Jobs Report Returns – The US economy added 64,000 jobs in November as the unemployment rate inched up to 4.6%, up from 4.4% in September (there was no October report, of course, due to the government shutdown). Health care and construction jobs were up, the Labor Department reports, while the federal government continued to lose jobs. [CHART: Bureau of Labor Statistics.]
WEDNESDAY 12/17/25
Live From the Oval Office -- President Trump will address the nation at 9 p.m. Eastern Time Wednesday from the White House.
Just Wiles About Trump – The morning after Vanity Fair published its sweeping, two-part interview with Susie Wiles, she apparently remains the Trump White House chief of staff.
Wiles instead continues to enjoy support from within the Trump administration, including from President Trump himself, who acknowledged in an interview Tuesday with Murdoch’s New York Post that he indeed does have a larger-than-life “alcoholic personality” (despite being a teetotaler … er, Diet Coketotaler) as his chief of staff said in the interview. Wiles, daughter of the late sports broadcaster and recovered alcoholic Pat Summerall, said she has a history of working to fix difficult men.
Quite remarkably, Wiles walked out early from meetings with the president to meet in the White House mess to meet with VFEditor-in-Chief Chris Whipple for the interview, which began very early in Trump’s 47th term, Whipple told NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly in an All Things Considered interview Tuesday.
It began early enough for Wiles to comment on Tesla/Starlink/Space-X CEO Elon Musk’s chainsaw-slashing of federal programs for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): “He is a complete solo actor. The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him. He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. …”
Or as people who think they are geniuses are.
Wiles told VF she was “initially aghast” when Musk applied his figurative chainsaw to the United States Agency for International Development.
“I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work,” Wiles said.
Today, the past-tense in the CoS’ statement on USAID is a token of the first year of Trump’s second term.
In her interview with Whipple, Wiles calls JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist,” but the vice president brushed this off in a press scrum Tuesday, saying “Susie is exactly the same person when the president isn’t around. …”
Trump is not seeing any Justice Department retribution against his political enemies,
except maybe in the indictment of New York Attorney Gen. Letitia James, for mortgage fraud.
“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Wiles told VF.
As for Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi: “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating” that that a group of conservative social media influencers to whom she handed The Epstein Files: Phase 1 was the “very targeted group that cared” about what was in it.
“First [Bondi] gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk,” Wiles told Whipple. “There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
“[Trump] is in the file,” Wiles said. “And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”
Wiles has taken to social media to call the Vanity Fair interviews a “hit piece.” Whipple pointed out to All Things Considered that Wiles has not called out a single fact contained within.
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Ticking ACA Bomb – Moderate Republicans have just three days as of Wednesday morning, before the end of the legislative session to decide whether they want to defy Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and vote with Democrats to extend the expiring Affordable Care Act/Obamacare enhanced premium tax credits, Punchbowl News notes. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) needs just four such Republicans to push his discharge petition, which would bring the bill to the floor without Johnson’s blessing, with the 218 votes needed for a three-year extension of the subsidies. –TL
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TUESDAY 12/16/25
No Donbas for Putin – While news outlets including NPR and the BBC report that Trump administration special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner are making progress over security guarantees with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy toward a peace plan in Russia’s war, Donbas Oblast remains an intractable sticking point.
Moscow’s position “has not changed yet” on the Donbas region and “they want our Donbas,” Zelenskyy told reporters in Berlin Monday, The Kyiv Independent reports. “And we do not want to give away our Donbas.”
Reports indicate Kyiv appears willing to give up potential NATO membership if the US and NATO’s European nations provide continuing security as Witkoff and Kushner continue negotiations with Zelenskyy and his team. The negotiations began weeks ago with the Trump administration’s 28-point peace plan, which Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said was not the result of a plan drawn up by Witkoff and his Russian counterpart, Kirill Dmitriev, but rather a full-on Kremlin plan that Witkoff agreed to pass on to Ukraine.
There has been, and remains to be, a long way to go.
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Republican Backlash on TDS – Three of 230 House Republicans have condemned President Trump’s Truth Social post that blame the tragic killing of Hollywood director and political activist Rob Reiner and his photographer/producer-wife Michel Singer Reiner on “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
“Regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), according to Politico. “I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid? I challenge you to defend it.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who is stepping down in January, called the death of Reiner “a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.”
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), posted on X-Twitter that Trump’s statement was “wrong.” There’s your three.
Reiner on MSNBC – now MS NOW -- recently called the political climate under Trump 47 “beyond McCarthy era-esque.” Reiner also had condemned the fatal shooting of Turning Point co-founder Charlie Kirk weeks ago on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Morgan, who has considered Trump a friend, said the president’s comments on Truth Social crossed “every line of basic human decency” The Independent (UK) reports. –TL
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MONDAY 12/15/25
Can a Peace Deal for Ukraine be Saved? – Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Berlin Monday for the second day of talks there, where the Ukrainian president pushed back against the US-backed proposal to withdraw from a “demilitarized zone” in Donbas Oblast, which Russia only partially occupies.
Zelenskyy said Ukrainian citizens should decide whether to bow to US pressure to make such territorial concessions in the eastern region, possibly via referendum, The Kyiv Independent reports.
Furthermore, Zelenskyy says Ukraine will not agree to drop its quest to join NATO short of security guarantees by the US, according to NPR’s Morning Edition.
The upshot is … these unpromising negotiations coincide with a shift in American interests away from NATO and Europe and toward potential domination of the Americas region, as the Trump administration carries Russian dictator/President Vladimir Putin’s water on negotiations with Zelenskyy.
Meanwhile, The New York Times’ Sunday op-ed section published details of a classified, multiyear assessment of how the response to a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan (President Xi Jinping has ordered his armed forces to be ready for it by 2027) called the Overmatch brief. The Pentagon brief “catalogs China’s ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites, and identifies the US military’s supply chain choke points.”
One bright spot for Europe and NATO is Germany’s intense military buildup in potential defense of Ukraine and against further Russian aggression, as chronicled by CBS News’ 60 Minutes Sunday.
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Terrorist Attack on Bondi Beach – Australian authorities are treating as a terrorist attack the shooting by two men at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in which at least 16 were killed and more than 40 injured. A 50-year-old man identified as one of the shooters was killed and his 24-year-old son was in critical condition, according to reports.
“An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, TIME magazine reports.
Australian leaders already have promised to overhaul the nation’s already strict gun control laws, The Associated Press reports. Gun laws were toughened after Australia’s last mass shooting in which 35 were killed in Port Arthur in 1996.
A local Chabad group organized the Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach. Although authorities haven’t identified victims, Chabad group organizer Rabbi El Schlanger reportedly is among them. Victims range in age from 10 to 87 years old.
A bystander who wrestled a long gun away from the 24-year-old shooter among the two has been hailed as a hero. 7NEWS Australia has identified the hero as Ahmed al Ahmed, 43, a fruit shop owner and father of two, according to the AP.
Meanwhile, the alleged 24-year-old shooter was investigated by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization in 2019 for ties to a Sydney-based Islamic group, the AP says.
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Reiner Tragedy – Nick Reiner, 32, son of Rob Reiner, 78, and Michel Singer Reiner, 68, was being held in Los Angeles County jail on $4 million bail for an alleged felony, according to jail records reported by The New York Times Monday. His parents were found dead in their Brentwood, California, home Sunday, the victims of an apparent homicide.
Nick Reiner had spoken for years about his drug abuse and bouts of homelessness, according to the report.
In addition to directing such classic films as This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and its 2025 sequel, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, When Harry Met Sally (1989) and Misery (1990), and playing liberal foil as son-in-law to Carrol O’Connor’s Archie Bunker in All in the Family (1971-79), Reiner was known for his political activism primarily for liberal causes. –Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa