Now I Have a Statute. Ho Ho Ho.

Christmas Eve with Trump, the courts, and an army of people who actually know what they are doing

Good morning, and Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! Inevitably at this time of year someone in our family triggers a friendly-ish debate, once again, about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. (It is. This is not a debate; it’s a diagnostic.) The fact arguing about it is an annual ritual settles it.

Sure, it may seem silly, this low-stakes bickering, coffee refills inducing banter, but it turns out to be a useful baseline for sanity. While normal people are having some lighthearted fun on Christmas Eve, the President of the United States was doing something else entirely. He was up at midnight, alone with his phone, rage-posting about television hosts.

On Christmas Eve, just before midnight, the president of the United States was on Truth Social threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of major television networks because their coverage and late-night programming were “almost 100% negative” toward him. He singled out the networks by name, obsessed over ratings, complained about salaries, and escalated into personal attacks, declaring Stephen Colbert a “dead man walking” who should be “put to sleep,” language that is grotesque even when generously interpreted as metaphor.

His Christmas Eve message to the nation was not peace, unity, or goodwill. It was a public fantasy about using state power to punish broadcasters for being insufficiently deferential. If taken seriously, it would amount to a Soviet-style assault on press freedom. The most charitable interpretation is not that he intends to follow through, but that a deeply unwell man with nuclear-era authority spent Christmas Eve hate-scrolling cable television and rage-posting into the void because he cannot log off. That is the best spin available.

Because no dystopian holiday special is complete without tonal whiplash, this same man then spent part of Christmas Eve taking calls from children via NORAD’s Santa tracker. In theory, this is supposed to be harmless whimsy. In practice, it played like performance art about impulse control. Trump narrated the process out loud, drifted into campaign bragging, reassured kids that Santa was being tracked to make sure he wasn’t “a bad Santa” infiltrating the country, praised states for voting correctly, explained that coal is “clean and beautiful,” and briefly tried to pivot to GDP numbers before conceding, correctly, that the kids were not especially interested.

Melania, to be fair, appeared to be waiting for her turn to take a call, phone in hand, doing what she was technically there to do. But as ever, she projected a kind of studied detachment: present, composed, and unmistakably elsewhere. Two coping strategies, same environment. He cannot stop performing; she never quite enters the frame.

Earlier that night, he had been threatening media outlets. Now he was telling children to go to bed and promising dollhouses. Same compulsions, just a different audience.

Back in the real world, the one where institutions still exist and adults still know how they’re supposed to function, something far more interesting was happening. Competent people were standing up to the regime, quietly and methodically, using statutes, case law, and patience. Which is where the schadenfreude comes in.

Former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya explained how he and Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter were summarily fired by email, like a breakup note, for being “inconsistent with the administration’s priorities.” That phrase does not appear anywhere in the law governing independent agencies, which allow removal only for cause. The point, of course, was pressure. Drag the litigation out long enough and people have to choose between principle and paying their mortgage. Bedoya eventually resigned to support his family, getting knocked out of the lawsuit in the process, which is exactly how the squeeze is designed to work.

But not before he and Slaughter did something quietly magnificent. After being summarily fired by email, without any allegation of “inefficiency, malfeasance, or neglect,” the only lawful grounds for removal, they went exactly where the public record lives: the FTC’s own public comment portal.

In filings posted on the agency website itself, they stated plainly that their purported terminations were unlawful, that under the governing statute they remained commissioners, and that the actions being taken by the FTC without them lacked legitimacy. Slaughter wrote that she continued to “serve as a duly appointed Commissioner” and warned that the agency was operating in violation of the law. Bedoya echoed the point, noting that the administration had deliberately avoided claiming any statutory cause for removal, because it couldn’t.

It was a bit of bureaucratic jujitsu: lawful, precise, and impossible to hand-wave away. They put their dissent exactly where future litigants, judges, and historians would find it, inside the agency record itself.

The kakistocracy hates that kind of resistance because it doesn’t rely on vibes or outrage. It relies on receipts, and receipts have a way of outlasting the people who try to pretend they don’t exist.

That theme carried straight into the Justice Connection, founded by former DOJ attorney Stacy Young after she resigned in January 2025, having taken Trump’s campaign promises and Project 2025 at face value. Justice Connection exists because DOJ employees, career professionals, famously apolitical rule-followers, are now being forced into an unthinkable position: obey illegal orders or lose their jobs. The organization provides legal defense, mental health support, career assistance, and public accountability for the people still inside the department trying to uphold the rule of law while being actively targeted by their own leadership.

Civil rights enforcement has been turned inside out, and career attorneys have fled. Laws meant to protect marginalized communities are being repurposed to target them instead. The civil division is skirting court orders. Pardons are being handed out like party favors, trashing years-long investigations and broadcasting the message that loyalty matters more than law. And yet: grand juries are refusing to indict. Trial juries are declining to convict. The machinery grinds when fed political nonsense instead of evidence.

Enter Harry Litman, patron saint of “let me explain why this isn’t actually the terrifying headline they want it to be.” Litman dismantled the panic around National Guard deployments by pointing out the detail that always matters: consent. When governors and mayors request Guard assistance, that’s cooperation, not coercion. It may still feel heavy-handed, but constitutionally it’s night and day from Trump trying to force troops into states that explicitly told him to stay out, a move the Supreme Court just slapped down. The reason this even feels ominous is because we’ve been watching an administration try to normalize muscle-memory authoritarianism for months.

Litman also walked through Judge Aileen Cannon’s ongoing effort to keep Volume Two of Jack Smith’s report, the Mar-a-Lago documents case, locked away. Thirteen months of sitting on an emergency order long after the justification evaporated. Now, a carefully timed invitation for Trump to intervene and argue that the report should never be released because Smith was supposedly invalidly appointed. The endgame is not acquittal or exoneration; it’s bottling the truth indefinitely. Think, delay as absolution, and once again, Trump’s most reliable ally in robes is right there to help.

But the most satisfying Litman segment might be the DOJ’s lawsuit against Illinois, because it shows what resistance looks like when states stop playing nice. Illinois passed laws barring civil immigration arrests at courthouses, protecting health and student records, limiting enforcement at universities and daycares, and, most provocatively, allowing people to sue federal agents personally under state law for flagrant constitutional violations. DOJ screamed “supremacy clause.” Illinois calmly replied, “Anti-commandeering.” You can enforce your laws, but you don’t get to conscript our courts and public institutions to do it for you. That fight is going to take years, and it may produce a landmark ruling, which is exactly the point.

This is how authoritarian projects actually get slowed down: not by shouting, but by friction. By people who know how systems work and insist they keep working that way. Think competence vs kakistocracy.

Which brings us back to Die Hard, and to my all time favorite line, if only for its sheer versatility, in cinema history: “Yippee ki yay, motherf**ker.” Not as bravado, but as infrastructure. John McClane wins because he understands the dynamics, how the systems connect, what happens when you pull the right wire and upset the expected cadence. Watching career civil servants, state officials, judges, juries, and lawyers quietly box Trump into statutes, precedent, and burden of proof, it’s not hard to imagine an entire army of dedicated public servants muttering that line under their breath as he enters yet another courtroom he does not control.

Finally, because the universe has a sense of humor, Santa did in fact outdo himself this year. A lottery ticket bought in Arkansas won a $1.817 billion Powerball jackpot on Christmas Eve, the second-largest in U.S. history. The odds were one in 292 million. Somewhere, a regular person woke up Christmas morning with a problem set that includes “hire a lawyer immediately” and “never answer an unknown number again.” In a year defined by chaos, corruption, and institutional stress tests, the randomness reminder feels almost charitable.

So Merry Christmas. Argue about Die Hard. Drink the coffee. Take the dog out under the winter sky. Marz and I had some company last night during our moonbeam vigil, another quiet moment, another peaceful intention sent out into the universe, because sometimes that’s the most radical thing you can do.

Take comfort where you can, and know this: competence is still alive and kicking, the law still has teeth, and there are a lot of people who know exactly how the building works and aren’t afraid to use the stairwells. And every so often, just often enough to keep things interesting, the universe hands someone a $2 ticket miracle and reminds us that randomness, wonder, and possibility haven’t been fully canceled yet.

Yippee ki yay.