When MAGA Comes to Christmas Dinner
A glimpse of what Trump’s movement does to its supporters.
Donald Trump has recently taken to saying that we have the “hottest” country in the world. But the markets say otherwise. “US stocks eclipsed by rest of world in 2025 as investors diversify,” reports the Financial Times this morning. “Chinese AI advances and the effects of Donald Trump’s trade war have boosted markets outside the US.” The article quotes the chief executive of Jupiter Asset Management, Matthew Beesley, describing his investment strategy: “anything but America.” Happy Monday.
My Grandma and the Hot Stove
by Andrew Egger
This year, I went back to my home in the Midwest for Christmas, visiting my parents and friends in St. Louis and both sides of my extended family in Iowa. My family and childhood community are quite conservative and full of Trump voters. But I’ve never really understood the Sturm und Drang this seems to cause so many families—I’ve talked to the people I grew up around plenty about my work and my views, and it’s never been a bad or mean-spirited conversation.
This year’s conversations weren’t any worse in that department, but they were definitely different. For the first time, I was struck by just how many ways all the current unpleasantness is actively changing their lives for the worse.
It started when I noticed a Post-It note on my grandparents’ fridge. “I donated $10 to Trump to get $2000 tariff check,” it read. “At the end it said I am charged to give $10 monthly. I did not!”
When I asked my grandma about it, she showed me her phone. Her texts, it turns out, are absolutely clogged with the scuzziest GOP fundraising solicitations imaginable. “Before I sign your name on your Tariff Check, is Patricia spelled right?” “Patricia, it’s Trump & I’m heartbroken. I don’t have verification to claim your MAGA Golden Eagle Award.” “Can’t believe you said NO to Trump’s $5k Dividend Check. Are you sure that’s your answer?”
Not all these texts are from the actual Trump campaign, of course. These sorts of tactics have been adopted by a whole host of candidates and PACs in the MAGAsphere. (The group she was snookered into donating to happened to be a leadership PAC for Texas Rep. Jake Ellzey.)
When she asked me if she’d been scammed, my first instinct was to say “no”—this wasn’t some fake group pretending to be a GOP politician’s PAC, after all, but the real thing. But in a simpler, truer sense, it was a scam from top to bottom. There are no tariff checks to claim, and if there were, you wouldn’t have to give money to Rep. Ellzey or anybody else to get them.
The whole thing was infuriating, and there was nothing to be done about it. Her phone number is out there, circulating among various GOP fundraising lists. No matter how many times she tries to unsubscribe, there’s always another text, another “check,” another disappointed message from “Trump.”
Later, an uncle asked me what I knew about a guy named Nick Fuentes. He’d learned that a younger relative was a fan of the young neo-Nazi podcaster. And that this relative had begun to consider himself a white nationalist, too. And that he was full of alarming talk about how white people have to learn to see themselves as victims of the system. My uncle was shocked and unnerved by all this and seemed to be asking me how to get through to a person who had fallen so far into that particular rabbit hole. We talked for a while about it, but I hardly knew what to say.
That’s an underappreciated feature of our political age: It’s not just that things are bad, it’s that they’re relentlessly so. You can’t turn it off. You can’t escape it. You can’t distinguish between real and fake, good and bad, normal and abnormal. The stuff keeps piling up. When I mentioned the Fuentes conversation to one of my sisters, who currently attends a conservative Christian college, she said she’d seen an unnerving uptick in casual antisemitism among her own peers.
Maybe none of this should have surprised me. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years writing about the damage done by Donald Trump, his politics, and his strange cultural movement not only to the country in general but to the people who support him in particular. It’s clearer than ever to me that that damage is extensive and pervasive and will outlast him by years. But I can’t abide by the schadenfreude-laden viewpoint that anyone who ever pulled a lever for Trump deserves whatever’s coming to them as a result. The fact is that this political moment is immiserating good people. I don’t blame them for that. I blame him.
A Year of U.S. Failure in Ukraine
by Cathy Young
Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Mar-a-Lago on Sunday to discuss a Russia–Ukraine peace deal—preceded, like his last visit to the White House, by a phone chat between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—could have gone worse. At least Trump didn’t berate him or tell him he has “no cards,” as he did at the infamous White House sit-down in February. But the Trump/Zelensky press conference definitely had some echoes of the February fiasco.
We’re back to jabs at Joe Biden, who “gave $350 billion away” to Ukraine. We’re back to Putin, man of peace: Trump asserted with a straight face that the Kremlin dictator “was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding.” We’re back to that special Trump–Putin fellowship as victims of “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” ( “a terrible, made-up, fictional thing by crooked Hillary and by Adam Shifty Schiff”). We’re back to “he told me very strongly, I believe him.” Zelensky, who has learned his lessons and didn’t skimp on profuse thanks this time, must have the patience of a saint.
As always, this praise for peace-loving Putin is totally disconnected from reality. Nothing says generosity like ballistic missiles and drones raining down on Kyiv Saturday night, killing at least one person and injuring 27. (Needless to say, Trump made no mention of that bombing.) Putin doesn’t even talk the talk: He was cosplaying generalissimo before the cameras yet again, stressing that Russia doesn’t need a peace agreement because it’s poised to capture all of the Donbas by military means. (It’s not.) Three days earlier, Putin decorated his chief war propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, at a Kremlin ceremony and listened approvingly as Solovyov spewed pure fascism about war as Russia’s new source of meaning and manliness. This is not a regime preparing for peace.
It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on. Trump, having promised to end this war in 24 hours, is desperate for a deal. Putin is convinced he is winning, so is uninterested in making a deal, but is interested in using negotiations to weaken Ukraine’s position.
For all the talk of progress from the Ukrainians and Trump, peace is very unlikely anytime soon. Both Trump and Zelensky say there’s now 95 percent agreement on the terms of the deal between the United States and Ukraine. But even if those last 5 percent can be reconciled, Russia will not agree to substantive security guarantees for Ukraine unless it has no other choice.
Trump may have intended for Zelensky’s Mar-a-Lago visit to be a year-end demonstration of success in his peacemaking effort. Instead, fittingly, it caps a year of failure and embarrassment.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Is DOJ Playing Games With the Epstein Investigation? On The Bulwark on Sunday, BILL KRISTOL sits down with RYAN GOODMAN to discuss new and upcoming Epstein document releases.
Don’t Expect Trump to Give Up on Deploying Troops Into American Cities... despite the Supreme Court’s refusal to greenlight his use of the National Guard in Illinois, writes KIM WEHLE.
The Ten (Or So) Best Movies of 2025... SONNY BUNCH gives readers a recap of the year that was in cinema.
America on Tape... A brutal (and hopeful) year, with SARAH LONGWELL sharing the best of the Focus Group podcast.
Why Did Trump Fire the Nation’s Historian? On How to Fix It, COLLEEN SHOGAN joins JOHN AVLON to discuss her unprecedented firing, why that decision matters, how history has become a political weapon, and what it says about power, accountability, and democracy at a moment when America is heading toward its 250th anniversary.
The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell... Trump misuses the artist’s work—like other cultural icons—to promote Gestapo tactics and nativist ideas, writes CATHERINE RAMPELL in Receipts.
The Biggest Dem Success Story Has Nothing to Do With D.C... The governors are leading the fight against Trump—and making the party’s best prospects for 2028, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
It Was a Bad Year for the American Military... No one should be surprised, observes MARK HERTLING.
Quick Hits
THE BOMBER SPEAKS: The identity of the person who planted a pair of pipe bombs in D.C. on the evening of January 5, 2021, was, until recently, one of the biggest remaining mysteries about the riot at the Capitol the following day, appearing and reappearing in numerous conspiracy theories about January 6th. But the alleged culprit, Brian Cole Jr. of Virginia, was at last arrested earlier this month, and over the weekend the Justice Department filed court papers detailing his extensive confession. The New York Times has more:
In his interview with federal agents, Mr. Cole insisted that he had never been “an openly political person,” the court papers released on Sunday said. But he also told investigators that as he began to follow the 2020 presidential race, he started to feel that if “something as important as voting in the federal election is being tampered with,” then “someone needs to speak up.” Mr. Trump repeatedly claimed without evidence that there was fraud in the results.
The papers said that Mr. Cole had told the F.B.I. that “the people up top,” including “people on both sides,” should not ignore the grievances of ordinary citizens or call them “conspiracy theorists,” “bad people,” “Nazis” or “fascists.”
On a motive behind his actions, he said “something just snapped” after “watching everything, just everything getting worse,” according to the documents. He added that he wanted to do something “to the parties” because “they were in charge.”
IT’S MILLER’S TIME: It’s been a Stephen Miller pet project for months: redirecting federal immigration enforcement away from migrants with criminal records or pending charges toward the communities where illegal immigrants live, the better to round them up indiscriminately. A new Washington Post investigation has details on how extensively that change has gone into effect:
The result has been a huge surge of such at-large arrests, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement tallying about 17,500 in September and on pace to exceed that in October. (The data The Post examined had been updated through the middle of that month.) That was far more than any other month included in the data, which dated back to October 2011.
Before this year, the highest number of at-large arrests came in January 2023, when the Biden administration made more than 11,500. ICE is making more than four times as many at-large arrests per week as it did in President Donald Trump’s first term, the analysis found.
DO NOT CONGRATULATE: “I was so naïve.” That’s how retiring Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene described her encounter with Trumpian politics to the New York Times. This whole year in politics—this whole decade—has been so insane that we should by now probably be immune to surprise. But it really is just nuts that Greene—of all people!—has so thoroughly burned her bridge with Trump that she’s now sitting for lengthy interviews with the hated lamestream media to go over every detail of her psychological process. “Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong,” she said. “You just keep pummeling your enemies, no matter what. And as a Christian, I don’t believe in doing that.”
The whole interview is worth reading for gems like this: “Greene [said] it began to dawn on her that when it came to the president, loyalty is ‘a one-way street—and it ends like that whenever it suits him.’ Being disabused of the idea that subservience would be rewarded appeared to have a liberating effect on her.”
Couldn’t have said it better ourselves! Once more, we are compelled to wonder: Can MTG survive our strange new respect?
Cheap Shots
I really appreciate Andrew's candid account of his own family. And I don't blame him for not laying the blame on his MAGA family members...after all, they're family.
But if we're being intellectually honest, you can't blame Trump while excusing his voters. Trump didn't become President (twice) in a vacuum. People voted for him. And to the extent that they were manipulated, on some level, they allowed the manipulation to happen. They're not innocent victims. They have free will, and they used it.
I was struck by Andrew’s piece. Not just the anecdotes about his relatives, but also the part where he mentions that he doesn’t understand the Strum and Drang this causes in other families. My friend, you’re a heterosexual white male. Of course it isn’t going to cause a lot of angst for you. This isn’t about identity politics, it’s the simple fact that the vast majority of Trump’s culture war battles will not affect you in a meaningful way. The reason why it causes strife in so many other families is that victims of such policies have to deal with advocates of the administration boasting in their faces.