The Miracle on Ice… Melts Down

Trump hijacks a hockey ceremony, denies Epstein, blackmails Indiana, and rage-posts through the night while America braces for real crises.

Good morning! The country was extremely busy degenerating overnight, and it’s time to sift through the wreckage. Let’s start with the part that actually restores your faith in humanity before plunging into the parts that make you question every life choice that led you to follow politics in 2025.

New York, never one to wait for the government to rescue anyone except the rich, has once again stepped up to protect its own people while federal agencies and their imperial stormtroopers play out Trump’s immigration fantasies. On frigid December nights, Street Vendor Project organizers walk the Bronx handing out whistles and “know your rights” flyers to fruit sellers and taco vendors who have become targets in Trump’s latest dragnet. Ninety-six percent of New York’s 23,000 vendors are immigrants; more than a quarter are undocumented. So naturally, the administration looks at this group of hardworking people supporting their families and thinks: “Let’s terrorize them with paramilitary raids and then pretend it’s law and order.”

New Yorkers have decided that the government’s sadism stops at the Hudson. When ICE swept through Chinatown after a right-wing troll posted about “African illegal immigrants,” it was the neighborhood, not Washington, that stopped the next raid. Volunteers mobilized across Reddit channels and word-of-mouth chains that would make Paul Revere jealous, eventually blocking ICE vans from leaving their garage. The miracle wasn’t on ice this time; it was on Canal Street, where 200 everyday people physically prevented abductions. Community groups are now training thousands in rapid response, converting bodegas into informal sanctuaries, and building a kind of civic immune system in real time. If there’s power in numbers, the resistance is downright electrical. (I write this with tears in my eyes. Bless you, NYC.)

Then there’s the other miracle, the one that took place in the Oval Office yesterday, where Donald Trump put on a cowboy hat and treated an event honoring the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team as his own personal therapy session. The ceremony began with the usual “greatest moment in sports history” boilerplate before veering into one of the most dizzying rhetorical face-plants of his presidency. One moment he’s pretending he personally defeated the Soviet Union; the next he’s claiming he “stopped eight wars,” “fixed Thailand and Cambodia,” and is making “a lot of progress” on Russia and Ukraine, which is news to… everyone involved.

The real magic trick came when he was asked about the Federal Reserve. Trump, who is rumored to have barely escaped Wharton with a passing grade, suddenly transformed into America’s Most Decorated Economist. He told the room that out of 71 monetary experts, only two people got the interest-rate question right, one was an unnamed Wharton professor, and the other was, naturally, Donald J. Trump. It was like watching a man speed-run his own mythology, except the myth is wearing a cowboy hat and still struggling to pronounce “Soviet.”

This Wharton-fantasy self-image might be charming in an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, but it’s considerably darker when you realize this same man has spent the past month quietly staging one of the largest U.S. military buildups in the Caribbean in decades. F-35 stealth jets, Growler electronic-warfare planes, rescue helicopters, Reaper drones, tanker aircraft, eleven warships, and the USS Gerald R. Ford have all now taken up positions circling Venezuela. Trump has already seized an oil tanker, announced he’s authorized covert CIA operations, and mused publicly about “land strikes.” Inside Venezuela, anti-aircraft guns are being moved into position and flight cancellations are sweeping the country. This isn’t saber-rattling; it’s loading the saber and handing it to a man who sends 1 a.m. emails asking strangers, “Are you seriously ignoring me?”

And that brings us to the 1 a.m. hour in the West Wing, when the President of the United States, flustered by the sudden reappearance of Epstein estate photos featuring himself, Epstein, and an assortment of sexual restraints straight out of a very dark Etsy shop, launched into a digital meltdown of operatic proportions. First, he attacked Indiana lawmakers for failing to gerrymander him a midterm victory, threatening to defund the entire state like a toddler who just discovered sharing is optional. Except this wasn’t sandbox politics; it was extortion. Threatening to withhold federal funds in order to coerce state officials into delivering a partisan outcome isn’t just unethical, it’s illegal. Federal dollars aren’t the president’s personal slush fund, and conditioning them on political obedience meets every textbook threshold for blackmail, abuse of power, and, in any functioning democracy, impeachment.

While Trump was committing crimes on social media and pretending to be the indispensable peacemaker of our time, reality, the kind with artillery, was unfolding in Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky appeared on video from war-torn Kupiansk itself, standing before the bullet-riddled city sign, calmly explaining that, despite Russian propaganda, Ukraine had just launched a successful counterattack. The 2nd Khartiia Corps pushed Russian forces back to the Oskil River, cut their land routes, liberated multiple villages, and killed over a thousand Russian soldiers since September. Russia claimed Kupiansk fell weeks ago; Zelensky, standing on Ukrainian soil under active fire, said simply: “The reality speaks for itself.” Ukraine understands that battlefield strength equals diplomatic leverage. Trump, meanwhile, thinks diplomacy works like blackjack: double down, pray, and blame the dealer.

From there, he wandered into a frenzy of fundraising emails so desperate they read like rejected Tinder messages. “Are you seriously ignoring me?” one subject line begged. “I thought we were closer than that.” Another offered fans a “confidential interview” with the president because “nobody else will see your answers,” which is exactly what you want to hear from a man with subpoena power. And of course, he sprinkled in promises of fireside chats and White House invitations if you’d only click on the link and validate him, the emotional equivalent of an ex who texts you “wyd” at 2 a.m. and then accuses you of betrayal if you don’t respond.

In the sober light of day, new polls reveal that Americans dislike Trump’s healthcare agenda with historic intensity. Only 29% approve of his handling of healthcare, his lowest rating ever across both terms, and even Republicans are split, with nearly 40% saying they disapprove. Large majorities support extending Obamacare subsidies, which expire in mere weeks. And Trump’s message to the 24 million Americans about to watch their premiums skyrocket? “Don’t make it sound so bad.” This from the man whose media surrogates now insist affordability itself is a “hoax,” which must be news to the millions of people who haven’t bought Christmas presents because they’re deciding between groceries and rent.

Somewhere beneath the flood of lies, threats, and 1 a.m. emails, the Epstein files keep expanding. Nineteen photos down, roughly 95,000 left. In the released batch, Trump appears alongside extremely young-looking girls, Epstein’s accoutrements of bondage and coercion, and, in what may be the darkest metaphor ever created, a box of novelty Trump condoms labeled “I’m Huge.” The man who claimed in the Oval Office he “knows nothing about Epstein” seems to have been photographed knowing quite a bit.

Before we close, we’d be remiss not to look north, where real leadership and real crisis are unfolding. Washington State is drowning under some of the worst flooding it has ever seen. Entire communities, Burlington, Sumas, Skykomish, were submerged as rivers surged to historic highs. National Guard troops knocked on doors all night, evacuating thousands as landslides swallowed highways and floodwaters breached homes. More than a dozen counties are now disaster zones, US-12 has been consumed by the Naches River, and US-2 is severed by mudslides. And because the climate crisis is no longer a subplot but the main narrative, another atmospheric river is already lining up to dump even more rain onto already-soaked ground.

As Washingtonians and our friends in British Columbia brace for the next wave, Trump is too busy rage-posting about being ignored, threatening Indiana, cosplaying a Nobel-Prize-worthy economist, and draping a cowboy hat over whatever’s left of his frontal lobe to notice that an entire corner of the country is underwater. The contrast is almost poetic: communities protecting vendors in the Bronx, neighbors rescuing each other from floodwaters in Washington, Canadians cutting through the rising dark with acts of solidarity, while the president who claims to “stop wars” can’t stop yelling into the void at 1 a.m., trying to convince the world he’s fine.

He’s not fine. The country is not fine.

But the people are showing us, again and again, how to fight back, on the streets of New York, in the mud and floodplains of the Pacific Northwest, in the trenches of Kupiansk, and in every inbox that refuses to answer, “Are you seriously ignoring me?”

Yes, Donald, as a matter of fact, we are.