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The new measure would let survivors and other parties go to court over records improperly withheld by the federal government. Reaching the signature threshold is a meaningful step toward a vote, with more hurdles ahead. Survivors deserve an accounting that protects their privacy and makes powerful institutions answer for their decisions. They have already waited long enough.

Here on the Homefront, my daughter has secured an excellent birthday arrangement. She gets to leave a day early with Grammy and her cousins for an extra day in Medford, where Grammy plans to take them to get their fingers and toes painted. She is going to love every second of it. My husband and I will drive down Saturday with Ezra and her older brother, meet everyone at the trampoline park for an afternoon of bouncing, and then reconvene at the hotel for swimming and dinner. She is overjoyed. I am overjoyed. My knees have not yet been consulted.

The part where my baby girl is turning five, however, has not received my approval. I remain proud of the wonderful young lady she is becoming while also feeling that time could demonstrate a little basic courtesy and slow the hell down. She is so excited about getting bigger. I’m trying to be a supportive participant in this deeply unreasonable development.

Everything at home is mostly good. The appliances are functioning. The plants are trudging along. The bedroom head unit for our heat pump did decide to begin dripping a large amount of water, because apparently the house felt we had grown complacent. Luckily, we caught it before it ruined my husband’s computer, and he’s fixing it. I appreciate warmth. I would prefer it without an accompanying indoor watershed.

Mom is still dealing with intense knee pain and waiting for an MRI. That particular kind of waiting is exhausting: the pain continues while the process of finding out what’s wrong moves at its own pace. I’m frustrated for her. Getting answers shouldn’t require quite so much endurance from the person already hurting.

Back in Washington, the Epstein petition is a concrete example of lawmakers using a tool that can get around leadership. A discharge petition lets members force an issue toward the floor when enough of them sign on. The new bill would also allow survivors to privately inspect unredacted records that mention them. Massie alleges that the Justice Department is still withholding millions of files required under the existing law. That allegation is part of the case supporters are making for stronger enforcement.

The timing still matters. Under the discharge process, the petition must wait seven legislative days before a signer can call it up, unless leadership schedules action sooner. Wednesday’s milestone creates an opening. The next test is whether Congress follows through.

A brief follow-up on Hegseth, whose impeachment effort Mom covered yesterday: the House voted 211–204 on Tuesday to send Massie’s resolution to the Judiciary Committee, effectively shelving it for this Congress. Eleven Democrats missed the vote; several cited traffic delays near the Capitol, and one had announced a medical absence. Enough additional Democratic votes could have defeated the referral and kept the effort moving. Democrats can pursue impeachment again when they take control in January. Voters who asked for oversight deserve to see that opportunity used.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is threatening to double tariffs on Mexico unless it stops migrant caravans. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded Thursday by saying no caravan has reached the U.S. border since he returned to office in January 2025. She acknowledged groups moving through southern Mexico and said authorities were working with them; she also rejected using force to disperse them.

Trump didn’t specify which tariffs he would double or when new duties would take effect, according to FreightWaves. That leaves businesses trying to plan around another threat with several essential details missing. My objection is simple: trade policy should come with enough information for the people affected to understand what the government is proposing. Migrants, too, deserve to be discussed as human beings whose circumstances require an actual response. Neither subject improves when the president reaches for the loudest possible language.

And a brief follow-up on measles, because this remains consequential: the United States’ elimination status is still under review. PAHO’s expert commission is meeting November 10–13, and Reuters reports that a public decision is expected early next week. The country has held that designation since 2000. We should be precise about where things stand while the review continues.

The CDC lists 5,182 confirmed U.S. measles cases for 2026 as of November 5. The designation concerns whether sustained domestic transmission has been interrupted; imported cases can occur in a country that maintains elimination. Behind that technical distinction are families, schools, and health departments dealing with a preventable disease. Maintaining protection takes ongoing work, and the consequences of falling behind reach people who had no say in the decisions that weakened it.

Here, we are preparing for painted nails, hotel swimming, and a little girl who is very excited to turn five. I want her to keep that excitement about the future. I want her to grow into a world where getting medical answers doesn’t mean waiting in pain, where a family can afford a home and dinner, and where the adults have kept preventable diseases from becoming another childhood milestone. Giving our children reasons to look forward to getting older feels like a responsibility worth taking seriously.

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Be quiet.

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No maps. No intelligence briefing. No difficult choices involving several branches of government. Just arrive at a place of profound national mourning and successfully refrain from becoming the reason a soldier has to raise his voice. It’s basically the tutorial level.

According to the Associated Press, Hegseth, his wife, and several senior aides posed for photographs near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier after Wednesday’s ceremony. As the group broke up, a loud laugh was heard, prompting the sentinel to call out: “All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times.”

We don’t know who laughed. The footage doesn’t establish that Hegseth himself made the noise. We do know that the group accompanying the man running the Pentagon required an instruction normally understood by visitors who have never commanded anything more complicated than a rental car.

Imagine getting everyone through the security arrangements, the scheduling, the transportation, the photographs, and then losing the mission at “indoor voice.”

Hegseth cultivates the sort of warrior persona that makes you suspect he thinks the Geneva Conventions are something you can disable in Settings.

He has the energy of a man who enters a Call of Duty lobby, announces that everyone needs to take this seriously, and then spends the next twenty minutes screaming into a headset while the smoke detector chirps behind him.

Somewhere, an exhausted teenager is saying, “Pete, your mic is picking up the whole house.”

And now a soldier has effectively delivered that message in person.

For clarity, Hegseth did serve. He was an Army National Guard infantry officer with deployments that included Iraq and Afghanistan. His military service is real. Which makes this even more embarrassing.

A veteran leading the Department of Defense should be particularly well equipped to bring a group to Arlington without requiring remedial supervision. You would hope that information came bundled with the job. Somewhere between nuclear readiness and procurement, perhaps someone could pencil in: “Your entourage should already know how to behave at the Tomb.”

But Hegseth’s public act depends on making sure we never go too long without being reminded how exceptionally tough he is. The warrior talk. The grievances. The permanent suggestion that manhood is under siege and only Pete, broadcasting at the volume of a leaf blower, can hold the perimeter.

After a while, you begin to wonder why something this self-evident requires such an aggressive advertising budget.

A man who walks into every room announcing that he’s the hardest man in it has assigned the rest of us an exhausting amount of clerical work. Apparently, we must keep acknowledging it. Yes, Pete. Very formidable. We’ve updated the spreadsheet. Please let someone finish explaining the naval appropriations.

At Arlington, though, the act encountered a standard that could not be impressed. The sentinel was doing his job. Tomb Guards undergo rigorous selection and training, and the Old Guard has maintained this duty since 1948. Their movements are precise because the responsibility deserves precision. There’s no bonus round where the rules become optional because someone important wants a picture.

“All visitors” is doing beautiful work here.

It includes the tourists. It includes the school groups. It includes the man whose calendar contains meetings about aircraft carriers. Rank doesn’t entitle your party to a premium subscription with the silence requirement removed.

And the Pentagon’s response was almost painfully sensible. Spokesman Sean Parnell acknowledged that the soldier had correctly reminded everyone to maintain decorum.

There really wasn’t much room to maneuver. An investigation into whether the silence was woke would have been difficult to announce with a straight face.

Still, consider the administrative achievement. The United States maintains an enormous military bureaucracy, and on this occasion its senior leadership group needed the operating instructions for a library.

You can picture the revised briefing packet. Arrival time, seating arrangements, weather forecast, and a final page, in seventy-two-point font:

PETE. SHHH.

The absurdity deserves the jokes, but the place deserves our care. The Tomb holds unidentified American service members. People go there carrying grief, gratitude, family histories, and the knowledge that some families never received the closure a name on a grave provides. It’s a place where the country has made a promise to remember people it couldn’t identify.

The silence gives that promise room. And that’s what Hegseth’s whole performance struggles to understand about honor. It can hold your attention without demanding it. It can ask something of you without first explaining how powerful it is.

Look at the sentinel. He didn’t need to tell anyone what kind of American he was. His care for the duty in front of him made that plain. When the moment required him to speak, he spoke. Then the work continued. There was no need to turn the correction into a story about himself.

That restraint makes Hegseth’s endless warrior branding look smaller. Every shouted declaration invites us to admire the man making it. The sentinel’s discipline directs our attention toward the people he is there to honor. One keeps asking us to look at Pete. The other reminds us why we came.

We should be able to expect that distinction from the people entrusted with sending Americans into danger. Their authority carries consequences far beyond whether they look sufficiently fierce on television. We need judgment, steadiness, and the capacity to recognize when their own importance is the least important thing in the room.

At Arlington, the most convincing demonstration of those qualities came from the person who had no interest in selling them.

Hegseth brought the warrior brand. The sentinel kept the promise, and when the branding got too loud, he muted the lobby.

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The wreath had been laid, the president had spoken, and the crowd at Arlington National Cemetery was thinning when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s party decided the moment called for photos.

So they gathered on the empty steps overlooking the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: Hegseth, his wife Jennifer, his chief of staff and several senior aides, posing and chatting. As they began to leave, someone laughed, loudly enough to carry across the plaza.

The Army sentinel stopped his patrol, turned toward them, and delivered a command that could probably have been heard at the Pentagon without benefit of a telephone.

“All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times!”

All visitors.

Tomb guards deliver that same warning to noisy school groups and wandering tourists. The sentinel didn’t make an exception for rank, and nothing in his orders told him to.

Even the Pentagon acknowledged that the soldier had acted correctly.

Hold on to that image: a soldier standing guard over America’s unknown war dead, enforcing a rule without regard to who was standing in front of him.

Elsewhere in Washington, and particularly in Silicon Valley, some very powerful people are discovering that the rules have an inconvenient habit of catching up with them.

On Sunday, Nvidia’s board announced an “independent investigation” into reports that its founder and CEO had been the target of a foreign intelligence operation, and declared its confidence in Jensen Huang. By Thursday morning he was gone: resigned as CEO, president and board member, effective immediately.

Whether the espionage allegations or a second reported affair with a subordinate finally prompted Huang’s departure matters less than the consequences. Nvidia has abruptly lost the CEO who built it amid a national-security scandal. CFO Colette Kress is now doing double duty as interim CEO, while the board has appointed its first chairman and must find a permanent successor.

For a company worth trillions, that’s quite a lot of emergency housekeeping. Apparently, being indispensable isn’t much of a succession plan.

Investors have noticed. Nvidia has lost market value, now pushing $2 trillion since its October peak. Not all of that belongs to Huang’s scandal; broader anxiety about the AI boom was already weighing on the stock. But the leadership crisis has added another rather expensive problem.

Then there is the husband.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Huang was introduced to Alice Huang by Kang Wei, a Chinese businessman he had known for a decade. Kang was also Alice Huang’s husband. Associates told the Journal that he seemed to accept the relationship for two years, sometimes joking that his wife was Jensen’s personal assistant.

It helps to separate what is documented from what remains alleged.

Corporate records show that the couple helped establish Megaspeed’s Singapore operation in 2023, with Alice Huang serving as a director. The company became an Nvidia cloud partner and purchased billions of dollars’ worth of chips and servers. China’s securities regulator fined Kang and his investment firm in 2018 over disclosure violations. Taiwan has now revoked Alice Huang’s entry permit.

U.S. officials suspect Chinese intelligence recruited Alice Huang because of her access to Nvidia’s CEO. Sources told the Journal that Megaspeed shipped restricted chips into China, while prospective investors described the couple pitching data-center projects with promises that they could get Nvidia technology past American export controls.

Beijing denies the espionage allegations. Megaspeed maintains that it operates lawfully. The Journal also reports that Singaporean authorities detained Alice Huang in 2025, although Singapore has not confirmed that account and says it did not investigate her alleged intelligence connections.

Whether Jensen Huang knew he was being targeted is almost beside the point. The purpose of an intelligence operation is often to exploit someone who doesn’t realize he’s being exploited.

What we do know is that one of America’s most strategically important technology companies sold billions of dollars’ worth of advanced equipment to a business whose principals enjoyed unusually close personal access to its CEO.

The espionage and illegal-export allegations remain unproven, but the questions are no less serious. What did Nvidia know about its customer? What warnings did American intelligence agencies provide? And why were those sales allowed to continue?

Those questions lead directly to Howard Lutnick’s door.

Before Trump’s May trip to Beijing, the Commerce Secretary received a highly classified memo, prepared under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, warning about Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang. It drew on U.S. surveillance of her and a chip-smuggling investigation into Megaspeed. Around the same time, Reuters reported that Commerce had cleared ten Chinese companies to purchase advanced Nvidia chips, although some approvals predated the warning. Megaspeed and its affiliates, meanwhile, had purchased at least $4.8 billion in Nvidia equipment and still hadn’t landed on the export-control blacklist.

It gets more awkward.

The New York Times reports that Commerce handed its Megaspeed investigation to the Justice Department after Nvidia’s general counsel contacted investigators, invoking permission from a senior Trump appointee. According to Axios, Trump authorized action against suspected chip diversion three separate times, only for Lutnick and his deputy Jeffrey Kessler to resist moving forward. Commerce disputes the reported confrontation in which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanded answers from Lutnick last week.

Republicans are now joining in. Sen. John Kennedy says Lutnick needs to explain himself “in front of God and country,” and expects a congressional investigation. House Republicans want testimony. Three GOP committee chairs have requested that Huang appear behind closed doors on November 18, just as Trump heads to the APEC summit in Shenzhen, where he expects to meet Xi Jinping. Subpoenas are being discussed.

As for Trump, his recollection is conveniently flexible. He learned of the allegations “not too long ago.” Intelligence officials might have briefed him, but he couldn’t recall. If they did, he acknowledged, “it didn’t make much of an impact on me.”

That last one is the most believable.

Not everyone has given up on Huang. As Nvidia’s board was weighing his future, ZeroHedge posted a modest proposal: “Elon please hire Jensen.”

Musk replied: “That would be an honor.”

Five words from the man who runs SpaceX, a company that launches satellites for America’s intelligence agencies. The FBI is examining Huang’s relationship with a suspected Chinese intelligence asset, and three Republican House committee chairs want him answering questions behind closed doors next week.

It isn’t a job offer, just a warm thought from one billionaire to another. Still, the vetting interview would be worth watching.

Another courtier has flown too close to the sun. Alina Habba Mildon, Trump’s former personal lawyer, has lost her $50 million contract with the family of a Venezuelan banker Trump later pardoned. She signed it while serving as acting U.S. attorney, then began collecting from the private company while working as a senior Justice Department adviser.

Trump called the deal “totally obnoxious and outrageous,” although the New York Times reports he privately suggested some of the proceeds ought to find their way to his future presidential library. Even an obnoxious contract is subject to the Trumptithe.

Her employer fired her for “failure to perform duties.” New Jersey’s ethics office has also filed disciplinary charges over a settlement she arranged at Trump’s Bedminster golf club, potentially putting her law license at risk.

Unlike Icarus, she reportedly keeps $14.5 million on the way down.

While Washington argues over accountability, voters have been making personnel decisions of their own.

Democrat Scott Colom has unseated Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi. Yes, Mississippi. In Alaska, Mary Peltola still leads Dan Sullivan, although that race remains uncalled.

Committees move slowly and boards move only when cornered. The voters have already moved.

Wednesday was Veterans Day, and also an anniversary. On November 11, 1921, America’s first Unknown Soldier was laid to rest at Arlington. The laughter on those steps came 105 years to the day after his burial.

This week it took a board meeting that ran into the night to remove a CEO. Senators and three House committees are demanding answers about intelligence warnings, chip sales and the Commerce Department. It may take the New Jersey Supreme Court to decide whether a former Trump lawyer keeps her license.

The sentinel’s task was simpler, but the principle was the same. He had an order, a voice, and no interest in anyone’s rank. Institutions only work if the people inside enforce the standards, no matter who is standing in front of them.

In a week of courtiers, the only person who knew exactly where he stood was the one standing guard.

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There is something especially revealing about treating scrutiny as an attack on the government while occupying the government. Public office comes with questions. Where did the money go? Who benefited? Who was harmed? Answering them is part of the job, however inconvenient that may be for an administration accustomed to grading its own homework.

Here on the Homefront, we are preparing for this weekend’s trip to the trampoline park for my daughter’s birthday, because apparently the appropriate reward for successfully keeping a child alive another year is to enter a building where every surface encourages her to launch herself into the air.

I also heard back from my insurance about the surgery to repair my sinuses. They said no. The estimate without insurance is $26,000, so I will go ahead and keep my broken sinuses. At that price, I would expect them to come with heated floors and a modest breakfast nook. I went looking for a way to breathe better and received a renovation estimate for the inside of my face.

My daughter got an early birthday present last night, and we let her stay up too late playing with it. This was a lovely decision made by the nighttime parents, who left the consequences for the morning parents. She was tired and cranky today, but absolutely nothing was going to keep her from dance class. She got ready and persevered. The commitment is impressive. The bedtime judgment remains a family concern.

Ezra is growing much too fast. My husband plays this game with him where he says “Ready, set, go” in this cute singsong voice and pretends to drop him, which makes Ezra laugh and laugh. Now Ezra says the same words in the exact same tone and throws himself down on his bed. He has learned the routine, hired himself as the performer, and requires no further assistance from management. It is unbearably adorable.

I have also concluded the investigation into my oldest son’s sudden forgetfulness regarding riding his electric scooter to school, and I was right all along: it is too cold in the morning. We have reached a transportation agreement. His dad will take him and the scooter to school, and he will ride it home. A diplomatic breakthrough, achieved without sanctions or anyone purchasing Greenland.

The plants are planted. The exterior trim is beautiful. The fairy garden is coming alive. And I have new hair. Life is trying to be good, and we are accepting what we can get. Even if my sinuses apparently require the kind of financing usually reserved for a vehicle.

That insurance denial does make today’s healthcare news feel especially close to home. Stateline reports that some conservative states are expanding access to short-term insurance plans as people struggle with the cost of comprehensive coverage. A Georgetown secret shopper study found brokers using misleading or inaccurate information while steering consumers toward limited plans.

These policies can have lower premiums because they can leave much more of the risk with the patient. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners explains that they may exclude preexisting conditions, need not cover essential benefits such as maternity care, prescriptions, and mental healthcare, and can impose annual or lifetime benefit limits.

My insurance denial didn’t involve one of these plans, but it does go to show that an insurance card and access to care can be two very different things, and policymakers ought to be judged on whether people actually receive treatment. A cheaper monthly bill is a poor consolation when the medical bill arrives and the coverage disappears into the fine print.

There’s another healthcare announcement worth looking past the headline. On Monday, federal officials announced $10 billion in rural health grants across all 50 states, the second annual installment of a five-year, $50 billion program. That money can support useful work, including staffing, maternal health, and access to care.

But KFF estimates that the same spending law cuts federal Medicaid spending in rural areas by about $137 billion over ten years. The grant program provides $50 billion over five years, while many of the Medicaid cuts continue beyond it. Those are different timelines, and the grants don’t fully replace the projected losses. KFF also notes that the money is not simply an unrestricted fund to keep struggling hospitals operating.

For those of us in rural communities, the consequences have very ordinary names: the appointment you can’t get, the longer drive, the missed work, the question of who will watch the children while you travel for care. I want these grants to help. I also want the next Congress to examine the damage they’re being asked to cushion. A ribbon-cutting photograph won’t tell us whether a community still has a doctor five years from now.

And while we debate what care people can afford, we are approaching another deeply troubling public-health milestone: the United States could lose its measles elimination status as soon as early next week. Reuters reports that the Pan American Health Organization’s expert panel is meeting through November 13, with a public determination expected early the following week. The decision hasn’t yet been announced.

The United States has held elimination status since 2000. That designation doesn’t mean there can never be another case or contained outbreak. It means sustained domestic transmission has been interrupted. PAHO defines reestablished endemic transmission as uninterrupted circulation of the same virus genotype and lineage for at least 12 months. This review will assess whether that’s happened; it’s not a new one-week deadline to contain the disease.

The CDC’s latest national update reports 5,182 confirmed cases through November 5. Behind that number are families, missed school, frightened parents, and public-health workers trying to contain a disease we spent decades bringing under control. If elimination status is lost, the label will be acknowledging a failure that has already unfolded. We should be asking what resources, vaccination efforts, and political leadership will prevent more families from paying the price.

Meanwhile, at the COP31 climate summit in Antalya today, UN climate chief Simon Stiell connected fossil-fuel dependence and climate disasters with inflation, household bills, and economic instability. He argued that clean energy and investment in resilience can help protect people from those pressures.

That belongs in the affordability conversation. Families don’t have a separate imaginary wallet for climate costs. The money comes out of the same budget that buys groceries, heats the house, and pays for healthcare. We should ask climate policy to deliver practical improvements people can feel, and ask politicians promising lower costs how their energy decisions will help households withstand the next disruption.

And today is Veterans Day. To everyone who has served, and to the families who have carried so much alongside them: thank you.

A recent account from the VA’s homelessness specialists offers a reminder of what support requires after the ceremonies end. Some veterans experiencing homelessness are working, but their pay can’t cover the cost of housing. Without a secure place to live, even following a treatment plan can become difficult: medications may need refrigeration, meals, supplies, or reliable transportation to appointments.

There are people doing that work every day, connecting veterans with housing, providing healthcare, bringing mobile services to communities, and helping someone get to an appointment. Their work deserves resources and attention long after November 11.

We can honor service by making it easier for someone to come home and remain safely housed, fed, and cared for. We can demand that the institutions making promises answer for whether they keep them. That’s what I want from this next chapter: answers, care people can afford to use, and enough room for an ordinary life. A child getting to dance class. A veteran settling into a home. A family planting something that will still be growing next spring.

Life is trying to be good. We ought to have a government willing to help.

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His proposed 250-foot “Triumphal Arch” near Arlington National Cemetery is facing another lawsuit, this one from nine members of the Kennedy family. Their complaint, filed Tuesday and reported today, argues that the structure would obstruct historic views and cast shadows over gravesites, including John F. Kennedy’s.

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Most people arrive at a cemetery and understand that this is an occasion to make themselves smaller. Donald apparently looked around and thought the dead needed a statement entrance. A federal judge temporarily blocked construction last week. But the arch has an additional qualification that deserves our attention: it has applied for a job in national defense.

Back in September, Trump announced that, at the military’s request, the project would also become a “top grade Military Complex,” accommodating drones, snipers, and ammunition. Of course. The Pentagon called. They’ve reviewed the threats facing the country, and what’s missing is a tremendous doorway. You can imagine the procurement meeting. Someone proposes improved communications. Someone else raises cybersecurity. Donald slides a picture across the table.

What if the entrance to France were bigger?

I appreciate the versatility. Usually, when I buy something unnecessary and start explaining its additional functions, we’re discussing a kitchen appliance. Yes, it makes waffles, but it also does sandwiches, and technically the children could inherit it. Donald’s purchase justification comes with sniper positions.

Unfortunately, Judge Tanya Chutkan examined the administration’s national-security explanation and observed that the supposed security features appeared nowhere in the planning documents used to review and approve the project. An awkward omission for a military complex.

You would think the military part might make the paperwork. A little diagram. A cupboard labeled DRONES. Something to distinguish the nation’s critical defense infrastructure from a very ambitious wedding backdrop. Instead, the national-security argument has acquired the familiar atmosphere of a child remembering, halfway through explaining why he needs a gaming computer, that it can also do homework.

There are legitimate reasons to protect Washington. Those reasons deserve serious planning, evidence, and scrutiny. The administration should be able to demonstrate why this particular structure, in this particular place, meets an actual need.

“Donald wants it enormous” is a design preference. We should be able to locate the security assessment separately.

Meanwhile, the White House says the arch is intended to honor the heroes buried at Arlington and has called it unfortunate that members of the Kennedy family joined the litigation. Imagine having to explain that you would prefer your relatives’ graves remain visible, only to be informed that you’re interfering with the president’s effort to honor them.

We understand your concerns about the shadow. Unfortunately, your loved one’s tribute requires us to block the sun.

The family’s objections concern the setting, the sightlines, and a place whose meaning already exists. Arlington does not need a president to improve its significance by installing something large enough to interrupt it.

The rows of graves have managed to communicate sacrifice with devastating clarity. They do it quietly. That may be where the misunderstanding began. Trump’s approach to remembrance seems to require a structure that can be seen from wherever people are trying to remember something else.

And this is where the absurdity becomes a question about power. National security carries weight because real threats exist. When an administration invokes it to defend a president’s preferred construction project, the public deserves to see the work behind the claim. Courts should examine it. Congress should ask questions. People whose families are buried nearby should be heard.

A president’s enthusiasm doesn’t settle those questions, however many capital letters he deploys. Veterans deserve care, housing, support, and a country willing to reckon honestly with what it asks of them. The people buried at Arlington deserve the dignity of the place chosen to remember them.

Donald deserves to survive the experience of being somewhere that isn’t about him. We could start with a modest exercise. Let the man visit a national cemetery and leave without adding square footage.

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This February, just past his 80th birthday, he arrived at the VA hospital in East Orange, New Jersey, after days of stomach pain. A CT scan suggested his appendix had burst and turned gangrenous. Doctors wrote that he needed surgery immediately.

The hospital’s operating room was out of service. Instead of arranging an emergency transfer, administrators scheduled him for the morning transport shift. By the time he reached the Manhattan VA, roughly 12 hours had passed since he arrived at East Orange. Surgeons operated immediately and found sepsis. He died on March 7.

No one can say for certain that faster surgery would have saved him, and ProPublica, which reported his story this morning, is careful not to. What the reporting does establish is that he needed emergency surgery, his hospital couldn’t provide it, and his transfer was delayed until morning.

A few hours after that story went up, the president and vice president stood at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the nation’s veterans. Vance encouraged them to celebrate and have a good time.

Veterans Day honors the living, and veterans have earned a good time. The government’s ongoing obligation is to give them something more substantial than speeches to celebrate.

Early in Trump’s second term, the administration floated mass layoffs at the VA, then backed off after veterans’ groups objected. What followed, according to ProPublica’s reporting, was quieter: canceled union contracts, a rigid return-to-office order that overwhelmed a 70-year-old hospital’s physical capacity, DOGE’s weekly what-did-you-accomplish emails, and buyouts for employees willing to leave. Front-line medical staff were supposedly protected. Many left anyway, and many were never replaced.

East Orange and its affiliated New Jersey facilities lost nearly a tenth of their staff. The number of roles with severe shortages roughly tripled, from about 30 to about 90, a list that reads like a hospital’s org chart: oncologists, surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, mechanics, cleaners.

In 2023, before he ran the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought said he wanted federal workers “in trauma.” Nobody has shown that anyone drew up a plan specifically for East Orange, but the hospital looks a great deal like the workplace Vought described. And as the VA loses the staff needed to provide care directly, more veterans are being routed into the private Community Care system that conservatives have spent decades advocating expanding.

By May, the VA had roughly 5,100 fewer doctors, nurses and other mission-critical employees than when Trump returned to office. That month, VA Secretary Doug Collins told Congress there was nothing hospitals couldn’t hire. If they needed a doctor, he said, they could hire one. Soon afterward, Collins quietly imposed staffing caps.

Hospitals can hire anyone they need, apparently, except the people they’re not allowed to hire.

Meanwhile, the department had gone more than a year without using authority Congress granted, with bipartisan support, to pay highly qualified specialists above the usual government salary limits. At a time when hospitals were losing experienced physicians, the VA was leaving an available recruiting tool unused.

Dennis, a 72-year-old Vietnam veteran with advanced colorectal cancer, needed radiation to ease his bleeding and pain. East Orange had stopped offering it after the medical physicist responsible for calibrating its equipment quit. Dennis was referred to Community Care, which was itself overwhelmed and understaffed. His doctors flagged his case as urgent at least five times. His consultation was scheduled for September 12. He died on September 4.

ProPublica doesn’t claim the delay killed him. Oncologists consulted by the reporters said it almost certainly made his final weeks more painful.

The VA insists care has improved, citing record appointment numbers and measures on which East Orange outperforms private hospitals. It cited privacy rules in declining to discuss individual patients but also failed to answer ProPublica’s questions about broader operational problems, including the operating-room closures.

In late August, Collins visited a VA campus near East Orange. He spent little time with veterans in the residential PTSD unit. On his way out, he stopped to speak with Willie Johnson, a veteran who had lost both legs, thanked him for his service and handed him a commemorative coin bearing the secretary’s own name. Johnson told ProPublica that care had changed since Trump returned to office, and that even the food had gotten worse.

The next day, administrators praised the visit and the distribution of commemorative coins in a staff email. One recipient ran the maintenance department that had struggled to keep the operating room functioning. Last week, a backup generator failed, and the operating room closed again.

A commemorative coin is not an operating room.

That’s how we’re caring for veterans after they come home. Now consider what we’re asking of the men and women still serving.

On September 2, 2025, a U.S. strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean left two survivors clinging to the wreckage. A second strike killed them. The Washington Post reported that Pete Hegseth had given a spoken directive beforehand to kill everyone aboard, which he denies.

The justification has shifted ever since. Defense officials suggested the men were radioing for backup. Then Adm. Frank Bradley, who ordered the second strike, told lawmakers they were in no position to make a distress call. What remained was the argument that the wreckage was still afloat with cocaine aboard. Rep. Jim Himes, who saw the video, described two unarmed men clinging to what looked like flotsam.

On October 16, another strike left two survivors. This time, American forces rescued them. The military demonstrated that surviving a strike did not necessarily mean receiving another missile.

Whatever those two men were carrying, they were human beings clinging to wreckage. International law requires feasible efforts to rescue people in distress at sea, not another missile directed at them. Their deaths also matter to the Americans who carried out the order.

The VA’s own National Center for PTSD recognizes moral injury: the lasting damage that can follow acts that violate a person’s deepest beliefs, or betrayal by those in charge. I can’t tell you whether anyone involved on September 2 carries that wound. But the administration authorizing these military operations is the same one whose policies, according to ProPublica’s investigation, are weakening the VA healthcare system those troops may one day need.

In 2016, as a Fox News commentator, Hegseth called Trump an “armchair tough guy” who was all bluster, and said the military won’t follow unlawful orders from its commander-in-chief. As secretary, he threatened to recall Sen. Mark Kelly to active duty, investigated him, and ultimately censured him and sought to reduce his retired rank after Kelly appeared in a video reminding service members of essentially the same thing. The 2016 Hegseth would make a fine witness against the 2026 one.

John Ullyot, Hegseth’s former Pentagon spokesman and a longtime Trump loyalist, says Hegseth makes the job about himself rather than the troops. Ullyot’s complaint is that the president deserves better. Fair enough, though the president isn’t the one waiting on a surgery.

At his news conference before Tuesday’s vote, Hegseth cast the impeachment effort as an attack on the troops. Hegseth isn’t standing up for the troops. He’s standing behind them.

Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican on his way out after Trump helped beat him in a primary, filed eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth. They cover war powers violations, a strike on an Iranian elementary school that killed at least 156 civilians, including more than 120 children, retaliation against Kelly, and the boat strikes, which have killed 243 people and which the articles call extrajudicial. Hegseth dismisses the charges as partisan policy disagreements, not impeachable offenses. But they are allegations of serious misconduct, and determining whether they warrant impeachment is part of the House’s constitutional responsibility.

On Tuesday, it declined to. The House voted 211 to 204 to send the articles to the Judiciary Committee, effectively shelving them for the rest of this Congress. Massie was the only Republican to oppose it. Every Democrat present voted to keep the effort alive.

Eleven Democrats weren’t present. Seven Republicans were absent too, but the Democratic absences were the ones that mattered: seven more votes against the referral would have tied it, and a tie kills the motion. Some of the absent Democrats were reportedly stuck in traffic on their way back from an event. Others had a medical procedure or a personal emergency. Nancy Pelosi was in San Francisco at a Veterans Day celebration, which is its own kind of irony. Democrats argue Republicans would have simply held the vote open until their own stragglers arrived. Maybe so. Showing up is still the minimum.

Trump celebrated on Truth Social that the Democrats’ impeachment attempt had “miserably FAILED!” He also declared the “EXONERATION of a Great American Patriot.” The articles were introduced by a Republican, and nobody voted on whether the allegations were true. An exoneration without an examination. I guess that’s how Washington does its paperwork now.

Congress, to be clear, didn’t decide whether Hegseth’s conduct warranted impeachment. It decided the question could wait.

Congress has the constitutional authority to oversee the military and the responsibility to make sure veterans get the care they were promised. Congress has the constitutional authority to oversee the military and the responsibility to make sure veterans get the care they were promised. This week, the House found a way to postpone the first. ProPublica documented how badly the second can fail.

The veterans who depend on the VA cannot wait for another election, another study, or another commemorative coin. They need doctors, nurses, functioning operating rooms, and access to treatment when they need it.

That leaves the rest of us. Congress answers to the people who gave it that job, and its responsibilities don’t disappear because a new majority takes office in January.

Before January 3. Massie has filed another Iran war-powers resolution that could reach a vote if the House remains in session long enough. Other war-powers measures may come first.

After January 3. Democrats take the House. Hakeem Jeffries has called himself a “hard yes” on impeaching Hegseth. Ask what that means in practice. Will there be public hearings on the September 2 strike? Testimony under oath? Release of the video, with necessary security redactions? An impeachment promise without an investigation isn’t accountability.

The VA, starting now. Ask your members of Congress for staffing and vacancy numbers at the VA facilities in your state. Is the department using the specialist-pay authority Congress already gave it? Will Collins lift the hiring caps and testify alongside the doctors and nurses who actually care for these patients? And what will Congress do to make sure veterans receive timely treatment rather than another referral into an overwhelmed system?

These are questions with answers that can be checked. Demand the numbers, the hearings, the votes, and the evidence that something has actually improved. A record number of appointments means little to a veteran who can’t get the treatment he needs.

The November election showed that voters can change who sits in Congress. But voting isn’t the end of our responsibility. It’s how we decide who will be answerable to us. Accountability is a daily obligation, not a biennial event.

The veterans honored at Arlington this morning kept their end of the bargain long ago. Our job is to make sure that after the speeches end, there’s an operating room with the lights on.

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The announcement ricocheted around the world. From London to Sydney to Abu Dhabi, newsrooms scrambled to determine whether the president of the United States was seriously proposing to staff his press operation with cage fighters. Was it an actual appointment, an elaborate joke, or an attempt to change the subject after Tuesday’s election? Even the White House wasn’t providing answers. Trump kept the spectacle going Sunday by sharing a cartoon of White’s proposed fighter-assistants attacking reporters in the briefing room.

White, who had been attending a boxing event in London, posted an image of himself at the briefing-room podium captioned “On to the next chapter,” then announced he was flying to Washington for a Monday meeting. By Sunday, Trump was saying he was “only kidding, but Dana loves the idea,” and insisting the meeting had been scheduled earlier for unrelated business. Nothing says unrelated like a podium selfie.

By Monday, White had arrived from London, and what might have been an impulsive presidential announcement had acquired the makings of a carefully staged exit. Trump escorted his longtime friend into the James Brady Briefing Room, where White tried out the podium, entertained questions, and eventually received another public offer to become press secretary. Would he take the job or “stay with this ridiculous UFC”? White politely declined; he did not want to be in politics. Trump declared himself “devastated.”

Whether the whole thing had been a joke from the beginning or White had helped devise an elaborate rescue operation over the weekend, the result was remarkably convenient. The president didn’t have to withdraw an embarrassing offer. His friend got to turn it down. Everyone played his part, nobody lost face, and the world’s reporters had spent three days following the production.

The real press secretary’s job has sat empty since Oct. 16, when Katie Zacharia departed after five days and a single briefing at which she answered three questions, the shortest tenure in modern White House history.

Trump did offer one revealing explanation for the entire episode: “We were having a very bad press day, and I said — I don’t know why — I thought of his name.”

Apparently, the remedy for a bad press day was three more days of headlines and a professional fight promoter to deliver the final bell.

In professional wrestling, kayfabe is the shared agreement to treat the scripted as real. A work is the staged performance. A shoot is when something real breaks through, and nobody can script what happens next.

Monday’s White House briefing had all the makings of a work: a presidential job offer that became a joke, followed by a conveniently public refusal, staged in a room built for answering questions.

This morning, across the Potomac, the Pentagon hosted its own production. Facing eight articles of impeachment, Pete Hegseth delivered a sixteen-minute highlight reel of military victories and presidential praise.

Congress, thankfully, isn’t obliged to follow the script.

AFP photographer Roberto Schmidt caught the moment the Guardian ran: Hegseth frozen mid-word beneath the Pentagon seal, one eye clamped shut, the other narrowed, mouth twisted sideways. All that’s missing is a corncob pipe and a can of spinach.

“I yam what I yam, and what I yam is lawful.”

This was his first Pentagon press conference since May. He held none when a Navy commander died in a helicopter crash on July 1, or when an Iranian missile killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan on July 17. He held one when his own job was on the line. Before he took the podium, a press officer warned reporters that anyone lacking decorum would be removed.

The eight articles, filed by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., accuse Hegseth of launching the Iran war without congressional authorization, continuing hostilities after both chambers voted in June to direct withdrawal, and exceeding the War Powers Resolution’s statutory deadlines. They also charge unlawful boat strikes, the unlawful capture of Nicolás Maduro, unauthorized operations in Yemen, disregard for laws meant to minimize civilian casualties, and retaliation against Sen. Mark Kelly for protected speech.

Hegseth answered with the president’s greatest hits. A few highlights, with the record:

“In the 250 years of our American republic, no Secretary of War or Secretary of Defense has ever been impeached for carrying out lawful military operations.”

That qualifier is doing heavy lifting. The House did impeach Secretary of War William Belknap, unanimously, in 1876, over a kickback scheme. Not for military operations, admittedly. The absence of a previous impeachment for a particular offense hardly establishes that the offense is permissible.

Midnight Hammer left Iran’s nuclear sites “obliterated.” Epic Fury left “more than 80% of their nuclear industrial base gone.”

After declaring Iran’s nuclear sites obliterated in 2025, Hegseth now says another war destroyed 80 percent of its nuclear industrial base. How much survived the first obliteration? And what, precisely, does “obliterated” mean?

“We control the Strait of Hormuz.”

Hold that thought.

“More than 70 narco vessels sunk, 218 narco terrorists dead.”

His figure falls below independent tallies. Task & Purpose tallied at least 240 killed as of Oct. 27, including two survivors killed by a follow-up strike as they clung to wreckage in September 2025.

Every operation was “notified to Congress.”

Notification is not authorization. The War Powers Resolution requires notice and withdrawal after 60 days without congressional approval, and the House voted to direct an end to the Iran war. Those questions sit at the heart of three articles.

“The only people who target civilians are the terrorists that we hunt, and I will dignify this claim no further.”

He never mentioned the Iranian school struck on the war’s first day, killing as many as 168 people, including more than 120 children. Senior U.S. officials have privately acknowledged American responsibility to the New York Times; publicly, no one has, and the investigation’s findings remain unreleased. Massie’s articles allege Hegseth dismantled Pentagon safeguards Congress established to minimize civilian casualties. Whether those deaths reflect negligence or something worse is exactly what an investigation should establish. Refusing to “dignify” the question is the opposite of one.

Hegseth told reporters that “the disgruntled congressman even admitted this himself yesterday. No failure here, just impeachment for success.”

Here is what Massie actually said on CNN Monday night. Hegseth, he said, “was effective at killing 200 school children,” effective at bombing fishing boats, effective at an unconstitutional kidnapping, “and that’s what we’re impeaching him for, his effectiveness in breaking the law.” Hegseth took sarcasm about dead children and presented it as a confession.

Massie saw the whole performance coming. Hegseth would try “to convince people he’s been effective and that he’s likable,” he predicted. “That’s not what’s at issue here.” Or more simply: “This isn’t a popularity contest.”

If it were a popularity contest, Hegseth would have another problem. Trump called him “perhaps the most popular and successful military official in the Country.” Quinnipiac’s September poll found 32 percent approved of his performance, while 57 percent disapproved, his lowest rating yet.

Trump also called Massie a “stone cold loser” whom he beat “easily, with a man that never ran before.” Except Ed Gallrein had run before, in a 2024 Kentucky state Senate primary, and lost.

On the subject of losers, Massie lost his primary in May. Trump spent last Tuesday watching his party lose both houses of Congress.

The script began to fray in the Q&A. Pressed on reports that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was rearming during the ceasefire, Hegseth acknowledged that “they’ll attempt to reconstitute.” He insisted Iran’s capabilities were severely diminished, but the prospect of rebuilding complicated the picture of an enemy he had just declared ruined.

Then came JD Vance, who wrote the morning after the election that “the reason we lost is the war.” Asked whether he agreed, Hegseth declined any “fingerpointing” and explained that “politics is not really my thing.” This from a man who had just spent sixteen minutes attacking Democrats, the press, and a Republican congressman.

Instead, he borrowed Marco Rubio’s formulation that the war was “not necessarily popular but it may have been necessary.” The historic military victory had been downgraded in under twenty minutes.

And then there was Stephen Miller. According to the New York Times, Miller’s pitch for the White House chief of staff job included telling Trump he needed to wind down the Iran war. Hegseth had just praised Miller as an “incredible American patriot” and the Pentagon’s great friend. But when a reporter asked whether they’d discussed ending the war, Hegseth said only that Miller was “busy in his new role” and that he looked forward to meeting with him.

The prepared remarks celebrated a war won. The questions revealed a war whose military, political, and diplomatic consequences were still being worked out.

While Hegseth puffed his chest and claimed control of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said two tankers caught fire there, one after striking a mine. That is Tehran’s account and has not been independently confirmed. Qatar warned that the strait’s continued closure, with winter approaching, is doubling the cost of the crisis.

Iran’s armed forces chief promised “many surprises” in any future war, and its first vice president said the confrontation continues with or without peace. The Gulf states approved a new military command headquarters in Kuwait, preparing for threats that apparently haven’t disappeared with Washington’s declaration of victory.

Brent crude slipped below $90 a barrel for the first time since August on hopes that the fighting is ending. Trump, meanwhile, says the war is “effectively over” and is already talking about sending the bill to the Gulf allies and Israel that he says America protected.

Hegseth called Massie’s articles “sabotage.” He cast the congressman as “a single rogue legislator” attempting to “veto national security decisions made by the duly elected commander-in-chief,” and warned that Congress would “undermine their missions in real time.” The impeachment itself he dismissed as a “circus,” “one small thing over here.”

Then he turned to the sort of congressional action he was eager to see. His department, he said, is “flooding the zone” during the lame duck in pursuit of “350 billion at a minimum” through reconciliation. “My job is not to litigate all of this every day,” he said. “It’s to ensure we’re funded.”

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war and control the purse. It gives the House the power to impeach and the Senate the power to try impeachments. Hegseth welcomes the appropriations and condemns the scrutiny.

Earlier, while arguing that previous defense secretaries had not been impeached for lawful military operations, he tossed in a remarkable aside: “War Powers Resolution or not.” But whether his operations complied with that very law is central to Massie’s allegations. Hegseth never explained how they did.

The proper remedies for policy disagreements, he argued, are legislation, debate, and “the next presidential election.” But Massie’s articles allege violations of the Constitution and federal law, not merely disagreements over policy. And voters held a congressional election just last Tuesday, changing who will control both chambers in January. Apparently, that election doesn’t figure into his understanding of accountability.

Republicans, in his telling, should be “delivering wins” rather than asking questions.

The War Powers Resolution and the impeachment clause are not obstacles to his job. They establish legal limits and mechanisms of accountability, and his oath runs to the Constitution, not to the president.

He accepts Article I when it writes checks and calls it treachery when it asks questions.

The Pentagon wasn’t the only place where the script ran into the record. Trump had been doing some character work of his own on 60 Minutes, playing the billionaire who barely notices his billions.

Asked about Forbes’s estimate that his net worth had risen nearly $3 billion, Trump replied that “so did everyone’s” and told the correspondent he “should have had stock.”

Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander took that as an invitation to actually run the numbers.

Only about 10 percent of Trump’s roughly $415 million in liquid assets sat in the stock market. Apply the S&P 500’s roughly 14 percent gain, and you get a few million dollars.

The $3 billion, from fall 2024 to fall 2025, came from elsewhere:

• About $1.4 billion in cash from World Liberty Financial and the Trump memecoin

• About $1 billion in crypto he kept for himself

• Roughly $400 million from an overseas licensing business he had promised not to expand during his first term, whose income rose about tenfold

• Nearly half a billion when a New York appeals court vacated his civil fraud penalty, while upholding the finding that he committed fraud

Trump also told 60 Minutes he devotes “almost no time” to his net worth and leaves the money to his son. Alexander recalls Trump Organization staff phoning a Forbes colleague nonstop for two weeks to push his number higher, and Eric Trump telling him in 2017 that he’d brief his father quarterly. Forbes editors once kept an informal “Donald Trump rule”: divide whatever he tells you by three.

At the rate his estimated fortune grew that year, Trump accumulated the equivalent of his entire $400,000 presidential salary every 70 minutes, including while he slept.

In fairness, Forbes says his fortune dipped slightly this past year as Trump Media and the crypto tokens slid. The golf and club business boomed, though, and a seven-figure Mar-a-Lago membership remains the simplest way to buy dinner near the president. All the while, the crypto buyers are losing heavily, and Trump has already cashed out.

The president says he doesn’t think about his money. Fortunately, Forbes does.

House Republican leaders have told members to expect a procedural vote as early as 5:30 p.m. Eastern, 2:30 Pacific. The likely move is to table Massie’s articles or bottle them up in committee. Massie has already warned what a referral would mean under the current leadership: “A referral to committee is to kill this.”

The math is tight. With a razor-thin Republican majority, as few as three defections could change the outcome. Massie sees two groups worth watching: a “retirement caucus” with little left to lose, and reelected Republicans who felt their “political mortality” on Nov. 3 after winning by a few hundred votes instead of their customary thousands. Attendance could matter, too, particularly among departing lawmakers.

The clock doesn’t necessarily run out on January 3. Impeachment proceedings can continue from one Congress into the next, although a resolution killed tonight would not automatically return. Democrats will control both chambers, and Massie expects hearings, sworn testimony from officials who served under Hegseth, and disclosures from people who “know some things that aren’t even public yet.” That’s his prediction, not a preview of established evidence. He also thinks Hegseth won’t make it to Dec. 31.

Some officials inside the Pentagon appear to have their own doubts about his future. The Intercept reports that current and former defense officials have discussed possible replacements, including Ron DeSantis and Mike Waltz. Asked about DeSantis, one official offered this assessment: “Anything is better than Hegseth.”

Trump, of course, says he’s standing by his secretary. Massie isn’t impressed: “They stand by them until the day they don’t.”

Tonight’s first vote may not be about whether Hegseth should be impeached. It may be about whether House Republicans are willing to let that question come to a vote at all.

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. Hegseth claimed the impeachment articles tell every service member “that their service was a crime.” They don’t. They accuse the civilian official who gave the orders of violating the law, not the people who carried them out.

“If they want to come for the warriors, they’re going to have to come through me,” he declared.

What a load of hogwash! Nobody is proposing to impeach the warriors. Congress is asking questions of Hegseth. He has placed the men and women under his command between himself and those questions.

It is precisely because we love and respect the men and women willing to put their lives on the line for this country that I believe Hegseth should go. They deserve leadership worthy of their courage and sacrifice, leadership that puts their welfare and the Constitution ahead of personal ambition. The Pentagon does not exist to protect its secretary. The secretary exists to serve the country and the people entrusted to his command.

Asking who decided what, and under what authority, isn’t sabotage. It’s Congress’s job, whichever party holds the gavel. Governing and investigating were never rival duties.

Hegseth says he’s standing up for the troops. This morning, he looked remarkably like a man barricaded behind them.

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According to Associated Press reporting, incoming House Oversight chair Robert Garcia says Democrats will not be intimidated. Good. The public deserves investigations grounded in evidence, conducted fairly, and followed wherever the facts lead. Threatening the investigators before they take charge is reason to insist on that work. And as we move from Washington to a measles outbreak, healthcare bills, and the electricity meter, the reason for paying attention gets considerably closer to home.

Here at home, Mom has lodged a formal complaint about my roots. I bleach my hair, but after a bleaching incident that fried a considerable amount of it, I decided to give it a long vacation from chemical intervention. It is healthy again. My roots, however, have taken advantage of the recovery period to establish a substantial presence.

Mom hates them. Apparently, I was not addressing this situation with the urgency she felt it deserved, so she made me an appointment. Tomorrow afternoon, my hair will receive professional attention, and my mother will hopefully be able to look directly at me again.

Before that, between 11 and 1, I must collect one child from school early, collect the older child, take him to an eye appointment, and then take him back to school. I swear these children have me operating a transportation company that accepts payment exclusively in snack wrappers and requests to change the music.

Meanwhile, my daughter’s Christmas concert is approaching, and the school sent the songs home for us to practice. There is a great deal of “Jingle Bells” happening in these halls. Her birthday is also this month, a fact she has taken personal responsibility for keeping at the forefront of everyone’s consciousness. This weekend we are taking her to her favorite place in the world: the trampoline park. She will bounce. I will marvel at the apparently limitless energy supply available to people who have never had to schedule their own appointments.

It should be a lovely, busy, fun-filled weekend. I want the biggest question hanging over it to be whether we remembered the trampoline socks. That is part of why today’s measles news deserves our attention.

The CDC’s November 6 update reports 5,182 confirmed measles cases in the United States through November 5. That is more than twice the 2,289 cases reported during all of 2025. There have been 43 new outbreaks this year. Those numbers represent people getting sick from a disease we have an effective vaccine to prevent.

Measles can cause pneumonia, brain inflammation, and death. Children younger than five and people with weakened immune systems are among those at greater risk of serious complications. It spreads through the air, and someone can be exposed in a room for up to two hours after an infected person has left. An ordinary trip through a shared space can become an exposure without anyone realizing it at the time.

The protection around those shared spaces is weakening. The CDC reports that MMR vaccination coverage among kindergartners fell to 92.4 percent in the 2025–2026 school year. About 280,000 kindergartners attended school without documentation that they had completed the MMR series. That figure doesn’t mean every one of those children was entirely unvaccinated, but it does identify a substantial gap in documented protection. National averages also conceal communities with much lower coverage.

Two doses of MMR are about 97 percent effective at preventing measles. The routine childhood schedule calls for the first dose at 12 to 15 months and the second at four to six years. Outbreaks or travel can change the timing a clinician recommends, including an early dose for some infants ages six to eleven months. Families should check their records and ask their child’s healthcare provider about their circumstances.

Measles often begins with a high fever, cough, runny nose, and red, watery eyes. The rash usually follows several days later, beginning on the face and spreading downward. If you suspect measles or know you have been exposed, call your healthcare provider immediately and call ahead before arriving for care so they can protect other patients. Treatment after exposure may help prevent illness or reduce its severity for some people, but timing matters. Trouble breathing, confusion, or severe dehydration requires emergency care; have someone alert the hospital that measles is suspected.

I keep thinking about how much effort goes into keeping children safe. We buckle them in, make the appointments, learn the songs, and remember which child needs to be where. We do all these small things because their lives matter more than anything. Public health is the part of that work we do together. It depends on families having access to vaccination, clear information they can trust, and institutions willing to defend the evidence.

The political responsibility here deserves scrutiny. Leaders should be pressed on whether their policies improve vaccination access, strengthen outbreak response, and give families accurate information. We should judge their answers against what they actually fund, recommend, and do. A preventable outbreak demands more than expressions of concern after children are already sick.

If you are someone who says you don’t follow politics, I understand the exhaustion. I have three children, a house that keeps inventing new repair projects, and a brain that occasionally considers answering an email a full day’s work. Nobody needs another thing to worry about.

But please look at what we’re talking about. Whether your child’s school has strong vaccination protections. Whether your family can afford health insurance. Whether your community has the resources to identify an outbreak before more children are exposed. People make those decisions. We elect some of them. Others are appointed by the people we elect.

You don’t have to spend every waking hour watching Washington. You deserve a life with room for other things. But we need enough of one another paying attention, checking claims, voting, and demanding answers to make neglect politically expensive. Because the consequences arrive in places we can’t simply switch off: the pediatrician’s office, the kitchen budget, the classroom where we leave our children each morning, trusting that the adults responsible have done everything they can to keep them safe.

That kitchen budget is also where Democrats’ healthcare promises will be tested. House leaders say early votes in the new Congress will focus on reversing Medicaid cuts and restoring the enhanced tax credits that help people afford ACA marketplace coverage. According to the AP, the Medicaid changes Democrats are seeking to reverse are expected to cut more than $900 billion from the program over a decade.

The new Congress takes office January 3. These are plans, and families should know the difference between a promised vote and restored coverage. Most legislation faces a 60-vote hurdle in the Senate, and Trump can veto bills that reach his desk. Delivering relief will require overcoming those obstacles.

Still, putting healthcare first is a commitment worth holding Democrats to. Families need to know whether they can see a doctor and afford the prescription afterward. Investigating abuse and delivering material help both belong on the job description. I want to see the votes, the negotiations, and sustained pressure to get people covered.

There is also a consequential energy fight happening while the outgoing Congress still holds power. The Senate is scheduled to take a procedural vote Monday on moving forward with a sweeping permitting package. The proposal would accelerate approvals for energy and infrastructure projects, including renewable energy, fossil fuel development, and data centers.

Supporters argue that faster approvals would help expand energy supply and lower costs. The package also includes provisions intended to make data centers pay the electricity costs associated with their operations. Those protections deserve close examination as lawmakers respond to concerns about household utility bills.

Environmental and conservation groups oppose the deal, warning that it would weaken environmental safeguards, undermine Tribal sovereignty, and restrict opportunities to challenge projects. That is a serious set of objections to legislation being advanced before newly elected lawmakers take office.

I want clean energy built, and I want families able to afford their electricity. I also want communities to have a meaningful say in what gets built around them. Congress needs to explain how the final legislation would deliver those things, and who would bear the costs when a project causes harm. A promise of affordability deserves the same scrutiny as any other political promise.

Tomorrow, I will be moving children between school and appointments and submitting my roots to professional rehabilitation. This weekend, I will be watching my daughter bounce toward another birthday. Those ordinary days are what I want our politics to serve: people healthy enough, secure enough, and supported enough to enjoy the lives they are working so hard to build.

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The interview with Ross Douthat offered something for everyone: investment advice for people who have misplaced their billions, a surprise inspection of military haircuts, and the possibility that George Washington would have understood cryptocurrency if only someone had brought a laptop to Valley Forge.

Through it all ran a remarkably consistent argument. Donald Trump has done wonderfully. Any evidence suggesting otherwise has arrived improperly labeled. Consider the economy.

Asked why Americans weren’t feeling the benefits of the prosperity he described, Trump blamed “bad messaging,” allowing that perhaps some of the responsibility for that belonged to him. A moment of reflection. Brief, but visible. Like spotting a deer beside the highway before it disappears into the brush.

Then we were back to the familiar complaint that the press doesn’t adequately report how well everything is going. There it is. Your household budget has a communications problem. You thought the issue was that the money leaving your account kept exceeding the money entering it. Apparently, the president’s explanation of your prosperity hasn’t reached you. Check your spam folder. There may be three billion dollars in there beside the coupon for printer ink.

This became an especially helpful possibility when Douthat raised a Forbes estimate of a roughly $3 billion increase in Trump’s wealth. Trump suggested everyone had benefited. When Douthat explained that his own fortune had not increased by that amount, the president supplied the missing ingredient.

“You should have had stock.”

Of course. I knew I’d forgotten something. Milk, bread, three billion dollars in capital appreciation. You get distracted trying to remember which child needs collecting from which building, and suddenly you’ve squandered another opportunity to become a financial dynasty.

Somewhere, a woman working a double shift is going to be furious when she discovers that wealth was available through the simple expedient of already having enough money invested. There’s also a problem with Trump’s explanation of his own gains. PolitiFact’s review found that the bulk of the increase came from sources other than ordinary stock holdings, particularly cryptocurrency ventures.

Even the financial advice needed a financial adviser. Douthat then asked about the conflicts surrounding World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto business, and investors connected to the United Arab Emirates. Wouldn’t Trump consider a comparable arrangement involving the Bidens corrupt? Trump’s defense included his own lack of knowledge about the business.

An interesting qualification for the man selling himself as the person who understands money better than everyone else. Apparently, his financial expertise is highly responsive to the question being asked. When there’s credit available, he is the conductor of the orchestra. When somebody asks who paid for the violins, he has never heard music.

The conversation wandered through his sons, investment managers, and the proposition that presidents have always faced conflicts, going back to George Washington. When Douthat pointed out that presidents hadn’t always owned cryptocurrency companies, Trump invoked “whatever crypto was at the time.”

I am delighted to announce the discovery of FoundingFatherCoin. An exciting opportunity for the discerning colonial investor. Limited supply. Revolutionary potential. Your password is written on parchment, and if you lose it, Benjamin Franklin can’t help you.

Washington had substantial private interests, and the relationship between wealth and political power has a long, ugly history. That history gives us reasons to examine presidential conflicts carefully. Trump seemed to be presenting it as a loyalty program in which enough previous misconduct earns the next customer a free pass.

Then came immigration, where he acknowledged that his deportation policies might have been too harsh and suggested working with Democrats on a deal.

That admission matters. So does what followed the interview’s recording: he elevated Stephen Miller, a principal architect of the hardline immigration agenda, to chief of staff. The patient has identified excessive caffeine as a problem and appointed an espresso machine his primary care physician.

Mom has already covered Miller’s promotion, but it belongs in this interview’s trail of contradictions. A president can express concern about the consequences of his policies. His staffing decisions tell us who will be helping produce the next set of consequences. The people living with those decisions deserve more than a thoughtful sentence followed by a personnel announcement that kicks the sentence down the stairs.

On war, the same habit of self-congratulation became considerably harder to laugh at.

Trump defended his record, talked up victories, and promised eventual success. Discussing Ukraine, he identified the hatred between Putin and Zelenskyy as an obstacle to peace. When Douthat noted the obvious difference between invading a country and having your country invaded, Trump brought up disrespect toward Russia.

Disrespect.

A sovereign country is fighting for its survival, and somehow the conversation has reached the question of whether the invader felt sufficiently appreciated. Imagine reporting a burglary and being asked whether you’d made the man carrying your television feel welcome.

The moral difference should be easy to locate. It doesn’t require a summit, a gilded conference table, or six weeks of consulting the television.

Artificial intelligence brought another round of confidence. Trump emphasized the competition with China and said the risks could be managed. He also expressed openness to safeguards, provided they didn’t leave the United States far behind.

That opening deserves follow-up. What safeguards? Who enforces them? What happens when a company’s ambitions collide with the public’s safety?

These are questions that require answers more substantial than assurances that somebody brilliant has it handled. Most of us have heard that sentence immediately before being handed a project that is on fire.

Then Douthat asked about UFOs, and the interview briefly escaped Earth’s regulatory environment. Trump described military pilots who had told him about strange aerial encounters. In the extended interview, he also spent time admiring their looks, their haircuts, and their resemblance to Tom Cruise.

We have reached the national security briefing’s swimsuit portion. An unidentified object is apparently exceeding the capabilities of American aircraft, but first, let us establish that the witnesses have excellent bone structure.

I would like to think that if aliens are monitoring our broadcasts, this is the moment one of them quietly cancels the landing. They crossed unimaginable distances hoping to make contact with humanity. They’re going to be told they look tired and asked whether their spacecraft could be finished in gold.

And finally, having visited the economy, immigration, war, private wealth, artificial intelligence, and outer space, the interview arrived at the one jurisdiction where Donald Trump can’t appoint the management.

Heaven.

Douthat posed a hypothetical: if entering paradise required forgiving political opponents such as Nancy Pelosi and James Comey, could Trump do it?

He couldn’t bring himself to say yes.

“I do hate some of my enemies, and I always will.”

Eternal happiness. One condition. And Donald is at the reception desk asking whether Nancy Pelosi has to be included.

Most of us hesitate to buy the enormous bag of spinach because we can’t guarantee our intentions through Thursday. This man is prepared to maintain a grudge beyond the collapse of his physical body.

Somewhere, eternity has acquired a records retention problem.

Even at the imaginary gates of heaven, Trump was looking for an exception. Again and again, Trump encounters a question that might require him to reconsider something about himself. Again and again, he finds a route back to his own exceptional treatment.

Americans should recognize their prosperity. Critics should accept his explanations. Historical precedent should excuse the conflicts. The world should appreciate his deals. Even an imaginary offer of eternal peace cannot quite persuade him to put down the grievance.

That habit has consequences while he holds public office. A president’s resentment comes with staff, a microphone, and institutions that can be pressured to accommodate it. His confidence shapes decisions affecting people who have no opportunity to interrupt and ask a follow-up question.

We need those questions asked anyway.

How do families afford their lives? Who benefits from presidential decisions? What limits apply to the people making them? Who is responsible when the promises fail?

An interview can expose the evasions. Congress, journalists, courts, and the public have to keep pursuing the answers. Because the rest of us are living here, paying for the decisions, and trying to build a future our children can inhabit.

Donald, meanwhile, has reviewed eternal paradise. He would like to speak to the manager.

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Republicans returned to Washington on Monday as an outgoing majority, still soaked from the biggest wave election since Watergate. They have five weeks before Democrats take both chambers on January 3, and a long list of things they’d like to finish: a spending deal before the December 11 shutdown deadline, a stack of judicial confirmations, and money to restock the munitions burned through in Iran. Sen. Rick Scott wants them working straight through Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The first fight of the lame duck, though, didn’t come from Democrats. It came from Kentucky.

Rep. Thomas Massie, the Republican who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger in May, rose on the House floor Monday and introduced updated articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The 34-page resolution contains eight charges. Because Massie invoked the House’s privilege procedure, leadership faces a two-legislative-day clock. House action could come Wednesday, which happens to be Veterans Day.

Voters elected a new Congress last Tuesday. This week we find out whether the old one was listening.

The midterms are over. The questions that brought people to the polls haven’t gone anywhere: the cost of health care, immigration, the war in Iran, and whether anyone in Washington intends to enforce the limits on presidential power. Both parties now have to show what their promises mean in practice.

Following what happens next requires paying attention to how those decisions are reported. That’s why I turn to Ground News. It brings coverage of the same story together so I can quickly compare reporting, understand what’s dividing the coverage, and find perspectives I might otherwise miss.

Take the impeachment effort against Hegseth. On Ground News, The Washington Post’s headline emphasizes the Iran war and the allegations against him. CBS News highlights the possibility of a House vote within days. Austria’s Kronen Zeitung presents him as a scapegoat for Republicans’ election losses.

Those frames direct our attention toward different questions. Are we examining the secretary’s conduct, counting votes, or watching a party search for someone to blame? Comparing them helps me notice when the political survival story threatens to swallow the accountability story.

Ground News lets me see those headlines together, alongside information about the outlets’ political leanings. That gives me more context for evaluating the reporting and deciding what deserves a closer look.

Whatever comes next, I want that wider view. Use our link to get 40% off Ground News’ Vantage plan and give yourself more context for the decisions Washington is about to make.

Subscribe to Ground News

Because the election settled who gets to govern. We still need to watch how they do it.

Eight articles, 34 pages

Massie’s resolution is long, but its charges sort into three piles.

War powers come first. The Iran war began on February 28 without a declaration of war or specific authorization from Congress. In June, both chambers approved H.Con.Res. 86, directing the president to withdraw U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran—the first War Powers concurrent resolution of its kind to clear both chambers.

There’s a constitutional wrinkle here. Whether a concurrent resolution can legally compel withdrawal without presidential approval is disputed, particularly after the Supreme Court’s ruling against legislative vetoes. The administration contests its binding effect.

But the congressional message was hardly subtle. The House voted 215–208 on June 3. The Senate followed 50–48 on June 23. Both chambers directed withdrawal. Hegseth continued overseeing the war, and Massie’s first three articles accuse him of violating the War Powers Resolution’s authorization and termination requirements.

Then there are the dead.

Article IV charges Hegseth with dismantling much of the Pentagon’s civilian-harm mitigation machinery, including eliminating more than 90% of the personnel assigned to combatant commands, before three Tomahawk missiles struck a girls’ elementary school in Minab. According to the resolution, at least 156 civilians died, including at least 120 children.

Article V covers the maritime strike campaign. Massie’s updated filing alleges 69 attack events involving 73 vessels, killing at least 243 people, including follow-up strikes against shipwrecked survivors. Article VIII addresses the 2025 bombing campaign in Yemen, which the resolution says killed an estimated 224 civilians.

The remaining charges concern Hegseth’s retaliation against Sen. Mark Kelly for reminding service members they can refuse illegal orders, and the January raid that seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

These are impeachment allegations, not findings of guilt. But they are specific allegations, laid out in 34 pages, with enough dates, documents and casualties to warrant more than a dismissive wave of the hand.

Hegseth calls the whole thing a “sham” pushed by a “disgruntled, defeated congressman.”

He’s right that Massie lost his primary. So did Hegseth’s party lose its congressional majorities. And unlike Hegseth, Massie appears to have read the election returns.

An AP survey found roughly six in ten midterm voters believed military action against Iran was the wrong decision, although affordability and corruption weighed more heavily in their congressional choices. Voters have delivered a political judgment. The House now faces a constitutional one: whether the secretary’s conduct warrants impeachment.

Those are different questions. Massie’s resolution demands an answer to the second.

The Wednesday deadline and the ghost of William Belknap

Massie has offered Hegseth one way out of his impeachment effort. If Hegseth resigns, Massie says he won’t press the articles.

He told The Washington Post there’s a “decent chance” impeachment passes and becomes a permanent “stain” on Hegseth’s record. He added, “If he’s contemplating leaving, this would be a good time to do it.”

Hegseth has spent much of his tenure embracing the title Secretary of War. He might want to study the personnel history.

In 1876, Secretary of War William Belknap, caught in a kickback scandal, resigned minutes before the House was scheduled to vote on his impeachment. The House impeached him anyway, unanimously.

The Senate subsequently voted that it had jurisdiction to try a former official and proceeded with the trial. A majority voted to convict Belknap on all five articles, but none reached the required two-thirds. Some senators who voted to acquit questioned the Senate’s jurisdiction over someone who had already resigned.

The lesson for Hegseth is straightforward: resignation can end Massie’s initiative, but it cannot extinguish the House’s constitutional authority. Massie’s offer is a political accommodation, not an immunity agreement.

And the historical record has a rather long memory.

Now the math.

Republicans hold such a narrow House majority that they can afford only a couple of defections on a party-line vote. Massie is one potential defector. Rep. Neal Dunn, who has been ill, hasn’t voted since July. Assuming full attendance and united Democratic support, three Republicans voting for impeachment would be sufficient. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries says he’s a “hard yes.”

House Oversight Chair James Comer has publicly acknowledged serious questions about Hegseth. Rep. French Hill says he wants to distinguish poor performance from an impeachable offense. Rep. Don Bacon has called on Hegseth to resign while weighing the resolution.

The first vote may not be on impeachment at all. Republican leadership could move to table the resolution or refer it to committee, avoiding a direct vote on the eight charges.

Speaker Mike Johnson called the impeachment effort a stunt in September and said it would be tabled. Instead, the House recessed early, putting off the confrontation until after the election.

That bought several weeks. It didn’t buy a better election result.

Meanwhile, at the White House

Trump’s defense of Hegseth has been enthusiastic, if not entirely consistent.

On Sunday, he said the secretary was guilty of only two things: “basically winning two wars.”

But in the 60 Minutes interview recorded Friday, Ross Douthat asked whether Trump credited Hegseth for the Venezuela operation.

“No, but he was a part of it,” Trump replied, before giving credit instead to the soldiers, generals and military equipment.

So Hegseth is apparently the man who won two wars, but not the man who gets credit for one of them.

Trump has always been more reactive than responsive. The answer depends on which question is being asked. It’s a useful illustration of Trump’s reactive approach: praise for the reporter asking whether he’ll keep Hegseth, withheld credit for the interviewer asking what Hegseth actually accomplished. Responding would require reconciling the two.

The two supposed victories deserve closer examination. The Iran conflict remains unresolved; tens of billions have been spent, American troops have been killed and wounded, and the Pentagon wants more money to replace expended weapons. The Venezuelan operation, the one Trump wouldn’t credit Hegseth for, is Article VII of Massie’s impeachment resolution.

Winning has a flexible definition.

Behind the scenes, the picture is less certain. Two former administration officials told The Washington Post that, based on their contacts inside the White House, there is little appetite for a prolonged defense of Hegseth. Trump has publicly expressed confidence in him, but those former officials see no sign of a major White House campaign against the impeachment effort.

Hegseth has decided to take his defense directly to the public. This morning he announced a Tuesday press conference, his first in more than 180 days, to answer the impeachment challenge.

He also offered a revealing preview. Criticizing the administration’s military operations, he suggested, amounts to “taking issue with the troops and what they accomplished.”

A convenient conflation for someone with his character. Troops carry out orders. Civilian leaders are responsible for the decisions behind them. Accountability for one is not an attack on the other.

Then there’s Stephen Miller.

On Friday, Trump recorded that same 60 Minutes interview in which he acknowledged that his immigration crackdown might have been “too tough” and had hurt Republicans politically. He even suggested the possibility of negotiating an immigration compromise with Democrats.

Later that same day, he promoted Stephen Miller, a principal architect of that crackdown, to White House chief of staff.

The interview aired Sunday, providing viewers with the peculiar spectacle of a president acknowledging that a policy had gone too far shortly after elevating the man most closely associated with designing it.

Rep. Marlin Stutzman, a Republican from Indiana, called the promotion a mistake. After a defeat like November 3, he said, “you have to fire people” rather than promote those responsible.

Susie Wiles, whom Miller replaced, had reportedly raised concerns about Hegseth’s conduct. Miller is a close political and personal ally of the defense secretary.

Trump’s personnel response to the election hasn’t involved much visible reconsideration. The policy can be too tough, while its architect is just right.

Todd Blanche has problems of his own

Hegseth isn’t the only Cabinet member attracting congressional attention.

In The New Republic, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman argues that the more straightforward impeachment case is against Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Litman distinguishes officials who abuse power within a democratic system and those who undermine the system’s ability to hold them accountable. His proposed charge against Blanche is retaliatory prosecution: allegedly using federal law enforcement against the president’s political enemies, including James Comey, Letitia James and Cassidy Hutchinson.

Trump supplied a fresh controversy on Saturday.

In a Truth Social post, he ordered the Justice Department to investigate Democratic lawmakers who had discussed impeaching Blanche and other administration officials. He called their statements “extortion at the highest level” and suggested they belonged in prison.

For the record, Article I gives the House the sole power of impeachment. The Speech or Debate Clause protects legislative acts from executive interference. Announcing an intention to exercise lawful congressional oversight is not, by itself, a criminal offense.

Asked Sunday on CNN whether lawmakers could face prosecution, Blanche said it depended on what crimes they had committed. He did not identify a specific criminal statute or confirm that an investigation had begun.

Threatening an investigation isn’t proof that one exists, but the president’s explicit instruction raises its own questions about the independence of federal law enforcement.

The Blanche and Hegseth stories intersect at Article VI.

Hegseth censured Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy combat veteran, and initiated action affecting his retired rank after Kelly joined other Democratic lawmakers in a video reminding service members of their obligation to refuse unlawful orders.

Blanche’s Justice Department went further, seeking indictments against Kelly and five colleagues over the video. A federal grand jury declined to indict them.

Litman argues that retaliatory prosecutions are particularly damaging because they can intimidate witnesses, political critics and public officials even when no conviction follows. The process itself can become the punishment.

Massie has another challenge underway. His Epstein Files Transparency Act II would allow victims, state and local authorities, and members of Congress to sue the attorney general over allegedly unlawful withholding or redaction of Epstein-related records. As of the last publicly documented count, its discharge petition had 216 signatures, two short of the 218 needed to force consideration. Massie says he expects to secure the remaining signatures now that Congress has returned.

That is a separate legislative effort, not an impeachment charge against Blanche. But it adds another potential avenue for scrutiny of the Justice Department.

One defeated congressman. Two procedural countdowns. Two Cabinet officers.

Massie may be leaving Congress in January, but he isn’t exactly clearing out his desk.

Paying for the war while voting on its architect

The Republicans eager to work through Christmas have an awkward item on their legislative shopping list.

The Pentagon says it needs additional funding to replenish precision weapons expended in Iran. Some Republicans want to include that money in another reconciliation bill, allowing them to bypass a Democratic filibuster if the legislation satisfies the Senate’s budget rules.

So, in the same week that lawmakers may vote on impeaching the defense secretary over the conduct of the Iran war, they’re being asked to find more money for its consequences.

Congress is being asked to replenish weapons expended in a war it never specifically authorized, even as it considers impeaching the man overseeing their use.

The irony requires very little embellishment.The Economist warned last week that Democrats could squander their electoral mandate if subpoenas and impeachment proceedings crowd out work on affordability and health care.

Congress has never had to choose between governing and oversight. It has committees, appropriations authority, investigative powers, and a legislative calendar. Its members are expected to do more than one thing.

Oversight is supposed to inform governing. If the Pentagon needs billions more, Congress ought to know why, how the money was spent, and whether the decisions that created the expense were lawful. Writing a check is not a substitute for asking questions.

If the House impeaches Hegseth, the articles would go to the Senate, where conviction requires two-thirds of the senators present. In 2024, the Senate dismissed the impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas without conducting a full trial. The Senate could take a similar procedural route here.

Impeachment alone wouldn’t cost Hegseth his job, but it would leave a permanent mark on his record. That’s the stain Massie is talking about.

A Veterans Day reckoning

Wednesday’s proceedings could lead in several directions.

Hegseth could resign, and Massie could abandon his impeachment effort. Republican leaders could succeed in tabling the resolution or sending it to committee. Or the House could vote to impeach a defense secretary serving under a president of its own majority party.

Each outcome would tell us something about how the outgoing Congress is responding to November 3.

Wednesday is Veterans Day, and Pete Hegseth may find himself facing an impeachment reckoning on the very day America honors those who have served.

I won’t pretend to be dispassionate about the prospect. I’m positively gleeful.

American service members have died and been wounded. Civilians have died by the hundreds. Hegseth faces serious questions about the wars and military operations he has overseen, the safeguards meant to protect civilians, and the limits Congress placed, or sought to place, on executive military authority.

Holding civilian leadership accountable is in no way an insult to the troops. Quite the opposite. Service members swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the personal preferences of whoever occupies the Pentagon.

Veterans Day began as Armistice Day, commemorating the moment the guns fell silent at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.

More than a century later, Congress has voted for American forces to withdraw from another war, and the administration has continued fighting. The resolution’s binding legal effect remains disputed, but the constitutional confrontation is unmistakable.

There is a certain historical symmetry in the possibility of an impeachment reckoning arriving on a day whose origins commemorate the end of a war.

As The Economist noted, voters did their job on November 3. The current Congress still has a job to do.

Wednesday may tell us whether any of its members have begun to take that responsibility differently.

FACT BOX: The Eight Articles Against Hegseth

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) introduced revised articles of impeachment on November 9, 2026. The 34-page resolution contains eight charges, each seeking impeachment, trial, removal from office and disqualification from future federal office. These are allegations, not adjudicated findings.

I. Starting the Iran war unlawfully. Charges Hegseth with initiating hostilities on February 28, 2026, without a declaration of war, statutory authorization, an attack on the United States or an imminent threat.

II. Defying Congress. Both chambers approved H.Con.Res. 86 directing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iran—the House on June 3 and the Senate on June 23. Massie calls it the first such War Powers concurrent resolution to clear both chambers. Hostilities continued. The administration disputes the resolution’s binding legal effect.

III. Ignoring War Powers deadlines. Alleges that the statutory 60-day limit expired May 1, and even the maximum additional 30-day withdrawal period would have expired June 1. No required certification or congressional extension was issued.

IV. Dismantling civilian protections. Charges Hegseth with eliminating more than 90% of civilian-harm mitigation staff assigned to combatant commands and weakening congressionally mandated safeguards. Cites the Minab school strike, which the resolution says killed at least 156 civilians, including at least 120 children.

V. Extrajudicial killings. Alleges at least 69 maritime attack events involving 73 vessels, killing at least 243 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, including follow-up strikes against shipwrecked survivors.

VI. Retaliating against Sen. Mark Kelly. Charges Hegseth with suppressing constitutionally protected speech through censure, threats and punitive actions against the retired Navy captain over his video reminding service members of their obligation to refuse unlawful orders.

VII. Seizing Nicolás Maduro. Charges Hegseth with directing the unauthorized January 3, 2026, military operation in Caracas that captured Maduro and Cilia Flores and, according to the resolution, killed at least 83 people.

VIII. Unlawful war in Yemen. Alleges that Operation Rough Rider involved approximately 1,100 strikes over 52 days in 2025, killing an estimated 224 civilians. Cites leaked Signal messages as evidence that administration officials knew there was no imminent threat requiring immediate military action.

What happens next: House action on the resolution is possible by Wednesday, November 11—Veterans Day. Leadership could seek to table or refer it rather than permit a direct impeachment vote. Assuming full attendance and unanimous Democratic support, three Republican votes would be sufficient to impeach. Conviction and removal would require a two-thirds Senate majority of members present.

Primary source: Rep. Thomas Massie’s revised November 9, 2026, impeachment resolution (34-page PDF).

Three days later he was hosting a business dinner at Sanliusifu, a Taipei restaurant he favors. Taiwan’s television cameras, which trail him everywhere, caught a woman in a pink dress at his side. She leaned in to speak into his ear and kissed his cheek, and when he stepped out to talk with reporters, she was standing just behind him.

Her name was Alice Huang. According to the New York Times, U.S. officials would later conclude she was working for China’s Ministry of State Security.

Nobody in Taipei knew that then. News crews simply filmed Taiwan’s most celebrated technology executive enjoying an evening out.

The scandal is being investigated in Washington. The photographs came from Taipei.

Nvidia designs the world’s most coveted AI chips, and Taiwan builds them. TSMC fabricates the processors, and a web of Taiwanese manufacturers, from Foxconn to Wistron, assembles them into the machines that power the AI boom. In May 2026, Huang said Nvidia was spending roughly $100 billion a year in Taiwan, up from $10 billion to $15 billion five years earlier, and expected that figure to reach $150 billion. He has called the island “the epicenter of the AI revolution” and himself “a very good ambassador of Taiwan.”

That may help explain why the allegations have struck a particular nerve in Taiwan. Tim Culpan, who has covered Huang for 26 years, says the people he spoke with weren’t principally shocked by the infidelity. They were disturbed by who the other woman was reported to be.

Fan Yun, caucus secretary-general for Taiwan’s governing Democratic Progressive Party, drew the line carefully: Huang’s private life deserves privacy, but the security questions are a serious public matter.

That distinction carries more weight in Taipei than anywhere else. Taiwan is not merely a supplier to American industry. It is a self-governing democracy facing a government in Beijing that claims it and has never ruled out taking it by force.

For all its importance to America’s technological future, Taiwan has discovered that even the weapons intended for its defense can become bargaining chips in someone else’s negotiations.

By March, a proposed $14 billion arms package for Taiwan, the largest ever contemplated for the island, was ready for Trump’s approval.

Then it waited.

Come May, Trump flew to Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping. Huang, absent from the initial delegation list, joined Trump aboard Air Force One during a refueling stop in Alaska. Trump returned saying he had discussed the Taiwan arms sale with Xi “in great detail,” and told Fox News the package was “a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly.” That ran up against the Six Assurances, a commitment Ronald Reagan made to Taiwan in 1982 that the United States would not consult Beijing before deciding on arms sales to the island.

Days after the summit, Taiwanese security officials reported that China had deployed more than 100 vessels across regional waters stretching from the Yellow Sea to the western Pacific, with numbers increasing after Trump and Xi met. Taiwan’s National Security Council chief, Joseph Wu, published a map of the deployments. By August, the USS George Washington, the Navy’s only forward-deployed carrier, had left the western Pacific to relieve the exhausted crew of the Abraham Lincoln in the Iran war, temporarily leaving the western Pacific without an American carrier strike group. Trump’s verdict on the Lincoln’s record-breaking deployment: “Not nearly enough.”

Xi came to the White House for a state dinner in September. Huang was seated at the head table.

None of this shows that Huang shaped Taiwan policy. It shows who had a seat at the table, and whose security was on the menu.

Megaspeed began life as 7Road International, a Singapore company connected to a Chinese online gaming business. It acquired its new name in 2023, just months after Washington imposed sweeping restrictions on advanced AI-chip exports to China. The timing was exquisite. Whether it was coincidence or design remains an open question.

According to the New York Times, Alice Huang was listed as managing director and later described herself as chief executive. The company’s balance sheet then ballooned at a pace that would embarrass a meme stock. The Financial Times reports that it grew from $33 million to $3 billion in 2024, much of the increase reflecting transactions among subsidiaries. An impressive transformation, although a balance sheet isn’t quite the same thing as a cash register.

Its anchor customer was Alibaba, which also became its lender. In June 2024, Megaspeed’s Malaysian subsidiary pledged its entire business as collateral for a loan from an Alibaba affiliate. Nvidia, the FT reports, first met with Megaspeed because of its computing-leasing contract with Alibaba. In early 2025, Alice Huang was pitching Chinese investors on another data-center project, assuring them there would be “no problem securing GPUs.”

Here’s where the fine print becomes a national-security question. Chinese companies can legally rent computing power from overseas data centers under certain conditions. Acquiring restricted Nvidia processors is another matter. When a company’s business depends on hardware Washington doesn’t want transferred to China, its financing arrangements deserve a closer look.

What happens if the borrower defaults? Who gets control of the assets? Does the export-control paperwork travel with the foreclosure notice?

Then there’s the inventory.

Bloomberg examined customs records showing Megaspeed imported at least 136,000 Nvidia GPUs through late 2025. Yet Nvidia’s inspection teams reportedly saw only a few thousand of the advanced Blackwell chips at the data centers they visited. Those aren’t directly comparable totals: the import figure covers multiple chip types, and Nvidia says additional equipment was accounted for in warehouses. Separately, Commerce Department inspectors found Nvidia equipment still boxed at a Malaysian facility in September 2024.

Megaspeed denies wrongdoing, and Nvidia insists its equipment is where it belongs.

Jensen Huang told Bloomberg in October that Nvidia had “counted every one” of the GPUs and described his interactions with Alice Huang as “completely normal and not unusual.”

On Sunday, acknowledging his intimate relationship with Alice Huang, he offered a different assessment of his personal conduct: there was “no excuse” for what he had done.

The affair is now acknowledged. Questions about chip inventories, financing arrangements and possible foreign influence remain unresolved.

What the Beijing trip didn’t advertise: before Trump flew to China in May with Huang aboard, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had overseen a highly classified memo warning top officials that Huang was in a close relationship with a woman U.S. intelligence believed had been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security, according to the New York Times. The warning circulated before the May summit and before Huang joined the president aboard Air Force One.

Trump had been briefed on the underlying intelligence even earlier. The Times reports he learned of the suspected operation roughly a year ago and chose not to act.

Huang says no one warned him. He told Bloomberg the government never informed him of its suspicions, and the Times reports he never received a defensive counterintelligence briefing. The reason is unknown, and tipping him off might have endangered the surveillance. Still, it leaves an uncomfortable picture: the president was briefed, the CEO says he wasn’t, and the CEO continued advising the president on technology policy affecting China.

Asked Sunday whether he wished he’d acted on the intelligence, Trump said, “No, I don’t think so.” Huang was “an honorable guy” who “probably has an excuse.” Then, unprompted, came the evidence for the defense: “We have the highest stock market.”

Huang, for his part, had already written that there was no excuse.

Earlier, in an interview with CBS’s Ross Douthat, Trump had said he couldn’t bring himself to forgive political enemies, even if getting into heaven depended on it. Trump can imagine an excuse for Jensen Huang’s relationship with a woman identified by U.S. intelligence as a Chinese spy. But he cannot imagine forgiving Nancy Pelosi.

The White House still hasn’t answered an important question: What safeguards, if any, did the administration put in place after learning that a suspected Chinese intelligence operative had established a close relationship with one of the most influential technology executives in America?

Ukraine has already lived a version of this. In October, satellite communications that its soldiers and drone operators depend on were throttled in the middle of a war. Who ordered the restrictions remains disputed. Asked about it in an interview broadcast Sunday, Trump said he didn’t know who was responsible, then volunteered that he probably had “a lotta power over everything.” He questioned whether the disruption had happened at all, yet claimed service was restored once he heard about it.

Musk and Huang haven’t done the same thing. The main point, however, is that the security of sovereign nations increasingly depends on technologies controlled by a handful of enormously powerful companies, and on decisions the public rarely sees and absolutely never votes on. Nvidia designs the processors that Taiwan manufactures. SpaceX operates the satellites an army at war needs to communicate.

That is a Lords and Serfs problem. The remedies range from public ownership to public control to enforceable public-service obligations on companies too essential to answer only to themselves. Which one fits which industry is a debate worth having. Pretending we don’t need the debate is not an option.

Nvidia’s board has assigned its investigation of the reported foreign intelligence effort to independent directors and outside counsel, while assuring everyone it remains confident in Huang’s leadership. Three Republican House committee chairs have requested a closed-door briefing with Huang on November 18, the day after Nvidia reports earnings. Trump is heading to Asia next week, where he hopes to meet Xi, and says he’d “certainly take” Huang along. In January, Democrats take control of both chambers and their investigative committees. Senators Chris Coons and Elizabeth Warren are already raising questions about Nvidia, Chinese access to advanced chips and the government’s handling of corporate accountability.

Determining whether a foreign intelligence service tried to influence the most important executive in the AI economy, and what the government did once it knew, is actual governing.

The investigations will answer narrower questions, however, than the one this story raises. When an essential service becomes someone else’s private property, the public’s ability to depend on it can become contingent on decisions the public has no power to make. The danger isn’t only that one powerful man might choose badly. It’s that whole countries must live with his choice and have no say in it.

Taiwan manufactures the chips, recorded the dinner and lives under the threat of Chinese military force, while its defensive weapons remain a bargaining chip in Washington’s dealings with Beijing.

The lords may own the infrastructure. But the consequences belong to everyone.

What to watch next

Nov. 11

Requested deadline for Huang to accept or propose an alternative congressional briefing date.

Nov. 17

Nvidia’s quarterly earnings announcement and analyst call.

Nov. 18

Requested closed-door briefing with three Republican-led House committees.

Nov. 18–19

APEC leaders’ summit in Shenzhen, where Trump expects to meet Xi.

There have been good things here, too. The kids came home from Halloween with bags so full of candy that I’m fairly certain we could survive a brief disruption to the grocery supply chain. They had a wonderful time, and when Monday brought school back around, everyone made the transition remarkably well.

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Our oldest has recently begun experimenting with getting a ride to school instead of taking his scooter. For two full months, he reliably remembered his helmet, his gloves, and how to charge the thing. Now one of these essentials mysteriously goes missing about twenty minutes before I need to leave with his sister, who is usually still in some stage of getting ready. I tell him I can take him, but he’ll be late because I hadn’t planned to drive him. A few times his dad has been able to save the morning. I can’t prove there is a strategy at work here, but the timing is suspicious, and the investigation remains open.

I’m seeing more of my daughter again, too. She spent much of the summer unusually tired, with little interest in being her dad’s helper out in the yard. That was so unlike her that I worried something was wrong. Blood work confirmed she was anemic, and since she started taking iron, I’ve begun to see her energy return. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that part of her until it began coming back.

Ezra, meanwhile, has discovered that he can remove his own diaper. He knows a bath requires nakedness, so he takes off the diaper, runs around the house until I spot him, and then heads straight for the bathroom door to make his request. It is an effective system, and most of the time I oblige.

My husband is nearly finished with the exterior trim, although the rain keeps interrupting his plans. I really do need to get that man a workshop. We have almost all our plants in the ground, and yesterday we cleared the brush to make a home for the coast redwood I finally convinced him we needed. My part of the bargain was helping clear the space, which seemed fair given that I was the person proposing we plant a tree that may someday tower over everything around it.

The tomatoes are still producing like crazy, the onions are nearly ready, and the caterpillars have arrived. That means the children have resumed their tradition of building a little house with leaves and grasses for any caterpillars they find. They make sure the caterpillars can leave whenever they want. One year, quite a few stayed for weeks anyway, and the children have been devoted caterpillar landlords ever since.

It was while thinking about those little houses, and the larger home we’re trying to make on this patch of land, that I saw photographs of another family arriving somewhere new.

On November 4, people carried crates down to a small loch in the Scottish Highlands. Inside was a family of six beavers, including young kits. Five hundred years have passed since beavers were last recorded beside Loch Ness. Humans hunted them until they disappeared from Scotland, and the water kept moving through a landscape that no longer had them in it.

In the photographs from the release, one of the younger beavers swims through the reeds. Another sits near the water grooming its belly. The adult female was the last to leave her crate. I keep returning to that detail, because for a moment the enormous story of a species returning after five centuries becomes wonderfully small. There is a mother taking her time. There are young ones discovering what’s around them. Someone has brought them to a place where they can stay together, and now the people standing nearby are waiting for her to come out when she is ready.

Those people couldn’t simply wish the beavers back. Trees for Life and Beaver Trust had to find a place with the right habitat, work with residents and land managers, arrange care for the animals, and make plans for the difficulties that might come. There were people with concerns about what beavers might do to farmland and waterways. The project listened, and the work of helping people and beavers live alongside one another will continue after the crates have been carried away.

That is part of the hope I want to hold onto. The people who brought this family back knew that opening the crates would be the beginning of a longer obligation. They did it anyway.

The beavers may now begin doing what beavers do. They will move branches, dig channels, and perhaps build dams that slow water and create wetlands. Frogs, dragonflies, birds, and other creatures may find shelter and food in the places they change. We can’t know yet exactly what this family will make of its new home. For now, the young ones have reached the reeds, and their mother has come out of the crate.

I think about all the hands involved in getting them there. The hands that cared for the animals before the journey, the ones that carried the crates, and the ones that opened them at the water’s edge. I think about people who lived here centuries ago and could have known beavers as part of an ordinary day, then about all the generations who never had that chance. We can give a different future to the creatures alive now and to the children who will grow up beside these waters.

That is what feels so powerful to me. We are the species that made the beavers disappear from this place. We are also the species that noticed their absence, listened to one another, and carried a family home. Our capacity to cause harm is real, and so is our capacity to take responsibility for it. Somewhere in the Highlands, that responsibility has muddy banks, reeds, six living bodies, and people committed to seeing what they need next.

I want my children to know that hope can look like this. It can begin with noticing that a small creature needs leaves and a way out of its little house. It can look like clearing brush because a tree deserves room to grow. And sometimes it takes years of conversations and careful planning before a mother beaver can leave a crate beside a loch her ancestors once knew.

This week, I wanted the relief of finishing something. Instead, I’ve been reminded of all the good that happens because people stay with work that isn’t finished yet. My daughter’s strength is returning little by little. Our redwood has a place waiting for it. The children will keep checking on their caterpillars. Across the ocean, a family of beavers has entered the water, and the people who brought them there will keep paying attention.

I hope tomorrow is gentler. I hope we get some rest, some rain that waits until the trim is done, and a fresh start. Most of all, I hope we remember what human beings are capable of when we look at a living thing that needs a home and decide to help it find one.

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Dana White has spent twenty-five years making sure everyone knows exactly who’s fighting, when, and whether the bout is on. Donald Trump offered him the White House press secretary’s job, and by dinnertime the answer was yes, no, and “see you Monday.”

At 1:40 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, Trump announced on Truth Social that “the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior,” had been offered the job of “Press Secretary of the United States.” White reposted it to Instagram with an image of himself at a lectern and the caption “On to the next chapter.” A few hours later, a source told CNN he’d turned it down. A few hours after that, White told reporters at a boxing event in London that he was flying to Washington that night for a meeting with the president on Monday.

The White House couldn’t settle it either. One aide told CNN the president was joking. Communications director Steven Cheung reposted the offer with “Hell yeah!” Polymarket opened a book on it.

For a full day, newsrooms from Washington to London parsed an Instagram caption, a Truth Social post and a vague promise of a Monday meeting with the intensity of Cold War Kremlinologists. Sports reporters found themselves covering a White House personnel decision, political reporters suddenly needed to know who Kayla Harrison is (the president spelled it “Harris”), and a role once held by Karoline Leavitt became the hottest open slot on the card. All of this for a job whose last occupant lasted five days.

The post itself rewards a close read. There is no such office as “Press Secretary of the United States.” White is a promoter and an executive, not a “violent Fighter.” The six “assistants” Trump wants him to bring along to “defend us against the Lunatic Left” include two Russians from Dagestan and a Brazilian. Trump flagged their foreign origins himself (“even though some are not from our Country”), which raises the delightful possibility of the new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s original Muslim travel ban, overseeing a press operation assisted by two devout Muslim fighters from Dagestan.

One of the fighter photos even carries an energy-drink advertisement. And in Trump’s accompanying collage, White stands behind a lectern bearing the presidential seal, rather than the ordinary White House briefing-room insignia. Apparently, we’re skipping the press secretary’s office and heading straight for the presidency.

The foreign press has been having a wonderful time with Trump’s post-election predicament, although the Russians have rather different reasons for paying attention. In Moscow, the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg recalled the old Soviet joke: an American brags that he can stand in Washington and shout “down with the U.S. president” without being arrested, and the Russian replies that he can do the same in Red Square. This week Russian newspapers proved the punchline, tearing into Trump in ways they would never dare with Putin. Moskovsky Komsomolets called him a diminished figure. Another headline diagnosed “post-Trumpatic disorder.”

In London, a pair of British radio hosts spent a podcast segment imagining how it happened. Their theory: the departing chief of staff, Susie Wiles, left behind a list of press secretary candidates that included Dana White, the former Pentagon spokesperson from Trump’s first term. Trump saw the name, thought of the cage-fight guy, and posted. There’s no evidence that any of this happened, but that’s hardly the point. Professional satirists are now writing fan fiction that’s barely stranger than the source material.

It stays funny right up until you check what else happened on Saturday.

Hours after the president posted fighter photos to fill his press office, Iranian state media reported blasts at several sites across southern Iran, Qeshm Island among them. On Sunday, Iranian authorities reported that two oil tankers had struck mines and a third had caught fire near the Strait of Hormuz. The circumstances remained unverified. CENTCOM announced Task Force Iron Gate, a new effort to disrupt Iranian weapons shipments and sanctioned trade along its land borders and across the Caspian Sea, extending American efforts beyond a naval blockade already months old. The Houthis fired missiles at Riyadh; debris from an intercepted projectile hit a Saudi Aramco building. Israel’s defense minister declared the mission in Iran “not yet complete.” Gulf stock markets slipped while traders waited to see what Trump does next.

The man they’re waiting on spent Friday night telling reporters this isn’t a war. “It can’t be a war when for 5 months nobody was hurt, killed, or anything else,” he said. The Pentagon’s own count stands at 23 American service members dead and 865 wounded. More than half of those wounds occurred during the renewed fighting that began in July. Asked about reported strikes on Qeshm that day, he said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” then described knocking out “a little bit of an anti-aircraft device” anyway. A few minutes later, while boasting about American control of the Strait of Hormuz, he offered another possible description of the U.S. military’s role: “maybe an occupier.”

It’s easy to see why the press secretary’s job has been hard to fill. Whoever takes it will be asked how the president plans to get out of a war he insists isn’t a war.

Congress has already passed an Iran war-powers resolution through both chambers, directing the withdrawal of American forces from unauthorized hostilities. It wasn’t legally binding, and the military operations continued.

The negotiations are, in a word, stuck. As one analyst explained to Al Jazeera, Washington wants a simultaneous agreement covering the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, renewed nuclear inspections and reductions in Iran’s highly enriched uranium. Tehran wants a step-by-step arrangement, with the blockade, sanctions and frozen assets all on the table. Israel is trying to assemble a new government while its defense minister promises more “preemptive action.” Qatar is still mediating.

Moscow, meanwhile, is watching for its own reasons. Beneath the mockery, the Russian press coverage had a quieter strand: some commentators worried aloud that a weakened Trump is bad news for Russia, because this particular president has been good for it. The biggest photo in Friday’s government paper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, was Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev at the White House with Melania Trump. Dmitriev then got a private meeting with the president. The Ukrainian delegation didn’t.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, U.S.-brokered talks on Ukraine resume in Abu Dhabi. The administration is attempting to negotiate an end to Russia’s war while struggling to find a way out of its own.

None of that gets easier with a lame-duck president, a new chief of staff who has called the opposition party “a domestic extremist organization,” and a press office apparently auditioning cage fighters.

Monday is shaping up as a double bill. Dana White has his meeting at the White House. On the same day, Republican Thomas Massie plans to revive eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, potentially forcing a House vote this week. Among the charges are alleged violations of the 1973 War Powers Resolution in Iran. On Sunday, Hakeem Jeffries told ABC he’s a “hard yes” and blamed Hegseth for a “reckless and costly war of choice in Iran.”

One man may get the podium. The other may face an impeachment vote over the war that podium will have to explain.

Laugh at the Dana White saga. It earned it, and the rest of the world is laughing too. But keep one eye on Massie’s impeachment effort. If Democrats vote together, a handful of House Republicans could determine whether Massie’s effort advances while the old majority is still seated. Those Republicans just watched their party lose both chambers in an election shaped by the Iran war, soaring prices and demands for accountability. A call to your representative this week is worth more than a dozen memes.

The UFC requires a signed contract, a public weigh-in and a commission’s approval before anyone throws a punch. In the cage, at least, everyone agrees when the fight starts. In Iran, nobody in this White House can tell you when it ends.

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By Friday afternoon, Donald Trump had responded. He replaced the chief of staff who’d spent nearly two years keeping his operation on its feet and put Stephen Miller in charge of the locks.

Miller starts Monday. Voters can expect a callback never.

Start with the scale, since the White House would prefer you didn’t dwell on it. Tuesday delivered the largest leftward electoral swing in roughly half a century, and Democrats took both the House and the Senate. In majority-Hispanic counties, the Washington Post measured a shift of nearly 30 points toward Democrats. The Wall Street Journal found Democrats carrying counties with populations at least 80 percent Hispanic by 40 points. Every congressional district touching the Mexican border went Democratic.

Those border numbers deserve a pause. Two years ago, Hispanic voters moved toward Trump in historic numbers. Then came masked raids, immigration dragnets that swept up American citizens alongside their intended targets, and the deaths of two Americans during federal immigration operations in Minneapolis. Voters who had once welcomed Trump’s promises of tougher border security were now confronting the consequences of how those promises were being carried out.

Voters weren’t voting on any one thing. Grocery bills, gas prices inflated by the war in Iran, and a steady drip of corruption stories all made the list. But immigration enforcement was on it too, and the dramatic shifts in Hispanic communities suggest that Trump’s approach had become a substantial political liability. Voters rejected how the policy was being carried out. Trump promoted its architect.

Three weeks earlier, Trump had declared there was “zero chance” Susie Wiles would be replaced and pledged his “COMPLETE confidence” in her. On Friday, asked what had changed, he offered a philosophy worthy of a fortune cookie: “Sometimes in life you have to make moves.” Asked what he wanted Miller to do differently, he said, “Just run things well.” Profiles in vision.

He also called Miller a “great manager.” In fairness, Miller has managed plenty: a staff of dozens, a daily call coordinating agencies, an immigration apparatus that answered to him. What he has managed, though, is compliance, turning presidential directives into orders and making sure they were carried out. Starting in January, a chief of staff needs a different skill entirely: running a White House that must negotiate with an opposition Congress holding subpoena power and the purse strings.

That was precisely the worry of Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who supports tougher border security and still called Miller “the worst of all possible choices.” A chief of staff, Tillis noted, has to be able to tell the president no. He said he had trouble imagining Miller ever disagreeing with Trump at all.

So what is Miller for? According to the New York Times, his pitch for the job included winding down the Iran war, partly because Trump’s core supporters saw it as a betrayal of his 2024 promises. Plenty of Americans outside MAGA want out of that war too, and if Miller helps end it, good.

The same reporting, though, says people familiar with his views expect him to steer Trump away from his initial post-election instinct to cut deals with Democrats, and toward more hard-line immigration enforcement and renewed attacks on diversity initiatives. Miller’s own statement on his promotion promised to “fight with all of our soul.”

That contrast is the tell. Miller’s reported willingness to wind down a war that alienated Trump’s own supporters should not be mistaken for a broader change of direction. On the domestic policies that have defined his career, the reporting suggests precisely the opposite. Trump heard Tuesday’s message perfectly well. He just decided most of the people who sent it aren’t his audience.

Trump may have concluded that Tuesday changes nothing about his agenda. The Constitution says otherwise about the powers of the incoming Congress. Beginning January 3, the White House will face a legislature with both the authority and the responsibility to examine what this administration has done, how it spent the public’s money, and whether the law was followed.

The administration’s first answer arrived within hours. Rep. Robert Garcia, in line to chair the House Oversight Committee, said Miller “should lawyer up.” Attorney General Todd Blanche replied on Fox: “Stephen Miller has a lawyer. It’s me.” The nation’s chief federal law enforcement officer was publicly volunteering his support for the incoming chief of staff before a single congressional subpoena had been issued.

It tells us something about the administration’s posture, which matters because of the plumbing. Congress can refer criminal contempt cases to the Justice Department, which Blanche now runs, or pursue enforcement through the federal courts. Either route can become a protracted struggle. The Justice Department may represent federal officials in appropriate official-capacity matters, but its institutional obligations extend well beyond protecting presidential advisers. Blanche has already made clear that Miller can count on his support.

An early test may come next week. Pete Hegseth, whose handling of the Iran war became another political liability for Republicans, faces impeachment articles that Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican, has said he will bring forward. Hegseth’s response to Miller’s promotion included posting a photo of himself with the new chief of staff captioned “Stand. Fight. Defend the Republic.” Whether Massie’s effort advances, Hegseth has made his alliance with Miller unmistakable.

Which brings us to the people voters just put in charge of Congress. Hakeem Jeffries, likely the next speaker, told Morning Joe that Americans “don’t want us to get even,” a line some took as a sign accountability was off the table. It isn’t. Later in the same interview, he argued that corruption carries an economic cost and that Congress should follow the facts and hold wrongdoers accountable. He told NPR that Democrats would pursue affordability and accountability simultaneously, with the Judiciary and Oversight committees responsible for investigating potential wrongdoing.

Good.

The two goals reinforce each other. Investigating questionable spending, exposing conflicts of interest, pursuing the recovery of public money where wrongdoing is established, and closing the loopholes that permitted abuses are not distractions from governing. Oversight can expose waste, inform legislation and help ensure that taxpayer money serves the people who paid it rather than those who may have improperly profited from it.

Congress doesn’t need to prove corruption before investigating credible evidence of misconduct. Finding out what happened is the purpose of an investigation. And when wrongdoing is established, the job doesn’t end with a televised hearing and a sternly worded press release. There are records to recover, legal remedies to pursue, safeguards to strengthen and, where the law permits, taxpayer funds to reclaim.

The voters exercised their power on Tuesday, but their responsibility didn’t end when the ballots were counted. Beginning January 3, Congress will have the authority to legislate, investigate, follow the money and pursue accountability wherever the evidence warrants it. Economic relief and oversight are not competing assignments. Both are part of governing.

Our job now, as citizens, is to make sure the people we elected do theirs. We must measure them not by promises, press releases or televised hearings, but by the laws they advance, the facts they uncover and the results they deliver.

An electoral mandate is not a substitute for doing the work.

Thank you all for your kind words and good wishes. With a little help from some pain meds onboard, my knee has progressed from agony to almost tolerable. I’m counting this as a victory.

Marz, meanwhile, is still keeping a keen eye on the perimeter for squirrels. I’ve informed him that any future squirrel-related emergencies will have to be handled without my knee’s participation.

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This must be tremendously exciting news for the East Wing, which would have loved to participate in the discussion but is currently unavailable for structural reasons.

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On Thursday, November 5, two days after voters handed Republicans a congressional defeat, Trump signed a proclamation designating the Oval Office, Outer Oval Office, and Cabinet Room a national monument. He described the result as a “landmark for the ages” and said the completed legal process would make it “impossible for anybody ever to destroy this incredible space.”

The man who brought demolition equipment to the White House has developed an urgent concern about what might happen if the next occupant has ideas. Apparently, the peaceful transfer of power now requires a separate negotiation over the side tables.

There is something almost touching about this stage of his relationship with democracy. The public has voted, the balance of power is changing, and the president is processing these developments by attempting to give his office the legal status of a protected archaeological site. Future generations may stand behind a velvet rope while a ranger explains that this is where the forty-seventh president struggled to distinguish the country’s property from his own taste. Please keep your children close. The cherubs are historically significant.

Trump has filled the Oval Office with gold accents, figurines, gilded mirrors, and decorative flourishes, including little gold cherubs brought from Mar-a-Lago. It is an extraordinary commitment to making the working office of the presidency look as though Versailles has opened a timeshare desk.

And some of this decorating was reportedly a personal undertaking. According to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book Regime Change, Karoline Leavitt once walked into the Oval Office and found Trump using superglue to attach gold decorations to the marble fireplace mantel. Please picture being the person who has to explain to the next administration that the president has glued things to the national inheritance.

Now he’s seeking federal protection for the room. Apparently, when the tube says permanent, Donald Trump still wants a second opinion from Congress. The East Wing got an excavator. His craft project gets a proclamation. This is a remarkably specific preservation philosophy: everything that existed before he arrived was available for improvement, but future presidents must approach his handiwork with the reverence normally reserved for cave paintings.

You can understand his anxiety. He has firsthand knowledge of what happens when a president decides the previous arrangement simply will not do. The evidence used to be on the east side of the building.

For accuracy, the East Wing was part of the White House’s National Historic Landmark property, rather than a separately designated national monument. Those are different designations. The White House is also expressly exempt from the usual review requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act. Historic status did not make the East Wing demolition-proof.

That distinction matters. So does the sight of the person responsible for its demolition presenting himself as the last line of defense against somebody else’s renovation. He has effectively arrived at the neighborhood preservation meeting in an excavator and asked whether everyone else has a permit.

The principle seems to be that previous presidents left behind alterations, while Donald Trump has left behind civilization. Their contributions were subject to his judgment. His contributions should be subject to federal protection.

History, apparently, becomes irreplaceable at the precise moment he finishes decorating it. But there is a complication, and it is beautifully located in his own paperwork.

The proclamation expressly preserves a president’s authority to redecorate and choose furnishings. It requires documentation, review, and consideration of alternatives before substantial alteration or demolition. It also preserves Congress’s authority over federal property and the White House’s existing statutory exemptions.

It doesn’t place every gilded object under eternal federal guard. The cherubs should retain counsel. A future president could change the furnishings under the very proclamation Trump signed. The gold accents have not been granted life tenure. Somewhere in the transition paperwork, there remains room for a perfectly lawful box marked Donald’s little things.

Nor does the proclamation establish the congressional approval requirement Trump described in his remarks. The text calls for a preservation process. His announcement supplied the force field.

This is a recurring difficulty with governing by superlative: eventually someone reads the document and discovers that “forever” means there will be a management plan.

Still, the timing gives the whole performance its particular flavor. After an election that reduced his party’s power, he was announcing protections for rooms he had personally redesigned. We can’t know every calculation behind that decision. We can, however, see what he chose to put in front of the cameras.

Democratic government depends on people accepting limits before those limits become personally convenient. Preservation rules are supposed to protect a shared inheritance. Checks on executive power are supposed to restrain whoever holds the office. If a president treats those safeguards as obstacles while pursuing his own plans, then demands their protection when imagining a successor’s, he’s asking for a special category of government service: restraint for everyone who comes after him.

That is a very different understanding of public stewardship from recognizing that the building, the office, and the authority are borrowed. The next president should respect the White House’s history. Trump should have respected it, too. The standard has to survive a change of occupants, even when the incoming occupant has the audacity to prefer fewer decorative angels.

So yes, this is quite a way to accept an election result: discover guardrails, demand permanence, and explain why the people who follow you must be more careful than you were. America has voted. The president has begun securing the furniture. Somebody please tell the East Wing that its application for historic concern has finally been approved.

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The pressing matter of state was the Oval Office itself. Trump signed a proclamation declaring it a national monument, along with the Cabinet Room, so that the space “won’t be able to be taken down, destroyed, touched, or anything else.” Nobody had proposed taking it down. Still, he warned of future vandals who might be “stupid people” bent on rebuilding it “in a slightly different shape,” and he pledged that if anyone starts knocking down walls, “you’ll call me wherever I may be and I will come back here.”

Picture it: a former president descending on Pennsylvania Avenue to defend the curvature of a room.

It’s an admirable commitment to preservation from the man who sent the excavators into the East Wing in October 2025. The wing that had housed generations of first ladies’ offices came down in a matter of days to clear ground for his ballroom, a project he had assured the public would sit near the existing building without touching it. On Thursday he boasted that the ballroom will be the finest in the world, with five underground stories of military facilities, and he complained that critics had sued over it. Apparently the rule against tearing down historic White House spaces to build something of a different shape applies to his successors, not to him.

The rooms he wants frozen in place are, of course, the ones he has spent two years lacquering in gold: gilded mirrors, gold eagles, cherubs shipped up from Mar-a-Lago. The proclamation doesn’t prevent a future president from redecorating, contains none of the congressional-approval requirement Trump described, and could itself become the subject of another president’s pen and another round of litigation. But the signature, he assured the room, deserved “a 10,” because “this space is a 10.”

Then a reporter asked about Pete Hegseth, and Trump got to talking about his wars.

Within minutes, the man who had just sworn to protect a historic room from “stupid people” was explaining the economics of military intervention. A “lightweight congressman,” he complained, had criticized him for spending $25 billion on Iran. Trump had a ready answer: “We’ve taken much more money out of Venezuela than that, you know, if you add them up, because it’s basically two wars.”

Read that sentence again, slowly. A sitting American president, defending the cost of one war, volunteered the spoils of another as the offset. Venezuela, where US forces seized the head of state in January and Washington took control of the oil revenue, is presented as the revenue line. Iran, where he now describes the American presence as “virtually an occupation,” is the expense. The ledger balances, in his telling, because one country’s oil is paying for the bombing of another.

He didn’t stumble into this. For months, Trump has been treating Venezuelan oil as a return on his military adventures, although the numbers, and even which war he’s supposedly paid for, keep changing. Sometimes it’s twenty-five times the cost, sometimes twenty-eight, sometimes ten. On Thursday, he dispensed with the multiplier and simply stated the business model aloud, in the room he’d just declared a monument to American greatness.

So whose money is he spending?

Since Trump volunteered it, we should start with the arithmetic.

The Pentagon told Congress last month that the Iran war had cost $47.1 billion through mid-October, nearly double the $25 billion figure Trump keeps waving off. Meanwhile, the last widely documented estimate put Venezuelan oil sales at a little over $13 billion as of July, a figure Trump himself acknowledged. Those are different reporting periods, and the oil sales represent gross revenue, not American profit. But even allowing for additional sales, the administration has offered no accounting remotely substantiating Trump’s claims of a tenfold return. Ten times the Pentagon’s war-cost estimate would be $471 billion. As business models go, it’s less a cash cow than a cow somebody else owns, which has been producing considerably less milk than advertised.

That brings us to the more interesting problem: ownership.

Legally, according to the administration itself, none of that money is America’s. The executive order Trump signed in January defines the proceeds as the property of the Venezuelan government, held by the United States in a “custodial capacity,” with disbursements directed by the secretary of state on Venezuela’s behalf. Energy Secretary Chris Wright went further and said the funds sit in an account in the name of PdVSA, Venezuela’s national oil company, explicitly “not into the ownership of the U.S. Treasury.” The first $500 million took a detour through an account in Qatar, chosen, officials explained, so that Venezuela’s creditors couldn’t freeze it. Venezuela owes as much as $170 billion to bondholders and oil companies, and the administration has been careful to keep them from getting at it.

There is no evidence that Venezuelan oil revenues have actually paid for military operations in Iran. There are several possible explanations for Trump’s boast, none of which he has offered: commercial benefits counted as though they were government revenue, plain inflation of the numbers, or uses of the money his administration hasn’t disclosed. Whichever it is, treating Venezuelan sovereign property as an American war dividend raises questions that cannot be answered by another presidential boast.

What happens to the money once the oil is sold is considerably harder to establish. The first sales went to the commodity-trading giants Vitol and Trafigura. One of Vitol’s senior traders had contributed approximately $6 million to political committees supporting Trump. That doesn’t establish wrongdoing, but it makes transparency about who received the contracts and on what terms all the more important.

A State Department official told Congress in April that approximately $3 billion in payments had been authorized for Venezuelan public salaries, oil-industry supplies, and other “approved uses.” Who approved the individual payments, and who ultimately received them? Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly declined to provide a full accounting of the money received, the amounts disbursed, and the recipients.

Caracas even established a website to track the revenue. When the figures were examined in July, the site showed just one transaction: $300 million in March. For an arrangement involving billions of dollars in another country’s sovereign wealth, that’s a remarkably thin public record.

There’s an older word for this arrangement, one that predates sanctions regimes and custodial accounts. A ruling power takes control of a subject territory’s wealth, pays the local officials’ salaries at its own discretion, rewards favored merchants with the trade, and boasts that the proceeds can pay for wars elsewhere. Medieval Europe called it tribute. The lord collected, the vassal state’s government ran on his allowance, and the serfs who actually produced the wealth were told it was being held for their benefit.

Trump just has better branding: a Treasury account in someone else’s name.

For months, Democrats have been asking what’s in that account. In September, House Republicans blocked an attempt to subpoena the records [VERIFY: source]. The administration has resisted providing a full accounting.

On Tuesday, the shareholders voted.

Democrats took both chambers of Congress, flipping Senate seats in Texas and Kansas and gaining roughly 46 House seats. Exit polls and post-mortems pointed repeatedly to the same grievances: the war, the cost of living, and a president who seemed considerably more interested in his own ambitions than in either. Voters had been promised lower prices and no new wars, and they got a tariff crusade, a conflict with Iran, and diesel prices to match.

Trump’s response has run through the full spectrum of acceptance, from denial all the way to slightly different denial. On election night he declared that he hadn’t been on the ballot, and if he had been, Republicans would have won “IN A LANDSLIDE.” By Wednesday he was conceding he “knew” the war would cost his party. By Thursday he was demanding that Alaska take the votes cast for two minor candidates and hand them to the Republican incumbent, a procedure with no precedent in American law.

None of it changes the calendar. The new Congress takes office January 3. Until then, the enterprise operates under old management, with eight weeks remaining and a Republican Congress that still has constitutional powers to exercise if its members can summon the inclination to use them.

Thursday’s meeting suggests the management is considering how to use the time. Trump sat down with his national security team to discuss restarting major operations against Iran. Officials pointedly noted the new moon over the Middle East on November 9, and Central Command has been finishing preparations. Before the election, Trump had promised no major military action until after the vote and predicted a deal would follow it. The vote is over. In the Oval Office, he said he would “rather not destroy the rest of the country if possible, but maybe I’ll have to,” and assured reporters they would “know soon enough.”

This is where Pete Hegseth’s fate stops being a personnel story. Republicans, who spent months defending Trump’s war, have discovered in the space of 48 hours that it was all Hegseth’s fault. Thomas Massie will reintroduce his articles of impeachment on Monday. Thom Tillis is publicly listing Hegseth’s failures, from the fired generals to the war plans texted to a journalist. Massie has offered the president an exit: fire Hegseth now, while a Republican Senate can still confirm a replacement.

CNN reports the logic may run the other way. If Trump decides to resume strikes, a source says, he may need to keep Hegseth precisely because a Democratic Senate won’t confirm anyone else. The window that protects the war secretary is the same window that permits a wider war. Hegseth seems to understand this. His defiant video, all slow-motion swagger and culture-war greatest hits, isn’t really addressed to the House. It’s an audition for the next phase.

So the shareholders voted to replace the board, but the chief executive still occupies the corner office. And before the new directors arrive, he’s contemplating another hostile takeover.

Whether he proceeds may depend on what the people currently holding office decide their responsibilities are, and whether they’re prepared to exercise them.

The Economist, never a publication given to barricades, greeted Tuesday’s results with something close to exhilaration. Its cover argument was that the wave represented a victory for American democracy itself, proof that voters can still punish a party they’ve long supported. Its prescription fits in a sentence: “Voters have done their job. Politicians must now do theirs.”

Fair enough. But the editorial also urges both parties to reconsider the ugly mechanics of modern partisanship, then offers examples drawn entirely from Republican campaigns: gerrymandering, Elon Musk’s $150 million intervention in Texas, attacks on Muslims and transgender Americans, and an especially vicious campaign ad in Ohio. Having documented one party’s conduct, it distributes the responsibility for reform evenly between both. Shared responsibility for governing, however, does not require pretending that responsibility for the conduct being criticized is equally shared.

The editorial then frets that Democrats might overreach, that subpoenas and impeachments could crowd out the work of lowering prices and restoring health care. It’s a familiar worry, and it rests on a false choice.

The Venezuelan oil accounts aren’t a distraction from the cost of living. Neither is Trump’s Russian diesel arrangement, which senators from both parties contend violates the 2022 ban on Russian energy imports and which the administration promoted as a way to ease fuel prices. Nor is a war whose Pentagon-estimated cost runs nearly double the figure the president keeps citing, supposedly offset, in his telling, by another country’s oil.

Following the money is part of the affordability agenda. It just involves more bank statements than press conferences.

The first obligation falls on the people who still hold the gavels. For eight more weeks, Republicans run both chambers, and The Economist is right that voters have handed them a second chance. They can take it in concrete ways: a vote on Massie’s articles rather than another early recess, a war powers resolution before Trump orders another round of strikes rather than a debate over their legality afterward, and committee chairs of their own asking Scott Bessent the question he has dodged all year. Where is Venezuela’s money, and who has been paid out of it?

None of this requires courage on the scale of a profile in a history book. It requires showing up to work in the two months before they lose the keys.

How many will seize that opportunity rather than wait to see which way the wind blows from the Oval Office remains to be seen. They might consider The Economist’s other observation: once an old king’s power begins to drain, it can drain faster than anyone expects.

On January 3, Democrats inherit the gavels, along with two responsibilities Washington keeps trying to present as competing priorities: governing and investigating.

Robert Garcia, the incoming Oversight chair, marked the election results with a two-word statement: “Lawyer up.” His committee will want the Venezuelan account statements, the disbursement records, the KPMG contract and any audits it produced, and the names on the oil sales agreements. Other committees will want a full accounting of the Iran war and the legal basis for authorizing Russian diesel imports over the objections of lawmakers from both parties. None of this is political retribution. It concerns billions of dollars, the cost of a war, and the legality of executive decisions.

That is the distinction The Economist nearly makes but doesn’t quite carry through. Oversight isn’t an indulgence Congress must somehow fit around the serious business of governing. It is serious business. The power to investigate exists because Congress cannot write sound laws, appropriate public money responsibly, or restrain abuses of executive authority while remaining deliberately ignorant of how the government operates.

Congress has the authority to demand the records, examine the decisions, and establish what actually happened.

After all, how can Congress do its job if it won’t even find out what the administration has been doing?

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That’s what stays with me as I think about Guy Fawkes: the distance between a nation’s glorious account of itself and the lives of people who have to survive inside it. Somewhere in that distance is a question we still struggle to answer. What is our freedom worth if we can watch someone else lose theirs and feel nothing except relief that, this time, the government has chosen somebody else?

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There is another question underneath it. How do we build a country where people’s safety survives a change in who governs them? Because a pendulum can swing for generations without carrying anyone toward freedom.

November 5 is a day of remembering. For centuries, Britain’s official observance celebrated the survival of a king and the defeat of the Catholic conspirators who tried to blow up Parliament in 1605. Bonfires marked the failure of the Gunpowder Plot. Effigies of the pope, and later Guy Fawkes, went into the flames.

The face once burned in celebration of the state’s survival eventually became a mask people wore to challenge its power. That reversal tells us how much a symbol can change as people make it their own. But the history makes a demand of us, too. If we’re going to carry a symbol of resistance, we ought to care about what happens to the people in whose name we resist.

No one should have to share our beliefs to deserve our protection. Freedom has to reach the person whose faith we don’t practice, whose politics we dislike, whose life looks nothing like ours. Otherwise, we’re asking only for the privilege of being safe while someone else is afraid.

Before Fawkes entered the story, England had spent decades making religious allegiance a test of loyalty to the state. Mary I, the Catholic daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, had lived through her father’s break with Rome, the annulment of her parents’ marriage, her mother’s displacement as queen, and her own declaration of illegitimacy. Her brother’s reign brought further Protestant reforms.

Religion had helped determine whether her family belonged at the center of the kingdom or outside its protection. Mary’s determination to restore Catholicism drew on sincere religious conviction; her cruelty can’t simply be explained as revenge for her mother. Under her rule, hundreds of Protestants were burned at the stake.

I find it difficult to sit with the fact that someone could experience so much humiliation and insecurity and then wield power this way. But suffering doesn’t automatically teach mercy. We have to choose what we do with what hurt us. Mary’s victims were entitled to their lives regardless of what she believed their souls required.

Her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, inherited a very different place in popular memory. Her reign became England’s golden age, associated with cultural achievement and national greatness. It also brought imprisonment, torture, and executions of Catholics.

Elizabeth’s government increasingly invoked national security and treason amid genuine conspiracies, papal hostility, and conflict with Catholic powers. Those circumstances matter. So do the people punished under laws that made religious allegiance dangerous. The rulers had their reasons. The people they persecuted had lives. Which poses the question: a golden age for whom?

Mary and Elizabeth upheld opposing religious settlements. They were not the left and right of a modern political spectrum. But their reigns expose a danger we can recognize: the state could change its religious allegiance while retaining the power to punish those who would not conform. Different communities found themselves afraid as the demands of the government changed. The pendulum changed direction. The freedom to live beyond its reach remained insecure.

I think about what that danger would mean inside a home. How do you explain to a child that something as intimate as prayer could bring the authorities to your door? How do you teach honesty when safety may depend on concealing what your family believes?

Shakespeare belongs in the history of Elizabeth’s England. So does the frightened family hiding a priest. We owe the people who lived through that reign enough honesty to remember both. Their suffering can’t become an acceptable footnote to somebody else’s greatness.

Guy Fawkes grew up in that England. Born in York in 1570 and raised Protestant, he converted to Catholicism and later fought for Catholic Spain in continental Europe. His military experience helped make him useful to Robert Catesby, the principal organizer of the Gunpowder Plot. Fawkes was assigned to ignite the explosives.

The conspirators concealed 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords. On November 5, 1605, they intended to kill James I and much of the governing establishment during the State Opening of Parliament. Afterward, they hoped to rally Catholic supporters and seize the king’s daughter Elizabeth, whom they intended to put on the throne. The plan promised a Catholic restoration. It offered little reason to believe that freedom would belong equally to everyone afterward.

Wanting Catholics to worship without persecution was a worthy cause. We should be able to say that without making excuses for mass killing. The humanity of the people the plotters hoped to liberate didn’t cancel the humanity of the people they intended to kill. That’s where conviction has to bear the weight of conscience. Being wronged doesn’t give us ownership of other people’s lives. Their plan also leaves us with a deeper problem. Installing a ruler of your own faith doesn’t establish everyone’s freedom of conscience. The next reversal of power can put your community in danger again.

An anonymous warning prompted searches of Parliament, and Fawkes was discovered on the night of November 4–5. He was interrogated and tortured, then convicted of treason and executed in January 1606. His capture didn’t make the state’s brutality righteous, either.

And beyond the conspirators were the Catholics who had never agreed to their plans and had no part in them. The plot deepened suspicion of their community and brought further restrictions. Peaceful people lived with the consequences of a conspiracy they’d never joined.

Responsibility for persecution belonged to the authorities who imposed it. No government acquires the right to punish an entire community because some of its members commit a crime. Yet the failed attack gave those already disposed to distrust Catholics a powerful event around which to organize that distrust. The people the plotters hoped to liberate were left more vulnerable.

Centuries later, fiction helped give Fawkes another life. Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta placed a stylized version of his face on a revolutionary fighting an authoritarian state. Anonymous and Occupy protesters helped make the mask an international symbol of resistance.

People found something in that face they needed: a way to say that those who govern us can be challenged. I understand that need. I feel it when I think about the country my children will inherit, and about how much of their safety will depend on whether people are willing to stand up for children who aren’t their own.

I want them to grow up knowing that a person’s dignity survives every ugly thing a politician says about them. That a government’s power to frighten someone doesn’t establish its right to do so. That they can refuse to participate in cruelty even when cruelty has become popular.

Those convictions have to hold when defending someone is inconvenient. When our neighbors disagree with us. When the person whose rights are being violated is someone we would never have voted for, worshipped beside, or invited into our home. The measure of our commitment is what we’re willing to protect when affection and agreement offer us no help.

That’s the standard I want us to bring to the Trump administration. We must resist its abuses, demand due process, and insist that public officials answer for what they do to people. A promise of order cannot excuse cruelty. A claim of authority cannot put a president beyond accountability.

But our demand has to reach beyond the next reversal of power. Immigration shows how public frustration can become a mandate for a dramatic change of direction. In 2024, dissatisfaction with the Biden administration, economic anxiety, and support for tougher immigration enforcement helped Trump return to office.

We should demand a system that can make fair, timely decisions and protect people’s rights. A contest over who can sound tougher leaves those practical obligations unanswered. When one administration’s answer becomes something the next promises to sweep away, families have to plan their lives around what the next election might take from them.

A democracy needs disagreement. It fails people when disagreement becomes permission to treat each other as enemies, and when winning power matters more than solving the problem that brought people to the polls. That is the broken cycle we have to confront.

This week, voters elected Democratic majorities to the House and Senate amid frustration over high prices, the Iran war, and government corruption. Another reversal, another chance to demand something better. There is reason to feel relief and hope. To everyone who voted, organized, and helped someone else participate: thank you. To anyone who crossed a party line because conscience asked more of them than loyalty did: thank you, too.

Trump retains the presidency. The incoming Congress will have to use its authority, and we will have to insist that it does. The people we elected owe us more than the comfort of seeing different names above the committee doors. They owe us the work.

That means pursuing protections that can endure beyond a single administration: fair procedures for immigration decisions, safeguards against arbitrary detention, and oversight that applies to officials from either party. We should judge their work by whether people become safer and problems become more manageable. A system that can keep changing the governing party while leaving people exposed to the same abuses is failing them.

I want my children to inherit something sturdier than the hope that the next president will be kinder.

Building that country requires courage, organization, and enough wisdom to keep the people we’re defending at the center of our decisions. Violence can deepen the danger around them, give officials an excuse for further repression, and leave grieving families to bear a cost they never chose. We owe those families more care than that. Peaceful resistance requires us to turn anger into something useful: protection for a neighbor, evidence that exposes wrongdoing, public pressure that an official can no longer ignore.

That means showing up peacefully and helping one another keep showing up. It means supporting credible journalism, documenting abuses carefully, and checking information before we pass it along. It means helping organizations that provide legal assistance and practical support, so a frightened person has somewhere to turn.

It means calling our representatives with specific demands, attending public meetings, and insisting on investigations when officials abuse their authority. A hearing, a record, a question asked again after somebody tries to evade it: these are ways to make power answer.

Choose one action you can sustain. Make the call. Attend the meeting. Find out which local organization needs help and what kind of help it actually needs. Help someone else participate when work, disability, childcare, or exhaustion makes it difficult. And keep going after the relief of an election victory wears off. Ask what has changed in people’s lives, what protection has been secured, and what will keep it from being taken away again. The people we put in office need to hear from us when they disappoint us, too. Winning our votes doesn’t earn them our silence.

There is nothing passive about this work. It asks us to pay attention when we’re

exhausted, cooperate with people we disagree with, and keep showing up when change is painfully slow. History asks us to think beyond the moment when resistance feels righteous. It asks what our actions will accomplish, who will bear their consequences, and whether the freedom we demand will extend to people outside our own community.

I want our children to know they have a voice. I also want them to learn how to use it: to protect someone, to challenge a lie, to build enough public pressure that the powerful can no longer comfortably ignore them.

We can carry that determination into the streets, the voting booth, the courtroom, and every room where decisions are made about our lives. We have work to do, and we need one another to do it.

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Cranes swung steel over what used to be the East Wing. Some of the ballroom’s steel had been donated by Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal, reportedly manufactured in Europe. A nice touch for a president who imposed tariffs to protect American steelmakers. Trump had signed the final I-beam himself, adding “Love!” above his name, and watched it rise with the contentment of a man whose day was going exactly as planned.

Elsewhere, the news was less structural. Kansas had elected its first Democratic senator in nearly a century. Texas sent James Talarico to Washington, the first Democrat to win statewide there in 32 years. Susan Collins was clearing out three decades of furrowed brows. Democrats flipped seven Senate seats and took the House with room to spare.

In his first public appearance after the rout, the President of the United States spent more than twenty minutes discussing his ballroom. The ceilings would soar more than fifty feet overhead. Naturally, it was “a structure the likes of which has never been seen anywhere.” He invited reporters to imagine the chandeliers.

But the marble was a particular triumph.

Not just any marble. “It’s a vein that people have been after for 50 years,” he explained. The quarry’s owner hadn’t wanted to sell it. “But he liked me.”

So that’s one.

The floor, he promised, will be the most beautiful marble you’ll ever see. It will need to be. Over in the Capitol, the roof had just caved in on his party, and by lunchtime his allies were already feeling their way toward the exits.

Before the cranes had finished for the day, the Republican lifeboats were already in the water.

JD Vance got there first. “The reason we lost is the war,” the vice president wrote in a long post on X. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.” He closed with a line that will follow him for a while: “everyone knows why we lost.”

Everyone, perhaps, except the JD Vance of November 2022. After that year’s disappointing midterms, he published an essay in The American Conservative titled “Don’t Blame Trump,” arguing that pinning the losses on Trump was a mistake. Four years later, he’s explaining another Republican defeat by pointing to a war launched by the Trump administration.

The war itself has given him some trouble. After the first U.S. strikes on Iran in June 2025, he assured Meet the Press that a clash with Iran would not be “some long, drawn-out thing.” Less than two days before this war began, he told The Washington Post there was “no chance” of a years-long Middle East war. In September, standing at the White House lectern, he declined to call it a war at all. Now it’s the reason his party lost the Senate.

Ron DeSantis, term-limited and suddenly free in 2027 and 2028, called the night “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans,” then spent much of his press conference explaining why Florida, under his leadership, had survived it. Few eulogies have doubled so neatly as presidential auditions.

Thom Tillis, who is retiring and therefore allowed to say things, was less interested in a single villain. Blame the war alone? “Give me a break.” He ran through Noem, Hegseth and Lutnick’s Liberation Day tariffs, and warned that if Republicans “double down on dumb,” 2028 will look like 2008.

Everyone had an explanation. Nobody seemed particularly eager to accept responsibility. And nobody was volunteering the man with the marble.

Trump’s own explanation came in installments.

Yes, the war played a part, he conceded, but he’d do it all again. And it wasn’t really the war, he clarified. “The price, not the war, the price.” Specifically, the gasoline prices the war had sent soaring, a distinction that will be lost on anyone who has filled a tank since February. When Vance’s post landed, Trump called it “largely true,” which is a generous review for a document that blames your signature policy for losing the Senate.

He had another explanation, one he was repeating behind closed doors, according to CNN’s Kristen Holmes: Republicans lost because he wasn’t on the ballot. He keeps pointing to the size of his rallies, although the crowds were often smaller than advertised. Holmes, who attended several and interviewed the people there, found that those she spoke with were already planning to vote Republican. Trump could exaggerate the crowds. He couldn’t conjure new voters.

As for impeachment, he isn’t worried “even a little bit.”

Which leaves a problem. If the war was right, the president blameless and the rallies enormous, someone else will have to explain why the Senate is gone.

Fortunately, Washington had a candidate in mind.

According to CBS News, Trump has been privately asking advisers whether he should fire his defense secretary, and Ron DeSantis has been floated as a replacement. A Republican close to the White House told CNN that if the president is serious about anyone taking responsibility, “it’s Pete Hegseth,” adding that Hegseth had been “either dishonest or incorrect” about the war’s timelines and goals from the start.

In public, Trump stood by his man. “I think he’s doing a very good job,” he said, and when asked about Hegseth filling the Senate seat Marsha Blackburn will vacate to become Tennessee’s governor, he added that Hegseth “would be very popular if he did that. But I haven’t heard that at all.” Nothing says job security like your boss musing about your next job.

The Pentagon, for its part, promised to press on “despite threats of sham witch hunts from Democrats,” and said Hegseth is “100% committed” to serving until the end of Trump’s term. It’s a bold forecast from a department that hasn’t been good at predicting how long things last.

The threat, though, isn’t only coming from Democrats. Thomas Massie plans to force an impeachment vote when the House returns next week, and several GOP sources told CNN they expect it to pass. That’s an expectation, not a vote count, but it’s a remarkable turnaround: in September, Speaker Johnson sent the House home early, conveniently postponing Massie’s first impeachment vote until after the election. Other Republicans have discovered the virtues of congressional oversight at precisely the moment it offers them a way to put distance between themselves and a Cabinet member.

A small historical footnote. On January 24, 2025, Hegseth’s nomination deadlocked at 50–50, with Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell voting no. The vice president broke the tie. His name was JD Vance.

Everyone knows why we lost.

For a president who has long treated the stock market as his report card, Wednesday’s grades were awkward. The S&P 500 had its best day since early August, rallying on the news that his party had lost.

Investors liked the idea of gridlock, and one Pictet strategist told the Financial Times the result was “a clear repudiation of tariffs and foreign policy.” Brent crude fell almost 9 percent on bets that Trump would now be under more pressure to end the Iran war. Man Group’s Kristina Hooper said the margin was a relief in itself: big enough, she believed, to prevent a serious challenge to the legitimacy of the results. Wall Street had considered a contested American election a financial risk. Read that sentence twice.

Defense contractors didn’t join the party. Lockheed Martin and L3Harris fell more than 6 percent and Northrop Grumman 4.5 percent, as the FT noted that Hegseth’s relations with Congress had soured over the war. Even the companies selling the Pentagon its missiles were having second thoughts about the future of Trump’s military spending bonanza.

In Texas, Greg Abbott lost to Gina Hinojosa, who campaigned for a moratorium on data centers. Back in August, Trump had called Abbott’s own pause on approvals “a mistake.” Abbott doubled down in September, tightening the restrictions. Meanwhile, the Texas Tribune found that data-center-related donors had given him another $2.8 million after he announced the pause. The permits stopped. The checks kept coming. The voters elected somebody else anyway.

Markets weren’t the only ones running the numbers. Moscow was doing some arithmetic of its own. The harshest review of Trump’s night may have come from an unexpected place: the Russian government’s own newspaper.

Rossiyskaya Gazeta, as the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg noted, tore into the president on Thursday morning. His campaigning, it said, had hurt Republican candidates rather than helped them. It predicted corruption investigations into Trump and his family, scrutiny of the ballroom, the arch and the Reflecting Pool, and renewed examination of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

And who knows? We might finally see the rest of the Epstein files before Trump gets his chandeliers.

Another Russian commentary acknowledged that Trump’s October diesel deal with Putin hadn’t helped him either. After a phone call with Putin, Trump announced the arrangement, and Treasury waived sanctions on Russian diesel through April 7, 2027, just weeks after he signed sweeping sanctions legislation against Russia. The idea was to lower fuel prices before the midterms. Prices stayed high, the voters delivered their verdict, and Moscow kept its waiver. Now even the tankers are reportedly having second thoughts: two shipments originally headed for the United States have changed course amid concerns about sanctions risks.

Then the Russian papers stopped gloating and started watching the clock.

Kommersant observed that in November and December, the administration would try to rely on the outgoing Congress, which it described as “more loyal.” It urged Russia to make maximum use of that opportunity. RBK warned that Democratic control could bring closer scrutiny of Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and new obstacles to any Ukraine settlement.

None of this constitutes an official Kremlin statement. But it offers a revealing glimpse into how influential Russian commentators assess Washington. They didn’t call the outgoing Republican Congress pro-Russian. They called it convenient.

January 3 is a constitutional date. Under the 20th Amendment, the new Congress takes office at noon. Trump will still be president, with substantial authority over foreign policy. But Russian commentators see January 3 as a deadline, when the administration may face a Congress more willing to scrutinize its dealings with Moscow.

They want Russia to make its moves before that happens. They’re saying so openly.

Worth watching between now and January 3: trips by Witkoff or Kushner, new sanctions waivers, any slowdown in weapons or intelligence assistance to Kyiv, and renewed pressure from Trump on Zelensky to accept a settlement.

Abroad, the headline writers had the time of their lives.

The Guardian went with “Trumped.” The Daily Mirror reached for Springsteen: “Reborn in the US.” Metro declared him a “lame Donald Duck,” and the Daily Star rewrote “My Way” as a farewell for MAGA. In France, Libération simply called him a loser, while the Catholic daily La Croix saw a “democratic jolt” and blamed petrol prices driven by the Iran war. When a Catholic paper and a communist one, L’Humanité, reach the same verdict, you can call it consensus.

Not everyone celebrated. Israel’s pro-Netanyahu Israel Hayom warned that the new Congress could be the most hostile to Israel in history, and Haaretz cautioned that Israelis used to decades of American protection weren’t ready for what comes next.

Foreign Affairs offered a sobering note: a boxed-in president might lash out abroad, threatening Canada, undermining alliances or pursuing new arrangements with Russia or China. Losing Congress doesn’t mean losing command of American foreign policy. Moscow, as we’ve seen, is hoping to take advantage of the time remaining.

In London, The Times was already contemplating the demise of Mar-a-Lago Face. It seemed only proper to prepare an obituary.

RIP, Mar-a-Lago Face (2016–2026)

Mar-a-Lago Face passed away Tuesday night in Texas, Kansas, Ohio and several other unlikely places, after a long struggle with gas prices. It was ten.

Born in Palm Beach, it rose from country-club obscurity to become the unofficial uniform of an administration. At its peak it was less a look than a loyalty oath: the lacquered hair, the filler, the bronzer applied with the confidence of someone who had never once checked a mirror in natural light. Cabinet secretaries adopted it, cable hosts perfected it, and its founder wore it in a shade not found in nature. The tan, more than the face, was always the true signature.

It is survived by an unfinished ballroom awaiting the most magnificent marble floor anyone has ever seen, a triumphal arch nobody asked for, and a defense secretary whose own days appear to be numbered.

Mourners are invited to make donations in its memory to the congressional oversight committees, which come under new management in January.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that you stop asking what it cost.

On the home front, I’ve suffered a rather more personal defeat. My right knee found itself between Marz, my 150-pound mastiff, and a cheeky gray squirrel. The squirrel escaped unharmed, Marz remains entirely unrepentant, and I’m now hobbling around on crutches with an MRI scheduled.

The squirrel, I regret to report, has learned absolutely nothing from the experience.

Have a wonderful day, everyone. I’m off to put my feet up, one of them rather more carefully than the other.

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The new congressional terms begin January 3, 2027. Until then, the outgoing Congress retains its authority. After that, Democratic majorities can block legislation, direct committee investigations, and, in the Senate, reject nominees for judgeships and senior administration positions. Those powers give the election consequences well beyond the satisfaction of watching a television map change color.

When I think about what I want my children to carry from this moment, I think about the words “We the People,” and what it would mean for them to grow up knowing those words include them. Those words belong to the people raising families, working exhausting jobs, and wondering whether anyone with power is listening. This is a moment when we can show our children what happens when those people stand up together and insist on being heard. You can’t keep walking over people and expect them to quietly make themselves smaller forever. We can organize, defend one another, and stand up for what’s right, even when we’re frightened and tired. I want my children to know that their voices matter before anyone teaches them to doubt it. I want them to inherit the courage to use those voices, and the conviction that they belong in every room where their future is being decided.

Congress has considerable tools for the job. Democrats can refuse to pass new legislation advancing Trump’s agenda. They can negotiate over future funding and seek enforceable limits on how agencies use it. Senate Democrats can reject nominees, including a Supreme Court nominee if a vacancy arises. Existing judges keep their seats, existing laws remain in effect, and Trump retains his executive powers. Still, having to negotiate with another branch of government would be a useful constitutional experience.

Reversing existing policies is harder. Trump can veto legislation, and overriding him requires two-thirds of each chamber. Under current Senate rules, ending debate on most ordinary legislation takes 60 votes. Democrats will have to explain those limits honestly while using the powers they do possess. A majority is a working instrument, and voters are entitled to expect somebody to pick it up.

One place to begin is the Epstein files.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act became law in November 2025. It requires the Justice Department to release covered unclassified records, with specified exceptions. It expressly prohibits withholding material because of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity. Protecting the comfort of a powerful person is not a lawful reason under that provision to keep a document from the public.

In January, DOJ announced that its releases totaled nearly 3.5 million pages and said it had fulfilled its disclosure obligations. Its account of withheld material included duplicates, privileged records, certain material covered by statutory exceptions, and unrelated records. Bipartisan lawmakers have challenged the department’s handling of the release. In October, a coalition of 17 state attorneys general urged Congress to strengthen enforcement of the law, arguing that DOJ continued to withhold required material.

That dispute needs an examination of the records and the decisions behind them. A very large pile of paper does not, by itself, answer whether all the required paper is there. Anyone who has worked in quality or compliance knows the distance between being handed a stack of documentation and establishing that the requirements were met. Washington should be capable of understanding this without a commemorative binder.

A Democratic majority could use its committees to seek the missing pieces: what categories remain withheld, which legal grounds officials invoked, who approved the decisions, and whether those explanations match the underlying records. It could seek testimony from the people responsible and examine how investigative leads were handled. Congressional subpoenas and releases of Epstein records already have bipartisan precedents. The change is who will set the priorities and decide how persistently to pursue the answers.

There is also proposed legislation to strengthen enforcement. The bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act II would give survivors, state officials, and others a route to challenge unlawful withholding in federal court. It would also address access to records and the use of certain privileges to resist disclosure. It remains a proposal, and passing it would require the ordinary legislative process, including a presidential signature or a successful veto override. A new majority could give that proposal serious consideration.

The measure of this work should be whether it serves the people who were harmed. Survivors deserve protection of their identities and private information, access to records concerning their own abuse, and serious attention to evidence that could support further investigation. They should never have to watch their suffering become a recurring promotional opportunity for politicians who forget the subject when the cameras leave.

That requires care with the evidence. A person’s name appearing in a file doesn’t establish a crime. An allegation needs investigation and corroboration. A survivor’s account deserves to be heard seriously, and every conclusion must reflect what the evidence supports. Those standards are essential to an investigation capable of delivering justice.

The same care applies to the possibility of consequences for Trump. Congress can investigate, make referrals, and consider impeachment if the evidence supports it. It can’t itself bring criminal charges. The House can impeach by a simple majority, but removal requires conviction by two-thirds of senators present, which means 67 votes if all 100 attend. Winning Congress doesn’t settle any of those questions.

Nor does issuing a subpoena guarantee a prompt answer. Officials can resist, assert privilege, and force disputes into court. Enforcement can take time. Democrats should prepare for that resistance with focused demands, preserved evidence, and sustained legal work. An unanswered request should remain on the public record, along with the reason it remains unanswered and what the committee is doing about it.

This is where voters should keep their attention. Which records were requested? What was produced? Which witnesses appeared? What contradictions were established? What action followed? Those questions will tell us more about accountability than the number of indignant clips a hearing produces.

There is room to feel hopeful about this result. A government with another branch willing to scrutinize it has fewer opportunities to act without challenge. Records obtained and examined can establish facts that survive the next news cycle. Serious oversight can expose failures, support changes in the law, and give people harmed by institutions a chance to have their experiences heard.

Before we turn to the work ahead, I want to thank the people who made this possible. To everyone who voted, volunteered, organized, and kept showing up through the exhaustion, thank you. And if you crossed party lines to stand against this administration’s abuses of power, your choice deserves recognition. It takes courage to challenge a leader your own party has asked you to defend. We can disagree about policy and still stand together against tyranny. Every person willing to make that stand helps give our children a country where their rights and voices have a future.

We should allow ourselves some relief, and then stay interested in what happens after the celebrations. The people who voted, volunteered, organized, and kept showing up have created an opening. Democrats will enter the new Congress with the authority to do consequential work with it.

Somewhere between the victory speech and the next fundraising email, there needs to be a calendar, a set of document demands, and a plan for what happens when the first answer is no. The survivors deserve that persistence. So does everyone who voted for a government that remembers whom it serves.

Voters have done their part. Now make them answer.

If this helped clarify what comes next, please restack it so more people can follow the work and judge the results. Paid subscriptions support both my work and Mom’s, and help us keep asking the questions powerful people would prefer we leave alone. Thank you for supporting our writing and our family’s adventures.

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Thank you to everyone who voted, including those who reconsidered their previous loyalties and decided that enough was enough. Thank you to the election workers, public officials, and ordinary citizens who stood up for our democracy when it needed them. Americans weren’t only voting for themselves yesterday. People in Kyiv sheltering from Russian missiles were watching, as were families in Tehran living under the bombs of a war Congress never voted to authorize. So were farmers in Canada and factory workers in South Africa whose livelihoods have been upended by tariffs announced on a whim. Our fellow travelers on this planet have spent two years absorbing the consequences of American choices. Yesterday, we gave them reason to hope we haven’t forgotten them.

And what a statement Americans made. Democrats flipped seven Republican-held Senate seats, including in Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina, and took control of both houses of Congress. The New York Times estimates a roughly 13-point Democratic advantage in the national House vote, potentially the largest margin for either party in a congressional election in at least half a century. Americans have taken the first steps toward putting an end to this disaster. But an election cannot, by itself, undo the damage, restore our institutions, or repair our relationships with the world. That will take considerably more than one extraordinary Tuesday.

So let’s take a moment to feel it. We earned it.

But only a moment. An election is a beginning, not a finish line. Now the real work begins.

By any measure, this was a rout. Kansas will send a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1932. South Carolina handed Lindsey Graham’s old seat to a pediatrician. And in Texas, voters ousted both Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott in a single night, electing James Talarico to the Senate and making Gina Hinojosa the first Democratic governor since Ann Richards.

The rejection was broad as well as deep. According to Times Voter Trends, Democrats won roughly 70 percent of both Hispanic voters and voters under 30, two groups where Trump made his biggest gains just two years ago. Every age group shifted left, including voters over 65. So did white voters without a college degree, a core of the coalition that put Trump back in the White House.

Now consider the man at the center of it all. For two months, Donald Trump traveled the country asking voters to treat this election as a vote on him. “So I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he told the Republican convention in Dallas. In Oklahoma he added, “Pretend I’m running please, because I’m on the ballot.” In Mobile he asked the crowd to close their eyes and imagine it. The night before the election, he told Sean Hannity, “If our people vote, we win in a landslide.”

Voters took him at his word. Then, as the results came in, the president discovered he hadn’t been on the ballot after all. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he posted. By morning he was telling Fox News, “I don’t view it as a hit on me. We’ve had the greatest two years in the history of the presidency in terms of the economy.”

Voters disagree. In the NBC exit poll, only 38 percent approved of his performance, the lowest Election Day rating for a sitting president in nearly two decades. Forty-three percent said they voted to oppose him, against 16 percent who voted to support him. Roughly three-quarters described the economy as being in bad shape, and about two-thirds said Trump’s policies had made it worse. On Election Day itself, new federal data showed that average gasoline prices over Trump’s second term had surpassed even Biden’s presidential-term average, reaching the highest nominal average for any administration. That’s a strange way to mark the greatest two years in history.

Having ruled himself out as the cause, the president spent election night looking for one. He blamed Fox News for putting Democrats on the air. He accused Greg Abbott of turning RINO. He blamed the candidates themselves, as though someone else had handpicked Ken Paxton. As Simon Marks of LBC observed, it’s hard to blame a terrible candidate when you’re the one who chose him. Anthony Scaramucci, who knows the man better than most, summed it up: the president asked Americans to treat the midterms as if he were on the ballot, and Americans said okay.

A referendum on a president, however, is not a blank check for his opponents. The AP Voter Poll found that about 7 in 10 voters, including roughly 4 in 10 Republicans, believe Congress hasn’t done enough to check the presidency. That’s not a love letter to the Democratic Party. It’s a job description.

Every rout needs a little comic relief, and the richest man in the world was kind enough to supply it.

Elon Musk, who promised last year that he would spend “a lot less” on politics, became the largest disclosed donor in modern American history instead. By mid-October he had given more than $445 million to federal political committees, more than double the roughly $177 million George Soros gave in 2022, when Soros was crowned the cycle’s biggest donor. Analysts at CNBC put his total election spending this year at no less than $474 million.

Texas was his biggest bet. Musk poured about $224 million into races there, including $158 million routed through the Senate Republicans’ main super PAC to the group backing Ken Paxton, and another $5 million to Greg Abbott. Both lost. Across the country, his own America PAC spent about $87 million on 44 federal races. As of Wednesday morning, its candidates had lost 29, won 3, and 12 were still uncalled. Ninety-three cents of every dollar it spent went to candidates who lost.

To be fair to the billionaire, he wasn’t facing a penniless opponent. James Talarico raised a record-breaking $146 million, much of it from small-dollar contributors. According to his campaign, 97 percent of contributions were $100 or less. Ordinary people supplied much of the money that allowed him to compete with the billionaire-funded political machine. In his victory speech, Talarico said his campaign had taken on “goliaths,” including “the richest man in the world,” and won.

Musk’s response came in two installments, moments apart. First: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.” Then: “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time.”

Elon Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars trying to influence American democracy. When the voters declined to cooperate, he started looking for off-world real estate.

Musk hasn’t lost his fortune, his government contracts, or his ability to finance future political campaigns. But come January, he will face a Congress with both the authority and the stated intention to examine how he exercised government power. His leadership of DOGE, his companies’ federal contracts, and the extraordinary access his operatives received to Americans’ personal information could all become subjects of congressional investigation.

Yesterday’s vote rang well beyond our borders. In Paris, Libération called it “une vague bleue,” a blue wave. London’s Daily Mail went with “historic blue tsunami.” The Times of India settled for “midterm blues for Trump.” Analysts from France 24 to Australia’s ABC to Britain’s LBC reached the same verdict American voters did: this was a judgment on Donald Trump and his policies.

The reactions ranged from celebration to cautious optimism to the sort of reassurance that tells you exactly what a government hopes won’t change. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, facing his own snap election later this month, said Americans had voted against policies that impoverish people and protect elite privilege, and predicted Spain would follow. South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, whose government is locked in trade tensions with Washington, said the results could usher in “a new era in world relations.” Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre called it a powerful signal that American voters want a change of course.

In Kyiv, the Kyiv Independent greeted the result as a potential boost for Ukraine, though Ukraine also lost one of its staunchest Republican allies when Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick was defeated. Moscow’s reaction was revealing in its own way. Russian newspapers acknowledged the scale of Trump’s defeat, while the state-run Rossiyskaya Gazeta suggested that a frustrated president might direct his anger toward Europe. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized that Trump remains president and expressed hope that his diplomatic initiatives would continue. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was less enthusiastic about the incoming Democrats, whose approach to Russia he characterized as deeply negative. Kyiv is looking for change. Moscow is emphasizing continuity. Both understand that control of Congress matters.

European leaders offered a useful reminder that yesterday’s election, however extraordinary, cannot instantly repair two years of damaged relationships. European Parliament Vice President Christel Schaldemose welcomed the possibility of stronger support for Ukraine and renewed cooperation, but insisted Europe must continue building its own independence. Trust, once squandered, is not restored by a single election.

Trump still occupies the White House, commands the military, and possesses considerable power to affect lives far beyond our borders. The new Congress can constrain that power, but it cannot simply wish away the damage already done.

And Trump didn’t spend the last two years acting alone. What about the powerful people and institutions that helped him along the way?

Simon Marks of Britain’s LBC pursued much the same question in his overnight coverage. In his view, the constitutional checks Americans were taught to trust largely failed over the last two years, and it took an election to do what institutions would not.

Start with Congress. Republicans controlled both chambers, with the authority to investigate, issue subpoenas, and demand answers. They exercised those powers selectively, while largely declining to challenge a president who was rapidly expanding executive authority. The branch of government charged with checking presidential power had become remarkably reluctant to use it.

Then widen the lens. Marks pointed to tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who courted the administration rather than keeping their distance, and to media owners he accused of bending their newsrooms to fit. He was particularly scathing about CBS News under its new owners, the Ellisons. Universities and law firms faced similar pressure and responded in very different ways. Columbia cut a deal; Harvard went to court. Several major law firms signed agreements with the White House, while others fought executive orders aimed at them and won in court. Accommodation is not the same as corruption, and resistance deserves credit. The point is to follow the evidence, not to paint every institution with the same brush.

Wall Street offered a revealing glimpse of what might be at stake. Shares of companies associated with AI data centers fell in early trading as investors contemplated a Democratic Congress and new governors who might insist on greater scrutiny of projects that consume enormous amounts of electricity and water. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa’s victory raised the prospect that communities might finally have more say over developments affecting their utility bills, water supplies, and public infrastructure. Investors were weighing the possibility of tougher permitting, environmental rules, and requirements that developers shoulder more of their own costs.

This is something we’ve been examining throughout our Lords and Serfs series. A rising stock market is not necessarily evidence of rising prosperity for working people. A corporation can report record earnings while its customers struggle to pay their bills. A data center can generate enormous wealth for investors while neighboring households worry about the cost of expanding the electrical grid. What looks like a booming economy from a corporate boardroom can look considerably less impressive from the kitchen table.

And if asking corporations to pay their own costs is enough to frighten investors, perhaps we should be asking who has been paying those costs until now.

The incoming Congress will have opportunities to examine government contracts, regulatory decisions, political influence, and the conduct of officials who were supposed to protect the public interest. Those investigations must be grounded in evidence, not conducted as exercises in partisan revenge. But neither should they be abandoned because someone worries that congressional scrutiny might unsettle the markets.

Some Democrats, and plenty of commentators, warn that the new majority will squander its moment if it spends the next two years on investigations instead of lowering prices. Rahm Emanuel told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius that a knock-down fight over impeachment would be a loser for Democrats, while ethics reform, a minimum-wage increase, or health care would be winners. Joe Hockey, Australia’s former ambassador to Washington, cautioned that a narrative dominated by corruption could crowd out the cost of living. Analysts on France 24 reminded viewers that swing voters who moved this year can move right back.

Those concerns deserve a serious answer, not a dismissal. Americans are struggling with health care, housing, groceries, fuel, and utility bills, and they expect the people they just elected to do something about it. Democrats say they have a plan. Hakeem Jeffries has promised early votes to restore the Affordable Care Act subsidies that lapsed in January, reverse nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts, roll back Trump’s tariffs, and force votes to end the war in Iran. He established working groups on health care, housing, groceries, energy costs, and caregiving months ago. That agenda has to be an immediate priority, and Democrats must show voters what progress they can deliver, even with a president who retains the power to veto their legislation.

Nobody is asking voters to choose, and voters didn’t ask Congress to. In the AP Voter Poll, roughly half of voters called government corruption crucial to their vote, a slightly larger share than those who said the same about the cost of living. They want lower prices and honest government, and they don’t see a contradiction.

Neither should Congress.Corruption is an economic issue. Government favoritism determines who receives public money, who escapes scrutiny, and who ultimately pays the bill. Investigating those decisions is how we find out where the money went and how to keep it from going there again. Even Emanuel’s own list of winning issues includes ethics reform. And surely investigating how existing safeguards failed is one way to design better ones. Rep. Jason Crow put it simply: Democrats cannot dodge their obligation to investigate corruption and overreach.

History has already run this experiment. In 2007, a new Democratic Congress passed the first federal minimum-wage increase in a decade. President Bush signed it on May 25 as part of a supplemental appropriations bill funding the Iraq war. Meanwhile, congressional committees were investigating wartime contracts, reconstruction spending, and the conduct of government officials and private contractors. Congress managed to raise wages, fund the government, and investigate the executive branch at the same time. That’s not a contradiction. It’s part of the job.

The line between oversight and political theater is real, and it’s drawn by how investigations are run. Disciplined oversight follows evidence, uses fair procedures, publishes what it finds, and turns its findings into reforms. Theater starts with the verdict and works backward. Democrats should commit to the first, and that includes being willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even when it leads somewhere uncomfortable.

Impeachment is a separate question. Rep. Joe Courtney told Australia’s ABC that opening with an impeachment resolution would be counterproductive. He’s right about the sequence. Investigate first. Let the facts decide what comes next.

Barack Obama struck much the same note in his response to the election. He thanked the candidates who stepped forward, the voters who supported them, and the election workers and volunteers of both parties who made the process possible. Americans, he said, want leaders who bring people together and offer practical solutions to their problems. But he also reminded Democrats that Trump has another two years in office. The task now is to “roll up our sleeves,” make changes wherever possible, “prevent further damage,” and prepare for the future.

That sounds very much like a call to govern and to exercise oversight, not to choose between them. But there is another test awaiting the incoming Democratic majority, and it may prove considerably more uncomfortable than investigating Donald Trump: whether Democrats are prepared to follow the money when it leads toward the people who helped finance their own victories.

Democrats did not win this election on small checks alone. Federal law bars corporations from contributing directly to federal candidates out of their treasuries, but that hasn’t kept corporate money out of politics. It flows through corporate-sponsored PACs funded by eligible individuals, contributions from executives and their families, wealthy donors, and outside groups that can spend without limit independently of candidates. Democrats benefit from all these channels. Their financial backers include figures from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and many of the same industries now waiting to see how much scrutiny the new majority is actually willing to apply.

Voters have noticed. The AP Voter Poll found that a substantial share of Americans don’t believe either party would be better at fighting corruption. Democrats held a modest advantage on that question, but they haven’t earned the public’s unconditional trust. They’ve won a probationary period.

Reid Hoffman, the tech billionaire and Democratic megadonor, wrote after the election that it’s now on Democrats to fight for an economy that serves every American, “not just the already rich and powerful.” He’s right. And the test of whether Democrats mean it won’t be found in their speeches. It will be found in their subpoenas.

When a committee follows the money behind a government contract, a regulatory favor, or a data center deal and finds a company whose executives or PAC also supported Democratic candidates, what happens next? Does the investigation continue, or does it quietly lose momentum? A Congress that examines only its opponents’ patrons isn’t conducting oversight. It’s settling scores.

None of this assumes that a political contribution establishes corruption. But the lords of this economy have always understood something the rest of us sometimes forget: they don’t need to own a party, so long as they keep friends in both. The new majority can demonstrate that friendship doesn’t buy immunity. Or it can demonstrate, once again, that it does.

Not every community joined the national shift. Here in Coos County, the latest unofficial election-night returns had Republican David Brock Smith leading Jeff Merkley by nearly 17 percentage points. That’s somewhat closer than Trump’s roughly 20-point margin here in 2024, although Christine Drazan carried the county by nearly 25 points over Tina Kotek. The results remain unofficial, and comparing a Senate race with a presidential one isn’t a precise measure of partisan swing. But the message is clear enough: the conversations this country needs to have aren’t finished, and some of the most important ones are happening in places like ours.

Donald Trump is still president. He still commands the military and holds the veto, and Republicans will control Congress until January 3. But the voters have already spoken, and their message wasn’t addressed exclusively to the Democrats who won. It was also directed at the Republicans who have spent nearly two years treating congressional oversight as an inconvenience to be avoided. They still hold the gavels. They still control federal spending, can demand answers, investigate abuses of power, and refuse to rubber-stamp the president’s decisions. The election didn’t suspend their constitutional obligations for the next two months. Quite the opposite. Americans have just demonstrated that elected officials are accountable to the people, not to the president. The current Republican majority might consider acting accordingly. January 3 is when control of Congress changes hands. It isn’t when congressional responsibility begins.

Here’s what I’ll be watching. Will the first House votes on health care and tariffs come quickly, as promised? Will the war powers resolutions on Iran keep coming until the war ends? And when the committees start following the money, will they follow it all the way, including to the doors of their own donors?

So thank you again, to every voter, every poll worker and every neighbor who refused to look away.

Now the real work begins right after Marz and I treat ourselves to a spa day.

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