Over the course of roughly six hours, the president learned that a federal judge had ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia to be released from immigration custody, a grand jury had again rejected an effort to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James, Republicans in Indiana’s state Senate had rejected his radical redistricting scheme and an Associated Press poll found that two-thirds of Americans reject his handling of the economy.

As days in the White House go, this one was pretty rough for the hapless incumbent.

At least Trump can still count on the sycophantic and obedient House Republican conference to make his days a little brighter, right? Wrong. NBC News reported:

The House approved a measure Thursday to reinstate collective bargaining rights to federal workers, a step toward restoring labor union protections for nearly 1 million federal employees.

The rare bipartisan vote, 231-195, marks the first time the House has voted to nullify an executive order from President Donald Trump this term.

,,,,,As a substantive matter, the vote was a big victory for federal workers, but as a political matter, this was the first time all year in which the GOP-led House approved legislation to reject one of Trump’s directives.

In the process, House members made Trump’s dreadful day just a bit worse, while simultaneously making Johnson look even weaker.

The Protect America’s Workforce Act now heads to the Senate, where it faces an uncertain fate.

At Donald Trump’s campaign-style event in Pennsylvania this week, the president repeated one of his favorite boasts. “We’re respected again as a country,” the Republican declared. He pushed a similar line a week earlier at a White House Cabinet meeting, claiming, “America is strong and respected again. On the world stage, we’re really respected.”

This has been a rhetorical staple for the incumbent president across both of his terms. It’s also demonstrably ridiculous: International public opinion research has consistently shown that global respect and confidence in the U.S. has reached record depths under Trump.

But it’s not just foreign citizens who’ve lost respect for the Trump-led U.S. — it’s also foreign officials. The New York Times reported:

Denmark’s military intelligence service raised concerns for the first time about the United States in its annual threat assessment, saying in a report released Wednesday that shifts in American policy are generating new uncertainties for Denmark’s security.

The report points to the United States’ use of tariffs against allies and its intensified activity in the Arctic, and raises many of the same concerns that European leaders have voiced about the direction of President Trump’s America-first foreign policy.

“The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies,” the report said.....

The concerns raised by Denmark’s military intelligence service dovetail with this week’s criticism from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said, after seeing the new White House National Security Strategy, that Europe needs to be become “much more independent” from the U.S. for its security.

It also comes a month after British officials, for the first time in modern history, started curtailing intelligence sharing with the U.S. to avoid complicity in possible war crimes.

Months earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that his country would forge new alliances because it was clear that the U.S. is “no longer a reliable partner.”

In August, Trump insisted, “We’re respected all over the world — like never before, probably.” A variety of words come to mind when describing how traditional our allies see the U.S. in 2025, but “respected” isn’t one of them.

The administration’s Interior Department announced last week that some annual passes to the national parks will feature a picture of Trump alongside an image of George Washington. As MS NOW reported, the agency also announced that entry to national parks will no longer be free on Martin Luther King Jr. Day or Juneteenth, but American visitors will be able to enter the parks without a fee on designated “patriotic” days, including Trump’s birthday.

The former development has already generated a federal lawsuit. The New York Times reported:

An environmental group on Wednesday filed a lawsuit challenging the National Park Service’s plan to emblazon President Trump’s face on some annual passes to national parks starting Jan. 1.

The suit, filed in federal court in the District of Columbia by the Center for Biological Diversity, argued that it would violate federal law to put Mr. Trump’s visage on some of the passes, which have traditionally featured photos of scenic landscapes and wildlife.

According to the plaintiffs, the 2004 Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act requires the passes to display the winner of an annual photo competition held by the National Park Foundation.

“Blotting out the majesty of America’s national parks with a close-up of his own face is Trump’s crassest, most ego-driven action yet,” Kierán Suckling, the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, told the Times.

As for the entrance fees, Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York introduced new legislation this week to guarantee free admission to National Parks on all national holidays, including Juneteenth and MLK Day, which Trump apparently doesn’t prioritize.

The same bill would block presidents from unilaterally altering the free-admission calendar at national parks without congressional approval.

This week, a poll from The Associated Press also found the president at a 36% approval rating, though this wasn’t the most jarring element of the data. From the AP’s report on its national survey:

President Donald Trump’s approval on the economy and immigration have fallen substantially since March, according to a new AP-NORC poll, the latest indication that two signature issues that got him elected barely a year ago could be turning into liabilities as his party begins to gear up for the 2026 midterms.

Only 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds. That is down from 40% in March and marks the lowest economic approval he’s registered in an AP-NORC poll in his first or second term.

While the president routinely (and falsely) claims, as he did again on Thursday afternoon, that the current U.S. economy is the single greatest economy in the nation’s history, a whopping 67% of Americans — two-thirds of the country — said they disapprove of his handling of economic affairs.

Shortly after the AP’s data reached the public, Trump published a curious message on his social media platform, peddling a variety of familiar nonsense about Joe Biden, inflation, consumer prices and the effects of his trade tariffs.

But then he turned to self-pity.

“When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country?” the president wrote. “When will people understand what is happening? When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?”

Trump didn’t literally ask, “Why aren’t people trusting my lies over their own wallets and life experiences?” but that seemed to be the subtext.....

If Trump wants to deflect blame, he can try. If he wants to appeal to the American public for patience, he’s welcome to do so. But to push delusional claims about an economic nirvana that clearly does not exist and then whine that people are showing him insufficient love in the wake of failure is pathetic.

After the Jan. 6 attack, Congress agreed to install a permanent plaque to honor the law enforcement personnel who helped protect the U.S. Capitol against pro-Trump rioters. By statute, the plaque would list the names of the officers who served; it would be placed on the western side of the building; and it would be in place by March 2023.

That deadline was almost three years ago. The plaque is done, and it’s ready to be installed, but as The Washington Post reported, it’s currently “sitting in a Capitol basement utility room surrounded by tools and maintenance equipment.”,,,,,

In light of this intransigence, two Jan. 6 police officers, former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and current Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges, filed a lawsuit over the summer to force congressional leaders to follow the law.

Donald Trump’s Justice Department has weighed in on the case in a wildly unpersuasive way. NBC News reported:

The Trump Justice Department argued Tuesday that the legally mandated plaque meant to honor the officers who protected the Capitol on Jan. 6 does not exist, claiming that the current plaque, which remains unhung, doesn’t qualify because it lists 21 law enforcement agencies rather than the names of roughly 3,646 individual officers who responded to the Capitol during the siege.

In other words, the plaque — which, again, is already finished and ready to be installed — highlights the 21 law enforcement agencies that helped defend the Capitol against the assault.,,,,,

But the bottom line remains the same: For all of Trump’s talk about “backing the blue,” the president’s Justice Department is fighting against a simple gesture to honor officers who protected democracy and our seat of government against rioters who’d been fed lies by the president himself.

The case is still pending in federal court. Watch this space.

Over the course of the past year, Donald Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to help Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who’s currently in prison for election crimes. The one step the president had not taken was to issue a pardon, since that wouldn’t make any sense.

Late Thursday, he did it anyway. The Associated Press reported:

President Donald Trump issued a symbolic pardon for Tina Peters on Thursday, but it alone won’t free the former Colorado elections administrator who was convicted under state laws of orchestrating a data breach scheme driven by false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

.....In August, Trump threatened Colorado with “harsh measures” unless the state agreed to release Peters, who he claimed had been “tortured by Crooked Colorado politicians.” More recently, Trump’s Federal Bureau of Prisons contacted the Colorado Department of Corrections, seeking to transfer Peters from a state prison to federal custody, but that didn’t work, either.

Left with no other options, the president announced a pardon for Peters.

Except that won’t work, either. Peters faced state prosecution over state crimes. She was tried and convicted in state court. She was sentenced by a state judge and sent to a state prison.

A federal pardon might make Trump feel better, but it’s also utterly irrelevant. As Colorado Attorney General Philip Weiser explained in a written statement, “One of the most basic principles of our constitution is that states have independent sovereignty and manage our own criminal justice systems without interference from the federal government. The idea that a president could pardon someone tried and convicted in state court has no precedent in American law, would be an outrageous departure from what our constitution requires, and will not hold up.”

The question, however, is whether Trump knows this.

It’s possible that the president, desperate to assist an ally he’s powerless to help, issued the pardon as a symbolic gesture, grudgingly aware of the fact that it will change nothing. What’s unclear, however, is whether Trump intended this to have some force of law as Peters’ attorney continues to work to get his client out of prison. Watch this space.

The Trump Justice Department has again failed to get a new indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James, with a grand jury declining Thursday to return charges, according to two sources familiar with the presentation.

The failure follows another grand jury rejection last Thursday and a dismissal the week before that of James’ charges on the grounds that the prosecutor behind them, Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed. The dismissal left open the opportunity to bring new charges with a lawful prosecutor.

In a statement, James’ lawyer Abbe Lowell said, “For the second time in seven days, the Department of Justice has failed in its clear attempt to fulfill President Trump’s political vendetta against Attorney General James.”

He said the “unprecedented rejection makes even clearer that this case should never have seen the light of day. Career prosecutors who knew better refused to bring it, and now two different grand juries in two different cities have refused to allow these baseless charges to be brought. In addition, a federal judge threw out the first indictment, pointing to the illegal appointment of a prosecutor put in place to carry out the President’s revenge. This case already has been a stain on this Department’s reputation and raises troubling questions about its integrity. Any further attempt to revive these discredited charges would be a mockery of our system of justice.”....

This isn’t the first case where the Trump DOJ has pressed forward despite grand jury resistance. In the case of Sidney Reid in Washington, the DOJ failed a whopping three times to obtain a felony indictment before reducing the case to a misdemeanor — and then losing that case at trial. A D.C. jury similarly acquitted sandwich thrower Sean Dunn of a misdemeanor after grand jurors declined to approve a felony indictment against him.

The administration had said it would appeal the Nov. 24 ruling by U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie that rejected Halligan’s appointment and dismissed the charges against James and former FBI director James Comey. MS NOW previously reported on DOJ’s plan to seek another indictment of James, as well as the DOJ potentially seeking new charges against Comey, too.

As part of the agreement that ended the government shutdown last month, Republican leaders in the Senate promised a vote on a Democratic bill to protect health care consumers and to extend existing Affordable Care Act subsidies.

On Thursday afternoon, GOP leaders kept their promise and brought the Democratic bill to the floor for a procedural vote. It needed 60 votes to advance, but it received 51. A rival Republican bill, which included some conservative reforms but which wouldn’t have protected ACA subsidies at all, also needed 60 votes. It received 51.

So where does that leave us? An MS NOW report summarized:

The failed votes leave lawmakers with just over two weeks to address the rising premiums. Many enrollees are expected to see their premiums more than double if lawmakers don’t act, and both chambers are scheduled to recess for the holidays at the end of next week.

Some lawmakers are still clinging to the hope that Thursday’s collapse might jolt bipartisan talks back to life.

....In a normal political environment, this would ordinarily be about the time when the president would intervene, show some leadership and set a path for his or her party. The trouble is, in 2025, as his party looks to him for guidance and direction, Donald Trump is responding with shrugged shoulders.

Part of this is the result of his own illiteracy on health care policy, and part of it is the result of learned experience: The White House recently intended to unveil a plan to address the problem, but officials pulled the plug when congressional Republicans balked at the proposed solution.

With lawmakers — or, more to the point, their constituents — running out of calendar, it’s tough to be optimistic.

The severity of the presidential arm-twisting over the course of several months was extraordinary. It was so intense that at least 11 Indiana Republicans were targeted with threats or swatting attacks after Trump started calling out individual state lawmakers. One legislator told The Atlantic he was worried the president’s followers felt so strongly about this that his house might be “firebombed.”

And yet, despite all of this, Trump’s power grab flopped. After months of White House arm-twisting, the gerrymandering plan mustered just 19 votes — with a majority of the Republicans in the state Senate voting with the Democratic minority against it.

It was one of the most brutal and humiliating failures of the president’s second term.

Except, to hear Trump tell it, this fiasco wasn’t that big of a deal.

Reporter: The senate in Indiana voted against the redistricting effort.

Trump: I wasn't working on it very hard. I wasn't very much involved

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-12-11T23:22:46.212Z

...But this unprecedented initiative has racked up some big losses, too. The scheme obviously fell far short in Indiana, and related efforts were rejected by Republicans in Kansas, New Hampshire and Nebraska, at least for now.

What’s more, Democrats are pushing back in ways the White House apparently didn’t anticipate, with California poised to add five additional Democratic seats next year and officials in other blue states eyeing related plans of their own.

Meanwhile, a state court ruling in Utah has created a near-certain win for Democrats, and progressive activists have collected more than enough signatures to force a fight over the future of Missouri’s map.

To put it mildly, this isn’t what Trump had in mind when he picked this fight several months ago.

This was unwise. GDP growth in the U.S. had only reached 6% once in the previous half-century, and that was because of a dramatic one-time drop in interest rates in 1984. Trump had set the bar unrealistically high, and to the surprise of no one, he failed to reach his own stated standard: Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, annual economic growth did not top 3% during his first term. In fact, in 2017 and 2019, when the president tried to tell the public the economy was the best it had ever been, GDP growth was 2.5% and 2.6%, respectively.

Having failed to meet these unrealistic goals previously, Trump and his team have learned their lesson.

No, I’m just kidding. They’ve learned nothing and are making the exact same mistakes.

Lutnick: "I think under President Trump you're gonna see the economy grow 6%"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-11T13:22:44.764Z

...A day earlier, at a White House event, his boss went considerably further.

Trump says he doesn't know why America can't achieve 25 percent annual economic growth

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-10T20:32:26.617Z

Annual GDP growth, Trump said, “should be able to be 20% or 25%,” adding, “I don’t know why it can’t be.”

I realize that economic policy has never been this president’s strong suit, but never in recorded history has the United States ever seen 25% annual growth. In 1942, when domestic production roared at the start of World War II, GDP growth reached nearly 19% — and we haven’t reached double digits since, even during economic booms.....

Just as importantly, as a political matter, he has a reason not to raise expectations like this. If, for example, the U.S. had 3% GDP growth every year during his second term, that would be evidence of a healthy economy. But according to Trump and his team, it would also deserve to be seen as a disappointment, since Lutnick is pointing to 6% growth, while the president himself pitches 20% to 25% growth.

There is such a thing as expectation management. These guys are flunking it in embarrassing fashion.