Very Close to Something, Very Far From the Truth

Trump negotiates wars by vibe, DHS steals Norman Rockwell, electricity gets more expensive, and the Epstein files somehow get “lost” again.

Good morning! We limped into the last weekend of the year thinking we might get a few quiet days to metabolize 2025, and then Donald Trump popped up at Mar-a-Lago like a jump-scare in a haunted house, announcing, between compliments about the catering and a nostalgic detour through his personal mythology, that he’s “very close” to ending the deadliest war since World War II. Very close, ninety-five percent close, or maybe 90. Or maybe “somebody would say 95.” The important thing is that it’s close enough for him to take a victory lap before anybody has actually won anything except the right to keep negotiating.

Trump hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Mar-a-Lago and performed the familiar routine: the indispensable dealmaker, the lone savior, the only adult in the room, the man who could end wars in a day if everyone would simply stop being so rude and start appreciating his genius. Zelenskyy, meanwhile, did what he has had to all year: show up, be grateful, keep Ukraine’s spine intact, and try not to get publicly shoved into a corner while the cameras roll. The public messaging was “progress.” The subtext was “land.” Trump said it plainly: some territory has been taken, and if you wait, more might be taken, so you’re better off making a deal now. That isn’t a negotiating stance so much as a shrug in a suit: the battlefield decides, and Ukraine should hurry up and accept the new reality before reality gets worse.

Zelenskyy did not endorse that framing. He repeated the basics any sovereign leader must repeat when an ally starts talking like the map is a casual suggestion: Ukraine’s position on territory is anchored in law and in the will of its people. The plan under discussion is reportedly about 90% agreed in broad strokes, with security guarantees described as the keystone, and those guarantees are the whole story, even when Trump tries to bury it under percentages and self-congratulations.

Here’s the Kyiv version, which is less of a press conference and more of a reality check delivered in measured tones: Zelenskyy is asking for U.S. security guarantees not for a cute election cycle, not for a “we’ll see how it goes,” but for decades. Thirty, forty, fifty years. He’s telling Trump, in essence, that Russia’s aggression has already lasted long enough to outlive the promises politicians like to make, and Ukraine isn’t signing anything that simply resets the clock for the next invasion. The White House, according to Kyiv’s view, is offering something like fifteen years with a “maybe” attached, plus a warning that if Ukraine doesn’t take the deal now, the guarantees might vanish. It’s the diplomatic equivalent of a used-car salesman tapping the hood and saying, “I’ve got three other buyers, so you’d better decide today.”

And then there’s the sequencing that should make everyone’s stomach flip a little: Trump spoke with Putin first. Zelenskyy confirmed Trump went point-by-point through the “20-point plan” with the Kremlin before meeting Ukraine’s president. That’s the power dynamic in one sentence. Trump treats Putin’s input as foundational, Zelenskyy’s as negotiable. The whole weekend had that vibe: the press gets a quick peek, then the door closes, and we’re told to trust the process, by the same man who thinks “process” is something you do to the truth.

Steven Beschloss summed up the weekend better than any official statement could: “Zelenskyy really loves his country. How else could he endure dealing with Trump, his lies, subservience to Putin and profound ignorance?”

While all this was happening, Beijing provided a different year-end message: not words, but live-fire zones. China launched its largest-ever war drills around Taiwan by area, explicitly designed to demonstrate its ability to encircle the island, blockade ports, and cut Taiwan off from outside support. Seven zones, closer than before. One zone activated without warning near the island’s eastern waters, because what’s international stability without a little surprise drill to spice it up?

The obvious point was psychological pressure, logistical disruption, and alliance-testing. Over 100,000 international air passengers are expected to be affected, domestic flights canceled, shipping routes strained, and everyone in the region forced to practice the grim arithmetic of “how quickly can this turn into something real.” Taiwan mobilized. It showcased its U.S.-made HIMARS, basically reminding Beijing that the island isn’t a prop and Fujian is within range. Markets shrugged, because markets always shrug until they don’t. And analysts warned again that these drills blur the line between routine and rehearsal, turning constant provocation into normal weather.

It’s a hell of a tableau: Trump narrating peace in Florida while autocrats elsewhere demonstrate, in real time, what peace looks like when you don’t have it.

Back home, the economy continues its tradition of being the plotline nobody can skip. Electricity bills are rising, and the experts are telling Americans to prepare for more pain ahead. Data centers get blamed because it’s comforting to have a single villain, but the truth is uglier and more structural: hurricanes, wildfires, grid replacement, fuel-price swings, and the cost of rebuilding infrastructure in an era where infrastructure keeps getting chewed up by climate and time. Rates are projected to rise again next year, and the politics of electricity is getting loud. People are skipping Christmas lights because power has become a luxury purchase. And utilities are planning trillions in investments that, one way or another, will land on someone’s bill.

At the same time, there is a sliver of wage news that feels like someone opened a window in a stuffy room: minimum wage increases kick in January 1 in 19 states, with more than 8 million workers getting a raise directly or indirectly as wage ladders adjust. We’ve reached the moment labor advocates once demanded like it was radical, where $15 is common enough that more workers live under state floors at or above $15 than under the federal $7.25, which has been collecting dust since 2009. That’s real progress. It’s also an indictment of how long it took to get here.

Here comes the part where we do the math and everyone gets mad at math for being accurate. A family of four trying to live “just above poverty” in the official federal sense could scrape by on paper with one $15/hour job working a punishing number of hours. But you didn’t ask for paper. You asked for reality, housing, food, transportation, and the small matter of not dying if someone gets sick. When you price in basic needs, $15/hour does not equal “stability.” It equals “two adults working full-time and still budgeting like a disaster is imminent,” because it usually is.

Which brings us to Max from UNFTR, who showed up with a brutally coherent overview of the economy heading into the new year and asked the obvious question: what exactly is the Trump team’s plan, besides lying louder? Trump keeps promising “tariff dividends” as if tariffs are a magical money tree that pays Americans to suffer. The numbers, inconveniently, refuse to cooperate.

So Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has pivoted to hyping tax refunds as economic rocket fuel, $100 to $150 billion, he claims, delivering maybe $1,000 to $2,000 per household. The catch, as Max points out, is that this isn’t new money at all, and it’s not even generous by recent standards. Under Biden’s final two years, Americans received roughly $290 billion a year in refunds, averaging about $3,100 per filer. In other words, Trump’s big “boost” is smaller than what people were already getting, now rebranded as a breakthrough. It’s like declaring you’ve invented fire and then triumphantly handing everyone a damp match.

Max’s broader point is that the messaging is unraveling because the policy is unraveling. A Fed governor aligned with Trump’s worldview got boxed into admitting the quiet part out loud: under Biden, the economy was recovering, jobs were strong, demand was growing. That doesn’t mean everything was great, Max is the first to note that Democrats failed to deliver the kind of immediate, tangible relief that would have changed daily life, but it does mean the current narrative that everything is Biden’s fault is getting harder to perform with a straight face. What we’re living with now looks less like an inherited curse and more like the predictable result of tariff-driven inflation expectations, a weakened dollar, and a political class that treats working people as props in a marketing exercise rather than participants in an economy.

And then, because 2025 refuses to end without one last grotesque flourish, we arrive at the Epstein files, now starring Todd Blanche, Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice’s increasingly surreal relationship with the public record.

Allison Gill’s latest reporting frames Blanche’s “we found a million never-before-seen Epstein documents” claim as a story that collapses the moment you look at the timeline. The core allegation, presented through letters, internal communications, and sources familiar with earlier redaction work, is that the government already knew about major volumes of Epstein materials, already demanded them, already moved them, and already ran intensive review and redaction operations earlier in 2025. Either these documents aren’t “new,” or they were “lost” in a way that would require superhuman incompetence or deliberate concealment, pick your poison, neither makes the DOJ look like an institution you’d trust with your library card.

And the redaction angle is where the whole thing turns from suspicious to openly cynical. Gill warns that “national security” is becoming the universal solvent for transparency: if the administration doesn’t want to disclose something, it waves the magic words and expects everyone to sit down and shut up. Meanwhile, the release becomes a slow-rolling production, dragging the scandal forward month after month, into election season, keeping survivors stuck in limbo and keeping the administration’s narrative machine fed. It’s less “justice” and more “content strategy,” except the content is other people’s trauma.

So that’s the Monday tableau: a Florida peace theater where the land question hangs like a guillotine over Ukraine’s sovereignty, a Taiwan blockade rehearsal with live-fire zones and disrupted skies, an American grid buckling under climate and infrastructure reality, minimum wage gains that are real but still far too small, and a federal government that wants you to believe it accidentally misplaced a mountain of Epstein evidence while insisting you shouldn’t care that much anyway.

And just in case anyone still wondered how deep the rot goes, the Department of Homeland Security spent the holidays stealing Norman Rockwell paintings to sell authoritarian nostalgia.

In a quietly devastating interview on Bulwark Takes, writer and artist Daisy Rockwell, Norman Rockwell’s granddaughter, explained how DHS has been using her grandfather’s copyrighted work without permission to promote its anti-immigrant messaging. Think wholesome white families, Boy Scouts, Santa Claus, and flags, paired with slogans about “protecting our American way of life.” It’s propaganda, and it fundamentally misunderstands both the art and the man.

Rockwell, she reminded, was not the cartoon patriot DHS wants him to be. Yes, his early work captured an idealized, overwhelmingly white vision of small-town America, often more fantasy than autobiography, given that he was a city kid. But in the 1960s, Rockwell did something far more radical than coasting on fame: he turned his art toward civil rights, painting some of the most enduring images of desegregation and moral courage in American history. The Problem We All Live With didn’t flatter the country. It confronted it.

That legacy is exactly what DHS is trying to erase. The Rockwell family wrote an op-ed condemning the misuse of his work, explaining that Norman Rockwell believed compassion, inclusiveness, and justice were the real American values. DHS ignored them, and then posted another image anyway. According to Daisy, that told her everything she needed to know.

There was no legal ambiguity here, she said, just contempt. Fair use allows parody and critique. What DHS is doing is appropriation, laundering white nationalist aesthetics through a familiar American brand, hoping nostalgia will do the work that arguments can’t.

Asked what she would say if she could speak to Donald Trump, Daisy Rockwell didn’t hesitate. She wouldn’t bother. “I don’t think anything would stick.” The line landed not as flippancy, but as weary realism, a recognition that some people aren’t persuadable because they aren’t listening, they’re marketing.

Her deeper point was more unsettling, and more hopeful at the same time. Norman Rockwell made his strongest, most morally explicit work late in life, when he could have played it safe.

Which is why watching his art conscripted by a federal agency engaged in family separation, mass detention, and immigrant demonization feels less like irony and more like theft. Not just of images, but of memory.

In an era when the government lies about wars, about prices, about documents, and about who belongs, even the past isn’t safe from being rewritten. And sometimes the clearest resistance comes not from a policy paper or a court filing, but from a granddaughter saying, calmly and publicly: no, this is not what America was, and it’s not what it’s for.

If you’re feeling whiplash, that’s because you’re conscious. The people running this circus are counting on numbness. Don’t give it to them.