing the Illinois Accountability Commission to document federal law enforcement actions and refer possible law violations to local and state agencies for investigation. Chicago is the latest target in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, and agents have arrested more than 3,000 people there.

    Pritzker acknowledged in an Oct. 16 interview that “federal agents typically have federal immunity, but they’re not immune from the federal government holding them accountable and responsible.”

    His statement is less sweeping than Miller’s and Pritzker noted that the federal government can prosecute federal agents. 

    Immigration agents, like other law enforcement officers, have broad protections when conducting official duties. That doesn’t mean they can’t be held legally accountable if they break state or federal law.

    “Federal officials are not categorically immune from state criminal prosecution, even while on duty,” Bryna Godar, attorney at University of Wisconsin’s State Democracy Research Initiative, wrote in a July 17 report.

    When contacted for comment, the White House pointed PolitiFact to an Oct. 23 letter U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote California officials. 

    “The Department of Justice views any arrests of federal agents and officers in the performance of their official duties as both illegal and futile,” Blanche wrote. 

    He cited several federal laws and provisions including the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause. The clause limits when states can prosecute federal agents who break state law, but it does not act as blanket immunity, legal experts said.

    Miller’s statement is “wrong on its face,” Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University constitutional law professor, wrote in his Oct. 27 newsletter.

    The federal government can prosecute immigration agents who break the law 

    Federal immigration agents can’t break the law with impunity.

    In 2024, a federal judge convicted and sentenced to federal prison a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent for using excessive force against two people at the southern border. Department of Homeland Security watchdog offices investigated the case.

    The federal government has cited its power to hold agents accountable in court arguments. After a Border Patrol agent shot and killed a 15-year-old Mexican boy at the southern border in 2010, the Justice Department said in a 2019 Supreme Court brief that the federal government investigates allegations of excessive force by agents “and may bring a federal criminal prosecution where appropriate.”

    Non-government organizations also can sue the federal government for its agents’ actions. Several groups in Chicago, including journalism organizations, sued the Trump administration saying federal agents are using “a pattern of extreme brutality in a concerted and ongoing effort to silence the press and civilians.”

    In that case, federal District Judge Sara Ellis ordered immigration agents not to use tear gas and other riot control tactics unless people are posing an immediate threat. If the agents are going to use tear gas, they are required to give a verbal warning first.

    After reports that agents weren’t following the court order, Ellis ordered Gregory Bovino, the senior Border Patrol official overseeing the federal immigration actions in Chicago, to meet with her every weeknight to report all confrontations officers have with the public. (After this story published, a federal appeals court temporarily paused Ellis’ order.)

    Vladeck wrote that even if the Trump administration does not investigate or prosecute immigration agents who might have broken the law, it doesn’t mean the federal government doesn’t have the power to do so.

    Pritzker said his state’s commission seeks to document actions that could be prosecuted in the future.

    State governments aren’t barred from prosecuting federal agents

    State governments also can prosecute immigration agents if they break state law. However, there is a limitation known as supremacy clause immunity which comes from the U.S. Constitution’s clause that says federal law supersedes conflicting state laws. 

    Protections against state prosecution for federal agents date back to an 1890 Supreme Court decision. David Neagle, a U.S. marshal assigned to protect a Supreme Court justice, shot and killed a man who assaulted the justice. California arrested Neagle and charged him with murder. The Supreme Court ruled that the state couldn’t prosecute Neagle because he was carrying out official duties.

    Generally, federal agents are protected from state prosecution if their actions were authorized by federal law, and if the actions were “necessary and proper” for agents to fulfill their duties.

    A federal court ruled in 1990 that a customs agent was immune from state charges for speeding while driving during a drug operation. The agent acted under U.S. laws and was justified in concluding speeding was necessary to fulfill his duties, the court said.

    But a U.S. marine wasn’t given immunity in 1990 after he killed a person in a car accident while he was driving in a military convoy in North Carolina.

    “In short, while Supremacy Clause immunity grants federal officials a partial shield from state prosecution, that immunity is not absolute,” Godar wrote.

    Contrary to Miller’s statement, Vladeck wrote, it’s not a felony “for local or state authorities to arrest someone who they have probable cause to believe committed a state crime.”

    If a state brought charges against federal immigration agents, the court would have to determine whether an officer reasonably would have thought the actions were necessary to carry out federal duties. 

    “That’s a generous standard, to be sure,” Vladeck wrote. “But it is by no means a get-out-of-prosecution-free card.”

    Our ruling

    Miller said, “To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”

    Immigration agents, like other law enforcement officers, have broad protections when they’re conducting official duties. But they’re not immune from prosecution if they break state or federal law.

    The federal government can and does prosecute federal officers who break the law. 

    States can’t prosecute agents for breaking state law if the agents were acting under the reasonable confines of their official duties. But those restrictions aren’t absolute.

    The statement contains an element of truth; federal immigration agents have some immunity from state prosecution. But the protections aren’t as sweeping as Miller made them sound, giving a different impression. Federal agents can and have been prosecuted by states.  

    We rate Miller’s statement Mostly False.

    UPDATE, Oct. 29, 2025: This story was updated to include an appeals court decision that happened after publication.​

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  • Trump Is Trying to Brand Political Opposition As Rebellion

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    Did the country mandate this?
    Photo: Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    When looking at judicial review of Trump 2.0’s many audacious power grabs, it’s easy to get bogged down and tangled up in legalisms. Constitutional law is complicated. Federal court procedures are not designed to cope with unprecedented assertions of presidential power advanced almost hourly in places all over the country. An extraordinary percentage of lower court, appellate court, and Supreme Court cases involving the administration’s actions are on emergency dockets. Staid jurists are trying to keep up with a fast-moving Trump train that is very deliberately violating norms in every direction.

    But now a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling that halted a National Guard deployment in Chicago, wrote some sentences that cut through the fog like a powerful search light and reached the real point of contention:

    Political opposition is not rebellion. A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, of course, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly. But because rebellions at least use deliberate, organized violence to resist governmental authority, the problematic incidents in this record clearly fall within the considerable day-light between protected speech and rebellion.

    In other words, the judges (one of whom was appointed by Trump, another by George H.W. Bush) slapped down as absurd the administration’s claim that protests against ICE’s activities in Chicago constitute a “rebellion” that warrants otherwise illegal deployments of military force in a U.S. city. And neither Donald Trump nor Pete Hegseth nor Kristi Noem nor Tom Homan nor Pam Bondi can turn these protests into the equivalent of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War, or a foreign invasion. Nor can Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is eager to send his own National Guard units to Democrat-governed Illinois in what amounts to a war between the states.

    It’s increasingly clear that treating political opposition as a rebellion is at the heart of the administration’s legal case for the militarization of political conflict that goes well beyond protests against ICE raids. In MAGA-speak circa 2025, the “Democrat Party” is now the “Radical Left,” and everything it does is presumptively illegitimate and probably illegal. Just yesterday White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt bluntly asserted that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” Earlier this week House Speaker Mike Johnson said the peaceful No Kings rally in Washington planned for October 18, which will feature massive displays of Old Glory and countless patriotic gestures, is insurrectionary: “This ‘Hate America’ rally that they have coming up for October 18, the antifa crowd and the pro-Hamas crowd and the Marxists, they’re all going to gather on the Mall.”

    This follows onto the threats of repression broadcast by the president and by his top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Both men blamed this crime by a deranged individual on Trump opponents writ large, with Miller going so far as to suggest that calling his boss “authoritarian” was an illegal incitement to the kind of violence that murdered Kirk, and an act of “terrorism.” Trump’s subsequent executive order called for a literal war on “antifa,” the shadowy and scattered network of protesters, that is useful in the ongoing clampdown precisely because it’s nowhere and everywhere. Meanwhile, his so-called Secretary of War called in the entire leadership of the U.S. armed forces to mobilize them for duty against the “enemy within.” This steady escalation of rhetoric, to be clear, is the logical culmination of the president’s relentless campaign of demonization throughout the 2024 campaign that treated opponents as anti-American, anti-Christian crooks who were deliberately destroying the country and importing millions of criminals to steal elections.

    Suffusing this militant attitude is the pervasive belief in MAGA circles that Trump’s narrow 2024 victory represents a mandate to do whatever he wants. It’s unlikely, in fact, that the swing voters who pulled the lever for Trump because they wanted lower gasoline or grocery prices or better border control bought into the full Trump 2.0 agenda, which is why his job-approval numbers are well underwater. But even if they did buy the whole enchilada, the 49.8 percent of voters who backed Trump do not have the right to revoke the constitutional rights of the remaining 50.2 percent. That would be true, moreover, had the 47th president actually won the “historic landslide” he keeps mendaciously claiming.

    The words of the Seventh Circuit judges really do need to become a rallying cry against the administration’s efforts to use every bit of power it can amass to silence and intimidate opponents and critics. Political opposition is not a rebellion and doesn’t justify a repression that turns half the country into suspected terrorists. This president has more than enough power to pursue his policies without ruling like a king. Enough is enough.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Obama rips concessions that businesses and others have made to Trump

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    (CNN) — Barack Obama ripped into the law firms, universities and businesses that have worked out settlements or other deals with President Donald Trump’s administration, arguing that “We all have this capacity, I think, to take a stand.”

    The former president said the organizations that concede to Trump should be able to say, “We’re not going to be bullied into saying that we can only hire people or promote people based on some criteria that’s been cooked up by Steve Miller,” referring to the top White House aide.

    According to an advance podcast transcript, Obama said he sympathized with those looking to avoid a backlash, but said, “We’re not at the stage where you have to be like Nelson Mandela and be in a 10-by-12 jail cell for 27 years and break rocks.”

    The comments, some of the most direct that Obama has made about Trump outside of his campaign trail appearances in 2020 and 2024, came in an interview posting Monday for the final episode of the “WTF” podcast hosted by comedian Marc Maron.

    Maron, who last interviewed Obama in 2015, has frequently talked about that conversation in subsequent episodes. In July, after announcing he would end the 16-year run of the pioneering podcast, he suggested that another talk with Obama would be a dream way to finish. Last week, he got his wish — though not by having Obama make another visit to his house, as many of the podcast guests tend to.

    Maron kept the interview a surprise even from fans, only teasing in his penultimate episode that he traveled to record it. They met in Obama’s office in Washington.

    The conversation focused on the state of America and what Democrats can find hope in — but Obama also criticized progressive absolutism and singled out one rising Texas Democrat who impresses him.

    The news out of his hometown on his mind, Obama called Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago “a deliberate end run around not just a concept, but a law that’s been around for a long time” — the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits the use of the military inside the US for law enforcement purposes.

    “That is a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy,” he said.

    Obama reflected on his own experiences in the White House, including dealing with pushback from Republican leaders such as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

    “If I had sent in the National Guard into Texas and just said, ‘You know what? A lot of problems in Dallas, a lot of crime there, and I don’t care what Gov. Abbott says. I’m going to kind of take over law enforcement, because I think things are out of control,’ it is mind-boggling to me how Fox News would have responded,” he said.

    The two also discussed the evolution of the media environment, particularly around the podcast world Maron helped shape, and what it has done to political communication.

    “It was interesting to me when people started criticizing Bernie [Sanders] or somebody else for going on Rogan. It’s like, why wouldn’t you? Yeah, of course, go,” Obama said, referring to “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.

    Among the Rogan guests who caught Obama’s eye: Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who turned a viral appearance on the podcast into fuel for what has now become a competitive Senate primary run.

    Obama called Talarico “terrific, a really talented young man,” adding that his appearance proves that going on long-form podcasts requires “a certain confidence in your actual convictions to debate and have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you.”

    Overall, Obama argued, “what people long for is some core integrity that seems absent, just a sense that the person seems to walk the walk, just talk the talk.”

    Obama said he particularly enjoyed a bit from Maron’s latest stand-up special when the comedian jokes that progressives annoyed the average American into fascism.

    “You can’t constantly lecture people without acknowledging that you’ve got some blind spots too, and that life’s messy,” Obama said. “I think this was a fault of some progressive language, was almost asserting a holier-than-thou superiority that’s not that different from what we used to joke about coming from the right moral majority and a certain fundamentalism about how to think about stuff that I think was dangerous.”

    “If I talked about trans issues, I wasn’t talking down to people and saying, ‘Oh, you’re a bigot,’” he said. “I’d say, ‘You know, it’s tough enough being a teenager. Let’s treat all kids decently. Why would we want to see kids bullied?”

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    Edward-Isaac Dovere and CNN

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  • Commentary: At Trump’s Justice Department, partisan pugnacity where honor, integrity should be

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    On Saturday, a home belonging to a South Carolina Circuit judge burned to the ground. Three people, including the judge’s husband and son, were hospitalized with serious injuries.

    The cause of the fire was not immediately clear. An investigation is underway.

    Obviously, the harm and destruction were terrible things. But what turned that particular tragedy into something more frightful and ominous is the fact the judge had been targeted with death threats, after ruling against the Trump administration in a lawsuit involving the state’s voter files.

    Last month, the judge, Diane Goodstein, temporarily blocked South Carolina from releasing data to the U.S. Department of Retribution, er, Justice, which is turning over tables in search of “facts” to bolster President Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election.

    Among those who criticized the decision, which was reversed by South Carolina’s Supreme Court, was Harmeet Dhillon, the San Francisco attorney who now heads the Justice Department’s beleaguered Civil Rights Division.

    Here’s a short quiz. Using professional norms and human decency as your guide, can you guess what Dhillon did in the aftermath of the fire?

    A) Publicly consoled Goodstein and said the Justice Department would throw its full weight behind an urgent investigation into the fire.

    B) Drew herself up in righteous anger and issued a ringing statement that denounced political violence, whatever its form, whether perpetrated by those on the left, right or center.

    C) Took to social media to troll a political adversary who raised concerns about the targeting of judges and incendiary rhetoric emanating from the Trump administration.

    If you selected anything other than “C,” you obviously aren’t familiar with Dhillon. Or perhaps you’ve spent the last many months in a coma, or cut off from the world in the frozen tundra of Antarctica.

    The cause of the fire could very well turn out to be something unfortunate and distinctly nonpolitical. Faulty wiring, say, or an unattended pot left on the stove. South Carolina’s top law enforcement official said a preliminary inquiry had so far turned up no evidence that the fire was deliberately set.

    What matters, however, is Dhillon’s response.

    Not as someone with a shred of sympathy, or as a dogged and scrupulous seeker of truth and justice. But as a fists-up political combatant.

    The timing of the blaze, the threats Goodstein received and the country’s hair-trigger political atmosphere all offered more than a little reason for pause and reflection. At the least, Goodstein’s loss and the suffering of her husband and child called for compassion.

    Dhillon, however, is a someone who reacted to the 2022 hammer attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband not with concern but rather cruel and baseless conspiracy claims.

    By then, Dhillon — a critic of Trump before he won the 2016 Republican nomination — had shape-shifted into one of his most vocal backers, a regular mouthpiece on Fox News and other right-wing media. Her pandering paid off with her appointment to the Justice Department, where Dhillon is supposed to be protecting the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans — not just those in Trump’s good graces.

    There’s plenty of tit-for-tat going around in today’s sulfurous climate. Indeed, the jabbing of fingers and laying of blame have become something of a national pastime.

    The administration asserts left-wing radicals are responsible for the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and a sniper attack on the ICE field office in Dallas. Those on the left blame Trump and his venomous vassal, Stephen Miller, for the incineration of Goodstein’s home.

    When Neera Tanden, a liberal think-tank leader and prolific presence on social media, suggested there might be a connection between the blaze and Miller’s hate-filled rhetoric, Dhillon responded like a juvenile in a flame war. “Clown … grow up, girl,” Dhillon wrote on X.

    When a spokesman for Gov. Gavin Newsom pointed a finger at Dhillon and her criticism of the South Carolina judge, Dhillon seized on some over-the-top responses and called in the U.S. Marshals Service. “We will tolerate no such threats by woke idiots, including those who work for @GavinNewsom,” Dhillon said.

    All around, a sad display of more haste than good judgment.

    That said, there is a huge difference between a press staffer getting his jollies on social media and the assistant attorney general of the United States playing politics with personal calamity.

    And, really, doesn’t Dhillon have better things to do — and better ways of earning her pay — than constantly curating her social media feed, like a mean girl obsessing over likes and followers?

    Worse, though, than such puerile behavior is what Dhillon embodies: an us-vs.-them attitude that permeates the administration and treats those who didn’t vote for Trump — which is more than half the country — as a target.

    It’s evident in the talk of shuttering “Democrat” agencies, as if federal programs serve only members of one party. It’s manifest in the federal militarization of Democratic-run cities and the cutting off of funding to blue states, but not red ones, during the current government shutdown.

    It’s revealed in the briefings — on military plans, on operations during the shutdown — given to Republican lawmakers but denied to Democrats serving on Capitol Hill.

    Dhillon is just one cog in Trump’s malevolent, weaponization of Washington. But her reflexively partisan response to the razing of Judge Goodstein’s home is telling.

    When the person in charge of the nation’s civil rights enforcement can’t muster even a modicum of civility, we’re living in some very dark times indeed.

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    Mark Z. Barabak

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  • Republicans See an Upset in Violent Texts From Virginia Democrat

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    A once-happy Virginia Democratic ticket.
    Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

    Until very recently, the much-watched off-year elections in Virginia were looking pretty bad for Republicans. Their gubernatorial candidate, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, has been struggling to compete financially and politically with Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a centrist congresswoman. Specific candidacies aside, Virginia has a long history of rejecting gubernatorial candidates from the party controlling the White House (which helped outgoing Republican governor Glenn Youngkin defeat Terry McAuliffe in 2021). Add in the Commonwealth’s recent blue-leaning tendencies and the terrible treatment its many federal employees have received from the second Trump administration, and you can understand why national Republicans have been more interested in the other big off-year gubernatorial contest in New Jersey.

    But now the Virginia GOP may have caught a break via some oppo research on the Democratic candidate for attorney general by National Review:

    On August 8, 2022, a Republican state legislator received a disturbing string of early-morning text messages from a former colleague, Jay Jones, this year’s Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general …

    Jones, who at the time had recently resigned from the state house after a brief stint representing Norfolk, had strong feelings about how the political class was eulogizing recently deceased former state legislator Joe Johnson Jr., a moderate Democrat with a long tenure in Virginia politics …

    “If those guys die before me,” Jones wrote, referencing the Republican colleagues who were publicly honoring the deceased Johnson’s memory, “I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.”

    Jones then suggested that, presented with a hypothetical situation in which he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of murdering then-Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert or two dictators, he’d shoot Gilbert “every time.”

    Apparently the texts were intended for a different recipient, but Jones’s words shouldn’t have been said to anybody about anybody. He reportedly compounded the offense in a follow-up phone call to the accidental recipient of the text suggesting that “he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views.”

    This was years ago, and Jones hasn’t displayed any offline violent tendencies, but as you can imagine, Republicans see a huge opportunity: not just to potentially defeat Jones (who was favored to win before all this controversy) but to divide and defeat the entire Democratic statewide ticket, as Axios explains:

    Leading Virginia Democrats, including the statewide ticket, have condemned the comments Jones made in 2022 suggesting a hypothetical scenario in which he would shoot the then-Republican House speaker and wished harm on his children.

    But none have called for Jones to step aside …

    Gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears and lieutenant governor nominee John Reid are pressuring their opponents on social media to call on Jones to drop out.

    Jones, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger and lieutenant governor nominee Ghazala Hashmi’s campaigns didn’t immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment.

    Unsurprisingly, those great advocates for civility in political discourse, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, have jumped into the fray with the latter quickly using the texts to defend himself and his boss for their own recent lapses in taste:

    Conservative media is all over this story, and Jones’s abject apologies for the texts have cut no ice in those circles. He’s not the real target anyway; it’s Spanberger, and as Axios put it, “pushing Jones off the ticket could fracture Democrats’ chances in a pivotal statewide race seen as a bellwether for next year.” To be clear, in Virginia statewide candidates run independently, so there’s not really a “ticket” the gubernatorial nominee can control. For another, Jones is the sole Black statewide Democratic nominee, in a state where Democrats rely heavily on robust Black turnout.

    I’m sure there’s back-channel talk about Jones “doing the right thing” and relieving his colleagues of his problems, along with pushback against the cynical manipulation of the “crisis” by Republicans. White House policy director Stephen Miller commented that Jones’s texts showed how “dangerously radicalized the Democrat Party has become.” But then Miller very clearly believes the “Democrat Party” should be outlawed, since, as he recently said, it is “an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists.” Pleasing the likes of Miller would be galling for Virginia Democrats. Perhaps Jones and his party can tough it all out, but MAGA folk will incessantly use his example to buttress their absurd argument that the main source of violent political talk is left of center and will perhaps even pull off an electoral shocker in a time and place in which the Boss and his agenda aren’t very popular.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Commentary: So much winning. Can Bonta maintain California’s legal hot streak against Trump?

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    It was late Sunday evening when President Trump got thumped with a court loss — again — by California.

    No, a federal judge ruled, Trump cannot command the California National Guard to invade Portland, Ore. At the request of California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and others, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut broadened a temporary restraining order that had blocked Oregon’s National Guard from being used by the federal government. It now includes not just California’s troops but troops from any state. At least for the next two weeks.

    It’s the kind of legal loss Trump should be used to it by now, especially when it comes to the Golden State. Since Trump 2.0 hit the White House this year with Project 2025 folded up in his back pocket, the state of California has sued the administration 42 times, literally about once a week.

    While many of those cases are still pending, California is racking up a series of wins that restored more than $160 billion in funding and at least slowed down (and in some cases stopped) the steamrolling of civil rights on issues including birthright citizenship and immigration policy.

    “We have won in 80% of the cases,” Bonta told me. “Whether it be a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order, and more and more now permanent final injunctions after the whole trial court case is done.”

    I’ll take it. We all need some positive news. I don’t often write just about the good, but in these strange days, it’s helpful to have a reminder that the fight is always worth having when it comes to protecting our rights. And, despite the partisan Supreme Court, the reason that we are still holding on to democracy is because the system still works, albeit like a ’78 Chevy with the doors rusting off.

    While Gov. Gavin Newsom has made himself the face of California’s fights against Trump, taking on a pugnacious and audacious attitude especially on social media, the day-in, day-out slugging in those battles is often done by Bonta and his team in courtrooms across the country.

    It’s hard to recall, but months ago, Newsom called a special session of the Legislature to give Bonta a $25-million allowance to defend not just California but democracy. And in a moment when many of us fear that checks and balances promised in the Constitution have turned out to be little more than happy delusions, Bonta has a message: The courts are (mostly) holding and California’s lawyers aren’t just fighting, they’re winning.

    “We can do things that governors can’t do,” Bonta said. “No role and no moment has been more important than this one.”

    Bonta told me that he often hears that Trump is disregarding the courts, so “what’s the point of litigation at all? What’s the point of a court order at all? He’s just going to ignore them.”

    But, he said, the administration has been following judges’ rulings — so far. While there have been instances, especially around deportations, that knock on the door of lawlessness, at least for California, Trump is “following all of our court orders,” Bonta said.

    “We’re making a difference,” he said.

    A few days ago, the U.S. Department of Education was forced to send out a final chunk of funds it had attempted to withhold from schools. Bonta, in a multistate lawsuit, successfully protected that money, which schools need this year to help migrant children and English learners, train teachers, buy new technology and pay for before- and after-school programs, among other uses.

    That’s a permanent, final ruling — no appeals.

    Another recent win saw California land a permanent injunction against the feds when it comes to stopping their payments for costs associated with state energy projects. That a win both for the climate and consumers, who benefit when we make energy more efficiently.

    Last week, Bonta won another permanent injunction, blocking the Trump administration’s effort to tie grants related to homeland security to compliance with his immigration policies. Safety shouldn’t be tied to deportations, especially in California, where our immigrants are overwhelmingly law-abiding community members.

    Those are just a few of Bonta’s victories. Of course, Trump and his minions aren’t happy about them. Stephen Miller, the shame of Santa Monica, seems to have especially lost his marbles over the National Guard ruling. On social media, Miller seems to be attacking the justice system, and attorneys general such as Bonta.

    “There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country,” Miller wrote. “It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”

    Never mind that the Oregon judge who issued the National Guard ruling is a Trump appointee.

    “Their goal, I think, is to chill and pause and worry judges; to chill and pause and worry the press; to chill and pause and worry attorneys general who stand up for the rule of law and for democracy, who go to court and fight for what’s right and fight for the law,” Bonta said.

    Bonta expects the administration, far from learning any lessons or harboring self-reflection during this mad dash toward autocracy, to continue full speed ahead.

    “We’re going to see more, and we’re going to see it fast, and we’re going to see it escalate,” he said. “None of that is good, including putting military in American cities or, you know, Trump treating them like his royal guard instead of the National Guard.”

    Even when the Trump administration loses, “they always have this like second move and maybe a third, where they are always trying to advance their agenda, even when they’ve been blocked by a court, even when they’ve been told that they’re acting unlawfully or unconstitutionally,” he said.

    On Monday, Trump threatened to use the Insurrection Act to circumvent the court’s ruling on the National Guard, a massive escalation of his effort to militarize American cities.

    But California remains on a winning streak, much to Trump’s dismay.

    It’s my bet that as long as our judges continue to honor the rule of law, that streak will hold.

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    Anita Chabria

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  • Stephen Miller leads GOP charge equating Democrats to ‘domestic terrorists’

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    WASHINGTON — President Trump rocked American politics at the outset of his first campaign when he first labeled his rivals as enemies of the American people. But the rhetoric of his top confidantes has grown more extreme in recent days.

    Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff, declared over the weekend that “a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country” is fueling an historic national schism, “shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general.”

    “The only remedy,” Miller said, “is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”

    It was a maxim from an unelected presidential advisor who is already unleashing the federal government in unprecedented ways, overseeing the federalization of police forces and a sweeping deportation campaign challenging basic tenets of civil liberty.

    Miller’s rhetoric comes amid a federal crackdown on Portland, Ore., where he says the president has unchecked authority to protect federal lives and property — and as another controversial Trump advisor harnesses an ongoing government shutdown as pretext for the mass firing of federal workers.

    Russ Vought, the president’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, plays the grim reaper in an AI video shared by the president, featuring him roving Washington for bureaucrats to cut from the deep state during the shutdown.

    His goal, Trump has said, is to specifically target Democrats.

    As of Monday afternoon, it was unclear exactly how many federal workers or what federal agencies would be targeted.

    “We don’t want to see people laid off, but unfortunately, if this shutdown continues layoffs are going to be an unfortunate consequence of that,” White House press secretary Karoline Levitt said during a news briefing.

    ‘A nation of Constitutional law’

    Karin Immergut, a federal judge appointed by Trump, said this weekend that the administration’s justification for deploying California National Guard troops in Portland was “simply untethered to the facts.”

    “This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” Immergut wrote, chiding the Trump administration for attempting to circumvent a prior order from her against a federal deployment to the city.

    “This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition,” she added: “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.”

    The administration is expected to appeal the judge’s decision, Leavitt said, while calling the judge’s ruling “untethered in reality and in the law.”

    “We’re very confident in the president’s legal authority to do this, and we are very confident we will win on the merits of the law,” Leavitt said.

    If the courts were to side with the administration, Leavitt said local leaders — most of whom are Democrats — should not be concerned about the possibility of long-term plans to have their cities occupied by the military.

    “Why should they be concerned about the federal government offering help to make their cities a safer place?” Leavitt said. “They should be concerned about the fact that people in their cities right now are being gunned down every single night and the president, all he is trying to do, is fix it.”

    Moments later, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he does not believe it is necessary yet, he would be willing to invoke the Insurrection Act “if courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

    “Sure, I’d do that,” Trump said. “We have to make sure that our cities are safe.”

    The Insurrection Act gives the president sweeping emergency power to deploy military forces within the United States if the president deems it is needed to quell civil unrest. The last time this occurred was in 1992, when California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush to send federal troops to help stop the Los Angeles riots that occurred after police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.

    Subsequent posts from Miller on social media over the weekend escalated the stakes to existential heights, accusing Democrats of allying themselves with “domestic terrorists” seeking to overturn the will of the people reflected in Trump’s election win last year.

    On Monday, in an interview with CNN, Miller suggested that the administration would continue working to sidestep Immergut’s orders.

    “The administration will abide by the ruling insofar as it affects the covered parties,” he said, “but there are also many options the president has to deploy federal resources under the U.S. military to Portland.”

    Other Republicans have used similar rhetoric since the slaying of Charlie Kirk, a conservative youth activist, in Utah last month.

    Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) wrote that posts from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office have reached “the threshold of domestic terrorism,” after the Democratic governor referred to Miller on social media as a fascist. And Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said Monday that Democrats demanding an extension of healthcare benefits as a condition for reopening the government were equivalent to terrorists.

    “I don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Fine told Newsmax, “and what we’re learned in whether it’s dealing with Muslim terrorists or Democrats, you’ve gotta stand and you’ve gotta do the right thing.”

    Investigating donor networks

    Republicans’ keenness to label Democrats as terrorists comes two weeks after Trump signed an executive order declaring a left-wing antifascist movement, known as antifa, as a “domestic terrorist organization” — a designation that does not exist under U.S. law.

    The order, which opened a new front in Trump’s battle against his political foes, also threatened to investigate and prosecute individuals who funded “any and all illegal operations — especially those involving terrorist actions — conducted by antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of antifa.”

    Leavitt told reporters Monday the administration is “aggressively” looking into who is financially backing these operations.

    Trump has floated the possibility of going after people such as George Soros, a billionaire who has supported many left-leaning causes around the world.

    “If you look at Soros, he is at the top of everything,” Trump said during an Oval Office appearance last month.

    The White House has not yet made public any details about a formal investigation into a donors, but Leavitt said the administration’s efforts are under way.

    “We will continue to get to the bottom of who is funding these organizations and this organized anarchy against our country and our government,” Leavitt said. “We are committed to uncovering it.”

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    Michael Wilner, Ana Ceballos

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  • ‘The Constitution isn’t far left’: Stephen King mocks Stephen Miller’s terror obsession | The Mary Sue

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    When it comes to spreading propaganda, no one does it better than the Republicans and Trump allies.

    Time and again, the radical group of individuals have desperately attempted to mobilise groups of people for their selfish interests, causing division and dispute in an already divided U.S. state. Unfortunately, their plan has mostly worked till now. However, there are still some people who see him and his allies as they are: hate-inciting, dictatorship-promoting, racist, sexist, transphobic, xenophobic, and anti-minority bigots.

    It is not just the general public who are speaking against Trump and his government; it is also people in power who do not align themselves with him. Prominent among them is American author Stephen King, known for writing books such as The Shining and The Shawshank Redemption. King has been a vocal supporter of the Democrats, endorsing several politicians from the party during the presidential elections over the years. He has also been open about his criticism of Trump, with him being one of the few people who had signed a letter opposing his participation during the 2016 presidential elections.

    King, doing justice to his surname, is yet again expressing disdain over Trump and his unparliamentary methods of exercising control over U.S. citizens. Not only that, he is also calling out those who support him. 

    White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has never shied away from echoing the words of his Dorito-brained boss. Time and again, he has taken to social media, especially X (previously Twitter), to express his views on critical issues and to blame the opposition for everything. On October 4, 2025, Miller, through a post on X, accused the Democrats of doing all the things the Republicans under Trump’s rule have been doing since he came to power in 2025. He wrote in the post:

    “The issue before is now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general.”

    He did not stop there, as he continued to suggest a line of action that includes the use of “legitimate state power” to “dismantle terrorism and terror networks.” Naturally, Miller’s comments did not sit right with Stephen King, who jumped into the conversation, condemning him for his misguided views. He wrote:

    “Sorry, Steve–The Constitution isn’t far left or far right. It’s the basis on our democracy, and you’re playing the terror card to try and overturn it. Won’t work.”

    Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

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    Sanchari Ghosh

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  • ‘If I Could Make It 100% MAGA, I Would’: Trump Gives Green Light to TikTok Deal

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    President Donald Trump signed an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House on Thursday that’s intended to give the green light for U.S. investors to take a large stake in TikTok. But details of the proposed deal still haven’t been revealed, and there are plenty of hoops to jump through before it’s finalized.

    “This is going to be American-operated all the way,” Trump said Thursday. “And great respect [sic] for President Xi, and I very much appreciate that he approved the deal. Because to get it done properly, we really needed the support of China and the approval of China.”

    Trump has claimed that China’s President, Xi Jinping, has approved the deal, but it still needs formal approval from China, according to the Washington Post. And the Wall Street Journal reports that the group of new investors who are supposed to take over TikTok has yet to be finalized, and legal details haven’t been ironed out.

    Who are these new investors? According to Trump on Thursday, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, and Rupert Murdoch are among the “four or five absolutely world-class investors” involved. Trump recently sued Murdoch for defamation over a Wall Street Journal article about a birthday book made for Jeffrey Epstein and signed by Trump in 2003.

    CNBC reported earlier Thursday that a new entity operated by Oracle, Silver Lake, and the Abu Dhabi-based MGX investment fund will control about 45% of TikTok. Thirty-five percent will be controlled by ByteDance investors and new holders, according to the business channel. And ByteDance will reportedly control 19.9%, the limit dictated by the law passed last year to force the Chinese company to divest or face a total ban in the U.S.

    Trump tried to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020 through an executive order, but that was stymied by the courts and ultimately dropped early in Joe Biden’s first term. But a bipartisan group of lawmakers revived the effort to ban TikTok on national security grounds in 2023, and that law was passed in 2024 and signed into law by Biden.

    President Trump pulled a complete 180 in March 2024 during the lead-up to the presidential election, insisting that he no longer wanted TikTok to be banned. And Trump has now delayed enforcing the law five times since he came into office in January. His repeated delays are almost certainly unlawful according to most experts, but Congress hasn’t acted.

    One area where Congress may act, according to the Washington Post, is by questioning whether the proposed deal actually follows the letter of the law. ByteDance investors will still hold a significant stake in the company, and ByteDance will apparently keep control of the TikTok algorithm in some way, though there are still questions about how all of that may shake out.

    A reporter asked Trump in the Oval Office whether he wanted to see the new TikTok algorithm suggest more MAGA-related content.

    “If I could, I’d make it 100% MAGA-related,” Trump said to laughter from his underlings. “It’s actually a good question, but I would… If I could make it 100% MAGA, I would. But it’s not going to work out that way, unfortunately.”

    But Trump then suggested other non-MAGA-aligned groups would still be allowed to exist on TikTok. “No, everyone’s going to be treated fairly. Every group, every philosophy, every policy will be treated very fairly,” said Trump.

    Trump may insist that everyone will get a fair shake on the new TikTok, but about 30 minutes later, in the same Oval Office presentation, Trump signed a presidential memo targeting left-wing and anti-fascist groups for prosecution.

    “These are anarchists and agitators, professional anarchists and agitators, and they get hired by wealthy people, some of whom I know, I guess… probably know,” Trump said. “You wouldn’t know at dinner with them. Everything’s nice, and then you find out that they funded millions of dollars to these lunatics.”

    FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and senior advisor Stephen Miller were all on hand to make threats against left-wing groups, claiming that they’re “domestic terrorists.”

    President Trump also claimed last week that TV stations that criticize him should get their broadcast licenses taken away.

    CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show under pressure, and ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel last week before reinstating him on Tuesday. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr made mob-like threats against ABC, and it remains to be seen how many more critics the Trump regime can successfully silence. Trump has previously tweeted that Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers are “next.”

    The president doesn’t like even the mildest forms of criticism, and the U.S. government has no problem demanding that media platforms censor people who oppose Trump. So it will be interesting to see what happens to TikTok’s algorithm after any deal is completed. It’s hard to imagine a world where Trump allows anti-Trump content to thrive on social media.

    But first, the TikTok deal has to be finalized. And despite Trump’s repeated insistence that everything is done, it seems like there are quite a few more hurdles before this one crosses the finish line.

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    Matt Novak

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  • Commentary: Please, Jimmy, don’t back down. Making fun of Trump is your patriotic duty

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    So Jimmy Kimmel is coming back, fast enough that there are still folks out there who didn’t know he was gone.

    Hallelujah? Praise be to ABC? Free speech triumphs?

    It all depends on Tuesday night, when we see if Kimmel returns undaunted, or if he has been subdued. Of all the consequential, crazy, frightening events that have taken place in recent days, Kimmel’s return should be a moment we all watch — a real-time, late-night look at how successful our president is at forcing us to censor ourselves through fear.

    Please, Jimmy, don’t back down.

    If Kimmel tempers his comedy now, pulls his punches on making fun of power, he sends the message that we should all be afraid, that we should all bend. Maybe he didn’t sign up for this, but here he is — a person in a position of influence being forced to make a risky choice between safety and country.

    That sounds terribly dramatic, I know, but self-censorship is the heart of authoritarianism. When people of power are too scared to even crack a joke, what does that mean for the average person?

    If Kimmel, with his celebrity, clout and wealth, cannot stand up to this president, what chance do the rest of us have?

    Patriotism used to be a simple thing. A bit of apple pie, a flag on the Fourth of July, maybe even a twinge of pride when the national anthem plays and all the words pop into your mind even though you can’t find your car keys or remember what day it is.

    It’s just something there, running in the background — an unspoken acknowledgment that being American is a pretty terrific thing to be.

    Now, of course, patriotism is the most loaded of words. It’s been masticated and barfed out by the MAGA movement into a specific gruel — a white, Western-centric dogma that demands a narrow and angry Christianity dominate civic life.

    There have been a deluge of examples of this subversion in recent days. The Pentagon is threatening to punish journalists who report information it doesn’t explicitly provide. The president used social media to demand U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi go after his perceived enemies.

    The one that put a knot in my stomach was the speech by Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar, speaking, without humor, at the memorial for Charlie Kirk.

    “We are the storm,” Miller said, hinting back at a QAnon conspiracy theory about a violent reordering of society.

    That’s disturbing, but actually mild compared with what he said next, a now-familiar Christian nationalist rant.

    “Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Miller said. “Our ancestors built the cities they produced, the art and architecture they built. The industry.”

    Who’s going to tell him about Sally Hemings? But he continued with an attack on the “yous” who don’t agree with this worldview, the “yous,” like Kimmel, one presumes (though Kimmel’s name did not come up) who oppose this cruel version of America.

    “You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred, you are nothing,” Miller said. “You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.”

    Humor, of course, ain’t nothing, which is why this administration can’t stand it.

    Humor builds camaraderie. It produces dopamine and serotonin, the glue of human bonding. It drains away fear, and creates hope.

    Which is why autocrats always go after comedians pretty early on. It’s not thin skin, though Trump seems to have that. It’s effective management of dissent.

    Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels knew it. In 1939, after his party had set up a Chamber of Culture that required all performers to adhere to certain rules, he banned five German comedians — Werner Finck, Peter Sachse, Helmuth Buth, Wilhelm Meissner and Manfred Dlugi — for making political jokes that didn’t support the regime. He basically ended their careers for daring satire against Nazi leaders, claiming people didn’t find it funny.

    “(I)n their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades,” the New York Times reported the German government claiming at the time.

    Sounds familiar.

    Kimmel, of course, is not the only comedian speaking out. Jon Stewart has hit back on “The Daily Show,” pretending to be scared into submission, perhaps a hat tip to Finck, who famously joked, “I am not saying anything. And even that I am not saying.”

    Stephen Colbert roasted Disney with a very funny parody video. Political cartoonists are having a field day.

    And there are plenty of others pushing back. Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken to all-caps rebuttals. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, whom Trump called “nothing,” is also vocal in his opposition, especially of National Guard troops in Chicago.

    The collective power of the powerful is no joke. It means something.

    But all the sober talk in the world can’t rival one spot-on dig when it comes to kicking the clay feet of would-be dictators. Mark Twain said it best: Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. Which is what makes Kimmel so relevant in this moment.

    Can he come back with a laugh — proving we have nothing to fear but fear itself — or are we seriously in trouble?

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    Anita Chabria

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