So, is Susie Wiles about to be spending more time with her family?
My guess: No. For all of his fondness for bellowing YOU’RE FIRED, he won’t fire any of the hand-picked lackeys who fluff him all day. But my guess is, it will make the underlings regard one another with even fiercer and more vicious thoughts blazing from their eyes.
You know who I think about sometimes? Bobby Kennedy. Here’s a guy who has been catered to, looked up to and otherwise fluffed himself, all his life. But for these cabinet meetings, he has to bow and scrape and ass-kiss like the rest of those yo-yos. It must chap his ass like nothing else, sucking up to that pig. All of that swallowed bile has to go somewhere. I’m thinking the fallout, when all of this explodes, is going to be epic.
And that was just this morning.
I don’t know if Roy’s excellent Substack today is unlocked, but here are a few good parts (and you should subscribe):
In his first term Trump pantomimed some policy interests, but these were impossible to take seriously. You may recall, for example, his stupid “Trumpcare” alternative to the ACA that was so poorly conceived his factota in Congress dragged their feet on it, terrified at how voters would react if it were actually put into practice, until John McCain did them the favor of killing it in the Senate. And with COVID he mainly handed off the work to the health bureaucracy while yammering so nonsensically about it on TV that it killed his 2020 campaign.
In this second term you can see what Trump, relieved of any obligation to make it look good for political reasons, is really about, and it ain’t steering the ship of state.
Since Congress ended the subsidies that were keeping ACA premiums down, his approach to the chaos that ensued isn’t some new version of Trumpcare 2.0 — it’s just letting everyone know he doesn’t give a shit what happens (“Don’t make it sound so bad”). He is observably content to see millions of Americans lose their insurance as revenge for having signed up for something called “Obamacare” in the first place.
Revenge is a big part of what fills in for policy in Trump governance. His reaction to the rebuke he received from the electorate for his pandemic malfeasance, too, has been a pathological act of vengeance against the health care establishment — indeed, against the very idea of health care, with the appointment of an actual dangerous lunatic to run it.
Yessiree.
Not much more to report today. Got two-thirds of the work shoveled off my desk, and am tentatively looking forward to a pleasant holiday interlude, if you ignore all the bad news in the world.
David C said on December 17, 2025 at 5:46 am
I read someone saying she did it for one line. The “oh sure, I read the Epstein files and Trump is in them, but he didn’t do anything wrong” line. I doubt that. I wonder if she’s hoping to be fired. If she’s spilling the beans on all of this, what does she know that she didn’t say? Maybe something indictable or so horrific that even the MAGAts will be repulsed. Of course, there’s no such thing the later. Anyway, she may rather be a witness for the prosecution than in the dock herself.
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Jeff Gill said on December 17, 2025 at 8:07 am
That closing of the Vanity Fair duo:
“Oh, good Lord,” Wiles said. “Trump doesn’t depend on anybody.”
Here’s the thing, and calling Susie Wiles disingenuous is no great stretch. But that’s just demonstrably not true on multiple levels. He’s very dependent — as was Bush, as was Obama, as was Biden — on a range of functionaries to make anything actually happen, from firing most of the USAID staff to making ships go boom in the Caribbean. Trump can’t do that, he needs people, he’s dependent on a variety of staffers with a special set of skills.
What continues to worry me is that for all that’s been said, we know relatively little about what the whole Miller/Vance/Vought cluster really wants to accomplish. Trump wants to get rich and indulge his id; Musk wants to feel like he can exert control over whatever he’s currently thinking about, whether it’s women or institutions or rocketships. Both can do a fair amount of damage, but their attention spans are limited by a variety of factors.
Miller, Vance, & Vought: they’re a mass of resentments that channel enough of Trump’s to make him give them their head and loosen the bridle straps, but I can’t tell where they want to gallop. I assume Scavino & Leavitt just enjoy wealth & power and are following whatever stale breadcrumbs they think lead to more of the same, but it’s the above three that worry me most. And full disclosure: Vought isn’t, as I recall, in either Vanity Fair piece. He’s working entirely under the radar, but with extensive authority, and Wiles isn’t saying a word, either because she doesn’t manage him, or she’s keeping him out of sight to try to leave him out of mind.
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Peter said on December 17, 2025 at 9:01 am
I have to disagree about RFK Jr. Yes, he’s been catered to his entire life. He’s never had to work for a large law firm; because of his name and family money, he can be a gadfly and work on his own. When it comes time for the deification at the cabinet meetings, he (and the other sycophants) are thinking that this is standard operating procedure in Big Business: All praise the CEO and his infinite wisdom.
The thing that I can never understand about Trump is that it’s a bottomless pit of hate. Even Hitler had his small pleasures – weekends at Berchtesgaden, playing with Blondi (the dog, not Bondi the AG), dinner and drinks with the Goebbels, some kinky stuff with Eva. Trump? Nothing. With the POSSIBLE exception of the Grande Ballroom du Trump, nothing has ever made him happy; nothing will ever make him happy. In a way, that makes me happy, but I’d be happier if he didn’t have to drag us into war and ruin the American government just to prove my point.
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Deborah said on December 17, 2025 at 9:02 am
Didn’t Wiles call Vought an absolute “zealot”, or something like that, in the Vanity Fair piece?
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Jeff Gill said on December 17, 2025 at 9:06 am
Yep. That’s it. It was like he’s in a completely different branch of government. Which he ain’t.
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Deborah said on December 17, 2025 at 9:06 am
But Blondi is the perfect description of Bondi, a lap dog for Trump who will obey his every command. I’m going to start calling her Blondi.
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Julie Robinson said on December 17, 2025 at 9:47 am
No VF subscription, but the clips I’ve read and the pictures give a lot. Good Lord, KKKaroline’s pores and lip filler needle marks, and Little Marco. Susie Wiles is fooling herself if she thinks she’s reining anyone in; she’s just another enabler.
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alex said on December 17, 2025 at 10:27 am
My WaPo subscription officially ended yesterday. Now they’re begging me to come back for just $40 a year (it was $120 just a few days ago). I think I’ll pass. Maybe if they come down to $20.
My money would be much better spent on Vanity Fair, and I’ve been seriously considering it for a while except that I have so many subscriptions already and not enough time for all of them (and waste too much time with too few of them as it is).
If there’s nothing else good about this presidency, the palace intrigue should be a hoot, and Vanity Fair will cover it probably better than any other.
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Michael said on December 17, 2025 at 11:15 am
I think it’s less about Wiles being fired and more about her plan to resign. This sort of “Oh, the horror” roman a clef is just the sort of thing guaranteed to facilitate a soft landing in the guest chair on Morning Joe.
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Jeff Borden said on December 17, 2025 at 12:43 pm
Alex,
Forgive me if I’m butting in, but I dropped the Post when it refused to endorse Harris. I’m getting messages offering a three-month online trial for $1, but I always respond with a laughing emoji. The Post is no longer dependable. I’ve found an online subscription to The Atlantic to be a brilliant replacement to the Post. Obviously, it doesn’t offer the full breadth of coverage of a large newspaper, but its stories on tRump and his “administration” have been thorough, well-reported and smartly written. It’s my go-to source for political news these days.
The saber-rattling at Venezuela is scaring the shit out of me and evoking memories of the run-up to the disastrous Iraq War, except this would be even worse. A “raging lunatic with the empathy of Jeffrey Dahmer” –the description of tRump by the “National Review”– and a moron of a defense secretary in over his head are hardly comforting as the leaders of an invasion. And, as always, it’s all about the fucking oil. It’s always the oil.
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Heather said on December 17, 2025 at 12:48 pm
Absolutely do not resubscribe to the Post. They just started rolling out AI podcasts, which are horribly flawed. I don’t know about you but I definitely don’t want to support any “newspaper” that just shrugs when its output is shown to be inaccurate.
https://www.semafor.com/article/12/11/2025/washington-posts-ai-generated-podcasts-rife-with-errors-fictional-quotes
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Jeff Borden said on December 17, 2025 at 1:13 pm
Now that right-wing gazillionaires and tRump supporters own CBS, they installed the hideous Bari Weiss as news director. Her first big program? A town hall with Erika Kirk, the Tammy Faye Bakker clone cashing in on the murder of her husband. Happily, ratings were an absolute disaster, drawing fewer than 2 million viewers. A rerun of “FBI” garnered more than 3 million. What a pity the Tiffany Network is now the Temu Network.
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Mark P said on December 17, 2025 at 1:36 pm
Trump’s Venezuela blockade means we are at war with Venezuela, declared or not. So any more killings of survivors of U.S. strikes on motorboats will be war crimes as well as murder. I hope the ICC charges Trump and Kegseth.
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Jeff Gill said on December 17, 2025 at 2:31 pm
If you don’t have a Vanity Fair subscription, a guy on Bluesky is keeping us informed thru GoFile:
https://gofile.io/d/ycgOQR
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Julie Robinson said on December 17, 2025 at 3:23 pm
Well. Something nice has happened. My mom’s cousin has offered to buy her timber land in rural Scotch Grove, Iowa. They own the adjacent land, and would like to consolidate. It’s a small property and is zoned agricultural, though no one would be able to farm it because it’s hilly and thickly wooded, so it acts as a nature reserve. They respect that, like to tromp around on it, and their daughter will do the same after they die.
Mom’s one stipulation was that she wanted to have her ashes scattered there, and they said they want to do the same. So it’s in the hands of an attorney and she will get a small check soon.
The great thing is that her orneriness prevented a guy from clear cutting the whole thing about 35 years ago. He had agreements with all the surrounding owners (before the cousin inherited), but without her selling, he couldn’t do it. He called pretty frequently and that made her more adamant not to sell. So it remained untouched and hopefully is safe for another generation or two. This really pleases us all. My kids were fine with being the land’s guardians if need be, but this will make the estate easier to settle when the day comes.
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Sherri said on December 17, 2025 at 4:00 pm
As I said yesterday, somebody’s going to have to explain to me why Susie Wiles is consequential, as she’s described in the article. What would be different if she weren’t there?
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Deborah said on December 17, 2025 at 4:17 pm
I think Susie Wiles is interesting to people as a gossip provider, not consequential to politics at all. She’s basically a go-fer, that’s about it.
As Michael mentioned above, I think the interviews coming out now are more about what come next for her, since Trump is going down the toilet. She doesn’t exactly want to burn bridges but she also doesn’t want this all as her legacy, who would? She may have had control over when the interviews would come out in the media as her consent for giving them in the first place. She’s saying they were taken out of context, or at least the White House is saying that now. Who knows, it’s all so chaotic.
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Sherri said on December 17, 2025 at 6:30 pm
You’d think a special counsel testifying before Congress that he had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the current president tried to overturn the 2020 election, developed powerful evidence that he willfully retained highly classified documents after leaving office, and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice, might draw a headline or two.
But since it’s old news, and the reason Jack Smith is testifying before Congress is for Republicans to find some way to trip him up and claim that it was all a political witch hunt, you have to search way down the page to find the story, and the headlines are “House Republicans Press Jack Smith Over Trump Investigation”, rather than Trump broke the law, repeatedly, and continues to.
Of course, the top headline is Trump breaking more laws and treaties, with his announced blockade (surrounding?) Venezuela until they give back everything they stole from us, I guess back in the 70’s when Venezuela nationalized the oil industry. Trump never really left the 70’s. Maduro hasn’t said nice things about Trump, I guess.
We may have to tear down the whole White House after Trump. Now he’s put up plaques with his opinions on his predecessors. I’m surprised that there are portraits of anyone other than Trump still up in his White House.
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Suzanne said on December 17, 2025 at 9:41 pm
I was gone, came home, my husband had the tv on, and as I sat down, the Orange Maniac began his prime time rage infused rant to the country. Did you know that military recruitment is up to record levels? And that every military member is going to get a check for $1,776.00 in the next few weeks? And that drug prices are going to go down by 400%, 500%, 600%? Heck, big pharma will be paying us to take their meds! Tariffs are paying for everything!
Un-freaking-real.
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Sherri said on December 17, 2025 at 10:07 pm
An interview with the photographer on the Susie Wiles profile (gift link):
https://wapo.st/49ixYtq
My favorite part:
Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you want to be portrayed?” We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye. And he says to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do, too.”
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alex said on December 17, 2025 at 10:45 pm
Enjoying the Bari Weiss ball of flames so far, and the news of Chia Pet as the best advertiser on her first prime time special. Maybe she can get Elliot Gould hawking reverse mortgages for her sit-down with Nick Fuentes.
I’m off to bed.
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Mark P said on December 17, 2025 at 11:12 pm
I guess I wasn’t paying attention, because I just noticed that Trump’s handlers are going to disband the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Too much climate alarmism.
This country is done for, and it deserves every bit of shit that Trump drops on us.
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Jeff Gill said on December 18, 2025 at 8:34 am
As a general question, along with being a subject of wide interest here, I’m putting this here with a gift link, but puzzled either about my inadequate caffeine levels this morning, or the reporting & writing here.
It feels like, at the end of the piece, the story tells us . . . nothing. And I get that the reality is dementia, beyond Alzheimer’s alone, is complex & more of a syndrome than a specific disease etiology. Which maybe should have been the topline article theme? But the new tests don’t seem to tell us much, or did I get lost in the detail about what they don’t do?
https://wapo.st/4pLTD37
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Deborah said on December 18, 2025 at 9:06 am
Jeff G, that article didn’t mention is that wanting a test to ascertain whether one has dementia is easier said than done. The average wait time to get an appointment with a neurologist for a test is 12-14 months. People aren’t able to rush out and get one. Which is one of the reasons the dementia center we are working on getting off the ground, is to offer other services for people and their caregivers in the meantime.
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Julie Robinson said on December 18, 2025 at 10:26 am
You’re not wrong, Jeff, it’s poorly written. Also, the pTau blood test is only for early early days. If you want the Leqembi infusions you really want genetic testing to rule out the presence of the APOE4 gene. Otherwise you risk brain bleeds.
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alex said on December 18, 2025 at 10:31 am
So today the WaPo is trying to lure me back by upping the price to $60 a month from yesterday’s offer of $40. Maybe they should try Trump mathematics and woo me with a 700 percent discount.
So here’s a gift article from the better paper. Hardly shocking after his eulogy for Rob Reiner but I have to wonder how he finds so much time for so much pettiness. To borrow one of my favorite metaphors from Nancy, it’s as if he’s writing on the walls of his padded cell with his own excrement:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/us/politics/trump-presidential-walk-of-fame-white-house.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9k8.DLuA.YDt0mZqA23Lk&smid=url-share
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susan said on December 18, 2025 at 10:40 am
Or as Driftglass describes them, he’s the leader of the tribe that rubs shit in their hair.
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tajalli said on December 18, 2025 at 11:12 am
Oh, Susan! 🙂
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David C said on December 18, 2025 at 12:43 pm
From what I understand, the current treatments for Alzheimer’s are better than nothing and at the same time practically nothing. Unless things have changed, they delay the advancement of the disease by a couple of months at best. With that, it seems like a blood test for it would just give me added time of heartache and worry. So no thanks.
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Deborah said on December 18, 2025 at 1:15 pm
Eat more cheese! https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/well/eat/cheese-dementia-study.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9k8.L6tW.LvVm0JH13OoU&smid=url-share gift article.
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Peter said on December 18, 2025 at 3:24 pm
Well Deborah, if that’s true, my chances of getting dementia are just over 1%. OTOH, if it weren’t for the medications I’m taking, my cholesterol level would be legendary.
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Suzanne said on December 18, 2025 at 3:28 pm
I love cheese! Now, even more reason to eat more of it!
So it seems that David Brooks, author of “The Road to Character” veered off that road far enough to be included in the latest Epstein photo dump.
https://theintercept.com/2025/12/18/david-brooks-jeffrey-epstein-photos/
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alex said on December 18, 2025 at 3:51 pm
And Brooks, notably, was all “move along, nothing to see here” regarding the Epstein files.
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Mark P said on December 18, 2025 at 6:13 pm
So, I have seen that the Kennedy Center is now the Trump-Kennedy Center.
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David C said on December 18, 2025 at 7:09 pm
It might take months to crowbar his name and all the faux gold horseshit off everything. Then again, there will surely be plenty of volunteers to help.
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susan said on December 18, 2025 at 7:13 pm
Deborah, I stopped reading that NYT article on cheese after I read this sentence:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, has said that the next edition of the federal dietary guidelines, expected in early 2026, will overturn the longstanding advice to limit the fats and “stress the need to eat” them.
That ass has upended any trust I have in what his agency spews out.
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David C said on December 18, 2025 at 7:36 pm
Animal fat, of course. They all talk like seed oils were invented in the 80s. They like to pretend that everybody had a jar of bacon grease to cook with and they used nothing else. I was raised on Crisco, Mazola corn oil, and whatever margarine was cheapest that week. So was everybody I knew. The nice thing about the past is that you can remember it however you care to. More so if you weren’t alive yet.
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diane said on December 19, 2025 at 8:50 am
David C, your family was a step up from mine then. I was raised on Crisco and margarine. Corn oil was fancy and if it couldn’t be fried in Crisco it wasn’t worth frying.
I still remember the first time I tasted actual butter at a friend’s house. It was a revelation. I begged to have butter at home. It was a no go. I blame that for my extreme addiction to butter in adulthood.
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