The Scale And Velocity Of Trump’s Accomplishments January 22, 2026January 22, 2026 14 Ways The Trump Administration is Trying to Kill Us It’s quite a list. American democracy on the brink a year after Trump’s inauguration The scale and velocity of what he has been able to accomplish in just a year have stunned even longtime observers of authoritarian regimes. Join today’s Indivisible call — 3pm EST. Support the opposition party. OPRT After the close yesterday, Oportun Announced A CEO Succession Plan, meaning that the CEO whom activist shareholders have been trying to oust is finally on his way out. If OPRT could really be earning $3 a share in two or three years as the activists imagine, then, at yesterday’s $4.84 close, it’s incredibly cheap. The fear, I guess, is that Trump will deport a significant proportion of their low-income Latino customer base. So: only with money you can truly afford to lose.
Alone In The World January 21, 2026 In one year, for all our considerable flaws and missteps, we’ve gone from being the world’s good guy . . . its beacon of hope and reliable ally . . . to being its blundering, boorish bully. No one likes a bully. All root for bullies to fall. Who are our allies, asked Rachel Maddow Monday night — Russia? North Korea? Putin is winning. It is to cry. ANNE APPLEBAUM CRIES OUT TO REPUBLICANS Trump’s Letter to Norway Should Be the Last Straw. Will Republicans in Congress ever step in? . . . The people around Trump could find ways to stop him, as some did in his first term, but they seem too corrupt or too power-hungry to try. That leaves Republicans in Congress as the last barrier. They owe it to the American people, and to the world, to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests. He is at risk of alienating friends in not only Europe but also India, whose leader he also snubbed for failing to nominate him for a Nobel Prize, as well as South Korea, Japan, Australia. Years of careful diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, are now at risk because senators and representatives who know better have refused to use the powers they have to block him. Now is the time. Join Indivisible! Support the opposition party! HYMC Shares we bought for $2.30 a couple of years ago and $3.20 in June changed hands at $45 in after-hours trading last night. Don’t hate me for suggesting you sell some and write calls against some more on the way up. I may take a loss on some of those calls and replace them with further out-of-the-money calls. PIRATE SHIP FedEx charged me $83.93 for second-day delivery of a 3-pound envelope. PirateShip.com would have charged $16.43. They route a zillion packages via UPS and USPS (yours among them) and pass most of their huge-customer-discount on to you. The reviews are 75% outstanding, though definitely not all. BREE FRAM FOR CONGRESS Ousted under Trump’s trans military ban, retired Space Force Col. Bree Fram launches bid for Congress. I’m proud to know her. And I love that Four-star General Stanley McChrystal (“perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I ever met” — former Defense Secretary Robert Gates) recently honored Bree and four others of the thousands Trump fired on New Year’s Eve.
Let’s Hear It For Independents! January 20, 2026January 20, 2026 But first . . . TWO ITEMS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED: > Trump Wins Wimbled0n Women’s Singles Championship > NATO Sprays Antipsychotic Medication in Airspace Over White House A GREENLANDER SPEAKS OUT An eloquent perspective even if you watch only the first couple of minutes. HOME INVASION There are so many clips like this one (90 seconds). Is this really the America most of us want? Does she strike you as the “worst of the worst”? When will the Republicans in Congress find the courage to stop the madness? ARCTIC INVASION Well, not the literal Arctic — Minneapolis. Joyce Vance Sunday: Tonight, about 1,500 active-duty soldiers, two infantry battalions of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, are under prepare-to-deploy orders for possible action in Minnesota. . . . . It bears repeating that the American military isn’t meant to be used for domestic law enforcement against American citizens, barring extraordinary circumstances that simply aren’t present here. The 11th Airborne, nicknamed the “Arctic Angels,” specializes in operating in arctic conditions. That’s convenient for Minnesota, or perhaps for Maine, where there are persistent rumors Trump plans to surge ICE this week, with an eye to the state’s Somali immigrant community. . . . Trump seems to be on course to become the first President to direct the use of U.S. military forces against American citizens during peacetime. And he’s doing it in a situation where the “unrest” is mostly peaceful protests resulting from Trump’s efforts to inflame the city. . . . . . . According to their website, the 11th Airborne Division . . . are ready to “deploy, fight and win decisively against any adversary.” Presumably, that includes the protestor in a giraffe costume ICE agents forced to the ground last week or the one dressed like a pickle. If the stakes weren’t so high, the whole thing would be ridiculous. And now . . . I take this as good news. It suggests there’s a huge and growing middle, neither far left nor far right, skeptical of — if not downright disgusted with — both parties . . . dismayed by the polarization and disfunction . . . looking to elect common sense moderates who can work together to do sensible things. But it’s hard for moderates to win because in most state primaries it’s mainly the hardest-core lefties and righties who take the time and trouble to vote. The solution is well known! > We need ranked-choice voting, especially for primaries. And open primaries. With these changes, candidates would have to appeal to the 80% who are not hard right or hard left. And we have to make mail-in voting super easy so it’s not just the fringes that vote. While we work to make that happen, I have to note that the extremism and nuttiness is not evenly distributed. Yes, there are a handful of Democrats who believe “men can get pregnant” or that we should “defund the police.” But I don’t think a single Democratic officeholder — and surely not a party leader — has ever espoused those views. Anywhere. Ever. By contrast, the leadership of the Republican Party, with the near unanimous acquiescence or approval of every elected Republican, calls for opponents to be jailed and executed; brands Renee Good a domestic terrorist without apology for shooting her in the face; publicly threatens to conquer a friendly neighbor; ignores the Constitution; protects pedophiles; labels opponents “vermin,” “garbage,” and “scum”; destroys without Congressional approval the global goodwill (“soft power”) both parties spent 80 years building; pardons the most violent January 6 felons; pardons the Honduran cocaine king; and — among so much else! — commits and condones unprecedented corruption. In Ken Martin’s 14 years as state party chair, Democrats flipped the Minnesota governorship from red to blue and never lost a single statewide race. In 14 years! Now, as DNC chair, he aims to repeat a good measure of that success nationwide. Click here to help.
Straight Out Of Two Corinthians January 18, 2026January 18, 2026 FAREED ZAKARIA The World Is Adjusting To An Unreliable United States. Putin is winning. FASCISM? Consider these parallels (75 seconds). The Proud Boys are winning. BAD NEWS FOR THE ELDERLY . . . After decades of advocacy, the Biden administration in 2023 tackled the problem of perennial understaffing of long-term care facilities. . . . In July, as part of the Trump administration’s budget reconciliation bill, Congress prohibited Medicare from implementing the new staffing standards[and other] long-sought rules to improve care for the aged. Old folks are losing. It’s all part of making America great again: Round up construction workers needed to build badly needed new housing; round up health care workers needed to care for an aging population; round up immigrants needed to harvest our crops; keep taxes low on billionaires — it’s straight out of Two Corinthians. STOP PROTECTING PEDOPHILES! When will Trump release the Epstein files? BILL MAHER It’s from years ago, but never gets old (7 minutes).
Why Greenland Prefers Denmark January 17, 2026 Denmark has more billionaires per capita; Denmark ranks way ahead in ease of starting a business; and . . . wow. Two minutes worth watching (“unmute” top right corner). Former Republican Rick Wilson: I’ll stop calling ICE the Gestapo when ICE stops running the Nazi playbook against American citizens. Just like Indivisible, he calls on Senate Democrats to use their “shut-down” leverage to rein in ICE now. Call your senators and urge them to draw that line in the sand. Maureen Dowd: There’s a great scene in “Lawrence of Arabia” when Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence comes back from battle and meets with Gen. Edmund Allenby, his British superior in Cairo. The bookish Lawrence tells Allenby he executed an Arab ally with his pistol and, “There was something about it I didn’t like.” Allenby reassures him that his distaste is to be expected. “No, something else,” Lawrence explains. “I enjoyed it.” Trump and his Proud Boys are having fun! It’s exciting! Imperialism is ever so much easier than affordability. Niceties be damned: As the daughter of a cop, I am sympathetic to the split-second life-and-death decisions the police have to make. But Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot and shot and shot Renee Good as she was trying to drive away, tragically overreacted — then called her a “fucking bitch.” He could have stepped aside and caught up with her later, since he had her license plate. Worth reading in full. WEEK-END FUN Five very enjoyable, informative minutes. EPSTEIN! Q: Where are the files?! Why is Trump protecting pedophiles?! A: ?
Greenland Is Having None Of This January 16, 2026 Greg Palast thinks Trump is right in backing Delcy Rodriguez over Machado — albeit for the wrong reasons. Trump wants praise for (expensively) rebuilding what he demolished. He’s like an arsonist who wants praise for calling the fire department. Jon Stewart takes issue with the supreme leader’s alternate reality (4 minutes). Indivisible asks you to call your senators and representative: Indivisible and our coalition partners demand that Congress must write a DHS appropriations bill that puts serious restrictions on ICE, ends its dragnet raids, and doesn’t add a penny to its already bloated budget. Click here for the how-to. Senator Elissa Slotkin: Several weeks ago, I and five other Members of Congress with service and veteran backgrounds made a video directly quoting the Uniform Code of Military Justice about the military’s responsibility to reject illegal orders. In response, President Trump called for my arrest, trial and death by hanging. Last week, former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, asked to interview me. This is on top of the FBI asking for the same. Friends – I served three tours in Iraq as a CIA analyst alongside the U.S. military and went on to serve under presidents of both parties in the White House and Pentagon. I’ve studied political authoritarianism in other countries where you can’t criticize the guys in charge without getting a knock at the door in the middle of the night. It’s hard to believe the knock is now at my door. But I’m not going to go quietly into the night in this. I have decided to fight back — legally and politically. Unfortunately, that takes resources. So while everyone who knows me knows I wish I didn’t have to ask … that’s what I have to do. With that in mind, can you make a donation to help us raise the resources we’re going to need to stand against Trump and the threats coming our way from the Trump Administration? Thank you. Your support means so very much. Greenland is having none of this (2 minutes).
Greenland And ICE: Snips From Two Posts Worth Reading In Full January 15, 2026January 14, 2026 Rick Wilson: The War on Greenland. Why the Joint Chiefs Must Resign. To plan this invasion is to stain the integrity of the entire general officer corps. It turns the professional military into a logistics department for a madman’s real estate ambitions. It tells every young lieutenant and NCO that the “Law of Armed Conflict” is just something we put in PowerPoints to look civilized, but that at the end of the day, we’re a mafia nation, a lawless actor, the biggest bullies on the block. . . . . . . handing Putin and Xi exactly what they want. Worth reading in full and sharing. Thom Hartmann: How ICE moved from enforcing immigration law to deciding which people belong in America and which people do not. When Joe Rogan starts referring to the Trump regime as if they’re Nazis, you know ICE and the GOP have a problem. Yesterday, he said: “Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where’s your papers? Is that what we’ve come to?” Mr. Hartmann and I both felt a chill when Bush 43 launched the Department of Homeland Security. There was something about that word — homeland — that rang wrong. Unlike me, he had the prescience to write about it 20 years ago. And writes today: If America is a homeland, it’s only a homeland to the surviving Native Americans who Europeans haven’t entirely wiped out. It’s far past time to end this use of white ethnonationalist rhetoric, rename the Department of Homeland Security, and purge that organization — and its ICE offspring — of their white nationalist bigots. Why the masks? Throughout American history [until now], the only police agency known to conceal their identities were the Klansmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they were routinely deputized in the South to police segregation laws. Worth reading in full and sharing. Thanks to all of you who’ve dug deep to support the opposition. For those who haven’t, it’s not too late! But — and here’s the point many miss — neither is it too early! (See Tuesday’s Bridges and Buses.) We need your help today. File your 4th quarterly estimated tax today (if any money is due). Here are the forms and instructions. (You can skip this if you file your complete return by February 2.)
Hundreds of Thousands of Murderers Roaming The Streets Cutting The Urban Speed Limit To 10 Miles An Hour January 13, 2026 On last night’s CBS Evening News, Trump said “we have hundreds of thousands of murderers in our country who were let in by Sleepy Joe Biden and ICE is trying to get them out.” This is alarming. And untrue. Hundreds of mass shootings have been carried out by native born Americans. Not one that I could find was committed by an undocumented immigrant who arrived during the Biden presidency. The National Institute of Justice reports that undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely to commit murder than U.S. citizens. Undocumented immigrants account for (very roughly) 5% of the U.S. population. They are less than half as likely as the native born to be murderers. Thus, they account for (very roughly) 500 of those 20,000 murders. Perhaps half of which are committed against each other (if rough rules of thumb hold), so 250 against U.S. citizens. There are about 7,000 pedestrian deaths each year. > Should we outlaw vehicles? Cut the urban speed limit to 10 miles an hour? Or just do our sensible best to reduce this number without causing mass societal and economic disruption? There are nearly 50,000 deaths from firearms each year (versus just 1 or 2 in Japan and 25 or so in Australia). > Should we ban all firearms? Or just do our sensible best to ban assault weapons and cop-killer bullets, bump stocks and ghost guns; require gun owners (as we do drivers) to pass a safety test, get a license, and register their purchases — running “universal background checks” to prevent criminals and the mentally ill from so easily making those purchases in the first place. There may be 250 murders of us U.S. citizens by undocumented immigrants each year. > Should we spend tens of billions of dollars a year to deploy a poorly trained force of masked secret police to round up “hundreds of thousands” of undocumented immigrant murderers when you’re FAR more likely to be murdered by your spouse, a family member, or someone you know? Or should we just do our sensible best to give local law enforcement the resources they request to deal with this important, tragic, but blessedly small, extra burden? GUESS WHERE JEFFREY EPSTEIN ALLEGEDLY SAID TRUMP AND MELANIA FIRST HAD SEX I mean, who cares — right? We know he’s an adjudicated rapist and that he and Epstein were best friends. We know he has never been big into fidelity or monogamy and that he lied about the $130,000 he denied paying a porn star. So none of this is news. I pass it on only because MAGA has long demanded to see the Epstein files. Trump himself signed the law Congress overwhelmingly sent to his desk requiring their release by December 19. So where are they? HYMC I sold some January 2017 HYMC calls yesterday for $11.60 that give the buyer the right to “call HYMC shares away from me” at $50 each, up from the $3 or so I had paid. But I also bought back — for a loss — an equal number of the calls I had sold with a $35 strike price. The folks buying these calls think there’s a good chance HYMC will be a lot higher within a year, and my bet — in eating a modest loss to raise my upside from 35 to 50 — is that they’re right.
We Alone Can Fix It January 13, 2026January 12, 2026 NO NEED TO CLICK: THE HEADLINES SAY IT ALL Trump’s Smithsonian censorship agenda is escalating. E.P.A. to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution. ‘Incomprehensibly stupid:’ How U.S. cuts in vaccine recommendations will impact Canadians. DOJ launches criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Trump calls for $1.5 trillion military budget — a 50% increase, none of it aimed at aiding Ukraine. Trump is trying to change how the midterm elections are conducted. CAROLE CADWALLADR: Peter Thiel’s New Model Army This newsletter is going to cover three crucial subjects today: How Britain’s national security is hopelessly compromised. We’ve sold out our military to a key Trump ally in what I believe is a catastrophically naive and dangerous deal. (If you’re American, this affects you too.) The global war on truth. And why sticking to the facts is now a radical act. How we fight back. In which I post a whole smorgasbord of inspiring videos that I grabbed off social media that you didn’t know you needed. I’ve never started with a bulleted list before but then I can’t remember a NATO country threatening to invade a NATO country before either. I figured you might need 3) after reading 1) and 2). . . . [We Brits] are now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump fascist project. We’ve sold out everyone in America who’s trying to fight back against it. I’m not using the f-word lightly or facetiously. I’ve avoided it for a year. But what is so dangerous right now is the assault on truth, on facts, on the evidence of our own eyes. What is happening right now in America is fascism. And we, the UK, are now up to our necks in it too. Former-Republican strategist Rick Wilson: . . . We have squandered the astounding inheritance of ten generations of Americans before us, shattered the bond of faith and trust in a system of representative government unique in the history of the world, and replaced it with a grotesque mirror image of freedom, liberty, and self-government. What has replaced it is dark, sick, and broken. It is a government led by the most egregious criminal in American political history, a man with a dark soul, a twisted mind racked with mental disorders and pathologies, and a will to power that rivals the dictators and strongmen we once understood without a blink of doubt or question to be the antithesis of our values. He is the kind of man Americans once sent their son to fight and defeat. He is served by a party, a movement, and a media that view him as a nearly religious figure, a man of destiny willing to smite the people and cultures they hate. . . . BRIDGES VERSUS BUSES Imagine you have to get a whole lot of people across a river 40 weeks from now. You need to begin building a bridge long before you charter the buses. NOW is the time to support infrastructure (the bridges); next summer and fall is the time to support candidates (the buses). If everyone followed this strategy, declining all candidate appeals until next summer, it would be a problem. For better or worse (worse, actually), few do. All 50 state Democratic parties rely in some measure on an adequately funded DNC, as do the 8,000 or so Democrats who will be running for various offices November 3. > If you can, please dig deep to help fund the opposition party. > Join Indivisible. > Volunteer with your local Democratic party (just Google to find it). If it’s semi-moribund, inject your energy to revitalize it! Get friends to join you! We alone can fix it.
ICE, Measles, HYMC, Epstein, And More January 11, 2026 Fareed Zakaria: Trump is teaching the world to fear America. His as-always must-read piece concludes: [The] strategic capital built over decades is now being squandered. And in the long run, an America that behaves like an utterly self-interested predator on the world stage will not grow stronger; it will grow lonelier. Allies will hedge. Partners will search for options. Neutrals will inch away. And the balancing that history predicted all along may finally arrive — not because America became weak, but because it forgot the real source of its strength. Putin is winning. Jonathan Alter: How the Murder of Renee Good Changes the Stakes for Good No one can predict how the murder of Renee Good will change this country. But there’s an encouraging history of change the aftermath of certain violent and tragic events, and a poor track record for governments that shoot their own people in the streets. Even when this story is pushed out of the headlines by some new outrage, we may look back on it as the moment when Donald Trump lost his grip. Speaking of stories “pushed out of the headlines,” have the Epstein files that MAGA demanded been released? The two are loosely connected because the Administration is claiming ICE agents are arresting child rapists — Tom Homan just said it repeatedly on “Meet The Press” — and that’s one of their justifications for going into Home Depot parking lots targeting non-white people and asking for proof of citizenship. According to MAGA, it’s not just immigrants we should suspect of child rape. MAGA want to see the Epstein files! So does Congress! Even if it winds up hurting some of Trump’s friends. Carl: “The Republican view is that it’s okay to shoot and kill a woman disregarding orders AND using her car as a weapon to knock you down or kill you.” → The President says the agent was run over by her car and went to the hospital. Yet you’ve seen the videos. They show him on the side of the car shooting her in the face. Did he get run over, then jump up and shoot her? Or did he shoot her from the side of the car and then sprint in front of the car and get run over? As tragic as Renee Good’s death was, there are two things that are worse. First, that rather than do what any other administration would have done — lament the tragic miscalculation and pray for the family, pending further investigation — they just lied and lied and lied, calling this woman with her dog in the back seat and dolls brimming out of her glove compartment — a “terrorist.” Second, that so many good people, like Carl, actually buy the lies. THANK YOU, RFK, JR. Georgia toddler paralyzed by rare flu complication as CDC warns of rising cases. (If only she had gotten her kids vaccinated.) South Carolina measles outbreak grows by nearly 100, spreads to North Carolina and Ohio HYMC I’ve previously explained how it could make sense to sell “covered calls” against some of your shares. Friday, I sold for $8.60 the right to buy shares from me at $42 that were then selling for $27.50 (and that we bought two years ago for $2.30 and six months ago for $3.20) anytime until January 15 of next year. Got all that? Read it very slowly and it could make sense. Let’s say HYMC drops to zero. At least I get to keep that $8.60. Let’s say a year from now, when the calls expire, it’s still around $27. I have my shares that can no longer be called away from me; plus that lovely extra $8.60. Let’s say it’s $42. The calls expire worthless to the buyer, but I have shares worth $42 and got to keep the $8.60. Let’s say the stock zooms and my shares are called away for $42 each. I get $42 on top of the $8.60 — $50.60. Yes, I’ve lost whatever further zooming occurred; if the stock had hit $100, hindsight would be mocking me. But I’d still have the shares against which I have not yet written calls. Also, I can always buy the calls back if they haven’t been exercised. Let’s say the stock runs up to $40. If that happened tomorrow, the calls would jump a lot in price, so I would take a loss buying them back (though not a dollar-for-dollar-loss; the stock would have risen by $12.50 but the calls would likely have risen by somewhat less). But if it were not tomorrow but (say) Thanksgiving, the calls — worthless until the stock rises above 42, and with only a few weeks left to run — wouldn’t cost much at all. It could make sense to buy them back at that point and then sell some new calls, at a higher strike price, with another year or two to run. There are a million variations of this, and what you decide to do might depend in part on whether your shares are in a taxable account or an IRA. But you get the idea. IN CASE YOU MISSED THIS ONE I once asked Warren Buffett why he’s a Democrat. He didn’t come to it without some thought, after all — his dad was a deeply conservative Republican Congressman. But if you read John Rawls, Warren told me, how can you be anything else? There’s much to be said for traditional Republicans — Romney was certainly right about Russia! Nixon signed into law both the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Environmental Protection Agency, Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system and warned against the military industrial complex, George W. Bush launched the PEPFAR program that has saved an estimated 25 million lives. But Trump’s Republican party has veered wildly off course. Appending the term “socialist” to the term Democrat is not a slur. If anything, it helps to define Democrats as the party of Jesus Christ and anyone else — Gandhi? Maimonides? Muhammed? you? — who cared, or cares, about the welfare of all mankind, not just their own. In case you’re in a position to help fund the opposition, please click here.