curated news excerpts & citations
Bulwark: Trump Says We Have the “Hottest” Economy. Markets Tell a Different Story.
The U.S. economy entered 2025 as the “envy of the world.” It exited well behind its peers.
MANY OF US HAVE BEEN raising hue and cry about the irreversible damage Donald Trump has wreaked on the economy. Tariffs! Corporate shakedowns! Destruction of research institutions! Deletion of data! Politicization of the Federal Reserve! Alienation of our allies! Socialization of private companies!
And of course, the collapse of the rule of law.
All of these things should be terrible for the U.S. economy, especially in the long term. And yet to date, the stock market has seemingly shrugged it all off.
In fact, markets look somewhat ebullient. In 2025, the S&P 500 grew a solid 16 percent—far better than the average year, and better than many forecasts, particularly in the wake of Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs.
So what’s going on? Why aren’t investors pricing in all these risks?
Some of it may be that they believe there’s a huge, sustainable Trump boom just around the corner. It didn’t come by the end of 2025, but perhaps it’ll arrive this quarter . . . or next quarter . . . or the end of 2026, per the latest goalpost-moving forecasts from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
But there are other ways to interpret what’s going on. None of them are particularly assuring:
- U.S. markets actually aren’t doing that great, when compared to our global competitors.
- The lion’s share of growth here in the United States—in both financial markets and hard economic data—is driven by a single sector: A.I . . .
- . . . which looks an awful lot like a bubble right now.
I find these explanations to be more persuasive than the hope that a new economic golden age is about to dawn. And to understand why, it’s worth recapping why you should worry about the long-term damage from Trump’s policies in the first place.
(Bulwark more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – January 4, 2026
Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the administration’s message about its strikes on Venezuela to the Sunday talk shows this morning. It did not go well.
…When Stephanopoulos asked why the administration thought it didn’t need congressional authorization for the strikes, Rubio said they didn’t need congressional approval because the U.S. did not invade or occupy another country. The attack, he said, was simply a law enforcement operation to arrest Maduro. Rubio said something similar yesterday, but Trump immediately undercut that argument by saying the U.S. intended to take over Venezuela’s oil fields and run the country.
Indeed, if the strikes were a law enforcement operation, officials will need to explain how officers managed to kill so many civilians, as well as members of security forces. Mariana Martinez of the New York Times reported today that the number of those killed in the operation has risen to 80.
…… Himes told Brennan that he thought Trump’s Venezuelan adventure would not go well: “We’re in the euphoria period of…acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2003, when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011, when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. These were very, very bad people, by the way, much, much worse than Maduro and Venezuela, which was never a significant national security threat to the United States. But we’re in that euphoria phase. And what we learned the day after the euphoria phase is that it’s an awful lot easier to break a country than it is to actually do what the president promised to do, which is to run it…. [L]et’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning knowing what? My God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
WSJ: Venezuela’s Defense Minister Says Members of Maduro’s Security Team Killed in Raid
Venezuela's Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino said in televised remarks on Sunday that "a large part" of Nicolas Maduro's security team were killed in the raid that led to the strongman's detention by U.S. forces.
The country’s armed forces support Vice President Delcy Rodriguez's appointment as acting president and will work to maintain order in Venezuela, Padrino said in a statement.
(WSJ more…)Independent: Cuba confirms 32 officers were killed during US attack on Venezuela
Thirty-two Cuban officers were killed in Venezuela over the weekend during an American military operation, the Cuban government has confirmed, marking the first official acknowledgement of the fatalities.
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Timothy Snyder: Venezuela: The Precedents
And America: The Future
Now that the United States has extracted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, it might help to consider four precedents. …
- American intervention in Latin America.
… This time around, there is no pretense that the goal is democracy. - The Second Iraq War.
… In Iraq, although it was embarrassing to say so, the American occupiers were reduced to cooperating with the people they said that they had overthrown. In Iraq, this evolution took years; in Venezuela it took hours. Insofar as there is an American plan, it is that everyone in Venezuela will now do what Americans want, starting with Maduro’s government, which is still in power. - The Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was striking to hear Donald Trump describe the extraction of Maduro as an “extraordinary military operation,” since this is essentially the same language that Vladimir Putin used in his speech announcing the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
…Less obviously, but more profoundly, the indifference to law is a victory for China. Until now, the Russians who have been doing the dirty work in China’s effort to remake the international order as simply a matter of power politics carried out by dictators in the service of personal priorities. Now the Americans are also helping to bring about a Chinese world order.
- The fascist wars. Fascist regimes were defeated in 1945, but they were, while they lasted, legitimated by war.
…Trump and his advisors seem to want the political gains of fighting a war without actually having to fight one. They want the short cut to fascism, claiming a huge victory right away, while tweeting about the enemies at home. But fascism requires not quick operations but real combat that endangers and thus engages civilians. Even assuming that Trump’s base and Americans generally support this Venezuela action, which is doubtful, it will be forgotten within days — unless it is escalated.
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The point of these four comparisons is not that history repeats. It is that history reveals.
(Timothy Snyder more…)
- American intervention in Latin America.
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Dean Blundell: Carney Heads to Paris as Ukraine Draws the Line – “Western Troops On The Ground Or No Peace Deal”
Why Ukraine is done with paper promises — and why Canada is already closer to boots on the ground than most people realize.
(Dean Blundell more…)
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Rook T. Winchester: Every Crackdown Starts With a Sentence Like This
When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says “rioters must be put in their place,” he isn’t improvising. He’s reading from a very old, very blood-stained script. In Tehran, that sentence is not rhetoric. It’s a permission slip. It’s the sound of batons being unpacked, rifles being checked, and the Basij revving motorcycles like they’re about to run a red light straight into a crowd.
(Rook T. Winchester more…)
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Mary Geddry: America Crossed the Rubicon in Caracas
From a false fentanyl narrative to an open promise of occupation, Trump just demolished the rules-based order, and dragged us somewhere dark.
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Crooks & Liars: Trump’s Ignorance: Don-Roe Doctrine
… Donald Trump claimed attacking, invading Venezuela, and capturing their president as part of the Monroe doctrine, he now dubs Don-Roe doctrine.
…The Monroe Doctrine was a U.S. foreign policy that opposes European colonialism and intervention in the Western Hemisphere that was carried out by President Monroe in 1823.
It was to protect the US from foreign intervention in our hemisphere.
It was not taking over countries and rulers we didn’t like and stealing their oil. Teddy Roosevelt then implemented his own version called the Roosevelt Corollary.
The Roosevelt Corollary of December 1904 stated that the United States would intervene as a last resort to ensure that other nations in the Western Hemisphere fulfilled their obligations to international creditors, and did not violate the rights of the United States or invite “foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.”
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Penelope Howe on Facebook: The Foreclosure of a Country
There is a glitch in the Venezuela story that most people are missing. The official line is that we captured a dictator to “restore democracy” and “stop drugs.” But those reasons don’t explain the timing. There is a $13 billion transaction happening right now that does. It’s called the Citgo Auction.
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Rachel Hurley on Facebook: Something about Venezuela is not sitting right with me.
… 14 days before the U.S. captured Nicolás Maduro, Russia evacuated the families of its diplomats from Venezuela. December 20th. Wives and kids. Quiet, organized, done.
Rachel Hurley on Facebook … if any of this doesn’t make sense – go back to my previous 3 essays from today
… It looks like in the same way they told us exactly what they were going to do with Project 2025, the Trump admin signaled the takeover for Venezuela in early December.
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Robert Reich: The Quagmire of Trump’s Venezuela
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Ken Klippenstein: Mamdani, Trump and the “A” Word
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Jack Hopkins: Let’s Call It What It Is: The International CON
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John Pavlovitz: Living in The United States of Embarrassment
A few months ago, I confessed to a close friend that I’d been imagining myself in a way I never had before in over half a century of living here in America: I’d been imagining myself as an expat.
…We’re shaking our collective heads here in the Land of the Freaked-out and the Home of the Facepalm, trying to make America good again despite our leaders… and we will.
(John Pavlovitz more…)
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Law & Crime: ‘Cannon’s order is the reason’: Mar-a-Lago judge muzzled Jack Smith such that he wouldn’t review his own Trump report before deposition, transcript reveals
(Law & Crime more…)
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Ruth Ann Crystal MD: Part I: Respiratory Illness Data, 1/4/2026
Ruth Ann Crystal MD: Part II: Research News, 1/4/2026
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Thom Hartmann: Part III: The Global Damage
Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: “The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink”
(Thom Hartmann more…)
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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