Still Standing on the Last Day

Fear, fraud, retribution, and the quiet work of surviving another year without surrendering democracy

Good morning! Welcome to the last day of the year, a year that seems determined to fling one more chair through the window on its way out. We’re ending this thing properly. Against all odds, we’re still here, a little singed, definitely tired, but intact enough to keep fighting for democracy, and that, in this moment, counts as a victory.

Boy, this is getting out of hand. The United States is now on the brink of losing its measles elimination status, a public health milestone we held for 25 years, because vaccination rates have cratered and federal leadership has decided that “personal choice” polls better than reality. South Carolina alone has logged 179 cases, more than the entire country recorded in six of the last ten years. Nationwide, we’re past 2,000 cases, nearly all among the unvaccinated, with transmission sustained long enough that unless it stops almost immediately, elimination status is gone. Measles, a virus that was effectively controlled, is once again spreading through schools, churches, households, and airports. This is what happens when ideology is allowed to veto science. It’s not abstract. Children are hospitalized, people are quarantined, and the administration that wants to lecture Americans about “personal responsibility” is nowhere to be found when responsibility actually matters.

At the same time, the Trump administration has discovered a sudden, selective passion for “fraud.” On Tuesday, Health and Human Services froze all federal child care payments to Minnesota, roughly $185 million a year that helps subsidize care for about 23,000 low-income children, based largely on a viral video from a MAGA YouTuber alleging fraud at Somali-run day care centers. There is no verified evidence, no completed audit, and no plan for the thousands of families who will be affected. Just another Trumpian knee-jerk reaction that smells a lot like retribution without regard for the consequences, a money spigot turned off, announced and amplified on X.

When reporters checked, most of the day cares cited were licensed, inspected, and operating. CNN dug deeper and found what anyone acting in good faith already knew: Minnesota has had real fraud cases, yes, and they’ve been investigated for years, mostly under the Biden administration, with dozens of indictments and convictions already secured. What changed wasn’t the existence of fraud. What changed was the political usefulness of it. Minnesota is governed by Tim Walz. Ilhan Omar represents it. Somali communities live there. And suddenly “fraud” becomes a justification for collective punishment, one that hits kids, working parents, and providers who did nothing wrong.

The hypocrisy here is staggering, and Bloomberg accidentally drove the point home with a sledgehammer. In a devastating investigation, Bloomberg documented how Trump’s clemency machine has repeatedly enabled real, documented, convicted fraudsters, including Eli Weinstein, a Ponzi schemer who received a commutation from Trump, immediately went back to defrauding families, churches, and small businesses under an alias, and is now reportedly angling for another pardon. Victims lost retirement savings, businesses, marriages, and mental health. Weinstein walked free. And it’s worth remembering that this selective “war on fraud” is being waged by a president who is himself a convicted felon for fraud-related crimes. Trump has turned clemency into a loyalty-and-access marketplace where wealth and proximity matter more than harm done. Fraud, in this administration, is not a moral concern, but a rhetorical weapon, ignored when it involves allies, amplified when it can be racialized and used to defund programs people actually rely on.

And speaking of weaponization, ICE is no longer pretending this is law enforcement. Internal documents obtained by The Washington Post reveal a $100 million “wartime recruitment” campaign designed to flood the country with deportation officers by targeting gun-rights supporters, military enthusiasts, UFC fans, NASCAR crowds, and anyone whose phone wanders near a base or a gun show. Influencers, geofencing, and plenty of combat imagery. “Defend the homeland.” This is the state recruiting a domestic force using the aesthetics of war and grievance, while Congress quietly triples ICE’s enforcement budget and the administration openly chases a million deportations in a year.

If that feels ominous, HBO’s new documentary Critical Incident: Death at the Border explains why it should. The film revisits the 2010 killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas, beaten and repeatedly tased to death by Border Patrol agents while handcuffed at a busy border crossing. His death was ruled a homicide. What followed was a cover-up: witnesses intimidated, cell phone videos deleted, evidence destroyed, and false reports filed. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights later concluded he was tortured. And the man overseeing the sector at the time? Rodney Scott, now Trump’s handpicked head of Customs and Border Protection. In a century of Border Patrol history, not one agent has been successfully prosecuted for an on-duty killing. That’s the institutional culture being expanded, supercharged, and marketed as patriotic grit.

Then there’s the turmoil within MAGA itself, now spilling into daylight. The New York Times profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene reads less like a redemption arc and more like a cautionary tale about loyalty as a one-way street that eventually runs you over. Greene, Trump’s most ferocious congressional cheerleader for years, a woman who spent half a decade normalizing his ugliest impulses, says the moment something finally snapped was Charlie Kirk’s memorial, when Trump bragged onstage that he hates his opponents. Greene called it “the worst statement,” said it exposed the emptiness at Trump’s core, and concluded flatly that he “has no faith.” She also admits, with startling candor, that MAGA trains its followers never to apologize, never to admit error, and just keep pummeling enemies forever, a cultural confession we’ve all witnessed in real time.

The rupture turned structural when Greene pushed for the release of the Epstein files. That, she says, was the line she was never allowed to cross. According to Greene, Trump screamed at her, warned that releasing the files would “hurt my friends,” and made clear that certain people were not to be exposed, not because of due process, victim protection, or national security, but because of personal consequence. Greene is alleging that the President of the United States intervened to block transparency in a child sex trafficking case to protect people close to him, or, given his own documented proximity to Epstein, possibly to protect himself.

Epstein is not an abstract scandal. Trump has been photographed with him, praised him publicly, flown in overlapping social circles, and spent years denying and minimizing the relationship. Greene’s account doesn’t just suggest favoritism; it raises the possibility that the line Trump drew was not about loyalty alone, but about exposure.

What followed makes the stakes even clearer. After Trump publicly branded her a “traitor,” Greene says she received a direct threat against her college-aged son. She immediately alerted Trump. According to the Times, his response did not express concern for the child. He insulted her instead and told her she had only herself to blame. When Greene protested that children should be off-limits, Trump reportedly doubled down.

That detail matters. It demonstrates not just cruelty but moral abandonment and the enforcement mechanism behind MAGA loyalty. In Greene’s telling, loyalty is not mutual, it is transactional, conditional, and disposable. Defy him, and even your family becomes collateral.

Greene now describes MAGA loyalty as a trap: reward obedience until it no longer serves power, then punish dissent without limit. Coming from Marjorie Taylor Greene of all people, this is not a warning from an outsider or a repentant moderate. It is an insider describing how power actually operates in Trump’s orbit, and why fear, not persuasion, is increasingly the glue holding it together.

She’s not alone. Lauren Boebert refused to pull her name from the bipartisan discharge petition demanding Epstein transparency. She was reportedly hauled into the Oval Office, sat down inside the situation room, surrounded by Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, JD Vance, and others, and pressured to back down. To her credit, she didn’t. Trump responded by vetoing her bipartisan bill to deliver clean drinking water to 50,000 rural Coloradans, legislation that passed unanimously. Boebert publicly called it out as retaliation. Even Nancy Mace has hinted she may walk away from Congress entirely. The message is blunt: challenge Trump on Epstein, and your constituents will pay.

When even Karl Rove is publicly warning that Americans are tiring of Trump’s hyperbole, retribution, and constant offense, and noting that Trump’s failure to deliver on the conspiracies he himself stoked has undermined trust among his own followers, you know something is shifting. Not collapsing, not resolved, but fraying. The shouting is getting louder because the persuasion isn’t working. Affordability is biting. Institutions are creaking. And the spectacle is starting to exhaust even people who once thrived on it.

We end the year where we began it: with a government that punishes downward and protects upward, that treats cruelty as strength, accountability as betrayal, and propaganda as policy. Measles is back. Child care funding is frozen on a whim. Deportation is branded as war. Corruption is forgiven if you’re connected. And truth, especially about powerful men, is treated as the ultimate threat.

So here we are, on the last day of a year that tried its damnedest to break things on the way out. We’re still standing, more clear-eyed, and far less naïve, but still here, still watching, still refusing to look away.

Tonight, I’ll step out of the news cycle and into something quieter. I’ll hold my last moonbeam vigil of the year at Shore Acres State Park, under the final night of the Christmas lights, with one of my sons and a couple of grandkids in tow. Marz, who is really just a human with four legs, will have to stay in the car this time, which feels deeply unfair, but he’ll get extra love when we get home. That’s the balance. You fight, you document, you refuse to normalize cruelty, and then you remember what you’re fighting for.

Democracy doesn’t survive on outrage alone, but in families, in truth told out loud, in vigilance that doesn’t blink, and in people who keep showing up even when the year throws one more chair through the window on its way out. We’ve lived to fight another day. Tomorrow, we do it again, clearer, tougher, and still unwilling to surrender the country to fear, lies, or retribution politics dressed up as governance.

Peace be upon you all!