The Republican rift: Pick a side, MAGA and MIGA cannot coexist
MAGA’s rise split the American right. The deeper question now is: which flag does the movement follow? America’s, or Israel’s?
Sarp Sinan Hacir
NOV 24, 2025
Photo Credit: The Cradle
“You can't be MAGA if you’re anti-Israel”
– Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
The US right is undergoing a rupture that is far more decisive than its culture wars or internecine policy disputes. At the core of this split are two incompatible visions: MAGA (Make America Great Again) versus MIGA (Make Israel Great Again).
It represents a fundamental clash over whose interests define the American right: the nation’s, or a foreign ally’s. Yet only one can define the future of the Republican movement.
If America comes first, then its policies, resources, and military must serve domestic priorities – not the ambitions of a foreign ally. If Israel comes first, then American sovereignty is secondary by definition.
The fracture has only sharpened after 7 October 2023 and is now reshaping the American right in real time.
The MAGA revolt against the establishment
For decades, Republican elites aligned their foreign and domestic agendas with neoconservative doctrine: endless wars, global policing, open markets, and a reflexive allegiance to Israel.
That consensus was shattered in 2016. Disaffected voters rallied to Donald Trump, who mocked figures like Jeb Bush, the last of a warmongering dynasty. Under the MAGA banner, the party’s base was recast into a new coalition: conservatives, evangelicals, religious Jews, anti-establishment activists, disillusioned independents, and even some anti-globalist voices from the left.
US President Donald Trump's populist slogan, “America First,” reflected a growing demand for national self-interest in place of international entanglements.
But this ran headfirst into the old guard’s loyalty to Israel. Could a country truly prioritize its own interests while committing unconditionally to a foreign state?
The Flood
When Israel launched its war on Gaza after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023, MAGA’s internal contradiction exploded.
The initial response followed familiar lines with conservative pundits and politicians closing ranks behind Tel Aviv. But as scenes of devastation in Gaza multiplied, many grassroots conservatives began to ask what exactly this alliance serves.
Washington was pouring more into Israel’s war effort than it had into Ukraine – with no debate, no returns, and no regard for American lives or interests. If “America First” meant anything, why was it absent here?
For decades, Republicans had repeated that Israel was “America’s greatest ally.” But Israel does not provide US jobs, technology, or security guarantees. It demands US military protection and drags Washington into regional conflicts it would otherwise avoid.
Initially, the backlash began quietly – online forums, podcast circles, and independent journalists. But it soon went mainstream.
Ben Shapiro, once the intellectual darling of the anti-woke right, found himself defending university campus crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests. This is from the man who once wrote a book titled ‘Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings,’ mocking the liberal left’s emotional politics. Now, under the pretext of protecting Jewish students, free speech was being suspended by Republicans.
For younger conservatives raised on MAGA, this looked like betrayal. If facts do not care about feelings, why were protests being silenced? If cancel culture was the enemy, why were actors, writers, and students being blacklisted for opposing genocide?
A movement under siege
The MAGA rebellion was not only about foreign policy. It was about taking on the entire architecture of US elite power – media, academia, finance, and foreign lobbies. And one lobby in particular became untouchable.
American conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson was ousted from Fox News after amplifying critics of Israel. Right-wing commentator Candace Owens was pushed out of Daily Wire after clashing with Shapiro. Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s early strategists, began warning of Israeli influence in conservative circles.
Nick Fuentes, who rose to prominence through campus debate circuits and became one of the more extreme voices of the MAGA generation, has turned into a lightning rod in the generational fight over Israel. When Carlson recently interviewed him, Shapiro spent an entire episode denouncing both men – accusing Carlson of normalizing antisemitism and warning that Republicans who “cower before the likes of neo-Nazis and their propagandizers ... deserve to lose.”
Yet Fuentes’s long-standing opposition to US military aid for Israel resonated with younger conservatives – particularly men – who were no longer persuaded by traditional justifications for America's unconditional support.
And then came Charlie Kirk– the founder of Turning Point USA. Kirk had built one of the most influential conservative youth movements in the country. He called himself a Zionist, and denied that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
But it was not enough. Because Kirk gave a platform to critics of Israel, donors pulled support. “I've been trying to tell Israel supporters, there's an earthquake coming in this country on this issue, and they don't believe me,” Kirk said in July.
Before his assassination, he reportedly told friends he feared Israel might have him killed. Some even said he sent messages expressing that fear directly. These claims were promptly dismissed as conspiracy theories.
Nevertheless, Kirk’s assassination was a shock to the movement. And it triggered a deeper reckoning. Netanyahu, unprompted, issued a statement insisting Israel had nothing to do with it.
Yet just weeks before, in an interview with Breitbart, Netanyahu was quoted as saying, “Israel is fighting Iran, and you can’t be MAGA if you’re pro-Iran, you can’t be MAGA if you’re anti-Israel. President Trump understands this, and he stands very strongly with us.”
To many, that sounded like a threat.
The Epstein revolt
Alongside the Gaza backlash, another scandal reared its head: Jeffrey Epstein. MAGA supporters believed this was their chance to expose the perversion of elite networks. But Trump hesitated.
Before the 2024 election, he hinted the truth might come out – then cautioned that “many innocent people may get hurt.” Afterward, he turned on his own party members for pressing the issue.
Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) and Thomas Massie demanded transparency. Trump attacked them both. He backed primary challengers against Massie and labeled MTG a traitor, withdrawing his support for her. In response to the escalating pressure and his withdrawal of support, MGT announced she would resign from Congress on 5 January 2026, citing her marginalization by MAGA leadership and the party’s elite.
Epstein’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence – whether through his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell’s Mossad-linked father, Robert Maxwell, or through Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, along with his access to bipartisan figures – raised uncomfortable questions. Adding to the controversy, leaked emails released by Democrats suggest that Epstein, who Trump once described as a “terrific guy,” said the US president “knew about the girls.”
Once again, MAGA’s confrontation with elite corruption was derailed by loyalty to Israel.
Who decides America’s future?
Two paths now stand before the American right. One leads to renewed sovereignty, to ending foreign entanglements, and putting US interests first. The other continues to place Israel’s priorities above America’s own.
In short: MAGA vs MIGA.
Today, MIGA holds institutional power. AIPAC dominates congressional primaries. Dissent is punished. Trump’s inner circle remains full of hardline Zionists like Laura Loomer. The billionaire Adelson family bankrolled his campaigns.
But MAGA still commands the base. Support for Israel among Republican voters has plummeted – from 65 percent favorable to 50 percent unfavorable. The backlash is real.
And Trump? He straddles the line. He supports Israel militarily, but cuts deals that anger Tel Aviv. He criticizes MTG, but defends Carlson’s right to speak. He fights Iran, but will not commit to regime change.
This balancing act cannot hold. As pressure builds, the Republican Party will be forced to choose.
If it returns to its neocon roots, the MAGA base may walk. If it stands with its base, MIGA must go.
One thing is clear: for one vision to survive, the other MUST fail.
Executive Order Provides For Bailout Of Overextended AI Companies
In December 2024 President Donald Trump named venture capitalist David O. Sacks as the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.”
Sacks is set to guide the administration’s policies for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.
AI-researcher Gary Markus is wondering how two recent tweets by Gary Sacks relate to each other:
One theory of capitalism holds that every company should be left to their own devices, with state intervention kept a minimum. This view was well articulated just a few weeks ago, by White House AI and Crypto Czar and well-known podcaster, David O. Sacks:
David Sacks @DavidSacks – 16:52 UTC · Nov 6, 2025
There will be no federal bailout for AI. The U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place.
The other theory of capitalism, if we can indeed call it that, holds that we should bailout important companies or industries that might overextend themselves. Quite the opposite from the above.
This latter theory, almost a form of safety-net socialism for overextended companies, seemed to be implied today, in a tweet that seemed to be laying the groundwork for bailout, by none other than … White House AI and Crypto Czar and well-known podcaster, David O. Sacks:
David Sacks @DavidSacks – 17:34 UTC · Nov 24, 2025
According to today’s WSJ, AI-related investment accounts for half of GDP growth. A reversal would risk recession. We can’t afford to go backwards.
The WSJ report Sacks mentions, archived here, is indeed gloomy:
The economy’s dependence on AI comes with risks. Stock price/earnings ratios are near record highs. If lofty profit predictions prove wrong, share prices may tumble and investment could slow. The S&P 500 fell about 2% last week on concerns about a bubble, despite rallying 1% on Friday.
Falling stocks could trigger a reverse wealth effect: Americans would consume less, which would tend to depress sales, profits and, potentially, employment.
…
If AI investment stopped growing, that could knock another 0.5 point off growth, Millar estimates. If it went to zero, that would knock a full percentage point off.
…
Another risk relates to the growing scale of AI-related borrowing.
…
If the revenue necessary to service that debt doesn’t materialize, lenders could take a hit, spilling over into debt markets, said Berezin.
China is letting the first type of capitalism reign their Artificial Intelligence efforts:
Rather than pick winners and losers, China states the policy objective and hundreds of commercial initiatives compete using diverse strategies to fulfil the ambition. Instead of a ‘winner takes all subsidies’ China gets a diverse, agile, ecosystem growing in parallel to its rapidly innovative economy.
Many Chinese models are published as open source and can be run on smaller clusters.
The U.S. has however decided to let the second form of capitalism rule its AI endeavors. There are only a few companies working on large AI projects. Their models are private and blocked from scrutiny. They are promising too much and are spending a huge amount of money. They are in need of ‘safety-net socialism for overextended companies’.
To provide for this the White House issued an Executive Order on:
LAUNCHING THE GENESIS MISSION
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose. From the founding of our Republic, scientific discovery and technological innovation have driven American progress and prosperity. Today, America is in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an important frontier of scientific discovery and economic growth. To that end, my Administration has taken a number of actions to win that race, including issuing multiple Executive Orders and implementing America’s AI Action Plan, which recognizes the need to invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement. In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II and was a critical basis for the foundation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories.
The Department of Energy is ordered to direct the initiative combining federal laboratories and ‘industry partners’:
Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall identify Federal computing, storage, and networking resources available to support the Mission, including both DOE on-premises and cloud-based high-performance computing systems, and resources available through industry partners. The Secretary shall also identify any additional partnerships or infrastructure enhancements that could support the computational foundation for the Platform.
The federal government will of course have to pay for those private resources.
Research with the help of AI will be done in six high priority fields. The timeline provided in the Executive Order is extremely ambitious.
Besides providing the instruments for a bailout the Executive Order is also creating the means of central control over AI and its application:
If you strip away the branding, Genesis is the U.S. government building a national AI backbone inside the Department of Energy and then inviting the biggest private sector AI players to plug into it.
…
But underneath, it centralizes the AI stack. Instead of letting the highest end compute and model capabilities drift entirely into the private sector, Genesis pulls them back into a structured federal environment. Access becomes conditional: follow the safety rules, share the data, integrate into the platform and you get to operate at the frontier. Don’t, and you’re on the outside looking in.
…
Genesis is the beginning of a nationalized AI infrastructure strategy. It will function as the bridge between government compute and private sector models, letting Washington influence which companies sit closest to the frontier and which capabilities get priority. It will speed up real scientific breakthroughs, but it will also quietly define the rules of the AI race on who participates, who gets access, and how the most powerful systems are directed.
By allowing for a bailout of over extended AI companies via ‘Manhattan Project’ sized federal spending Trump is also attempting to prevent a stock market slump that would cost the Republicans the majority in the House.
Posted by b on November 25, 2025 at 15:45 UTC | Permalink
And now ya know why the Tech Bros sucked up to Trump...
'Capitalism without risk' sorta put the lie to all that blather and how they deserve the fruits of risk...
China proves the point that communists understand capitalism better than the capitalists do.
Let the market crash, it is a parasite on the producers
******
Will MTG’s Resignation Trigger Other Republican Exits, Ending House Majority Before Midterms?
Posted on November 26, 2025 by Yves Smith
In her resignation statements, Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor included in her reasons that she was unable to get things done for her district, particularly table legislation, and that having to defend an abusive Donald Trump and fight for her seat only to face the prospect of being in the minority after midterms was deeply unappetizing.
It appears other Republicans are thinking along the same lines. From Chuck L:
BREAKING: Trump gets nightmare Monday news as it's revealed that an "explosive" wave of House Republicans will soon resign like Marjorie Taylor Greene did — destroying Mike Johnson's Speakership.
This has MAGA world in an absolute panic...
This possibility seems serious enough to have generated a segment on Breaking Points:
While there is some truth to the argument by Saagar and Krystal that Congresscritters brought these woes on themselves, a few caveats are in order.
First, my impression is that in most countries, being what the UK calls a backbencher (there a Member of the House of Commons who is not a minister), as in an not-much-of-a-name, no special appointments legislator is indeed not an influential position. Most party members in most countries are expected to follow party discipline. For instance, it isn’t as much commented on as it should be that the reason Democrats caved on the shutdown was Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to whip votes, as is normally done, and explicitly told members to vote their conscience.
In the US, parties exercise control through substantial centralization of funding and other resources. House members have barely any staff, and smallish budgets, so they can’t even buy much in the way of research. I am not sure of the Republican version of this syndrome but here is how it works on the Democrat side. From a 2011 post, Tom Ferguson: Congress is a “Coin Operated Stalemate Machine”:
Let’s first look at how crassly explicit the pricing is. Ferguson cites the work of Marian Currander on how it works for the Democrats in the House of Representatives:
Under the new rules for the 2008 election cycle, the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] asked rank-and-file members to contribute $125,000 in dues and to raise an additional $75,000 for the party. Subcommittee chairpersons must contribute $150,000 in dues and raise an additional $100,000. Members who sit on the most powerful committees … must contribute $200,000 and raise an additional $250,000. Subcommittee chairs on power committees and committee chairs of non-power committees must contribute $250,000 and raise $250,000. The five chairs of the power committees must contribute $500,000 and raise an additional $1 million. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn, and Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel must contribute $800,000 and raise $2.5 million. The four Democrats who serve as part of the extended leadership must contribute $450,000 and raise $500,000, and the nine Chief Deputy Whips must contribute $300,000 and raise $500,000. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must contribute a staggering $800,000 and raise an additional $25 million.
Ferguson teases out the implications:
Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, our Congressional parties now post prices for key slots on committees. You want it — you buy it, runs the challenge. They even sell on the installment plan: You want to chair an important committee? That’ll be $200,000 down and the same amount later, through fundraising…..
The whole adds up to something far more sinister than the parts. Big interest groups (think finance or oil or utilities or health care) can control the membership of the committees that write the legislation that regulates them. Outside investors and interest groups also become decisive in resolving leadership struggles within the parties in Congress. You want your man or woman in the leadership? Just send money. Lots of it….
The Congressional party leadership controls the swelling coffers of the national campaign committees, and the huge fixed investments in polling, research, and media capabilities that these committees maintain — resources the leaders use to bribe, cajole, or threaten candidates to toe the party line… Candidates rely on the national campaign committees not only for money, but for message, consultants, and polling they need to be competitive but can rarely afford on their own..
This concentration of power also allows party leaders to shift tactics to serve their own ends….They push hot-button legislative issues that have no chance of passage, just to win plaudits and money from donor blocs and special-interest supporters. When they are in the minority, they obstruct legislation, playing to the gallery and hoping to make an impression in the media…
The system …ensures that national party campaigns rest heavily on slogan-filled, fabulously expensive lowest-common-denominator appeals to collections of affluent special interests. The Congress of our New Gilded Age is far from the best Congress money can buy; it may well be the worst. It is a coin-operated stalemate machine that is now so dysfunctional that it threatens the good name of representative democracy itself.
There’s even more damning material in this post. And even before Ferguson described these practices in the Washington Spectator, Jane Hamsher called out the Obama veal pen. From a 2010 post:
Jane Hamsher has chronicled the aggressive Obama efforts to shackle liberal groups :
Someone asked me over the weekend to be more explicit about what the term “veal pen” means:
The veal crate is a wooden restraining device that is the veal calf’s permanent home. It is so small (22″ x 54″) that the calves cannot turn around or even lie down and stretch and is the ultimate in high-profit, confinement animal agriculture.(1) Designed to prevent movement (exercise), the crate does its job of atrophying the calves’ muscles, thus producing tender “gourmet” veal.
[]
About 14 weeks after their birth, the calves are slaughtered. The quality of this “food,” laden with chemicals, lacking in fiber and other nutrients, diseased and processed, is another matter. The real issue is the calves’ experience. During their brief lives, they never see the sun or touch the Earth. They never see or taste the grass. Their anemic bodies crave proper sustenance. Their muscles ache for freedom and exercise. They long for maternal care. They are kept in darkness except to be fed two to three times a day for 20 minutes…..
I heard it over and over again — if you wanted to criticize the White House on financial issues, your institutional funding would dry up instantly. The Obama campaign successfully telegraphed to donors that they should cut off Fund for America, which famously led to its demise. It wasn’t the last time something like that happened — just ask those who were receiving institutional money who criticized the White House and saw their funding cut, at the specific request of liberal institutional leaders who now principally occupy their time by brown nosing friends and former co-workers in the White House.
And so the groups in the DC veal pen stay silent. They leadership gets gets bought off by cocktail parties at the White House while the interests of their members get sold out….
Where are they on health care? Why aren’t they running ads against the AMA, the hospitals, the insurance industry barons who have $700 million in stock options, PhRMA, the device manufacturers and the White House for doing back room deals with all of the above?
Why are they not calling for the White House to release the details of those secret deals?
Because they are participating in those deals, instead of trying to destroy them. Well, that and funneling millions of dollars in pass-throughs to their consultant friends that they are supposed to be spending on the health care fight.
The truth is — they’ve all been sucked into insulating the White House from liberal critique, and protecting the administration’s ability to carry out a neoliberal agenda that does not serve the interests of their members. They spend their time calculating how to do the absolute minimum to retain their progressive street cred and still walk the line of never criticizing the White House.
So it is a bit surprising to see supposed DC insiders like the Breaking Points duo seem unaware of this dynamic, that any Representative or Senator that is interested in being re-elected, unless they are fabulously wealthy and can fund their own campaign (think Mike Bloomberg level rich) is hostage to the harsh discipline of money-dependence. The ginormous cost of running for office, thanks to the expense of TV ads, is the reason. Most countries either disallow political TV commercials or allow candidates a limited amount of free air time if they have met certain thresholds.
Second, it is a bit unfair in particular to depict Republican Congresscritters in abdicating their duties with respect to DOGE in particular. Trump was elected by a solid margin. Many Republicans campaigned on budget scaremongering or other flavors of fiscal rectitude. Democrats were notably missing in action in doing anything about DOGE save handwringing. And what were they to do? They could attempt to hold Trump legislation hostage…..which would be highly irregular for the party members of a new President. Perhaps they could encourage harmed voters to sue and file amicus brief supporting them.
Third, Trump’s spectacular vindictiveness is another reason that unhappy Republican legislators might hesitate to act. Recall that Trump called MTG a traitor. He has applied the same label to Democratic Congresscritters, all with either military or spook state credentials, who banded together to publish a commercial reminding servicemembers of their duty to disobey unlawful orders. Trump has launched FBI investigations. From Aljaazera:
The FBI has requested interviews with six Democratic lawmakers who appeared in a social media video urging members of the United States military to “defy illegal orders”, according to the legislators.
The statements on Tuesday came a day after the Pentagon said it was reviewing Senator Mark Kelly, a US Navy veteran and one of the six lawmakers, over potential violations of military law…
President Donald Trump has previously accused the lawmakers of sedition and said in a social media post that the crime is “punishable by DEATH”.
All six of the Democratic lawmakers in the video have served in the military or the intelligence community.
Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, one of the six in the video, told reporters on Tuesday that “the counterterrorism division at the FBI sent a note to the members of Congress, saying they are opening what appears to be an inquiry against the six of us”.
Third, it is still important to point out the established pattern of Congress ceding power to the Executive Branch, as Saagar and Krystal have done. But this pattern goes back at least the Nixon imperial presidency. And it extends far beyond war powers. One of my pet beefs is the way Congress treats the economy as really not their problem and punts that largely to the Fed and the Administration. Admittedly, trying to legislate to response to big shifts in activity is hard. So how about more emphasis on policies that operate as economic stabilizers….which particularly favors social safety nets, as in spending drops in good times and rises in bad ones? Or even more boldly, a discussion of the need for a more concerted view of what growth oriented policies might be, starting with infrastructure spending?
Regardless, we can hope that Trump is hoist ahead of the midterm schedule on his petard of incompetence and bullying. Such schadenfreude!
This piece actually throws more shade on the Ds than the Rs. Whatever, two sides of the same coin. And of course we'd like to see Trump take one on the chin in the mid-terms, but then what? Another vindictive impeachment investigation, no doubt. And if it is based upon the naked graft and abuse of office, fine. But to allow the Dems to take a victory lap on a slam dunk, to give them credit for attacking a problem which they created would be counter-productive and a continuation of the duopoly cycle.
Separating opposition to Trump from support for the Democratic Party is Job 1.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Trump continues to speculate about running for a third term. Democrats are screaming that it's impossible and that it violates the Constitution. Trump's inner circle claims that if he really wants to, he can, and that there are supposedly legal loopholes. If he doesn't like it, he can go to the Supreme Court, which could theoretically side with Trump in this dispute. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump makes another attempt, but it's more likely that Vance will be the next Republican candidate, possibly paired with Rubio.
Meanwhile, yesterday, Trump rescinded all of Biden's auto-signature decisions. This included 92% (!) of all the decisions signed by Biden or for Biden.
Now they are declared invalid en masse. This is worse than the "fight against Obama's legacy" during Trump's first term. It "nullifies the actions of his predecessor," so to speak.
Importantly, the rescinded decisions included all pardons, including those granted to Hunter Biden and various Democratic Party officials for various crimes (both known and unknown). And if the Democrats thought they could hide behind fake Biden signatures, they now officially lack that protection, and the door to their criminal prosecution is open. What could be better for Trump than, before the 2026 midterm elections, any agenda pushed by the Democratic Party (like "Trump is a Kremlin agent" and "Trump sucked Clinton's cock") can be countered with investigations into the crimes of the Biden gang and the Democratic Party elite?
But in the long run, this intraspecies struggle between ghouls is undoubtedly beneficial.
I doubt he'll be capable by then, he ain't now and is failing continually.
******
A Top US Foreign Policy Magazine Warned About Trump’s Counterproductive Policy Towards BRICS
Andrew Korybko
Nov 29, 2025
Staying the course risks harming the US’ strategic interests, but arguably not in the way that they fear.
Foreign Affairs, the influential Council on Foreign Relations’ bi-monthly magazine, published an intriguing article in late October titled “Losing the Swing States: Washington Is Driving the BRICS to Become an Anti-American Bloc”. It was co-authored by the CEO of the Center for a New American Security think tank and his Research Associate. The gist of their article is that Trump 2.0 has recklessly worsened the US’ ties with BRICS members India, Brazil, and South Africa at the risk of radicalizing their foreign policies.
They can’t think of a cogent explanation for why he did the first (though it’s arguably punishment for India refusing to subordinate itself as the US), posit that the second is out of solidarity with his jailed ally Jair Bolsonaro, and believe that the third is connected to concerns over the Boers. While they acknowledge that the US has some legitimate reasons to be upset with all three, they’re still of the view that Trump has gone way too far in worsening ties with them, which harms the US’ interests.
Accordingly, their article warns that India, Brazil, and South Africa could turbocharge China and Russia’s speculative goal of weaponizing BRICS against the West, which could lead to them more actively participating in its unofficial de-dollarization policies and creation of alternative financial platforms. This could result in the further loss of Western financial institutions’ influence, thus “weakening a key pillar of American clout and the effectiveness of Washington’s sanctions.” Here are five background briefings:
* 1 November 2024: “Did The Latest BRICS Summit Achieve Anything Of Tangible Significance At All?”
* 10 February 2025: “Trump’s Pressure Campaign Against South Africa Is About More Than Just The Boers”
* 7 March 2025: “De-Dollarization Was Always More Of A Political Slogan Than A Pecuniary Fact”
* 25 July 2025: “Trump’s Campaign Against Brazil Is About More Than Bolsonaro, Bilateral Trade, & BRICS”
* 31 July 2025: “Trump Is Hellbent On Derailing India’s Rise As A Great Power”
As can be seen, the US’ worsening of ties with India, Brazil, and South Africa under Trump 2.0 is driven by ulterior motives in all three cases, while BRICS – which is superficially one of the reasons behind Trump’s policy decision – actually isn’t the anti-Western powerhouse that many believe that it is. The last point is the most relevant to Foreign Affairs’ article since it challenges the premise that BRICS could pose an even greater threat to the West than it supposedly already does if the aforesaid ties further worsen.
Nevertheless, there’s merit to their argument that the US should enter into rapprochements with them (such as it might soon do with Brazil and India), all while acknowledging that “no multi-aligned country will suddenly go all in with the United States.” Fears about BRICS speeding up de-dollarization processes and quickly building alternative financial platforms that replace Western ones were never all that credible, so this wouldn’t offset those scenarios, but it would still advance the US’ strategic interests.
Trump’s bullying risks breeding resentment that could materialize in non-BRICS-related forms that harm other US interests even more with time. India might refuse to help jointly manage China in the region, Brazil could expand agricultural and resource cooperation with China in ways that further accelerate the latter’s rise, and South Africa’s continued defiance could inspire other African states to resist US bullying too. It’s therefore better for the US’ strategic interests that it moderates its approach towards all three.
Pretty funny, little Andy is more worried about China than anything else. And Trump doesn't moderate anything unless he's in retreat.
******
As US Hunger Rises, Trump Administration’s ‘Efficiency’ Goals Cause Massive Food Waste
Posted on November 29, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. It appears the press has been doing Trump a favor on the deportation front. I had been under the impression that the Administration was pointedly sparing business operators, particularly large businesses such as hotel chains and major food processors such as meatpackers. Rather than thuggish ICE raid, a fast way to crack down on illegal migration would be to make it less attractive by pursuing those who hire undocumented workers.
This article indicates, however, that the immigration crackdown has also disrupted farms and other ag industry players, as well as damaging farmers via trade wars that lead to foreign buyers shunning their output, most notably China with soyabeans.
By Tevis Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Provost Associate Professor of Environment, Development and Health, American University School of International Service. Originally published at The Conversation
The U.S. government has caused massive food waste during President Donald Trump’s second term. Policies such as immigration raids, tariff changes and temporary and permanent cuts to food assistance programs have left farmers short of workers and money, food rotting in fields and warehouses, and millions of Americans hungry. And that doesn’t even include the administration’s actual destruction of edible food.
The U.S. government estimates that more than 47 million people in America don’t have enough food to eat – even with federal and state governments spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on programs to help them.
Yet, huge amounts of food – on average in the U.S., as much as 40% of it – rots before being eaten. That amount is equivalent to 120 billion meals a year: more than twice as many meals as would be needed to feed those 47 million hungry Americans three times a day for an entire year.
This colossal waste has enormous economic costs and renders useless all the water and resources used to grow the food. In addition, as it rots, the wasted food emits in the U.S. alone over 4 million metric tons of methane – a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.
As a scholar of wasted food, I have watched this problem worsen since Trump began his second term in January 2025. Despite this administration’s claim of streamlining the government to make its operations more efficient, a range of recent federal policies have, in fact, exacerbated food wastage.
Immigration Policy
Supplying fresh foods, such as fruits, vegetables and dairy, requires skilled workers on tight timelines to ensureripeness, freshness and high quality.
The Trump administration’s widespread efforts to arrest and deport immigrants have sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol and other agencies into hundreds of agricultural fields, meat processing plants and food production and distribution sites. Supported by billions of taxpayer dollars, they have arrested thousands of food workers and farmworkers – with lethal consequences at times.
Dozens of raids have not only violated immigrants’ human rights and torn families apart: They have jeopardized the national food supply. Farmworkers already work physically hard jobs for low wages. In legitimate fear for their lives and liberty, reports indicate that in some places 70% of people harvesting, processing and distributing food stopped showing up to work by mid-2025.
News reports have identified many instances where crops have been left to rot in abandoned fields. Even the U.S. Department of Labor declared in October 2025 that aggressive farm raids drive farmworkers into hiding, leave substantial amounts of food unharvested and thus pose a “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages.”
Foreign Aid Cuts
When the Trump administration all but shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development in early 2025, the agency had 500 tons of ready-to-eat, high-energy biscuits worth US$800,000, stored to distribute to starving people around the world who had been displaced by violence or natural disasters. With no staff to distribute the biscuits, they expired while sitting in a warehouse in Dubai.
Incinerating the out-of-date biscuits reportedly cost an additional $125,000.
An additional 70,000 tons of USAID food aid may also have been destroyed.
Tariffs
In the late 20th century, as globalized trade patterns grew, U.S. farmers struggled with agricultural prices below their production costs. Yet tariffs in the first Trump administration did not protect small farms.
And the tariffs imposed in early 2025, after Trump regained the White House, severed U.S. soybean trade with China for months. Meanwhile, there’s nowhere to store the mountains of soybeans. An October 2025 agreement may resume some activity, but at lower price levels and a slower pace than before, as China looks to Brazil and Argentina to meet its vast demand.
Though the soybeans were intended to feed the Chinese pig industry, not humans, the specter of waste looms both in terms of the potential spoilage of soybeans and the actual human food that could have been grown in their place.
Other Efforts Lead to More Waste
Since taking office, the second Trump administration has taken many steps aimed at efficiency that actually boosted food waste. Mass firings of food safety personnel risks even more outbreaks of foodborne diseases, tainted imports, and agricultural pathogens – which can erupt into crises requiring mass destruction, for instance, of nearly 35,000 turkeys with bird flu in Utah.
In addition, the administration canceled a popular program that helped schools and food banks buy food from local farmers, though many of the crops had already been planted when the cancellation announcement was made. That food had to find new buyers or risk being wasted, too. And the farmers were unable to count on a key revenue source to keep their farms afloat.
Also, the administration slashed funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency that helped food producers, restaurants and households recover from disasters – including restoring power to food-storage refrigeration.
The fall 2025 government shutdown left the government’s major food aid program, SNAP, in limbo for weeks, derailing communities’ ability to meet their basic needs. Grocers, who benefit substantially from SNAP funds, announced discounts for SNAP recipients – to help them afford food and to keep food supplies moving before they rotted. The Department of Agriculture ordered them not to, saying SNAP customers must pay the same prices as other customers.
Food waste did not start with the Trump administration. But the administration’s policies – though they claim to be seeking efficiency – have compounded voluminous waste at a time of growing need. This Thanksgiving, think about wasted food – as a problem, and as a symptom of larger problems.
Trump’s South America policy is getting more ridiculous by the day.
Yesterday he announced a pardon for the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who is serving a 45-year sentence for partnering with drug traffickers who had allegedly shipped 400 tons of cocaine to the United States. He also endorsed a right wing candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura for Sunday’s election in Honduras. Asfura belongs to the same party as Hernández.
This is unlikely (archived) to have the effect that Trump desires:
The reaction to Mr. Trump’s pardon in Honduras was one of shock, and many wondered how it would play into the elections this weekend.
“It will obviously stir up the same powerful negative sentiment seen in the 2021 elections that pushed Juan Orlando out of power,” said Leonardo Pineda, a Honduran analyst, who said that by linking the conservative candidate, Mr. Asfura, with Mr. Hernández, Mr. Trump could actually hurt his chances of winning.
While pardoning a convicted drug smuggler on one day Trump uses the next one to threatening Venezuela for alleged drug smuggling for which there is no evidence.
A week ago the Federal Aviation Administration has issued a Notice To Air Man (NOTAM) for Venezuela:
The alert speaks of a ‘worsening security situation and heightened military activity in or around Venezuela.’
‘Threats could pose a potential risk to aircraft at all altitudes, including during overflight, the arrival and departure phases of flight, and/or airports and aircraft on the ground,’ the FAA notice states.
The warning is for the Maiquetía Flight Information Region which includes Venezuelan airspace and parts of the southern Caribbean – such as Colombia, Guyana, Brazil, and Trinidad.
Venezuela responded by revoking operation rights for airlines which were following that advice.
Today Trump made an explicit threat to all airplanes in Venezuelan airspace:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump – Nov 29, 2025, 12:43 UTC
To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
But is he going to do? Order the military to shoot down random passenger planes?
Before that Trump had announced land operations in Venezuela:
President Trump suggested Thursday the United States will “very soon” take action against alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers on land after weeks of repeated strikes in Caribbean waters.
“In recent weeks, you’ve been working to deter Venezuelan drug traffickers, of which there are many,” Trump told military personnel in remarks on Thanksgiving. “Of course, there aren’t too many coming in by sea anymore.”
“You probably noticed that people aren’t wanting to be delivering by sea, and we’ll be starting to stop them by land also,” he continued.
“The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon. We warn them: Stop sending poison to our country,” Trump added.
The threat is empty. There is no real option for a military land operation in Venezuela.
All Trump assertions about Venezuela, its alleged ‘terrorist gangs’ and drug smuggling are completely bogus.
This is not at all about drugs but about stealing the huge oil reserve Venzuela has:
“[Oil] is at the heart of the matter,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro told CNN in an interview published Wednesday.
“So, that’s a negotiation about oil. I believe that is [President] Trump’s logic. He’s not thinking about the democratization of Venezuela, let alone the narco-trafficking,” added the South American president, who last month was sanctioned by the Trump administration.
Just a week ago Trump had a phone call (archived) with the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in which he presumably tried to press him into resigning:
The United States has built up a substantial military presence in the Caribbean aimed at Venezuela. Administration officials have said their goal is to deter drug smuggling, but have also made clear that they want to see Mr. Maduro removed from power, possibly by force.
The New York Times reported in October that Mr. Maduro had offered the United States a significant stake in the country’s oil fields, along with a host of other opportunities for American companies, in an effort to defuse tensions. But Mr. Maduro sought to remain in power, and the U.S. officials cut off those discussions early last month.
The Trump administration has falsely claimed (archived) that two criminal organizations in Venezuela, Tren de Aragua and the Cartel de los Soles, are involved in drug trafficking while being controlled by President Maduro:
Henrique Capriles, an opposition figure, former governor and presidential candidate who has been marginalized in recent years, said in an interview that while Tren de Aragua is a dangerous gang, the idea that it was controlled by Mr. Maduro amounts to “science fiction.”
…
Regarding Tren de Aragua, drug trade experts point out that it originated in a prison in Venezuela’s Aragua state and American intelligence agencies circulated findings in February that the gang was not controlled by the Venezuelan government. Its leader is thought to be Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, who escaped from the prison.
…
[N]o evidence has been found that Tren de Aragua is engaged in cross-border drug trafficking, according to Insight Crime, a research group focused on organized crime.
When real drug smuggling occurred in Venezuela it was directed and controlled by the CIA:
[E]xperts who have analyzed the Venezuelan drug trade for decades say the Cartel de los Soles is not a literal organization but shorthand for drug trafficking in the armed forces. That phenomenon is not unique to Venezuela, afflicting democratic and authoritarian countries alike in the Americas.
…
The origins of using the term Cartel de los Soles to describe illicit military activities stretch back to an era well before Mr. Maduro became president in 2013. The term gained traction after a 1993 scandal when the C.I.A. worked with the Venezuelan military to send a ton of cocaine to the United States in a bid to infiltrate Colombian cartels.
The whole Trump South America policy is not about drugs or Venezuela but about U.S. control over the whole continent with the help of right-wing proxy leaders.
Meanwhile the U.S. military continues to strike random fisherman near Venezuela (archived) with drones and missiles.
Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has given verbal orders to kill anyone who survives a first strike (archived):
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
…
Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
Hegseth had overruled the most senior military lawyer of the U.S. Southern Command who had called the strikes illegal:
The JAG at Southern Command specifically expressed concern that strikes against people on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean, whom administration officials call “narco-terrorists,” could amount to extrajudicial killings, the six sources said, and therefore legally expose service members involved in the operations.
…
There have been other signs of disagreement within the administration over the strikes. The head of Southern Command, Adm. Alvin Holsey, plans to step down after less than a year in a job that typically lasts about three years.
Holsey announced in October that he will depart next month.
Eleven people in a boat is by the way a sure sign that these were not drug smuggler but most likely illegal migrants:
Current and former officials within the U.S. military and DEA have expressed doubt that all 11 people aboard the first vessel were complicit in trafficking.
The boat in question, a go-fast vessel with four motors, is common in the region and would typically be manned by a small crew — perhaps one mechanic, a driver or two, and another person focused on security, one DEA official said.
More people on board means less room for drugs to sell, the official explained.
I still very much doubt that Trump will order military strikes on Venezuela. Chances are high that any such operation would end in a quagmire. It would lessen the chances of any other policy success he might want to have.
Posted by b on November 29, 2025 at 16:54 UTC | Permalink
4 Shocking Ties Between Rubio, Lobbyists, and Hernández Narcotics Indictment
Former handshake between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and convicted narco-president Juan Orlando Hernández now under scrutiny amid Trump’s pardon pledge and lobbying revelations.
November 29, 2025 Hour: 3:21 pm
Marco Rubio’s past ties to a GOP lobbying firm paid by convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández raise alarms over U.S. foreign policy integrity.
Rubio Hernández Lobbying Scandal Exposes Deep Political Ties Behind Trump’s Indulto
WASHINGTON — The recent announcement by former U.S. President Donald Trump that he will grant a “full and complete pardon” to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president currently serving a U.S. federal sentence for drug trafficking, has reignited scrutiny over a long-documented web of political and financial connections linking Hernández, Republican lobbying powerhouse BGR Group, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Far from an isolated act of clemency, Trump’s pledge appears deeply entangled with a system of influence-peddling that has shaped U.S. policy toward Central America for years. At the center stands Rubio—a figure who, as a Florida senator, once publicly praised Hernández for “taking on drug traffickers,” even as evidence mounted that the Honduran leader was personally profiting from the very cartels he claimed to fight.
Now, with Rubio overseeing U.S. diplomacy from the State Department, critics warn that the Rubio Hernández lobbying scandal reveals how foreign actors can exploit the U.S. lobbying system to buy legitimacy, evade justice, and ultimately secure political favors—including presidential pardons.
The BGR Group Connection: How Hernández Bought Influence in Washington
In early 2020, as his legal situation began to collapse—following the life sentence of his brother, Tony Hernández, for trafficking tons of cocaine into the U.S.—Juan Orlando Hernández signed a $660,000 contract with BGR Group, a Washington-based lobbying firm founded by former Republican Governor Haley Barbour.
The goal was clear: rehabilitate Hernández’s image in the U.S. capital as a “trusted ally” and “anti-narcotics partner,” despite mounting evidence that he had accepted millions in bribes from cartels to fund his presidential campaigns.
According to a detailed investigation by VICE News, BGR Group went to work immediately:
It contacted 11 congressional staffers, three of whom had previously worked directly for Marco Rubio.
It distributed press releases portraying Hernández as a bulwark against organized crime.
It arranged meetings with U.S. officials to reinforce the narrative of Honduras as a cooperative security partner.
All this occurred while U.S. prosecutors were building their case against Hernández himself—culminating in his 2024 conviction for conspiring to import over 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.
Read the full VICE investigation on BGR’s lobbying for Hernández (VICE News)
Critically, BGR Group was not just any firm—it was a major Republican donor network with deep ties to Rubio’s political career. Records show the firm hosted fundraising events for Rubio’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaigns, as well as his short-lived 2016 presidential bid.
This means that the same lobbying apparatus paid by a convicted narco-president helped finance the rise of the man now shaping U.S. policy toward Latin America.
Explore FEC records on BGR’s political contributions to Rubio (Federal Election Commission)
Trump’s Pardon as Political Payback—Not Justice
Trump’s announcement—made via Truth Social on Friday—comes amid his open support for Nasry “Tito” Asfura, Hernández’s political protégé and the National Party’s 2025 presidential candidate in Honduras. Trump has explicitly tied future U.S. aid to Asfura’s victory, signaling that Washington’s backing is conditional on political alignment.
In this context, the pardon of Hernández appears less like mercy and more like a strategic signal: loyalty to U.S. Republican interests—even when demonstrated through illicit means—will be rewarded.
Hernández, after all, was once Washington’s favorite Central American strongman. He allowed the U.S. to maintain military bases in Honduras, cracked down on migrant caravans, and supported U.S. regional agendas—all while allegedly running a state-sponsored drug enterprise.
Now, with Rubio at the State Department and Trump eyeing a 2028 comeback, the Rubio Hernández lobbying scandal underscores a troubling reality: foreign leaders can launder their reputations through U.S. lobbying firms, gain access to top policymakers, and ultimately escape accountability—even after federal conviction.
As one Latin American diplomat put it: “This isn’t diplomacy. It’s transactional impunity.”
Geopolitical Context: Undermining Rule of Law in the Americas
The fallout from the Rubio Hernández lobbying scandal extends far beyond bilateral relations. It strikes at the credibility of the entire U.S. “war on drugs” and its claims of promoting democracy and rule of law in Latin America.
If a president convicted of trafficking cocaine can secure a presidential pardon through backroom lobbying and partisan loyalty, what message does that send to reformers in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Colombia?
Moreover, it deepens regional distrust of U.S. intentions. For years, progressive governments in the region have argued that Washington prioritizes compliance over justice—backing authoritarian but cooperative leaders while condemning leftist governments for lesser offenses. The Hernández case validates that critique.
Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have long denounced this “selective morality” in U.S. foreign policy. Now, even centrist allies are questioning whether the U.S. system can be gamed by those with enough money and the right lobbyists.
In a hemisphere increasingly seeking multipolar partnerships, such scandals fuel the narrative that U.S. democracy is for sale—and that sovereignty is secondary to political convenience.
Trump pardons convicted narco-trafficking pol amid plot to rig Honduran election
Wyatt Reed·November 29, 2025
Donald Trump is threatening to destroy the Honduran economy unless the country elects the oligarch-run National Party. Now, he’s even pardoned the last party member to rule the country, who was convicted in 2024 of smuggling hundreds of tons of drugs into the US.
On November 28, US President Donald Trump Trump declared he will be pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced to 45 years in a New York prison in 2024 for his role in helping smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the US in a drug-running scheme linked to the Sinaloa cartel. Hernandez, Trump wrote, had been “treated very harshly and unfairly.”
While Hernandez was President of Honduras, he initiated contracts worth over half a million dollars with Republican lobbying firm BGR Group, after his brother, Tony, was sentenced to life in prison for cocaine smuggling. In the time since, BGR has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the campaign of Marco Rubio, the Cuban American former senator who now serves as Trump’s Secretary of State.
As The Grayzone reported, the US Department of Justice indictment of Hernandez contained explicit and often shocking details of his role in transforming his country into the Western hemisphere’s premier narco-state. The US-backed president “wielded incredible influence and partnered with some of the most notorious narcotics traffickers in Honduras, allowing them to flourish under their control,” a DOJ prosecutor stated.
A screenshot shows the table of contents of the 2023 indictment of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.
Speaking to a Honduran outlet the day after the pardon was announced, Hernandez’s longtime pastor credited the decision to the fact that “Donald Trump was and is a friend of Juan Orlando.”
The Honduran government has noted that despite being pardoned for crimes against the US, the investigation into his crimes in Honduras remains open, and he will likely be required to turn himself in upon his return to the country.
Trump’s announcement came in a statement demanding that Honduran voters elect his preferred candidate, threatening to economically sabotage the country if Tito Asfura – leader of the narco-friendly National Party that Hernandez controlled before his conviction – does not emerge victorious Sunday.
“If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras… we will be very supportive. If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad,” Trump wrote on his Truth social media platform. Trump deployed the same strategy in Argentina’s October 2025 midterm elections, successfully strong-arming voters there into backing the party of the country’s mentally unstable president, Javier Milei.
The message came just two days after Trump first publicly meddled in the Honduran election with a statement urging voters in the Central American to cast their ballots for Asfursa, who he called “the only real friend of Freedom in Honduras.” In that post, the US President railed against the other two candidates: the ruling Libre Party’s Rixi Moncada – “who says Fidel Castro is her idol,” Trump claimed – and “borderline Communist” Liberal party candidate Salvador Nasralla.
“Normally, the smart people of Honduras, would reject [Moncada], and elect Tito Asfura, but the Communists are trying to trick the people by running a third Candidate, Salvador Nasralla,” Trump claimed, insisting that “Nasralla is no friend of Freedom” and is merely “pretending to be an anti-Communist only for the purposes of splitting Asfura’s vote.”
With his brazen interventions, Trump appeared to concede that the initial US plot to control the outcome of the vote had failed.
Leaked recordings expose initial coup plot
Before Trump’s threat to nuke the Honduran economy unless voters elected the National Party’s Asfura, Washington seemingly planned to sow chaos in the election by manipulating the preliminary vote count in favor of Nasralla. In doing so, it would generate widespread skepticism of the result, and demand a new vote.
But the ruling Libre party foiled the plot by releasing a series of recordings containing evidence that the right-wing, US-backed opposition was planning to launch an electoral coup.
In the audio files, voices strongly resembling the National Party’s electoral Councilor Cossette López and top National Party Congressmember Tomás Zambrano can be heard discussing plans to delay the transmission of vote counts in order to generate widespread perceptions of fraud, and provoke a national crisis by falsely presenting Salvador Nasralla as the initial favorite. The speakers suggest they can manipulate the vote by ensuring a friendly contractor was selected to transport ballots on election day.
The recordings, which also feature an unnamed man presenting himself as a military officer, show the trio describing a plan in which NGOs, international electoral observers, and the US Embassy conspire to declare a Libre victory illegitimate, and see the party removed from power. The plot is framed as being carried out with US government assistance, with Lopez seemingly encouraging her colleagues to “use the tools that the people at the Embassy gave us.”
Some of the plans mentioned in the recordings appear to already be in motion, including a call by the voice matching Zambrano’s to “sow doubt in the electoral process” in the run-up to the vote. Elsewhere, Lopez appears to call for all friendly media coverage “to be focused on the fact that there’s going to be fraud” in order to generate “suspicion among the people that there’s going to be fraud, or that the elections won’t be recognized” from abroad.
“We’re going to say that they’re going to manipulate a CNE advisor so that the results favor and an electoral crisis is created,” the voice matching Lopez’s continues. This exact scenario played out in the weeks following the release of the audio files, when the Attorney General of Honduras opened an investigation into Lopez due to her comments, and calls grew for Lopez to be removed from her CNE post.
After the US-friendly NGOs declare the vote illegitimate, “the idea is that the government of the United States” steps in and agrees the vote should be nullified – “that would be the nail in the coffin,” the voice adds. And “what I am clear about is that the military is with us,” she states.
Once the audio files revealing the electoral coup plot were publicized, the US puppetmasters of the Honduran right-wing scrambled to control the narrative, seeking to flip the script by baselessly accusing Libre of seeking to steal the election through dirty tricks. But this cynical tactic has apparently expended its utility, prompting Trump to enter the fray with an explicit threat to devastate the Honduran economy unless it elected the National Party.
Once Stolen, Twice Shy
Known for its corruption and financing by drug lords including Mexico’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the National Party first came to power thanks to a US-backed coup in 2009. It maintained its grip on government thanks to blatant election rigging in order to fraudulently seize the presidency of Honduras.
In 2017, Juan Orlando Hernandez declared himself the president following a bizarre incident in which he went from losing handily to emerging with a sizable lead after a mysterious blackout at the country’s main voting tallying center. The Trump administration rushed to recognize the results, cementing the party’s grip on power for the next four years.
Despite Hernandez’s incarceration in 2024, the dirty tricks appear to have continued. This election cycle, Honduran outlet Contracorriente identified a vast “digital network that disguises political propaganda as local news to attack the ruling [Libre] party in Honduras,” which it referred to as the Nahual Network. The outlet suggested on November 28 that the network was likely operated by Fernando Cerimedo, an Argentinian advisor of National Party candidate Asfura, noting that “Cerimedo’s history aligns with several patterns observed in the “Nahual network”: the use of fake accounts, manipulated amplification of content, armies of trolls, and the fabrication of narratives designed to erode trust in democratic institutions.”
For his part, Nasralla has expressed no objections to the plans voiced in the audio recordings leaked this October. Instead, the Liberal Party candidate sought to reinforce the narrative that Libre is to blame for any electoral chaos. In early November, the former TV and beauty pageant host declared that if Libre were to attempt to engage in election fraud, the US would have no choice but to draw its naval assets away from the coast of Venezuela and threaten to invade Honduras – and suggested that Hondurans should “avoid” this possibility by voting for him.
Yet just a few weeks later, he was unceremoniously dumped on social media by Donald Trump, who warned Hondurans not to be “tricked again” by the “borderline communist.”
It was an abrupt turnaround for Nasralla, who had been invited by a prominent right-wing legislator from Florida to a congressional hearing in Washington the previous week which was seemingly designed to advance the electoral plot.
As a result, with just 10 days left before a tightly-contested election, Nasralla was not in his country’s capital of Tegucigalpa, where the other two main parties’ leaders were busy holding last-minute rallies. Instead, he was nearly 2,000 miles away on Capitol Hill, appearing before a US congressional committee aimed at delegitimizing his top opponent, Rixi Moncada, the proposed successor to Honduras’ current democratic socialist President, Xiomara Castro.
The hearing, which was presented as a preemptive effort to warn Castro and Moncada against attempting to steal the election, was chaired by Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a Cuban American former broadcast personality from South Florida best known for her on-air regime change tirades. From her perch on the committee, Salazar railed against Xiomara Castro, Moncada, and their social democratic Libre Party, accusing them of attempting to “impose communism” on Honduras.
Salazar continued by waxing nostalgic about the Obama-backed 2009 coup d’etat which overthrew the current president’s husband, Manuel Zelaya, before demanding to know whether the Honduran military could intervene to “stop” the Castro government from “trying to rig the elections.” She recalled that she was in Honduras working “as a journalist” when Honduran soldiers “pulled [Zelaya] out of his bed… in the middle of the night in PJs, and put him on a plane to Costa Rica, because Mel Zelaya wanted to implement communism in Honduras.”
“Now 16 years after, his wife is doing this job.”
Salazar’s commentary was filled with contradictions, vacillating between opposition to foreign interference in the upcoming elections while openly dictating to Honduran voters that they “not elect a communist.” But in Tegucigalpa, her performance was seen as a malign act of meddling.
“We condemn her interference,” Moncada shot back, concluding that Salazar “should respect Honduras and respect the Honduran people.”
Throughout the session, Salazar teed up seemingly-scripted answers from a number of regime change operatives, including Trump’s first-term appointee as ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Carlos Trujillo – who was exposed mid-hearing as a well-paid lobbyist whose Honduran clients strongly oppose the current government.
Among Trujillo’s clients were a large bank whose founding president led the National Party for years, and the so-called Prospera charter city, a self-proclaimed “startup zone with regulation and tax autonomy” established under the National Party, which hosts a variety of “human augmentation” tech companies on Honduran land with no oversight, much to the chagrin of the current government.
During his testimony, Trujillo lashed out at Castro, accusing her of such horrible crimes as having “repeatedly expressed an affinity for totalitarian regimes” like “Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua,” her “decision to eliminate and sever all diplomatic ties with Taiwan and establish and recognize the Communist Party… of China,” and having “failed to seat the Israeli ambassador… for over a year and a half.”
Other alleged misdeeds of Castro’s government included threatening to cancel an extradition agreement and kick US troops out of the military bases they’ve operated in Honduras since the ‘80s, when they were set up to wage a dirty war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government to the south.
Though he neglected to mention his friendly meeting with Hernandez in 2018, Trujillo was quick to credit himself and Salazar for liberating Hondurans from the yoke of a hypothetical Honduran dictatorship led by Hernandez’s former victims.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to recognize when you’re sitting in the seats that you’re sitting [in], the importance of the words you say, and how important they are in-country – in Honduras,” Trujillo gushed. “And how it gives hope to the Honduran people – the amount of people you see sitting here behind us – who really, their hope on saving their democracy is kind of vested in a hearing like this.”
Responding later that day, Rixi Moncada described the visitors seated behind the speaker differently, characterizing them as the very elites who conspired with the US in 2009 to remove Zelaya from power in the first place. “There are people there who participated directly in the coup and are getting away with it,” she stated, adding that those on-hand for the hearing in Washington were “surely from the 25 economic groups and 10 families in this country that monopolize the financial sector.”
Off-shoring the consequences
In the days since, Trump-aligned figures have continued to ratchet up tensions with the government of Honduras, setting the stage for a potential stand-off between the democratic will of Hondurans and Washington. The outcome could reverberate across the hemisphere, potentially triggering a renewed wave of migration to the north and violence at home.
During the OAS session on November 25, the ambassador of Javier Milei’s Argentina unleashed an unhinged regime change rant, describing the interrogation-style hearing as a measure of “preventative diplomacy” aimed at ensuring Hondurans didn’t follow in the example of Cuba and Venezuela. He was joined by US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, who argued that Honduras was experiencing an electoral “crisis” before calling on member states to pressure the Honduran government to adhere to American instructions when carrying out its elections.
Landau concluded imperiously: “I urge you to use your collective voice to warn officials in Honduras of the consequences of meddling in the process or interfering with the results” of the upcoming elections.
Trump to ‘permanently pause’ migration from ‘third world countries’
Originally published: Al Mayadeen on November 28, 2025 by Agencies (more by Al Mayadeen) | (Posted Nov 30, 2025)
U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that his administration will implement an indefinite suspension of migration from what he termed “Third World Countries,” a sweeping policy shift triggered by a fatal shooting near the White House the day before.
The directive follows an attack on November 26 that left two West Virginia National Guard members shot in Washington, DC. Specialist Sarah Beckstrom succumbed to her injuries on Thursday, while Andrew Wolfe remains hospitalized in critical condition.
Authorities identified the suspected shooter as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national. Records indicate that Lakanwal entered the United States in September 2021 through Operation Allies Welcome during the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal. However, government files show he was granted asylum status in 2025 under the current Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security.
In a statement posted on Truth Social, Trump declared he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover.” The president did not specify which nations would fall under this classification or provide a timeline for the suspension; however, he indicated the policy would include reviewing cases approved during the Biden administration.
On another note, earlier on Thursday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow stated the administration would conduct “a full-scale, rigorous reexamination” of Green Card holders from designated countries of concern. USCIS also immediately suspended all immigration applications from Afghan nationals on Wednesday night.
19 countries face heightened scrutiny
According to administration guidance, the review will focus on 19 nations previously identified in Trump’s June proclamation on national security threats. These include Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and several other countries facing full entry restrictions, plus partial limitations on nationals from Cuba, Venezuela, and six other nations.
Trump’s directive also includes plans to terminate federal benefits for non-citizens, deport individuals considered security risks, and pursue denaturalization for migrants who “undermine domestic tranquility.” The administration aims to remove anyone deemed not a “net asset to the United States” or “non-compatible with Western civilization.”
Legal experts and civil rights organizations have raised multiple concerns about the announcement. Critics argue the term “Third World” lacks a legal definition and represents discriminatory policy reminiscent of previous travel bans.
Soldiers Have ‘Duty To Refuse’ Hegseth’s Order To Commit War Crimes
My post on Trump’s war on Venezuela two days ago mentioned a Washington Post report (archived) about a war crime directly ordered by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth:
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
The Intercept had previously reported (archived) the second strike the U.S. military had launched against survivors:
People on board the boat off the coast of Venezuela that the U.S. military destroyed last Tuesday were said to have survived an initial strike, according to two American officials familiar with the matter. They were then killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.
…
Last week, a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that the strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and said that the Trump administration paved the way for it by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force earlier this year.
“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the War Department official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”
The high-ranking Pentagon official is correct in that the strikes against boats in international waters are criminal attacks on civilians.
But the killing of survivors of such strikes is more than that. It is undoubtedly a war crime.
Hegseth’s order to kill survivors was clearly illegal. It was the duty of the soldiers in the line of command to reject the order. That they have not done so but followed the order is in itself a war crime.
How do we know this?
Because the Department of Defense’s LAW OF WAR MANUAL (LOWM) (pdf) says so:
18.3 DUTIES OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE ARMED FORCES
Each member of the armed services has a duty to: (1) comply with the law of war in good faith; and (2) refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit violations of the law of war.
Further down the Manual uses the exact case in question, an order to kill survivors at sea, as an example of an illegal order:
18.3.2 Refuse to Comply With Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations.
Members of the armed forces must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations. In addition, orders should not be construed to authorize implicitly violations of law of war.
18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations.
The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.27
Every soldier down the line of command, from the commanding general receiving Hegseth’s verbal order down to the guys who pushed the button to launch the missile had the duty to reject the order. Those who have not done so are themselves guilty.
The footnote in 18.3.2.1 points to the case of the Canadian hospital ship HMHS Llandovery Castle which on 27 June 1918 had been torpedoed by a German U-Boot:
The sinking was the deadliest Canadian naval disaster of the war. 234 doctors, nurses, members of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, soldiers and seamen died in the sinking and subsequent machine-gunning of lifeboats.
In 1921 a German court sentenced two officers to years in prison because they had followed the illegal order of the submarine’s captain, Helmut Brümmer-Patzig, to kill the survivors.
According to the footnote in the LoWM the court said:
“It is certainly to be urged in favor of the military subordinates, that they are under no obligation to question the order of their superior officer, and they can count upon its legality. But no such confidence can be held to exist, if such an order is universally known to everybody, including also the accused, to be without any doubt whatever against the law. This happens only in rare and exceptional cases. But this case was precisely one of them, for in the present instance, it was perfectly clear to the accused that killing defenceless people in the life-boats could be nothing else but a breach of the law. As naval officers by profession they were well aware, as the naval expert Saalwiachter has strikingly stated, that one is not legally authorized to kill defenceless people. They well knew that this was the case here. They quickly found out the facts by questioning the occupants in the boats when these were stopped. They could only have gathered, from the order given by Patzig, that he wished to make use of his subordinates to carry out a breach of the law. They should, therefore, have refused to obey.”
It can not be more clear. The DoD’s Law of Warfare manual is using the case of killing survivors at sea as an example of an illegal order. Today the court would say:
“They could only have gathered, from the order given by Hedseth, that he wished to make use of his subordinates to carry out a breach of the law. They should, therefore, have refused to obey.”
There are signs that one commanding officer did his duty and refused to execute Hegseth’s illegal order. On October 16 the U.S. military attacked another, the sixth, vessel. Two of the four people on board survived and were rescued:
President Trump said that the two survivors of a U.S. military strike Thursday on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea will be returned to their countries of origin.
…
One survivor is from Ecuador and the other is from Colombia.
Thursday’s strike marks the sixth known boat attack in the area since last month — and the first known attack with survivors. Mr. Trump said the strike was against a submarine carrying mostly fentanyl and other illegal narcotics.
…
A Navy helicopter transported the survivors from the semi-submersible to a Navy ship, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to CBS News on Friday.
“It is the custom of the sea to save people who are at risk in international waters. You don’t sort of sail on. That’s against every principle of naval activity,” Eugene R. Fidell, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, told CBS News on Friday. “You’re supposed to save people, even though the people here are people who are only in danger because the U.S. was attempting to kill them.”
On the very same day those survivors were rescued, October 16, the DoD announced that the head of its Southern Command was ‘stepping down’:
The military commander overseeing the Pentagon’s escalating attacks against boats in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration says are smuggling drugs is stepping down, three U.S. officials said Thursday.
The officer, Adm. Alvin Holsey, is leaving his job as head of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees all operations in Central and South America, even as the Pentagon has rapidly built up some 10,000 forces in the region in what it says is a major counterdrug and counterterrorism mission.
It was unclear why Holsey is leaving now, less than a year into his tenure, and in the midst of the biggest operation in his 37-year career. But one of the U.S. officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said that Holsey had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.
It now seems clear that Admiral Holsey got fired for not following Hegseth’s illegal order and for ordering the rescue of the survivors of the strike.
Hegseth meanwhile reveals himself as veritable psychopath:
Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth – 0:37 UTC · Dec 1, 2025
For your Christmas wish list…
@U.S. Southern Command
There are signs that Congress is waking up to the issue (archived) and that Hegseth’s order may well have real consequences for him:
A top Republican and Democrats in Congress suggested on Sunday that American military officials might have committed a war crime in President Trump’s offensive against boats in the Caribbean after a news report said that during one such attack, a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors.
…
The lawmakers’ comments came after top Republicans and Democrats on the two congressional committees overseeing the Pentagon vowed over the weekend to increase their scrutiny of U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean after the report. Mr. Turner said the [Washington Post] article had only sharpened lawmakers’ already grave questions about the operation.
The senators and member of congress should grow a spine and use their power over the budget to reign in the president. The secretary of defense must be fired from his position. Admiral Holsey must be reinstate as Southern Command.
Posted by b on December 1, 2025 at 09:39 UTC | Permalink
Hoodlum
@NotHoodlum
“Ah, just one more thing, sir. You’re blowing up those boats, saying they’re filled with drugs headed for the US. But then you go and pardon the guy who brought in 400 tons of cocaine. That’s billions of doses. Help me understand that.”
10:24 PM · Nov 29, 2025
·
383.7K Views
*****
MAGA Antitrust Is Officially Dead: DOJ Sanctions Price Fixing With Slap on the Wrist Settlement Against Rental Housing Collusion Kingpin RealPage
Posted on December 1, 2025 by Conor Gallagher
We wrote last week about nine states’ settlement with the nation’s largest landlord, Greystar, and how it portended bad news for the Department of Justice (DOJ) civil case against RealPage:
Some believe that the cushy Justice settlements with mega landlords like Greystar and Cortland, which include cooperation in the case against RealPage, mean the book is going to get thrown at the latter. Color me skeptical. It’s more likely these are just the opening sweeps of the whole crime spree under the rug.
Well, the dirt pile under the rug just got a whole lot bigger. A few days before Thanksgiving, the DOJ announced in a holiday news dump that it’s settling its civil case with RealPage.
To recap, Greystar and other mega landlords used common software offered by the Texas-based, private equity-owned company RealPage in order to collect real-time pricing and supply levels, and then used that data to make unit-specific pricing and supply decisions in order to gouge the American commoners.
In December the DOJ closed its criminal investigation into RealPage. Back in August, Greystar reached a settlement with the Department of Justice in which it did not admit any wrongdoing nor pay even a token fine. In recent months states reached weak settlements with landlord behemoths like Cortland and Greystar who use RealPage as a price-fixing middleman. Those included couch change fines, but at least held out the possibility that they would need to stop using RealPage’s collusion software.
As we pointed out last week, however, the “limits” placed on the mega landlords—many of which are private-equity-owned using software created by RealPage,which is owned by private equity powerhouse Thoma Bravo— use of information-sharing software were dependent on the final federal judgement against RealPage.
So it effectively all came down to the Trump DOJ and its lawsuit against the company. And the DOJ basically declared open season on the American peasants.
Here’s Matt Stoller commenting on the outcome of the case, including bizarre attack on him from DOJ Antitrust Chief Gail Slater on the Twitter/X. It’s all well worth a read, but here’s the part explaining how RealPage and landlords will only need to make a few tweaks to keep robbing you:
The settlement is a set of “complex behavioral remedies” that have such a poor track record of being enforced. And they feel full of loopholes that will allow the company to approximate much of the earlier behavior. For instance, there are lots of different rules on “synthetic curves,” “unaffiliated property data,” “surrogate data,” exceptions of exceptions, and much of the terminology does not match up with the original complaint. If I were a defense lawyer trying to insert loopholes into a settlement, this kind of document is what I’d propose.
Take, for instance, the “synthetic curves,” mentioned previously which is essentially a list of prices that RealPage offers to help landlords set rents. The settlement says RealPage can’t offer the same synthetic curve to different clients, which would be a form of price-fixing. But it doesn’t say that RealPage can’t offer a similar synthetic curve to different clients. If RealPage slightly tweaks the list of prices, or uses last week’s curve, then that seems fine. Or maybe it’s not, it’s a gray area. Which means detecting a violation would be so difficult, and then complaining to a judge about such a violation would also be time-consuming. RealPage knows this agreement won’t be policed vigorously.
RealPage is obviously planning on continuing business as usual. Here’s what the company had to say about the settlement:
The settlement also provides greater certainty for housing providers and technology innovators that revenue management software can be operated confidently and in compliance with the views of federal antitrust enforcers…
The settlement reflects RealPage’s long-standing commitment to compliance and responsible innovation, ensuring our products continue to benefit both property owners and their residents.
No findings or admissions of liability: The agreement includes no financial penalties, damages, or findings or admissions of wrongdoing.
Continuity for customers: There is no disruption to customer operations. All RealPage solutions remain fully available, compliant, and configurable to meet evolving legal requirements.
Formalizing product modifications already made or planned: The settlement essentially commits RealPage to the modifications to its revenue management solutions that it already has been implementing since over a year ago.
Independent oversight: RealPage has agreed to an independent monitor to confirm the ongoing compliance of our revenue management products, reflecting our confidence in their integrity and our long-standing commitment to responsible operation and innovation.
A few notes.
The idea that RealPage’s software benefits residents is ludicrous and is contradicted in previous statements made by company officials, as well as those using its software.
For example, here’s company executive Andrew Bowen bragging about how the software was “driving it,” referring to rental price increases. He added: “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”
As we’ve detailed, there is strong reason to believe that RealPage and use of its collusion software by Wall Street landlords has been a major contributor to the ever-worsening homeless crisis in America.
“The Condition of Laboring Man at Pullman,” political cartoon from Chicago Labor Newspaper, July 7, 1894, which accurately sums up the situation faced by working Americans today. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
2. “Continuity for customers” means ongoing illegal behavior now blessed by the DOJ. Let’s review:
Here’s an Associate Vice President of one of the defendants talking up the collusionary aspect of the software, which was featured in RealPage’s own literature:
With LRO [RealPage’s Lease-Rent Options] we rarely make any overrides to the [pricing] recommendations . . . [W]e are all technically competitors, LRO helps us to work together . . . to make us all more successful in our pricing . . . LRO is designed to work with a community in pricing strategies, not work separately.”
RealPage’s “recommendations” is code for price-fixing:
To ensure that the landlords abide by these “recommendations,” RealPage puts significant “pressure” on them “to implement RealPage’s prices,” including by requiring clients to submit requests to deviate to the “corporate office” and tracking the “identity of the client’s staff that requested a deviation.” Multifamily Compl. ¶¶ 17-20, 261-86. As a result, landlords using RealPage adopt RealPage’s recommendations 80-90% of the time.
Furthermore, according to a March 2024 joint legal brief from the DOJ and FTC, even without the additional pressure, these types of recommendations via algorithm are still illegal:
It is per se illegal for competing landlords to jointly delegate key aspects of their pricing to a common algorithm, even if the landlords retain some authority to deviate from the algorithm’s recommendations. Although full adherence to a price-fixing scheme may render it more effective, the effectiveness of the scheme is not a requirement for per se illegality.
3. ““The settlement essentially commits RealPage to the modifications to its revenue management solutions that it already has been implementing since over a year ago.” That is likely referring to a tool RealPage rolled out offering its clients the ability to remove the use of nonpublic competitor data when calculating rent “recommendations.”
But here’s the problem, again from Stoller:
RealPage gets to keep its pricing advisors that tell landlords what to charge. The change is those advisors are not allowed to have broader meetings, but they are still allowed to have one-on-one conversations with landlords as long as those conversations are based on public data…
I find this to be an odd choice. How is a pricing advisor supposed to have a discussion solely based on public data or the client’s data? If a client says “what do you think about raising rents here” and that pricing advisor just talked to a different landlord who is raising prices, what are they supposed to say? Are they supposed to delete all the info in their head? Law firms have client conflicts for exactly this reason. This settlement is *asking* to be violated.
Add it all up, and it looks like Thoma Bravo likely met the Trump administration asking price. From Aug. 6, “MAGA Antitrust Agenda Under Siege by Lobbyists Close to Trump,” which describes how big money is buying get out of jail cards on antitrust violations. Here’s the segment that applies to RealPage:
Other companies facing antitrust investigations are now looking to hire lawyers or lobbyists close to Trump after witnessing the favorable settlement that HPE reached, according to several defense lawyers who regularly represent merging companies before the Justice Department.
…Thoma Bravo, a private-equity manager that owns a company facing several antitrust lawsuits, also hired [Brian Ballard—a longtime Trump backer, who raised $50 million for his 2024 election] in March to lobby on competition issues related to the real-estate market, according to filings. The department last year sued Real Page, a Thoma Bravo portfolio company, alleging that RealPage’s rent-setting software allowed apartment landlords to illegally coordinate price increases.
And here we are.
Nine states who were co-plaintiffs with the Antitrust Division against RealPage did not sign on to the settlement, but is there a reason for hope there?
These are the same nine (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon and Tennessee) that just championed an offensive $7 million settlement from the nation’s largest landlord, Greystar.
In that same settlement they also inserted the following wiggle room that would allow the company to keep using RealPage software depending on the decision from the Trump DOJ. Here’s the text from the state’s deal with Greystar:
Greystar may license or use a Revenue Management Product in a Settling State that complies with the terms of an agreed Final Judgment between the United States and RealPage in United States et al. v. RealPage et al…
For the avoidance of doubt, if only a RealPage-U.S. Final Judgment (but not a RealPage-Settling States-Final Judgment) is filed with the court by January 5, 2026, then Greystar may use a Revenue Management Product that complies with a RealPage-U.S. Final Judgment.
Well, the weight of federal antitrust law came down on RealPage like a feather, so it looks like the nation’s largest landlord and all its co-conspirators should be back up and running on tweaked collusion software in no time. And it’s obvious by now that the billionaire crybabies got what they paid for by supporting Trump and demanding that Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter be gone from their respective positions at the heads of the Federal Trade Commission and at the DOJ Antitrust Division (that’s not to assume a Kamala administration would be any better as she was also in the billionaires’ pocket and refused to commit to keeping Khan on).
RealPage, rather than being humbled by the DOJ settlement, looks emboldened. The company, fresh off its gift from the DOJ, is embracing its role as a flag bearer for the movement to equate illegal activity by the economic elite with free speech:
“Price gouging Americans for basic necessities” as a corporation’s First Amendment right, is what it looks like in a corrupt oligarchy where billionaires buy elections to control democracy. https://t.co/cXBFk1K5aU
— Melanie D’Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) November 26, 2025
That’s in addition to the free speech lawsuit the company has already filed against Berkeley, California over its ordinance barring landlords from using AI-driven pricing algorithms to set residential rents.
Additionally, the company continues to go full speed ahead with surveillance pricing and AI. Over the summer RealPage acquired Livble, a service that lets people pay their monthly rent in installments. More from The Verge:
Livble describes itself as a “flexible” rent payment solution. Renters can split payments into up to four installments throughout the month. The service bills itself as helping tenants “avoid late fees and credit card fees” as well as “build credit through rent,” but it charges $30 to $40 per loan…Under the deal, RealPage will integrate Livble into its property management software and will handle “all collections.”
But that’s not all Livble does:
“For underwriting tenants who want to split their rent into installments over the month, Livble uses Plaid’s open banking data.”
Plaid offers an app for people to have more control over their financial data. Really its to facilitate consent to share banking data with 3d parties? pic.twitter.com/FJJWVE0GJz
— Lee Hepner (@LeeHepner) July 28, 2025
RealPage also recently unveiled its Lumina AI Workforce, which it says will feature “intelligent AI agents that work across leasing, operations, facilities, finance, and resident engagement.”
So we’re rapidly moving towards a situation where housing is dominated by Wall Street interests using software that coordinates pricing and has access to your financial data with decisions increasingly being made by AI. And the DOJ just said that’s A-OK.
The festival of pardons that now features prominently in America’s political life offers a measure of how the republic, in its late-imperial phase, is crumbing.
President Donald Trump signing the pardon for the national Thanksgiving turkeys on Nov. 25 in the Oval Office. (White House /Daniel Torok)
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
Wandering among the media over the Thanksgiving weekend….
I read that President Donald Trump announced that he has granted a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, who has been serving one year of a 45–year sentence in a federal prison in West Virginia for running an immense, decades-long cocaine-trafficking operation, in cahoots with some of Latin America’s most notorious drug cartels during his term as president of Honduras.
[Hernández was released from prison on Tuesday.]
Plainly proud of himself, the Trumpster boasted of this act of misplaced mercy on his Truth Social digital site in all caps if you please, “CONGRATULATIONS TO JUAN ORLANDO HERNANDEZ ON YOUR UPCOMING PARDON. MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!” Señora Hernández reportedly wept (happy tears) on hearing her husband will soon be free.
Then on Sunday I read that Trump has commuted the sentence of David Gentile, who was serving a seven-year sentence for his part in a scheme that bilked 10,000 investors of $1.6 billion by — the usual thing — lying about the performance of the funds he operated and covering payouts Ponzi-style.
A commutation and a pardon are not quite the same: In the former case the conviction still stands, in the latter it is erased. But who’s counting? Gentile had reported to prison Nov. 14 and was free after serving less than two weeks of his time.
Back to social media, of course: On Thanksgiving Day Trump’s pardon czar — yes, he has one, named Alice Marie Johnson —declared she was “deeply grateful to see David Gentile heading home to his young children.”
This Alice Marie Johnson, it is fun to know, was convicted of cocaine-trafficking charges in 1996 and had served 21 years of a life sentence when the Trumpster commuted her sentence during his first term.
Alice Johnson during Trump’s State of the Union Address in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 5, 2019. Jared Kushner, advisor to the president, and his wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter, on her right. (White House /Andrea Hanks/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Just as I was gathering my thoughts about the Latin American president who flooded the United States with coke and the private executive who got caught defrauding thousands of unknowing investors and the ex-con managing Trump’s clemency operations, news came that Bibi Netanyahu, who was indicted on corruption charges six years ago, asked Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, to pardon him.
This is a very big banana. The Israeli prime minister stands accused of bribery, fraud and breach of public trust in three separate cases and has been dodging justice, lately by prolonging a genocide, ever since his trials began. As has been well-reported, Netanyahu has long attempted to destroy the Israeli judiciary — its independence and integrity — to pervert the nation’s courts in his favor and, so, avoid a guilty verdict.
Demonstrators in Jerusalem Feb. 13, 2023, join a wave of protests against the government’s plan to curb the power of the judiciary. (Oren Rozen/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
And what did Bibi say in his appeal to Herzog? He must be cleared of all charges, he asserted, for the sake of Israel’s “security and political reality.” O.K., this has been his bedrock argument all along. But then the beyond-belief taker-of-the-cake, a reference to Trump’s recent appeals to Herzog in Netanyahu’s behalf:
“President Trump called for an immediate end to the trial so that I may join him in further advancing vital and shared interests of Israel and the United States.”
Pardons, pardons, commutations, commutations. In mid–October Trump commuted the sentence of George Santos, the short-lived Republican congressman, who was serving seven years for an assortment of fraudulent activities.
A few days later it was Changpeng Zhao, the former chief executive of Binance, a cryptocurrency firm, who was given a brief prison sentence and fined $50 million for using Binance to launder money. Binance — so often there is some kind of back story in these cases —turns out to be involved in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency doings. Trump gave Zhao a full pardon on Oct. 21.
President Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao came shortly after Zhao’s company, Binance, helped catapult the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial, into international recognition. The firm is a major source of the Trump family's fortune. 60 Minutes reports, Show more
Yet more. On Nov. 9 Trump pardoned — preemptively, short of any charges filed — 80 people associated with his efforts to reverse the 2020 election result. In a piece published the following day, Forbes lists eight high-profile figures Trump has pardoned so far in his second term. And there are, of course, those convicted or awaiting trial for crimes committed during the now-famous Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the Capitol. On the day of his inauguration, Jan. 20, 2025, Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people.
Trump’s misuse of his power to pardon, including the clemency extended to war criminals during his first term, is extravagant by any measure. But he is not setting any records by way of numbers.
During his years in the White House Joe Biden pardoned, preemptively pardoned or commuted the sentences of 4,245 people. This figure includes 1,500 commutations and 39 pardons the Biden White House announced on a single day, a little more than a month before he left office. Dec. 9, 2024, now marks a record in this line.
“There’s more of a sense of the insider pardon than we’ve seen previously,” Bernadette Meyler, who professes in constitutional law at Stanford University, told NPR after Trump’s Nov. 9 pardons were announced. Will you give us all a break, Professor? Only a card-carrying liberal could possibly make such an assertion. No one who followed the Biden pardons, starting with his son, Hunter, can take it seriously.
Let’s give these numbers a little historical context. During his first term Trump issued 1,700 pardons or commutations. Obama issued 1,927 during his White House years, George W. Bush 200 and Bill Clinton 459.
If you want to go further back in history: Kennedy, 575; Theodore Roosevelt, 981; Ulysses S. Grant, 1,332; Lincoln, 343. Andrew Johnson extended clemency to 7,650 people, but this included many thousands of former Confederate officials and officers and so must be counted an atypical case.
Something has happened these past two administrations, we have to conclude, and I see two ways to explain it. Both, in my view, reflect the state of our crumbling republic in its late-imperial phase.
One, we live amid the radical breakdown of law and the decay of our foundational institutions. Power is ever more — and ever more unconstitutionally — concentrated in the executive branch, and both of the White House’s most recent inhabitants, Biden no less than Trump, have demonstrated an extravagant disregard for the law.
And as the United States collapses into lawlessness, an obvious domestic crisis also has obvious international dimensions. When Trump announces his intention to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández even as the United States prosecutes an unlawful campaign against “narco-terrorists” and threatens to attack Venezuela on the specious grounds its government is a major drug-trafficker, one or another kind of disorder is the only possible outcome.
“This action would be nothing short of catastrophic,” Mike Vigil, formerly a senior official at the Drug Enforcement Agency, told The New York Times after Trump announced the Hernández pardon, “and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,”
To turn this question another way, would Bibi Netanyahu have cited Trump in his request for a pardon had he, Trump, not made the same appeal — and not backed the Israeli terror machine’s barbaric lawlessness in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in West Asia?
Related to this, there is the progressive sequestration of power that is now evident all around us — certainly in the United States but also among many of its clients, if not most of them. Trump’s pardons and most of Trump’s foreign and security policies betray a supreme indifference to the Constitution and the American electorate and a betrayal of those who voted him into to office.
The exercise of power without reference to its legality, sequestered power and its close cousin, impunity: The festival of pardons that now features prominently in America’s political life is an in-our-faces measures of this. A dysfunction all by itself, the crowded party of pardons is also a symptom of something graver.
Bitter as this may be to recognize, Trump’s regular resort to pardons and commutations also betokens crises that run well beyond the setting free of drug-runners, financial flim-flam artists and assorted other scammers in higher places than they ever ought to be. This is what decline looks like on the ground.
(And there it is: 'the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy'. The ruling class sees Trump as an anomaly, cognitive dissonance prevents them from seeing the truth, that he is their Avatar.)
*****
Trump Goes Full Biden, Insists No Inflation, Affordability a Con as Strained Consumers Know Better and Trump’s Polls Sink Further
Posted on December 3, 2025 by Yves Smith
Sometimes a picture, or in this case a video, is worth 1000 words. But unlike King Canute, who knew his words could not hold back the incoming tide, Trump really seems to believe that his bluster can surmount the reality of more and more middle and lower income consumers feeling the crunch as medical insurance/healthcare, housing, and auto costs keep rising, with little relief on other fronts.
Admittedly, Biden did sit still while a CNN reporter rattled off figures showing that the economy was not in great shape before Biden gave a reflexive denial, as opposed to interrupting her to name call. But the substance is the same:
Biden looks shocked as CNN host Erin Burnett reels off a list of stats detailing how bad the economy is. Biden claims he's already "turned it around" and that every poll showing Americans favouring Trump on the economy is wrong. Full report here: https://t.co/smaN0DjOVD pic.twitter.com/K2wTAwdrse
— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) May 9, 2024
Insultingly, Trump is specifically trying to deny the proposition that his tariffs are making the inflation picture worse. Try telling that to small businesses, many of whom have had to scramble and have had little success in finding domestic alternatives to foreign suppliers. No wonder the word “con” comes so easily from his lips. It’s an exercise in projection.
A new NBER study found that the initial impact of tariffs was to increase the reported rate of inflation by 0.7%. From Money:
The annual inflation rate for August — which was 2.9% — would have been 2.2% without tariffs, the researchers said, putting the U.S. “much closer to the Federal Reserve’s inflation target” of 2%. Instead, the costs for all sorts of everyday items, including goods produced domestically, have gone in the opposite direction due to tariffs.
“Prices began rising immediately after the broader tariff measures announced in early March and continued to increase gradually over subsequent months,” the researchers said.
Labor Department data shows that inflation had been cooling for several consecutive months at the start of the year before Trump implemented broad tariffs.
Note the rate of annual inflation continued to increase, reaching 3.0% in September. And back to Trump’s Biden scapegoating:
To highlight what citizens are upset about when they invoke “affordability,” it is not just the up and downs they’ve experienced in the last year but the trajectory over time. Covid produced a huge cost shock. Even if the increase from there have moderated, the new baseline has strained many households. And those at the top don’t get it, because real solutions call for redistribution, as in a reduction in rentierism, from medical insurance and pharma to car costs to housing to higher education…this list goes on. So the Trumps and Bidens and their minions are reduced to variants of “Let them eat cake” or in Trump’s case, crapified Walmart Thanksgiving packages.
But Trump’s increased lashing out may not be dementia but that this self-imagined Colossus bestride the world finding there are other tides he can’t turn. A new round of poll results show his net disapproval rate continuing to increase. From the New Republic in Only One President Was Less Popular Than Trump Is Right Now: Poll:
CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten….cited a recent Gallup poll that saw Trump’s net approval rating sink to -24 percent from -1 percent in January. “We’re talking about a drop of over 20 points in the wrong direction for the president of the United States,” the analyst said.
The only president who was less popular than Trump at this point in his second term? Richard Nixon, who had an approval rating of -36 points just a few months before he resigned from office. “Anywhere you look this is the second-worst for a president of either party in their second term dating all the way back since the 1940s,” Enten said.
Since the 1940s, Enten said, no president has successfully increased their approval rating by more than five points between this point in their second term and the midterm elections. Unless Trump can “break history,” he can say, “‘See you later!’ to that Republican majority,” Enten cried.
Per The Hill before the Gallup bomb dripped, an average of recent poll results found he was at a mere negative 13 approval. That suggests the Trump decay is accelerating. And The Hill attributed the sorry results to the economy.
But the Administration, lacking the imagination and will to change course, appears to genuinely believe, as did Team Biden, and as we pointed out early on, Obama, that every problem can be solved with better messaging. From the New York Times:
Just this past weekend, Mr. Trump posted a lengthy social media message boosting his efforts to lower prescription drug costs, which concluded: “If this story is properly told, we should win the Midterm Elections in RECORD NUMBERS. I AM THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT. TALK LOUDLY AND PROUDLY!”
Again, the clip at the top shows Trump has retreated from that claim, apparently as too obviously not credible. Later in the Times account:
Members of the administration have also said that as Mr. Trump prepares to ramp up messaging about his affordability agenda in the coming months, they would be careful to avoid the mistakes of Mr. Biden, whose “Bidenomics” messaging fell flat with voters.
Kevin Hassett, a top White House economic adviser, told reporters last month that “Trumponomics works and Bidenomics doesn’t,” and that income growth was notable under Mr. Trump.
He added: “But we understand that people understand as they look at their pocketbooks that go to the grocery store, that there’s still work to do.”
It’s going to be well-nigh impossible for him to apply porcine maquillage to losing Ukraine. Trump might have had a face-saving play in Venezuela, by doing a repeat Iran of obliterating a few military sites and declaring victory. But he’s gone way too far in noisemaking and troop movements to beat an easy retreat. Xi has bested Trump on rare earths. Even though some experts say it was Trump that called Xi over soyabeans rather than Xi over Japan (and the new PM Takaichi may have gotten out over her skis on her own), it further appears that Trump has had to signal to her to tone down the anti-China rhetoric. Even Thailand’s interim Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul stared Trump down. Thailand resumed action at the Thai-Cambodia border after Cambodia mined area that were being patrolled by Thai soldiers (it was confirmed that these mines were new), resulting in one soldier having his foot blown off. Thailand has since taken the matter to the UN.
Trump halted trade talks with Thailand over Thailand allegedly breaking “his” peace deal. Trump and Malaysian prime minister Ibrahim got on the phone with Anutin, presumably for the purpose of further browbeating. But Anutin got Trump to back off and later say he was decoupling the trade talks from the border dispute settlement.
If you can’t push around a country in Southeast Asia, where you are their biggest export market, what kind of superpower are you? Trump is quickly finding out how far (not very) his favorite tricks get him.
Mind you, we have three more years of this to endure, barring unforeseen events. Trump’s propensity is to become more violent in his rhetoric and actions when he is losing. Lord only knows what is in store.
Trump Administration Supporting Bayer at Supreme Court Over Monsanto/Roundup Deal, Savaged by Investors for Wealth Destruction in the Name of Executive Preservation
Posted on December 3, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. The article below describes how Bayer is trying to get out of the Roundup herbicide liability it took on when it acquired Monsanto. Why the Trump Administration is assisting a big German company that knowingly entered into what institutional investors derided as the worst deal ever is beyond me. The kicker here is that Bayer bought Monsanto for entirely executive serving reasons. Bayer was vulnerable to acquisition by pharma giants like Pfizer. It bought Monsanto solely to bulk up so as to be too big to swallow comfortably.
As we explained in our coverage of litigation against Bayer executives, board members, and the investment bankers on the deal, Bayer knew of the Roundup cancer liability risk yet chose to ignore it, because they had studies that pooh-poohed the idea. They persisted with the transaction even after the WHO found that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, was a probably carcinogenic to humans. The Bayer execs convinced themselves that that was not a firm enough finding to put them at legal risk, when US juries found otherwise.
As we explained in a 2020 post:
It isn’t simply that Bayer-Monsanto has replaced AOL-Time Warner in most press reckonings as “the worst deal of all time”. Yes, nearly every penny of the $66 billion that Bayer paid for Monsanto has gone poof. Yes, Bayer is the first time in German corporate history that a public company got a majority vote of no confidence from its shareholders. Yes, Bayer is at risk of bleeding out over seemingly endless Monsanto-related liability claims (Roundup has so taken the center stage that what would ordinarily be a big-deal litigation drain, Dicamba, is treated as an afterthought). Unlike any other company ever facing similar litigation, Bayer has neither taken Roundup off the market, nor reformulated it, nor put a cancer warning on it. It looks like Bayer will eventually declare bankruptcy.
It is that unlike AOL-Time Warner, initially hailed as a brilliant tie-up but quickly went a cropper when the dot-com mania ended, virtually all major analysts and shareholders hated the idea of the deal from the date it was announced, and the business press was just as critical. Monsanto was already recognized as being dependent on Roundup when more and more consumers and experts were concerned about glyphosate risks.
And most important, the deal went ahead for the worst possible reason: Bayer management wanted to bulk up so as not to be acquired. The real motive was to keep current management in place to preserve their lofty pay and high status.
Monsanto was the only major candidate left standing, for the obvious reasons. Both the chemical and the pharma industries had seen decades of consolidation, and Bayer was a tempting target by having little debt and not having kept up with the agglomeration game. When Pfizer’s bid for Allergan fell apart due to an adverse tax ruling, long-standing and highly regarded CEO Marijn Dekkers, who had long opposed the idea of Monsanto deal, suddenly retired. The “two Werners,” Chairman Werner Wenning and the surprise new CEO, Werner Baumann, both of whom had long pushed to buy Monsanto, were in charge and moved forward rapidly with their plan.
Except they couldn’t, save tying an anchor to Bayer in the form of a $2 billion breakup fee. Bayer could do only limited due diligence on Monsanto due to the fact that they were competitors and the acquisition was subject to anti-trust review in the US and Germany. Those assessments usually take months; this one took 24.
In the meantime, Bayer out of obstinancy or ignorance chose to ignore signs that the evidence of glyphosate’s cancer risks were becoming solid enough to kick off a tidal wave of suits.
So what sexual favors were exchanged to get the Trump Team to weigh in on behalf of Bayer? Not that that will cut much ice with the Supremes, but the optics are dodgy, and not just for the obvious “siding with big company peddling toxic weed killers, but for one that additionally thumbed its nose at and destroyed value of the capitalist classes.
By Carey Gillam. Originally published at The New Lede
Bayer, the beleaguered maker of Roundup herbicide, has garnered the support of the US Department of Justice in its court battle to turn back a tide of litigation brought by people claiming the company failed to warn them of cancer risks associated with the weed killers.
In a Dec. 1 filing with the US Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, appointed by the Trump administration in April, told the court that it should take up an appeal from Bayer that the company hopes could help it quash ongoing lawsuits inherited when it bought Monsanto in 2018.
Bayer, which maintains its glyphosate herbicides do not cause cancer, argues that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), which governs the registration, distribution, sale, and use of pesticides in the United States, preempts “failure-to-warn” claims against the company. Because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved labels with no cancer warning, failure-to-warn claims should be barred, the company maintains.
Multiple courts have rejected Bayer’s argument, including two appellate courts, ruling that FIFRA does not preempt failure-to-warn claims, though one appellate court – the Third Circuit Court of Appeals- has sided with Bayer.
A similar effort by Bayer to get the high court to weigh in on the preemption issue was rejected in 2022 after the Biden administration’s Solicitor General asked the high court not to hear Bayer’s appeal on the same issue, saying that “FIFRA does not preempt” such claims.
“Although some aspects of EPA-approved labeling may preempt particular state-law requirements, EPA’s approval of labeling that does not warn about particular chronic risks does not by itself preempt a state-law requirement to provide such warnings,” then-Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the 2022 brief to the Supreme Court. The agricultural industry reacted with outrage at the time, saying Prelogar’s position posed “great risks” to the regulatory system and global food systems.
In contrast, Sauer’s brief to the court this week was closely aligned with Bayer’s arguments, saying the Third Circuit ruling favoring Bayer’s position on preemption “correctly allows EPA to determine on a nationwide basis what warnings must appear on a particular pesticide’s label to avoid an unreasonable risk to human health.” He said given conflicting court rulings on the issue, review by the Supreme Court “is now warranted…”
Sauer also echoed Bayer’s language on Roundup safety: “After careful scientific review and an assessment of hundreds of thousands of public comments, EPA has repeatedly determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans, and the agency has repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings,” the Solicitor General wrote in his brief.
Bayer has paid out more than $11 billion in jury verdicts and settlements but continues to face tens of thousands of lawsuits from people alleging they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma from use of Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides sold by the company. It has told investors for the last few years that getting the Supreme Court to rule in its favor on the preemption issue is a key goal.
Bayer celebrated the support from the administration, issuing a statement on Tuesday saying a positive ruling from the Supreme Court “could help bring the company closer to closure” in the Roundup litigation.
“The support of the US Government is an important step and good news for US farmers, who need regulatory clarity,” Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said in a statement. “The stakes could not be higher as the misapplication of federal law jeopardizes the availability of innovative tools for farmers and investments in the broader US economy.”
Bayer said a ruling from the Supreme Court on the preemption issue could impact other industries as well.
“It is time for the US legal system to establish that companies cannot be punished under state laws for complying with federal label requirements,” Bayer said.
Kelly Ryerson, co-executive director of American Regeneration and a leading lobbyist in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement that the Trump administration says it supports, was furious at the Justice Department move.
“MAHA voters chose this administration because they were tired of watching captured regulators sign off on chemicals that are poisoning their families, not because they wanted Washington to hand pesticide giants a liability shield,” Ryerson said.
“President Trump specifically promised to address the harms from pesticides. This move to support the Supreme Court in hearing Bayer’s case for federal preemption of state laws that protect our safety could not stray further from that promise he made to American citizens,” she added.
The Roundup litigation began in 2015 after the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, reviewed years of independent research on glyphosate and Roundup, and found the weed killer to be a “probable human carcinogen.”
Alongside its path through the courts, Bayer has also been pushing for new state and federal legislation that would effectively preempt lawsuits based on failure-to-warn claims.
Why MAGA Is Not Working Class: An Interview with John Bellamy Foster
By John Bellamy Foster (Posted Dec 03, 2025)
Originally published: OttolinaTV (more by OttolinaTV)
Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster was recently interviewed on Italy’s OttolinaTV. Read the accompanying note below, and watch a video of the conversation here.
In this first part of a two-part interview with Prof. John Bellamy Foster, we analyze the MAGA phenomenon from a materialist perspective, highlighting the main social composition of the classes that form the base of support for the trumpian regime. John Bellamy Foster begins by rejecting the idealist categories through which, in the West, the concept of fascism has come to be analyzed—referring back to another video we published on the channel during the Fest8lina event in July ’25, where we addressed the topic with prof. Gabriel Rockhill. Instead, Foster proposes a classical analysis of the fascist phenomenon, locating its nature in the social composition of the classes that constitute its foundation. In the current historical period, this consists of an alliance between monopoly capital (including the decisive role of Big Tech) and what Foster calls the “lower middle class.” This class is marked by contradictory elements and has historically been used by ruling classes for reactionary purposes. However, Foster avoids what we might call a reductionist economic determinism: the task of an emancipatory political subject would be to develop a mass line capable of speaking, on the one hand, to the working classes and, on the other, to this increasingly impoverished lower middle class, in order to pull it away from the hegemonic project of big capital. The complexity of this task is evident, yet it becomes possible insofar as one works on the internal contradictions of this class. The interview ends with a brief analysis of Zohran Mamdani’s success in the New York City mayoral elections. Regardless of debates concerning the actual authenticity of Mamdani as a figure (Foster seems to regard him as genuine), the fact that the capital of the empire can be won on a platform centered on the material demands of ordinary people shows that a return to materialism is a necessary—if not sufficient— condition for the victory of a truly emancipatory political project.
He's corrent on that 'lower middle class' thing. At a rightwing rally I attended years ago(opposition research!) the majority of the atendees appeared to be lower/middle management, franchise owners and marginally successful tradesmen. And think back to those original Trump rallies; ya think those fleets of RVs were owned by workers?
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
Hook, line and sinker...
******
Trump’s MAGA crisis: Is MTG making moves or calling it quits?
Joaquin Flores
December 4, 2025
Whatever comes next will not be quiet, and it will not be unseen, because this is the art of theater in American politics.
Nothing is like American politics with its over the top drama, drawing in the world’s attention, for how could it not, because love it or hate it, it is the gleaming star-spangled unfolding story of the collapse of globalism, and the country’s great reorientation carries all the shades of theater, every human story of betrayal and destruction. It is impossible to look away when the stakes reach every corner of the planet. So when a U.S. congresswoman and MAGA darling like Marjorie Taylor Greene breaks with President Donald Trump and announces she will resign from Congress, we confront the question: Is this the end Greene’s career, the end of MAGA, a civil war inside it, or a robust opportunity for MTG to make moves?
Could MTG be aiming at national politics, or will she turn her ambitions on Georgia’s gubernatorial elections? Will Trump nebulously vacillate between populist and oligarchic forces only to face being triangulated out in a failed gambit to balance contending class interests where an America First economic plan cannot deliver? Will Trump, in the end reconcile with MTG as he did with Elon Musk, or will he alienate a large part of his base?
The long brewing political crisis within MAGA surrounding Epstein, Israel, and later Charlie Kirk’s assassination had foreshadowed Greene’s announcement, and so it hit like confirmation that MAGA was irreparably divided. Democrats are surely eyeing the possibility of mid-term gains and a chance to retake the House, since pessimism with the state of the economy remains high. Greene has been flooded with both push-back and support but either way, “there is no such thing as bad publicity”, or so the saying goes. She still has control over her narrative and this equals political capital.
It is also said that nothing in politics is coincidental, and while Greene might just be out, this controversy could also wind up being an opportunity for her to ride the clout-wave to ever greater heights. The policy fights at the root of the MTG row with Trump so well align with the the so-called MAGA civil war that the opportunity here would be strange to squander. But what is motivating MTG and what is behind the conflict that makes these MAGA policy issues so volatile? Is this really a MAGA civil war or rather populist MAGA forces running up against the entrenched corporate and Zionist interests that have dominated Republican politics for decades?
The MAGA that MTG joined was the insurgent populist wave that broke through wherever the political terrain allowed, and that opening happened inside the Republican Party a few years ago, despite nonstop efforts by the old-guard to suppress the uprising and restore the party to Wall Street austerity and neoconservative geopolitics. Trump is seen as too moderate or compromising with the very status quo whose legitimacy crisis was the key to his own success; and therein lays the whole tension.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks alongside President Donald Trump at a campaign event in Rome, Georgia, on March 9, 2024. | Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images
But is Greene truly finished with Trump or with the movement as a whole? MAGA is often wrongly treated as a catch-all label for anyone who supports Trump, but the long understood reality of non-MAGA Trump voters became the subject of a November 28th Politico piece and poll showing, “More than half of Trump’s voters last year — 55 percent — describe themselves as MAGA, but a critical 38 percent do not.”
MAGA vs. Neoconservatives on Vax, Israel, Globalism, and the EU
After Trump began reshaping Republican politics toward the end of the teens, many standard neocon Republicans who had opposed him realized that fighting him was a losing strategy and gradually shifted into public support. By the 20’s this produced a broader conservative social-media influencer world outside of MAGA’s own that became “Conservative Inc.” or the “Sometimes Trumpers,” combining big-business donor interests, AIPAC networks, and a social-media influencer ecosystem, wrapped in a MAGA banner. They have culture-war themes that overlap with parts of the MAGA domestic agenda, yet they consistently downplay or individualize the deeper socioeconomic crisis that has crushed the American working and middle class which MAGA on the other hand pays close attention to, overlapping with a once uniquely Democrat constituency, and therefore part of its potency and strategic significance.
Neoconservatism has only survived by performing a weak imitation of MAGA, with lifelong Never-Trumpers rebranding themselves as Sometimes-Trumpers and now loudly professing loyalty as Always-Trumpers, even though their politics remain far closer to Netanyahu or Nikki Haley, and guided by pundits like Ben Shapiro. Trump often appears to satiate their narratives with his saber rattling threats aimed at Iran, Hamas, Venezuela, or more recently Nigeria. But what he does in the end often leaves the war hawks deflated and let down.
MAGA as MTG embodies it aligns with working-class issues in both the social and economic spheres and sees them as inseparable, pursuing tariffs, tighter immigration rules, reindustrialization, investment from partners into America, and a national-mercantilist trade posture. Healthcare and affordable housing remain battleground issues with Democrats who once saw this as their sovereign domain. Trump enigmatically sustains MAGA, named MAGA, but is also distinct from it, suggesting MAGA was something that Trump either discovered or brought together from parts of the silent majority.
Trump Caught Between People and Power
The underlying tension beneath Trump’s politics is simply that the populist mandate he was elected to fulfill comes up against his own need to align support from among the oligarchy. Whether or not Trump is compromised, was always acting poor faith, or instead is going to fulfill his electoral mandate and deliver on core MAGA promises remains to be seen, or at least so the debate goes. Trump and the MAGA phenomenon were under tremendous and real persecution for many years, faced a witch hunt in the form law fare and the politicization of the justice system against Trump during his first term and during the Biden administration. Trump supporters were ostracized on social media, deplatformed, censored, doxed and even de-banked. Politically Trump survived these attacks thanks to his broad base of support and his base experiencing these attacks alongside him, and through this a sort of bond was created.
If Trump betrays this bond and becomes defined by protecting the system of the old-guard in some pragmatic deal-making sense, leaving his MAGA base behind, our modern day Crassian opportunists and Optimate forces will then attack Trump once he’s isolated. Trump then to avoid this may be pushed to support the ‘national left’ defining the MAGA base on populist measures.
MAGA from the start was engaged in a two-front war, against the Zionist Christian right and Wall Street business conservatism. They pursued this conflict not by opposing Christianity or business in principle, but by steering these away from Zionist and Globalist end goals. On the economic front MAGA confronted the pro-corporate and anti-worker program of the neocons, not with old-style class-struggle leftism, but with a trans-class approach that linked business and labor to the joint outcomes for the nation. The other front targeted the Zionist Christian bloc, which had supported some domestic issues like abortion and culture war matters, but tied those to a Zionist outlook that compelled the forever wars MAGA opposes.
Trump often straddles these MAGA positions with oligarchic interests towards national economic growth, which does not present an inherent problem. But in the balance of striking this New Deal of sorts, this great renegotiation of the social contract which only the present moment brings to the table, there are conflicts over the details, in the commitments, in the burdens that will be bore and by whom. Foreign policy is not immune from this tension either. Trump’s pro-Netanyahu rhetoric at times and endorsement of censorship on the war on Gaza at American universities strongly conflicted with core MAGA views. MTG represents the MAGA pole very publicly, and demonstrating where it overlaps with some populist-left Democrat views, with The Guardian covering her joint statement with democratic socialist Bernie Sanders condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Trump does tend to deliver in the end, pulling the rabbit out of the hat, though not always, but nevertheless his zig-zagging course always produces discontent, despair, even the dreaded disengagement. MTG serves a role in maintaining coherency within this conflicted narrative, so it only makes sense that capable parties would be dropping the ball if they were not operationalizing it.
MTG maintains MAGA cohesiveness where Trump appears conflicted
Trump now faces something like a Caesarian conundrum during the period of the First Triumvirate, pulled by competing interests inside and outside the trans-class coalition, as he tries to manage crises that the old Republican and Democrat guard created.
The neocon old-guard appropriated the MAGA identity in order to steer Trump back toward their agenda. Whether Trump has resisted this, enabled it, or merely allowed the impression to persist is debatable, but many working and middle class MAGA Americans who MTG has aligned with believe reforms are arriving too slowly and see Trump’s entanglement with tech oligarchs and Zionists as either the source or the byproduct of that problem.
What’s huge in all of this is that MTG gives MAGA disappointment with Trump some coherence, consistency, and a narrative that reflects disaffection in the base, but also a sense of direction and purpose, which cuts against the real crisis of voter apathy. MTG can keep support for MAGA coherent while Trump weaves his ‘Art of the Deal’ in ways that cost him with his base, at least initially.
MTG’s brand remains strong, and she is not in political decline. What looks like impulsive conflict, chaos, or infighting is often political theater by design, part of a broader spectacle that pulls ever larger audiences into a kind of Baudrillardian hyper-reality where myth and fact blend together, creating a narrative that feels complete in its own right, even as it blurs the line between truth and fiction.
Being in a strong position with expanding visibility and reach, the idea that she would suddenly decide to quit politics simply does not make sense. The issue inspiring the row is even less convincing, since while it reflects broader structural problems it’s hardly anyone’s hill to die on. The dispute centered on H-1B visas, where Trump is thought to have made limited concessions in order to keep relations with China and India on stable footing, while also satisfying employers in key domestic sectors who depend on the lower labor costs that these foreign specialists are willing to accept. MAGA was simultaneously slapped in the face when Trump’s team floated a 50-year mortgage, seemingly for people who do not understand how interest-rate math actually works.
Newsweek reported on the centrality of these issues a few weeks ago in vox populi fashion, quoting some ostensible MAGA influencers: “Matt Morse, an “America First” content creator and commentator, called the interview “catastrophic for Trump”. He wrote on X: “Whoever’s in Trump’s inner-circle that’s been telling him that we need more H-1B visas, 50 year mortgages, and 600,000 Chinese students needs to be FIRED IMMEDIATELY. AMERICA FIRST.”
Morse later followed up: “I am one of the largest pro-Trump commentators in the nation. I get tens of millions of views every single month talking about Trump’s America First agenda. And right now, I’m absolutely f****** beyond P***** OFF that tonight, as a justification for H-1B visas, Trump said that Americans don’t ‘have talent.’ Absolutely unreal.”
This seems like an easy to resolve problem if MTG and MAGA make noise about it and it draws enough attention. It is symbolic of a larger issue but still offers Trump an easy out in the form of an Executive Order or similar.
The 2026 Factor
It’s fair to say that MTG is making moves because she’s too well positioned not to. MTG’s November 4th appearance on The View, followed by Trump’s withdrawal of endorsement on November 14th, and culminating with the House’s near-unanimous Epstein files vote on November 18th (427-1), all work very strongly for her strategy. The surface narrative appears straightforward enough with MTG publicly lamenting the slow pace of change within the MAGA movement, criticizing the dominance of grifters, and expressing frustration that her loyalty has gone unreciprocated. Her later rhetoric in response to Trump’s withdrawal about refusing to be a “battered wife” carries emotional weight that seems authentic and appeals to a certain female demographic in the state of Georgia that may swing Democrat or Republican.
How would all of this make sense if someone could make a winning game plan out of these facts? MTG has national attention, but most effectively it could be turned back on Georgia.
Georgia’s gubernatorial race opens in 2026, with Brian Kemp termed out and the field wide open. MTG represents Georgia’s 14th district, a deeply red territory, but a governorship requires appealing to suburban Atlanta voters who swing elections. Can her current positioning, combining patriotic messaging with working-class economic concerns typically associated with the left, be calibrated for a statewide audience? The question becomes more intriguing when we note that Democrat Stacey Abrams might run again, creating the need for a populist Republican who can speak to crossover voters and women who Abrams will pick up if the GOP instead errors and opts to back a neocon establishment conservative figure like Kemp.
Biden won Georgia in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes which Trump contests to this day, and the state remains fundamentally purple, requiring Republicans to activate and expand the base, which MTG no doubt does. Kemp, though endorsed by Trump a few years prior, joined the anti-Trump alliance in 2020 with Pence and pushed back against the president’s appeals to challenge the outcomes. With MTG as governor, she could help guard against irregular election procedures working against the Trump machine in 2028, whoever the candidate may be.
Looking toward the midterm elections we see that if MTG drops out of politics entirely when she resigns from the House in January, she has done nothing with the political capital she has earned, her strong record, and her recent exposure to the Democrat base that watches The View.
The only mar on her record would be that she abandoned constituents by quitting politics. This is only redeemable if she is doing so to pursue higher office and has greater power to deliver. If she pursues the Georgia governorship, her recent moves make more sense as pre-campaign positioning. Creating distance from Trump from the economic left, while maintaining the America First message, allows her to appeal to Trump-skeptical suburbanites without alienating the base. When the time comes, Trump can reconcile with MTG as he did with Musk when it comes to 2028.
In the end the question is whether the forces now shaping American politics can be steered by those at its center. MTG may play her cards or not, Trump may recalibrate or collapse, and MAGA may fracture or continue to be a driving force in Trump’s base. What is clear is that the struggle over America’s direction is no longer abstract, and Trump has less than a year to prevent his party from defeat. MTG has tremendous political capital and whether by design or eventuality, Trump will probably come to invest in it. Whatever comes next will not be quiet, and it will not be unseen, because this is the art of theater in American politics.
President Maduro Reveals Details of Respectful Call With Trump
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro (C), Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: PP
December 4, 2025 Hour: 8:58 am
The Venezuelan leader urges state-to-state dialogue as a path toward peace.
During a visit to communal governments in Miranda state on Wednesday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro revealed details of the “respectful and cordial” phone conversation he held with U.S. President Donald Trump last week.
The Venezuelan leader advocated for state-to-state dialogue as a path toward peace and diplomacy amid growing threats and the U.S. military buildup near Venezuela’s coast.
Maduro said the call was initiated by the White House and emphasized his commitment to diplomatic prudence, which he said he learned during his years as foreign minister and under the guidance of Commander Hugo Chavez, who taught him discretion in matters of great importance.
“When important things are happening, silence prevails until they occur,” the Bolivarian leader said, adding that diplomacy would be welcome if the call signals progress toward respectful dialogue between Venezuela and the United States.
Even with the psychological terrorism that the #US has applied towards #Venezuela and its territory, the people have not weakened in the slightest and remain strong, affirms Venezuelan President #NicolasMaduro#teleSUR pic.twitter.com/Tvm5DNwzRa
— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) December 1, 2025
“The U.S. — its people, its youth — are tired of endless wars,” Maduro said, recalling that the collective psychology of the American people has been shaped by the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
In this context, Maduro invoked the spirit of the “United Liberating Army of the 21st Century,” saying the struggle for sovereignty and independence remains alive.
He recounted Venezuela’s historic resistance during its emancipation, referencing a letter written by Spanish Gen. Pablo Morillo to the king of Spain. In the letter, Morillo expressed concern over the tenacity of the Venezuelan people in the face of colonization, referring to them as “determined beasts.”
“Not only were the Spanish unable to subdue us, but we expelled them from all of South America together with our Colombian, Panamanian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Argentine, Uruguayan, Chilean and Bolivian brothers,” Maduro said, highlighting the figure of Liberator Simon Bolivar as “a genius of unity, of overcoming intrigue and divisionism — a genius in building multiple army corps.”
Addressing Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, the Venezuelan president emphasized that Bolivar was able to command seven army corps simultaneously “without WhatsApp, without telephones, without satellites,” and managed “to pulverize thousands of men better armed than we were, men the king of Spain sent on hundreds of ships to subdue us.”
“They could not defeat us then, and they never will,” Maduro said, referring to the current international climate surrounding Venezuela.
Funny, Trump said the phone call was bad, it was a phone call. Guess he hates history lessons, he wasn't happy with Putin's history either. 'Ignorance is bliss'.
Trump’s Intervention Undermined Legitimacy of Honduran Elections: AAJ
U.S. President Donald Trump. X/ @CMonteroOficial
December 4, 2025 Hour: 8:01 am
Legal observers warn of external interference and risks to democratic stability.
On Wednesday, the observation mission of the American Association of Jurists (AAJ) released a preliminary report on its work during Honduras’ general elections, concluding that U.S. President Donald Trump’s interference “has thrown the democratic legitimacy of the process into crisis.”
“This mission highlights the extreme gravity of external intervention in the Honduran electoral process, particularly the statements made by the U.S. President Donald Trump and the Argentine President Javier Milei, which have thrown the democratic legitimacy of the process into crisis and constitute a flagrant violation of the Honduran people’s right to self-determination,” the AAJ said.
In the days before the elections, through messages posted on social networks, Trump and Milei openly supported the right-wing candidates Salvador Nasralla (National Party), and Nasry Asfura (Liberal Party).
The U.S. president even conditioned his economic support on a victory for the Honduran oligarchy and said he would pardon the former Honduran President Jose Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced in the United States to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking — a promise he ultimately fulfilled.
Trump’s Former Campaign Manager Assisted Honduran Presidential Candidate https://t.co/DgkkMuvnSt
— Nancy Willing (@NancyWilling1) December 4, 2025
“The AAJ reiterates its rejection of foreign interference in the Honduran electoral process and urges states and international actors to fully respect Honduran sovereignty, reaffirming the inalienable right of the Honduran people to determine their own destiny without external pressure,” the organization said in the report presented to the National Electoral Council (CNE).
Regarding the dissemination of results from last Sunday’s general elections through the Preliminary Electoral Results Transmission system (TREP), the AAJ said the system “accounts for partial projections that may distort perceptions of the final election result, and the publication of the tally representing 100 percent of the records” from the Voting Reception Boards (JRV) must be awaited.
The mission reported incidents “related to implementation of the biometric system, difficulties with connectivity (irregular in some polling centers) for its correct operation, and problems affecting fingerprint and facial identification of older adults who went to the polling stations.”
The electoral observers also expressed their “deep concern over the leaks that occurred within the CNE, which were detailed ut supra and may distort the legitimacy of the electoral process.”
Trump really said: ‘vote for the right wing candidate in Honduras and I will pardon his convicted drug-dealer friend and ally’.
The “War on Narco-terrorism” is a complete scam. pic.twitter.com/PPwZorYTwe
— Samuel (@resisres) November 29, 2025
The AAJ referred to leaked audio attributed to electoral councilor Cossette Lopez (linked to the opposition National Party), “which revealed a scheme of bribes aimed at affecting the functioning of the TREP, obstructing the distribution of electoral materials, disrupting the operation of the TREP, and influencing sectors of the military to produce an institutional breakdown.”
The American Association of Jurists called for “absolute transparency by the CNE at all stages of the process and in the final tally being carried out during this period, in order to preserve social peace, institutional transparency, the political rights of the Honduran people and democratic stability.”
Rixi Moncada, the presidential candidate of the Liberty and Refoundation (Libre) Party, has claimed that an “electoral coup” is underway due to technical irregularities, media manipulation and unprecedented external interference in recent Latin American history.
The results released by the TREP, which the Libre party does not recognize, show a virtual technical tie between the candidates of the so-called bipartisan system representing the Honduran oligarchy: Nasralla and Asfura. Moncada is placed in third position, with about 19 percent of the vote.
Under Honduras’ Electoral Law, the CNE has 30 days after the election to issue a ruling declaring the official winner of the presidential contest, a deadline that expires on Dec. 30.
The knives are out for the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The leaks from the Pentagon about him will continue until Hegseth is gone.
The officers do not want a boss who is giving illegal orders while scapegoating the generals and soldiers who follow them:
At the White House on Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, read a statement that said Mr. Hegseth had authorized the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, “to conduct these kinetic strikes.”
She said that Admiral Bradley had “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”
Bradly gets pushed forward to take the beating while Hegseth and Trump claim innocence:
Bradley will have the chance to address outstanding issues about the strikes when he speaks with lawmakers Thursday behind closed doors. Some lawmakers have said the Trump administration appears to be making Bradley into something of a scapegoat.
“Looks like they’re throwing him under the bus,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), often a critic of the administration, “but these kinds of decisions go all the way to the top.”
Adm. Bradley had the poor choice of following an illegal order or getting fired.
In my recent piece abut U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean I suggested that the head of Southern Command, Adm. Alvin Holsey, was made to retire because he rejected orders to kill survivors of U.S attacks:
On the very same day those survivors were rescued, October 16, the DoD announced that the head of its Southern Command was ‘stepping down’: ..
…
It now seems clear that Admiral Holsey got fired for not following Hegseth’s illegal order and for ordering the rescue of the survivors of the strike.
A piece in today’s Wall Street Journal confirms this impression:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shocked official Washington in mid-October when he announced that the four-star head of U.S. military operations in the Caribbean was retiring less than a year into his tenure.
But according to two Pentagon officials, Hegseth asked Adm. Alvin Holsey to step down, a de facto ouster that was the culmination of months of discord between Hegseth and the officer. It began days after President Trump’s inauguration in January and intensified months later when Holsey had initial concerns about the legality of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, according to former officials aware of the discussions.
Hegseth has now claimed (archived) to have not seen no survivors when he was in the room watching the stream of a second strike happening that killed survivors of an allegedly smuggling boat:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that “a couple of hours” passed before he was made aware that a September military strike he authorized and “watched live” required an additional attack to kill two survivors, further distancing himself from an incident now facing congressional inquiry.
…
“I did not personally see survivors,” he said in response to a reporter’s question, “… because that thing was on fire and was exploded, and fire, smoke, you can’t see anything. You got digital, there’s — this is called the fog of war.”
That, however, contradicts the original reporting of the issue. The Washington Post wrote (archived) that Hegseth was watching the video stream when survivors of a strike were clearly visible and was aware of the order to kill them:
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
The NY Times reports further details (archived):
Before the Trump administration began attacking people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors, according to multiple U.S. officials.
The military would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless, shipwrecked and out of what the administration considered a fight. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the United States deemed to be a hostile action, like communicating with suspected cartel members, the officials said.
After the smoke cleared from a first strike on Sept. 2, there were two survivors, and one of them radioed for help, the U.S. officials said. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the operation, ordered a follow-up strike and both were killed.
The reasoning is ludicrous. Survivors of a murderous strike are to be rescued. But survivors who call for help to be rescued have to be killed:
Under the plans Mr. Hegseth had approved, Admiral Bradley interpreted the purported communications between the initial survivors and colleagues as meaning that the survivors were still in the fight, rather than shipwrecked and helpless people whom it would be a war crime to target.
The whole legal construct behind these strikes is obviously nonsense:
The Pentagon’s defense of its actions rests heavily on the premise that there was a “fight” in the first place. In defending the campaign of summary killings at sea as lawful, the administration has relied on Mr. Trump’s disputed determination that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that people suspected of smuggling drugs for them are “combatants.”
A still-secret memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel accepts Mr. Trump’s claims about the nature of drug cartels and that there is an armed conflict. Based on that premise, it concludes that the boat strikes are lawful.
One of its key related conclusions, according to people who have read it, is that suspected cargos of drugs aboard boats are lawful military targets because cartels could otherwise sell them and use the profits to buy military equipment to sustain their alleged war efforts.
The Pentagon’s emphasis on the purported radio communications appears to rely on that logic. The idea appears to be that without a second strike, another boat could have come to retrieve not only the survivors but also any of the alleged shipment of cocaine that the first blast did not burn up, so calling for help was a hostile act.
The OLC memo is intentionally confusing cause and effect.
People and cartels are greedy. They sell drugs to make money. Whatever arms they may have are used in support of that primary aim. They are in business, not in an ‘armed conflict’. They do not to fight wars for lebensraum or ideologically reasons:
A broad range of legal experts reject the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s claim that this is an armed conflict. They say that there is no armed conflict, that crews of boats suspected of smuggling drugs are civilians, not combatants, and that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have been giving illegal orders to commit murder.
Hegseth has given orders to murder civilians. If this were an ‘armed conflict’ Hegseth would have committed a war crime.
Or, as conservative commentator George Will scathingly remarks (archived:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.
Pete Hegseth has long argued for more brutal wars, for more unfair fights to satisfy his inner psychopath:
In books and on television, Hegseth argued for years that U.S. military leaders should relax rules for American forces, allowing them to fight unburdened by concerns of future courts-martial. More freedom to operate, he insisted, and less regulation by military lawyers would make troops more lethal and effective, and could be justified under the laws of war.
…
Hegseth’s views were shaped by his own experience in the Army. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005, in the northern city of Samarra, which was a counterinsurgency hotbed. The regiment’s Charlie Company, which included Hegseth, employed such aggressive tactics that it was referred to by some soldiers as the Kill Company [archived]. Four of its soldiers were later court-martialed on charges of killing unarmed Iraqis. Three of them were convicted; one case was thrown out on appeal.
Hegseth has cited a JAG briefing on “legal and proper engagement” that he says he and fellow troops received when they deployed. Hegseth says his soldiers were told they couldn’t fire on an armed man unless it was clear he posed a threat.
Hegseth pulled his platoon aside and told them to ignore the legal advice. “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains,” he says he told them, according to his 2024 book “The War on Warriors.” “Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat.”
Hegseth brought such convictions to the Pentagon. In February, when he fired the top JAGs, he said they could be potential “roadblocks” to lawful orders “given by a commander in chief.”
Defense Secretary Hegseth’s inherent brutality is likely the reason why he got hired for his position:
Trump selected Hegseth as defense secretary partly because of his views on loosening the rules of engagement, two people familiar with the presidential transition said.
It is high time for Congress to rein both men in.
Posted by b on December 4, 2025 at 09:24 UTC | Permalink
Resistance builds within the United States against Trump’s drive to war with Venezuela
As Trump continues to lodge threats against the Bolivarian Republic, US Congress and grassroots movements mobilize to stop a new war.
December 05, 2025 by Devin B. Martinez
Billboard up in New York City against the US threats against Venezuela. Photo: The People's Forum
The US government has continued to accelerate its drive to war with Venezuela. While rumors circulate about phone calls and possible talks between US President Donald Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in tandem, the US head of state has continued to launch bizarre and illegal threats and accusations against the South American nation. On Saturday, November 29, Trump unilaterally declared that Venezuelan airspace was closed, despite international law stipulating that only Venezuela has authority over the airspace above its territory and that air traffic above Venezuela has since continued.
While Trump, his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have claimed land strikes and “action” against Venezuela could begin imminently and that the country should be on alert, as of now, only the aerial attacks on vessels in the Caribbean have continued. To date, the US missile strikes on boats in the Caribbean have killed at least 83 people. Washington claims they were trafficking drugs, without providing evidence.
The unprecedented military buildup in the region now consists of aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), F-35 fighter jets, at least eight war ships, and 15,000 US troops, as well as coordinated US military activity in Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Dominican Republic.
Despite Trump’s brazen appetite for war, it appears that public opinion in the United States is against Trump’s escalation against Venezuela. A recent poll conducted by CBS News/YouGOV found that 70% of people in the US would oppose the US taking military action in Venezuela. At the same time, some, albeit limited, bipartisan initiatives have been taken in Congress to attempt to use congressional authority to block Trump from taking military action. From the legislature down to the grassroots movements, opposition to a US war on the Caribbean nation is growing.
Pressure mounts in Congress against Trump’s threats of war
As the Trump cabinet prepares for fresh international law violations, they are already feeling the backlash of ones already committed. Committees in US Congress have reportedly launched investigations into US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for crimes related to missile strikes on boats in the Caribbean, in which the order was reportedly to “kill everybody”.
“These are serious charges, and that’s the reason we’re going to have special oversight,” said Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as reported by PBS.
The mounting scrutiny follows a Washington Post report that details Hegseth’s direction to strike a bombed boat a second time, called a “double tap” strike, even as survivors clung to the edge of the burning vessel. In addition to the investigation, several congressional democrats are calling for Hegseth’s resignation.
When questioned about the targeting of boat strike survivors in an interview with The Hill on December 2, Trump distanced himself from the order and Hegseth blamed Admiral Mitch Bradley for the second strike.
“I moved on to my next meeting. A couple hours later I learned that that commander had made the … correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,” said Hegseth.
Adding to the pressure on Hegseth in particular, the Pentagon’s inspector general released a report on Thursday, December 4, concluding that the defense secretary violated department rules and put US forces at risk when he used a signal chat to share details of airstrikes on Yemen back in April.
The renewed scrutiny comes after a bipartisan coalition in both the Senate and the House attempted to check the US president’s ability to carry out deadly strikes in the Caribbean through the War Powers Act.
As opposition continues to build in the legislature, grassroots movements are also mobilizing against the US war drive on Venezuela.
As threat of war grows, so does the people’s resistance
In the same CBS/YouGov poll, 75% of people in the US said that the government needs to show evidence that the boats it is bombing are carrying drugs. Only 13% of Americans believe that Venezuela is a “major threat” to US national security.
“The Trump administration is wildly out of step with public opinion as he threatens to initiate a new forever war with the aim of looting Venezuela’s vast oil resources,” said Brian Becker, National Director of the ANSWER coalition.
After Trump declared Venezuelan airspace to be “closed”, claiming that land strikes would begin “very soon”, a coalition of organizations, including the ANSWER coalition, The Peoples Forum, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and others, announced a national day of action on December 6. According to a press release by the coalition, over 50 cities will host protest actions under the slogan “No war on Venezuela – Stop the war before it starts”.
“The Trump Administration’s repeated strikes in the Caribbean have shocked the world as brazen violations of international law,” the coalition asserts.
“Now, Trump is openly threatening to escalate his aggression to land strikes on Venezuelan territory – an unmistakable act of war. This could easily spiral into a ‘boots on the ground’ invasion, and lead to catastrophic death and destruction.”
Organizers expect the day of action to be a “powerful display of the mass opposition” to the US war drive against the Bolivarian nation.
In the wake of decades-long US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the growing resistance in Congress and the streets shows that the people of the United States refuse to be dragged into yet another imperialist disaster.
Trump’s ‘peace plan’ is a war plan for Ukraine
December 4, 2025 Lev Koufax
President Trump with defense and commerce officials, Aug. 26. The proposed Ukraine framework reflects the merger of military strategy and economic interests — ensuring continued war profiteering under the guise of peace.
In late 2025, the Trump White House rolled out a new “28-point plan” to end the war in Ukraine. Far from a serious bid for peace, the proposal is designed to lock in NATO’s gains, give the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev time to regroup, and blame Russia when the fighting resumes.
Under Trump’s peace farce, the borders would be frozen along the current line of contact in an immediate ceasefire. Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea would officially be recognized as Russian territory. The plan also requires Ukraine to constitutionally commit to not joining NATO.
At first glance, this seems reasonable. However, the plan also calls for a Ukrainian standing army of 600,000 troops, Ukrainian EU membership, and security guarantees from the United States. In practice, this is NATO by another name. It allows for continued military investment and gives the West an open check for new provocations against Russia.
Russia’s strategic objectives
Washington portrays Russia’s intervention as the first step in a new Napoleonic or Hitler-style march across Europe. Western media depict Putin and the Russian people as power-hungry aggressors bent on rebuilding the czarist empire. This caricature has nothing to do with reality.
Russia is a capitalist state with its own interests, but it did not choose this war in a vacuum. For three decades, NATO has expanded eastward, ringing Russia with bases and missile systems and backing a hard-right regime in Kiev that waged war on the people of Donbass. Russia’s 2022 intervention was, above all, a response to this encirclement.
From the outset, Russian leaders have named four main objectives in Ukraine: to demilitarize the country, to break the power of fascist formations like the Azov battalion, to protect the people of Donetsk and Luhansk from state terror, and to ensure that Ukraine is permanently neutral — not a NATO bridgehead on Russia’s border.
Since the fascist Maidan coup of 2014, Ukraine has received massive Western arms shipments and training. Neo-Nazi formations have been folded into the regular military and security services. The regime has torn down Soviet monuments, outlawed communist organizations, attacked unions, and elevated Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a national hero. For the people of Donbass, this has meant years of shelling, blockade, and repression.
In this context, Russia’s insistence on a neutral Ukraine and real security guarantees is not “imperial ambition,” but a refusal to accept a permanent NATO forward base on its doorstep — a price Russian society has already paid for in lives and hardship.
Why offer a plan Russia cannot accept?
The U.S. proposed this knowing it contained provisions that Russia could never accept. Russian acceptance of this plan would arguably put them in a worse strategic position than when the war began. The Ukrainian army would be over twice the size it was in 2022. The Ukrainian government would remain a hardline right-wing U.S. puppet regime.
While technically keeping Ukraine out of NATO, this provision is in name only. The security guarantees did not exist when this war began. Why would Russia accept a stronger U.S. military alliance with Ukraine? This merely sets up another conflict down the road.
Russia has been clear from the beginning, it cannot allow a NATO military bridgehead on its western border. This peace plan would, de facto, establish such a bridgehead. It also allows for massive U.S. economic investment in Ukraine for rare earth mining, natural gas pipelines, and infrastructure projects. Deepened U.S. control over Ukraine’s economy is not a path to peace; it’s one of the very conditions Russia set out to prevent.
So, why propose this plan when Russia clearly cannot accept it? It’s hard to say exactly, but the most likely reason is rhetorical positioning. Washington puts forward a proposal that appears “reasonable” to a public worn down by war. When Russia refuses, the U.S. blames Moscow as the sole obstacle to peace and uses that propaganda to justify more weapons, more funding, and more escalation.
Now, there is another possibility – even if remote. It is possible that Trump and the generals and billionaires around him truly believe they can enforce this plan on Russia through economic warfare. Russia has faced crippling sanctions since the start of the war, with little impact. Through industrial war mobilization and deepened economic ties with China and the Global South, Russia has consistently circumvented most of the West’s sanctions.
If there is a belief in Washington that sanctions and financial pressure can force Russia to swallow a plan that cements a hostile Western military outpost on its border, that belief has no basis in reality.
The U.S. doesn’t want peace
The billionaires who control the U.S. economy — and the politicians of both major parties who answer to them — are not seeking peace in Ukraine. They are seeking profit and strategic advantage. The war has been a bonanza for Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and the rest of the military-industrial complex. They have made fortunes shipping weapons into Ukraine, and they see no reason to stop.
They are interested in war, profit, and the isolation of their primary target: China.
Even if the West believes Trump’s plan can be implemented, peace isn’t the goal. Any cessation of hostilities under this framework would be temporary — a breather for the U.S. and its proxy in Kiev to regroup, rearm, and prepare for the next round of confrontation with Russia.
The U.S. does not want to cool global tensions or bring Russia back into its fold. The U.S. billionaires want to make money, and they have made loads of it by waging war on Russia. Needing a break to regroup is not the same as a genuine desire for peace. Peace is explicitly opposed to the economic interests of the entire military-industrial complex.
These defense magnates and the U.S. government hope that by draining Russia through endless war, they can eventually force regime change and deprive China of a key strategic ally. Imperialism will do whatever it takes to maintain its dominance and increase its profits, even if that means promoting phony peace plans.
The 47th POTUS is the oldest person ever elected to the White House, so now may be a good time to question his increasingly erratic behavior.
The 47th POTUS is the oldest person ever elected to the White House, so now may be a good time to question his increasingly erratic behavior.
Nobody will ever accuse the American president of being a linear thinker and talker. Trump’s speaking style meanders wildly from one subject to another, occasionally leaving the listener feeling vertigo in the process. A rollercoaster ride comes to mind. In the past several months, however, people have noticed a change in tune, and not necessarily for the better. Trump’s thought processes have veered off course as the 79-year-old leader appears more confused, combative and bombastic than ever before. This has caused an increasing number of people to question his state of mind.
In the past several months, there have been numerous Trump social media posts (160 in five hours on December 2) that bear little resemblance to reality and that have left members of his administration scrambling to explain them to a startled public. In November, for example, Trump unleashed a powerful salvo against Nigeria, which left many wondering if the United States was gearing up for war against the African nation.
“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, “guns-a-blazing,” to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities. I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it would be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING! THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!” Trump posted to his Truth Social account, Nov.1.
So much for ‘speak softly and carry a big stick,’ as Teddy Roosevelt once advised. While Trump has good cause to be concerned about the treatment of Christians, a restrained, nuanced and presidential message may have been the best approach. At the very least, it would have presented the U.S. leader as being in full command of his senses and emotions. This is just one example of Trump seeming to forget that hundreds of millions of people hang on his every word. Meanwhile, perhaps the only thing that prevented war in Africa was the flare up against America’s neighbor Venezuela, which has become the target of Trump’s wrath over drug trafficking.
“To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY,” Trump posted to social media on November 29 as rumors of a full-scale invasion of the South American country hung in the air.
Apparently, however, nobody informed the U.S. leader that he does not have the authority to close the airspace in another country. The warning came after Trump told Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro that the U.S. would consider military force if he didn’t leave power willingly. Thus far, Maduro continues to call Trump’s bluff, remaining in office together with his entire administration.
Then there was an earlier message in October in which Trump ranted about restarting the testing of America’s nuclear weapons. He wrote on October 29 during a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping: “The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
Where to begin? First of all, Russia possesses the largest nuclear weapon stockpile, not the United States. He then talks about other countries that are now conducting tests of their nuclear weapons, which of course is not true. No country is in the process of testing their nuclear weapons by means of detonation. Russia has not conducted such a test in 35 years, in the last days of the Soviet Union. Finally, it is the Energy Department that oversees nuclear weapon testing, not the Department of War.
It is hard to understand what Trump’s announcement really means. Once again, the reader is left with nothing more than uncertainty over the mental condition of the man who possesses America’s nuclear football.
All this points to the possible conclusion that Donald Trump is suffering some sort of cognitive decline that is becoming more and more apparent with each passing day. The problem in such cases, however, is getting the afflicted person to admit to their condition and pass the torch to someone else. Trump is simply too much of a vain and conceited egoist to admit to such a thing, while his loyal administration – much as was the case under Joe Biden – is satisfied to continue with the status quo. None of this bodes well for the United States and its immediate future.
Trump really said: ‘vote for the right wing candidate in Honduras and I will pardon his convicted drug-dealer friend and ally’.
(@resisres) November 29, 2025
