USA Today:

The U.S. Postal Service is making new changes in 2026, including adjustments to the postmark process, which could result in late fees and penalties for anyone mailing time-sensitive documents such as tax returns or bill payments.

For decades, the postmark – an official mark that shows where and when mail was accepted by the Postal Service – has been used in law as proof that an individual met a deadline, such as submitting a ballot by Election Day.

A USPS postmark used to indicate the date when mail was dropped in a mailbox or submitted at the post office counter. Now, USPS is clarifying in a new rule that the postmark will reflect the date an envelope is first processed by an automated USPS sorting machine, potentially days after it was dropped off – not the actual drop-off date….

For a long time, Americans have assumed that mail will be postmarked the day it is mailed and may not be prepared to account for the extra days.

Tax payments, charitable contributions, legal filings, rent payments and other bills or items that rely on postmark dates for deadlines can be impacted by later postmarks and risk late fees, penalties, or delinquency.

Many states also accept ballots that are postmarked by Election Day….

Two weeks ago, after Donald Trump’s handpicked allies claimed they had renamed The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to include the incumbent president’s name, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed a curious boast: She insisted that the center’s board, stacked with Trump loyalists, had “voted unanimously” to make the change......

With this in mind, was Leavitt simply lying in her statement? As it turns out, it depends on what one means by “unanimous.” The Washington Post reported:

The Kennedy Center adopted bylaws earlier this year that limited voting to presidentially appointed trustees, a move that preceded a unanimous decision this month by board members installed by President Donald Trump to add his name to the center.

The current bylaws, obtained by The Washington Post, were revised in May to specify that board members designated by Congress — known as ex officio members — could not vote or count toward a quorum. Legal experts say the move may conflict with the institution’s charter[/i].

In other words, after the president seized control over the cultural institution early last year, he chose loyalists to serve on its traditionally bipartisan board. Those board members then decided that their colleagues — the ones who weren’t appointed by Trump — would be powerless when it came time for the board to make decisions......

As the congresswoman’s civil suit proceeds, other lawmakers have taken an interest in the burgeoning controversy, including Democratic Rep. April McClain Delaney of Maryland, who introduced legislation last week to remove Trump’s name.

As for the center’s entertainment lineup, artists continue to cancel their plans to perform at the Kennedy Center as a result of Trump’s gambit. Watch this space.

But Trump isn’t doing any of those things. Instead, he’s apparently decided to reward himself with a new, made-up approval rating that he prefers over reality. The Hill reported:

President Trump claimed Tuesday that his ‘real’ approval rating is at 64 percent, despite polls showing it is below 50 percent.

‘The polls are rigged even more than the writers,’ Trump said in a late-night Truth Social post. ‘The real number is 64%, and why not, our Country is “hotter” than ever before.’

To be sure, there is some variation among the recent surveys. Gallup found only 36% of the public approves of Trump’s job performance, but Quinnipiac University put the number at 40%. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found the president with 39% support, while the latest Marist poll put the number at 38%.

But the grand total of publicly available national polls, conducted at any time in 2025, which showed Trump with a 64% approval rating is zero.

Those surveys had no basis in reality, and it’s certainly weird to see an American president giving himself generous approval ratings based on data that only exists in his imagination. But let’s not lose sight of the trajectory: Based on Trump’s own telling, his imaginary approval rating slipped several points over the course of 2025

The Washington Post had a related report during Oz’s ill-fated GOP campaign for the Senate, adding that during his show’s 12-year run, Oz “provided a platform for potentially dangerous products and fringe viewpoints, aimed at millions of viewers, according to medical experts, public health organizations and federal health guidance.”

Years later, too little has changed. The Hill reported:

Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, on Tuesday called the seasonal flu vaccine ‘controversial of late’ and advised various Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiatives as ways to ‘overcome’ the virus.

Appearing on Newsmax, Oz spoke on this year’s flu season, which has been marked by a more severe strain than previous years.

In context, the Newsmax co-host asked about the growing number of Americans struggling with a dangerous flu strain. It led the CMS chief to stray far from his lane and start pontificating in irresponsible ways.

Dr. Oz on the "super flu": "Every year there's a flu vaccine. It doesn't always work very well. That's why it's been controversial of late. But like many illnesses, the best news out there is if you can take care of yourself so that when you do end up running into the flu, you can overwhelm it."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-30T20:03:34.506Z

......Indeed, Dr. Jerome Adams, Trump’s first surgeon general, noted online earlier this week that this year’s vaccine will make flu viruses milder and make hospitalizations less likely, even if there’s a mismatch between the annual vaccine and the predominant strain.

“Even in mismatched years, flu vaccines provide cross-protection because the strains are related,” Adams wrote on X. “Historical data … show mismatched vaccines can still reduce lab-confirmed flu risk by around 50-60% overall and are particularly good at preventing severe outcomes like hospitalization and death.”

As for why Oz took an irresponsible message to a national television audience, I won’t pretend to be able to read his mind — though it’s worth emphasizing for context that he not only has a lengthy history of pushing dubious medical advice, he’s also part of a Republican administration with radical ideas related to public health, including flu shots.

The pipeline project in Colorado, like the measure for the Miccosukee Tribe, cleared Capitol Hill with overwhelming bipartisan support. And if White House officials had any concerns about the effort, they kept those opinions to themselves.

With this in mind, when Trump vetoed the bill, observers were left with a limited number of possible explanations: (1) Maybe the president was punishing Colorado as part of the Tina Peters case; (2) perhaps he was punishing Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado over her support for Epstein files transparency; or (3) both.

Trump helped shed light on his reasoning soon afterward. Politico reported:

President Donald Trump told POLITICO on Wednesday that he vetoed a bipartisan bill to fund a Colorado water project because he views it as a waste of taxpayer money, saying residents are leaving the state under Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.

‘They’re wasting a lot of money and people are leaving the state. They’re leaving the state in droves. Bad governor,’ Trump said in an exclusive phone interview with POLITICO.

Around the same time, the president published an item to his social media platform in which he called Colorado’s Democratic governor a “scumbag,” before concluding, in reference to Polis and other state officials: “I wish them only the worst. May they rot in Hell.”

In other words, Colorado hasn’t freed a prisoner convicted of a felony whom Trump likes, and so the White House appears to be taking steps to punish the state.

Indeed, the veto of the pipeline bill, known as the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act, was the latest in a series of anti-Colorado moves from the Republican administration. As The New York Times summarized, “Miffed at Colorado’s votes against him in three successive elections and furious at its refusal to free Tina Peters, a convicted election denier and ardent Trump supporter, Mr. Trump has opened an assault against the Democratic-run state. His administration has cut off transportation money, relocated the military’s Space Command, vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center and rejected disaster relief for rural counties hammered by floods and wildfires.”....

In August, Trump threatened to impose “harsh measures” on the Rocky Mountain State unless it agreed to release Peters from prison several years before her sentence runs its course. We’re now getting a better sense of what that means in practice.

While it’s possible that there was no cause for concern, Trump’s unfortunate record made it difficult to give him and his team the benefit of the doubt. It was against this backdrop that the president spoke to The Wall Street Journal about these questions, and his comments advanced the story in weird and unexpected ways. From the report:

President Trump is taking more aspirin than his doctors recommend. He briefly tried wearing compression socks for his swelling ankles, but stopped because he didn’t like them. And he regrets undergoing advanced imaging because it generated scrutiny of his health.

‘In retrospect, it’s too bad I took it because it gave them a little ammunition,’ Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on his decision to get a cardiovascular and abdominal scan in October.

Broadly speaking, there are a handful of key takeaways from the reporting and interview......

The president, the Journal went on to report, “has at times eschewed the advice of his doctors and scoffed at the medical community’s widely accepted health recommendations.” This is especially true when it comes to aspirin, which he chooses to take daily and which apparently causes him to bruise easily. In fact, the president acknowledged applying makeup to his hands to obscure discoloration.

“His skin is so delicate that Pam Bondi, now his attorney general, caused his hand to bleed when she nicked him with her ring while giving him a high-five at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee,” the article noted......

Stepping back, the president’s comments were hardly out of character. Throughout his decadelong political career, Trump has repeatedly expressed his disdain for science and medical evidence on everything from the climate crisis to vaccines to Covid-19 treatments, so it stands to reason that Mr. Inject Disinfectants is going to prioritize his superstitions and baseless assumptions about “nice, thin blood” over the recommendations of those who know what they’re talking about.

The trouble is, this is the same president who believes he has the credibility and expertise needed to give the public guidance on, among other things, how much Tylenol to take and what child vaccination schedules should look like.

In other words, Trump’s comments to the Journal weren’t just important in their own right, they were also a timely reminder to the public that his judgment on matters related to health are better left ignored.

An "under pressure" Donald Trump was spotted "freezing" up in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Body language expert Judi James, speaking to The Mirror US, believes the encounter at Mar-a-Lago had an unexpected pause that caught Trump and Netanyahu off guard. Trump was spotted freezing momentarily as he spoke with Israel's prime minister, which James has suggested is a sign of growing pressure for the president.

"Losing track or 'freezing' mid-flow is a common experience for most people," James said, "especially when they are tired or feeling under pressure, but it will usually come with compensatory signals like a clicking of the fingers or filler noises or winding gestures to fill the gap and explain the search for the right word, but there are no signs of any of these from Trump here."

James went on to suggest that Trump was not pausing to think about what he wanted to say, but had frozen up. The difference, she said, comes from how Trump speaks in meetings, with a "stream-of-consciousness style with few, if any, moments of showing he's evaluating the wisdom of speaking out of turn."

The "freezing" could be because Trump was unaware that Netanyahu or his team were listening to him, and James suggested Trump was "distracted by the lack of active listening signals from the other side of the table, plus one 'soft power' ritual that a lot of hosts do have a problem with."

The Kennedy Center adopted bylaws earlier this year that limited voting to presidentially appointed trustees, a move that preceded a unanimous decision this month by board members installed by President Donald Trump to add his name to the center.

The current bylaws, obtained by The Washington Post, were revised in May to specify that board members designated by Congress — known as ex officio members — could not vote or count toward a quorum. Legal experts say the move may conflict with the institution’s charter.

Trump took over the Kennedy Center in February, purging its board of members he had not appointed. The months that followed saw struggling ticket sales and programming changes that began to align the arts complex with the Trump administration’s broader cultural aims, culminating with the annual Kennedy Center Honors hosted by the president.

Days later, on Dec. 18, the board voted to add the president’s name to the institution, and within 24 hours it was on the website and the building itself: “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”....

The federal law that established the Kennedy Center designates specific government and federal positions — including the librarian of Congress; the mayor of Washington, D.C.; the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; and the majority and minority leaders of the Senate — to serve as ex officio members.

The law identifies them as part of the board of trustees, which it directs to maintain and administer the facility as a living memorial. But it does not distinguish between voting and nonvoting members, which has been a point of ambiguity in the days following the vote to rename the Kennedy Center......

Beatty, who sued the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees Dec. 22 to stop it from adding Trump’s name to the institution, declined to comment for this story. But her lawsuit argues the center’s statute makes her a “a full voting member.”......

Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at Catholic University, said his read of the statue establishing the center was “not quite as demonstrative” as Beatty’s, but “I’d argue that the statute does not differentiate among types of trustees in terms of powers and obligations, which would include voting.”

Colinvaux added that “basic governance principles” “do not allow for the ‘muting’ of members” of an entity’s governing body, which is a “deliberative body.”

Diplomatic efforts to resolve Russia’s war in Ukraine were made complex this week when Vladimir Putin alleged that his rural home had been targeted by a failed Ukrainian drone attack. Russia offered no evidence to substantiate the claims, and as The New York Times reported, Ukraine strenuously denied that such an operation took place:

Ukraine immediately denied any such attack, accusing the Kremlin of inventing a pretext to undermine the peace talks being orchestrated by the Trump administration. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who met with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Sunday to discuss a possible deal, called the Russian allegation a ‘complete fabrication.’

The Ukrainian president added that Russia fabricated the attack in part to “justify additional attacks against Ukraine.”

Donald Trump, however, apparently accepted Putin’s claims at face value.....

In case that weren’t quite enough, moments later, Trump told the reporter who asked the question, “I mean, you’re saying maybe the attack didn’t take place. It’s possible, too, I guess, but President Putin told me this morning it did.”

Trump to a reporter: "You're saying maybe the attack didn't place? That's possible too I guess. But President Putin told me this morning it did."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-29T18:42:26.609Z

The comments reflected a simple truth that too often goes unmentioned: Trump simply trusts Putin. The Republican has never explained why, but the Russian leader has the American president’s ear, and Trump appears eager to accept Putin’s claims at face value — despite everything he really ought to know about the former KGB agent’s record and obvious lack of credibility.

Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who has consistently been critical of the White House’s weakness toward Moscow, wrote via social media, “President Trump and his team should get the facts first before assuming blame. Putin is a well-known boldface liar.”

The fact that Trump will likely ignore the retiring congressman’s good advice speaks volumes.