All Gas. No Brakes. Trump Quakes.

It’s dark out there, literally and politically. But there is hope, too.

As we noted last week, the first year of the Trump tariff economy has mostly been hell on small businesses, while bigger players have found ways to adapt in the short term. But as Politico notes, even the big guys can only keep that going so long:

Retail giants have proven more adept than expected at cushioning the blow of President Donald Trump’s steep tariff hikes over the spring and summer, keeping prices for consumer goods from surging this year by as much as many economists anticipated. But business executives and corporate analysts are warning they can’t do that forever.

“In the first half of next year, we are concerned that consumers are going to start to see the price increases become a little more broad based, and there may not be all the [holiday sales] promotion to help clear through some of that,” Joseph Feldman, a senior managing director at Telsey Advisory Group, who focuses on the retail sector, said in an interview. “So that could be a little bit of a sticker shock for some people.”

Happy Monday.

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(Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images.)

The Next Two Weeks

by William Kristol

As we approach the darkest day of the year in a couple of weeks, it’s natural to take stock of the political darkness around us as well.

Yes, there are plenty of dark deeds to notice. In area after area, the Trump administration continues to do extraordinary damage to this country.

But it’s also noteworthy that in recent months the forces of darkness have suffered setbacks.

On September 30, we entered a government shutdown. Democrats took a political risk in going down that path. But it’s pretty clear that they came out of that confrontation politically ahead. In particular, the issue of rising health care premiums was moved front and center.

Meanwhile, on October 18—No Kings Day—millions of Americans demonstrated peacefully and patriotically, putting the lie to Republican rhetoric about “hate America” and “‘pro-terrorist” gatherings. And on November 4, Republicans had a miserable off-year election day.

Then, two weeks later, on November 18, Congress voted to require the release of the Epstein files. And a little over a week after that, the coverup of the first Caribbean boat strike started to unravel. The unraveling has proceeded apace ever since.

The task now is straightforward: It’s to maintain momentum. It’s to keep the pressure on. It’s to make the next couple weeks as bad for the Trump administration and the Republican party as the past couple months have been.

This Thursday, as a result of the deal that ended the government shutdown, the Senate is set to vote on a Democratic proposal to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies for three years. The plan will almost assuredly fail due to Republican opposition. This should allow Democrats to spend all this week highlighting the health care issue in a favorable way.

And this in turn will lay the groundwork for a critique of Trump’s economic policies next week, when lots of data will be released and there’ll be a Federal Reserve Board meeting as well. It’s not just health care prices that are going up, after all! There’ll be a chance to bring home to voters that a year of Trump economic policies and Republican governance has led to both rising prices and a slowing economy.

Meanwhile, this week, after some members of Congress saw the complete video of the September 2 boat strike, Democrats can continue to make the case that all the footage, as well as other documentation, should be released to all of Congress and the American public. What response to this reasonable demand does the administration have? It was the administration, after all, that originally put out the first part of the video. The president recently said he’d be fine with the entirety of it being released. Let’s see the whole thing.

Along with that, Democrats can continue to explain that the entire campaign in the Caribbean is illegal and unauthorized. And they can warn that foolish and chest-thumping Trump administration policies could well be leading us into a wider and totally unnecessary war.

And then at the end of next week, on December 19, the Epstein files are due to be released. If the administration does release them, Democrats can highlight the Trump administration’s attempt for a whole year to cover them up until forced to give in. If the administration tries to continue the coverup, they’ll be even easier to attack. In any case, lots of Epstein news just before Christmas can’t be good for Trump.

So my plea to Democrats and to the entire opposition for the next two weeks is: Go to a few holiday parties (if that’s your thing). Make plans to enjoy the holidays and take a (short!) break from the political madness.

But not yet! For the next two weeks, press your advantage. Full speed ahead. It’s not yet time to indulge thoughts of peace and good will to all men (if that’s your thing). For the next two weeks, the kind of Christmas spirit we need is Washington crossing the Delaware and winning a victory for the cause of freedom.

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‘Double-Tap’ Doublespeak

by Andrew Egger

The “double-tap” boat strike scandal seems to get more complicated by the hour. Not because the facts of what took place that September day are complicated, but because it’s getting difficult to keep track of all the lies, distortions, and whiplash-inducing story revisions the Pentagon and its Republican allies have floated the last few weeks.

When the Washington Post first reported the “double-tap” story over Thanksgiving, the Pentagon’s first impulse was to issue an indignant, maximalist denial. “This entire narrative is completely false,” spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. Hegseth called the report “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory.”

When the New York Times published a follow-up report confirming much of the report while calling one of its details into question—specifically, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had issued a verbal order prior to the first strike to kill everybody aboard the vessel—the Pentagon seized it like a life preserver. “It is frankly disgusting that the Washington Post would publish something that is so insanely false,” Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson told reporters¹ last week. “Thankfully, the New York Times stepped in and corrected the record and let the American people know that what they were publishing was absolutely fake news.”

Hegseth was unequivocal in his denial that he had specifically authorized the “double-tap” strike, saying the decision to kill the shipwrecked survivors had been Adm. Frank Bradley’s alone. (Hegseth insisted last week that Bradley “made the right call.”) And Donald Trump said he believed Hegseth.

But according to reporting from NBC News Saturday, Bradley told lawmakers in closed-door briefings last week that his orders as he understood them from Hegseth were to kill everybody aboard—because all 11 people on the boat were on an internal list of military targets previously compiled by the Pentagon.

Despite all this, the White House’s congressional allies, some of whom viewed footage of the strike last week, have been perfectly willing to give their support to this ridiculous spin. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has made it his mission to attack the story from another angle. He’s disputed the premise that the two survivors sitting dazedly on the inverted hull of their half-sunk vessel counted as “shipwrecked” at all.

“It looked at one point like they were trying to flip the boat back over, presumably to rescue its cargo and continue their mission,” Cotton said yesterday on Meet the Press. “Maybe they were signaling to other airplanes or drug cartel boats. . . It doesn’t really matter what they were trying to do. What matters is they were not in a shipwrecked state.”

It is, of course, no shocking new development that people in power lie to cover their own asses. But I think it’s fair to say at moments like this that we’re seeing a new form of lying in the Trump White House and among its allies.

The old kind of Washington lie was a lie geared toward the belief that people wanted and valued the truth. It was a lie that in many ways respected the power of the truth, trying to stick as close to it as possible. This sort of lie could often be seen in the non-denial denial, or in the classic phrase “I do not recall.” It existed in a world where a person (or the office he or she belonged to) could benefit from telling lies, but would also suffer should they be broadly perceived as having lost their “credibility.”

Things are different now. The White House issues its lies at maximum volume, scattershot and erratic, not bothering to distinguish truth from falsehood. They change their story at will, dropping their prior story the second it no longer seems useful and moving on to whatever feels useful in the new moment. Wash, rinse, repeat. This strategy would be toxic to their “credibility”—if it were obvious that “credibility,” as a useful political concept, still existed. The White House seems to be betting it no longer does. There’s no truth or lies. There’s just narratives, crashing into each other at high speeds, and the only way to win is to have yours hit harder.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump’s National Security Strategy: Atlas Shrugs… Hopefully the administration’s second National Security Strategy document won’t have much to do with the its actions, writes ERIC EDELMAN.

• When Power Stops Caring About the Law… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN discuss the Venezuelan drug-boat strike, the Signalgate IG report, and the rush of Trump cronies courting Moscow.

• This Is What It Looks Like When RFK Jr. Wins… His handpicked “experts” just voted to roll back hepatitis B vaccine guidelines—and reverse a historic public health victory, reports JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.

• From Congress to the Bookshop at the Corner… On How to Fix It, JOHN AVLON talks with former REP. STEVE ISRAEL about his new historical thriller The Einstein Conspiracy, Israel’s life as a small bookstore owner, the politics of Long Island, rising antisemitism, and the reforms he thinks could fix American democracy.

• Trump Weighs Moving on From Noem… The DHS secretary has overseen the president’s most controversial domestic initiative. But her future is increasingly in doubt, reports ADRIAN CARASQUILLO in Huddled Masses.

• (Focus) Group Therapy… On this week’s Focus Group podcast, ASTEAD HERNDON joins SARAH LONGWELL to explore why swing voters are fed up with both parties and what the Maine Senate primary reveals about Democratic priorities.

• Caribbean Boat Strikes and the Use (and Misuse) of Special Forces… Our nation’s silent professionals deserve clear chains of command and a real chance at strategic success, writes MARK HERTLING.

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Quick Hits

UNITARY EXECUTIVE: The White House has spent this year claiming unprecedented control over the ability to unilaterally fire government officials. The Supreme Court is now poised to decide how far to let them get away with it. Today, the court will hear a challenge to Trump’s March attempt to fire Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter.

Current law and existing Supreme Court precedent only permits commissioners like Slaughter to be fired for cause: specifically, “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Such for-cause protections have for decades given certain government employees a degree of insulation from political interference, and have helped give rise to the structure of semi-independent agencies like the FTC and the Federal Reserve. But some conservative legal scholars have long viewed these arrangements as incompatible with the Constitution, which they argue vests the federal executive power solely in the president. It also has offended Trump, who never met a power he didn’t believe he was entitled to.

The odd and despiriting thing is that, even as the Supreme Court gears up to rule on this particular matter of federal-employee protection, we’re already living in a de facto world where the White House has largely gotten away with behaving as though civil service protections don’t exist. As Politico’s Josh Gerstein writes:

The Trump administration’s firing spree has targeted thousands of probationary federal employees as well as longtime intelligence community and Justice Department officials, senior FBI agents, immigration judges and individual federal prosecutors, including Maurene Comey, a daughter of former FBI Director James Comey.

Many have been given termination paperwork containing the brief phrase: “Art. II Constitution.” The words are shorthand for a claim that Trump has authority to fire anyone working in the executive branch, not just managers or policymakers. Critics say the stance amounts to a power grab unseen in the U.S. since the federal civil service was created in 1883.

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PARDONER’S REMORSE: Last week, we wrote about Donald Trump’s remarkable pardon of Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who was facing federal bribery and money-laundering charges. Fresh off the pardon, Cuellar promptly filed to run for reelection . . . as a Democrat—a fact that appears to have caught Trump totally by surprise. In a 388-word Truth Social post yesterday, the president waxed lyrical about his own graciousness in pardoning Cuellar (“God was very happy with me that day!”) and expressed his indignation that Cuellar would continue “to work with the same Radical Left Scum that just weeks before wanted him and his wife to spend the rest of their lives in Prison - And probably still do!”

“Such a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry’s daughters, will not like,” the president fumed. “Oh’ well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!”

As is so often the case with Trump’s from-the-heart rhetoric, there’s a lot to unpack here. There’s the bizarre collapse of his assumption that Cuellar would abandon the Democratic party just because Biden’s DOJ had charged him and Trump had pardoned him. There’s the preciousness of Trump’s assumption that Cuellar’s daughters—who wrote a very flattering letter to Trump trying to talk him into a pardon—would view Cuellar’s act as a betrayal. And there’s that strange “next time, no more Mr. Nice guy.” It appears Trump is warning Cuellar that if he makes the slightest of missteps, the current DOJ will come knocking. And there will be no more pardons this time.

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Cheap Shots

1. Well, “reporters.”