Philadelphia local news, sports, jobs, cars, homes

Category: Will Bunch

  • The other ‘insane’ thing about Trump and Venezuela | Will Bunch Newsletter

    The Eagles are who we thought they were. A team that consistently disappointed its fans despite winning the NFC East in defense of its Super Bowl crown put in a disappointing one-and-done playoff performance under a clueless offensive coordinator, with a banged-up O-line and some stars (cough, cough…A.J. Brown) perhaps past their peak. But this is what Philly fandom is all about: one battle after another.

    If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

    Dirty, toxic oil from Venezuela is the last thing that America needs

    John Beard drives near a liquid natural gas facility in Port Arthur, Texas. In addition to LNG facilities, Port Arthur is surrounded by oil refineries and petrochemical plants. Beard says Black and brown communities like Port Arthur are having to bear much of the risk posed by the facilities.

    You could say that crude oil is in John Beard Jr.’s blood. His dad worked for more than 44 years at a giant Gulf Oil refinery in the heady 20th-century days of the South Texas energy boom, and Beard then followed his father’s footsteps by working 38 years at a rival Exxon facility in Beaumont, before heading home to sleep in the shadow of Port Arthur’s own dense row of dozens of refineries.

    But today, Beard — a longtime civic activist and political leader in Port Arthur’s large Black community — is fighting to keep oil out of his neighbors’ blood, literally.

    “It was nothing to wake up the next morning and find a yellow stain against the side of your house with something had been released in the air,” Beard told me last week on the phone as he talked about growing up surrounded by tall refinery stacks. “You may have smelled it, or you may have slept through it and all and come to find out that it stained your house or whatever.”

    Although the Gulf Coast city of 55,000 was dubbed Texas’ “cancer belt” decades ago, it wasn’t until 2010 — when Beard heard about a report that Port Arthur residents are 40% more likely to develop cancer than similar towns just 25 miles upwind — that Beard became a tireless environmental activist.

    “You know how you say when the refinery has a sneeze, we get pneumonia?” he asked. “But no, we don’t get pneumonia. We get cancer.” The most-feared disease has touched pretty much every family that Beard knows in the economically struggling town.

    This was all before last week’s lightning bolt of news: that the U.S. military had bombed Venezuela and seized its indicted strongman leader Nicolás Maduro. It was quickly followed by Donald Trump announcing a scheme to bring some 30-to-50-million barrels of oil to the United States — meaning the backyards of Beard and his neighbors.

    Indeed, experts have tagged Valero’s big refinery in Port Arthur that towers over Beard’s home — heavily invested in specialized equipment to process the sour, heavy crude that comes from Venezuela — as most likely to benefit from Trump’s proposed gambit.

    Environmentalists say any new refinery jobs and U.S. corporate profits will be swamped by increased pollution of both the toxic chemicals that have already sickened Port Arthur, and greenhouse gases that threaten us all through climate change.

    When America woke up 10 days ago to news that Trump had ordered the dead-of-night assault on Venezuela and seized Maduro, there was one word that echoed among Democratic lawmakers asked for a comment. “Is anyone going to just stop for a second and be honest?” U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told CNN. “This is insane. What the hell are we doing?”

    But the first wave of critics like Moulton focused mainly on the rank illegality of Trump’s maneuver — failing to get congressional approval or even consult its leaders, over an act of unlawful aggression that killed as many as 100 people on the ground, and which seemed to lack any planning for how to deal with the aftermath of taking Maduro.

    Those problems have been amplified in the days since Moulton and others branded the operation as “insane.” It is indeed insane when Trump declares to the world that the United States is “in charge” of Venezuela and a few days later his State Department says the country is unsafe for Americans because of violent roving gangs. For that matter, it’s also meshugana to upend the global order that has reigned since the end of World War II, when the U.S. led efforts to ban wars of aggression.

    But we’re not talking nearly enough about what’s maybe most whacked-out about Trump’s splendid little war in Latin America — that by making his operation all about taking the oil, he seeks to endanger the entire planet by accelerating climate change. One expert told the Associated Press that increasing production of Venezuela’s thick, dirty crude by a target of 1 million barrels a day would also add roughly 360 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the production process — a significant spike in the gases that are warming our planet.

    That Trump made it clear that his goal in making war against Venezuela was all about grabbing its oil on the one-year anniversary of the deadly Los Angeles wildfires — perhaps the most dramatic of the floods, amped-up hurricanes, and other weather catastrophes exacerbated by a hotter planet — was especially disgusting.

    Michael E. Mann, director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that while Trump’s initial target for Venezuelan oil seems modest, experts believe the South American nation could harbor a whopping 300 billion barrels under ground. He has written that Trump aims to make America a “petrostate,” allied with other bad actors such as Russia and Saudi Arabia in working to undermine any global consensus around fighting climate change.

    Less than a week after the Venezuela strike, the New York Times reported that Trump’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is dropping its longtime requirement to weigh the cost on human lives — early deaths, or chronic diseases like asthma — in regulating key air pollutants, including those from oil refineries. As a matter of policy, the U.S. government now values the dollars that Valero or Exxon can make from burning dirty oil over the very existence of Beard and his Texas community. That’s not surprising from the crew that’s dismantled an entire generation of EPA programs that once targeted the environmental racism that dumps pollutants on disadvantaged Black and brown communities like Port Arthur.

    Indeed, the 100 fatalities caused by the Trump regime’s militarism against Venezuela — although a human-rights outrage — will likely pale over time against the canopy of death and destruction that historians will blame on the president’s obsession with doubling down on fossil fuels while other nations focus on green energy such as wind or solar.

    A preview of the world’s coming attractions is arguably taking place right now on the blood-soaked streets of Tehran, where experts believe months of severe drought that sometimes left poorer neighborhoods in the Iranian capital with little or no running water has been a key trigger for the collapse of social order.

    While foreign policy experts aren’t wrong to worry about U.S. expansionism triggering World War III, Trump’s backward-looking energy policies could cause a similar or worse toll through civil war and mass migration. While top energy officials — including the Exxon Mobil CEO who called Venezuela “uninvestable” — say Trump’s Venezuela dreams are economically unrealistic, the time lost for America to reduce its greenhouse gas pollution is a clear and present danger for civilization.

    History is almost sure to judge that “insane” was far too generous a word to describe it.

    Yo, do this!

    • I’ve written about this before but I can’t say enough about the essentialness of Andrew Hickey’s long-running podcast, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, which currently is up to around 1969 on its long, strange trip. His latest episode — about Jimmy Cliff, “Many Rivers to Cross,” and the invention of reggae — proved unexpectedly prescient when Cliff died at age 81 just before its release. Now, the passing of the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir has me dredging up his recent episode about the Dead, “Dark Star,” and the rise of an almost spiritual cultural phenomenon.
    • In the world of media, the mid-2020s will be remembered as the moment that intrepid independent journalists stepped up and did the work that traditional newsrooms are suddenly too cowed or too compromised to perform. Since ICE and the Border Patrol amped up their immigration raids last summer, I’ve become a big fan of Amanda Moore (@noturtlesoup17.bsky.social on Bluesky), who has birddogged Greg Bovino and his goon squad from the Big Easy to the frigid streets of Minneapolis. Check out her coverage of the far right for Mother Jones.

    Ask me anything

    Question: Please explain how the “anti-elite” [MAGA] base can continue to support all the elite personnel in charge of America’s economy in this regime? Just ONE recent example: [Pennsylvania Sen. Dave] McCormick’s wife’s Facebook promotion in charge of….“sovereign relations concerning AI…“. — @tim215.bsky.social via Bluesky

    Answer: Tim, I think the ascension of Dina Powell McCormick — the former Trump 45 aide who is also married to Pennsylvania’s Republican junior senator — to the job of president of Facebook’s parent company Meta has profoundly troubling implications. This is neither to say that Mark Zuckerberg’s new hire lacks qualifications, nor that Senate spouses should be barred from the private sector. But the move surely reflects Silicon Valley’s determination to curry favor with the personalist Trump regime by any means necessary. What bothers me even more, as a Pa. voter, is that I see the issues surrounding Meta — especially the currently unchecked rise of artificial intelligence, or AI — as requiring clear-eyed leadership. How can anyone now expect Sen. McCormick to be an honest broker?

    What you’re saying about…

    Last week’s question about the attack on Venezuela drew a robust response, as I expected, and — also as I expected — almost unanimous opposition to Trump’s policy for the troubled country. Most of you saw the military operation as illegal and unconstitutional, and share my befuddlement (see above) on the president’s assertion that taking Venezuela’s oil was the prime reason, except for Jon Elliott, who wrote: “I absolutely endorse Trump’s Pirates of the Caribbean excursion with one proviso — he performs Maduro redux in North Korea.” More typical was Tom Lees: “I was born in June 1945, two months before the dropping of the atomic bombs. The world order that has prevented WWIII seems to be in the process of being dismantled by people who should be imprisoned (Donald Trump) or institutionalized (Stephen Miller).”

    📮 This week’s question: Given the uproar over the killing of Renee Good, is “Abolish ICE” now the mainstream position, and do you support it? If so, how should the U.S. enforce its immigration laws? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Abolish ICE” in the subject line.

    Backstory on the end of Newsom’s WH dreams

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during his State of the State address Thursday in Sacramento, Calif.

    One of the most anticipated stories of 2026 isn’t supposed to happen until the waning weeks of the year, when the votes from the midterm election have been counted and top Democrats beginning lining up for their shot at following Donald Trump as the 48th president. But the most consequential early moment in that Dem primary race may have already happened. On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom faced a career-defining choice between the growing populism of his party’s anxious voters, or the Silicon Valley moguls who’ve been there for him in the past.

    Newsom chose the billionaires.

    At issue is a citizen initiative to place a wealth tax on California’s richest of the rich — those with a net worth of more than $1 billion — to pay a one-time levy equal to 5% of their assets, with most of the revenue targeted toward keeping troubled hospitals open and other healthcare costs. Backed by a powerful labor union, the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the ballot measure reflects growing global rage over economic inequality and the current zeitgeist among Democrats likely to vote in the 2028 primaries. Not surprisingly, the push has angered Silicon Valley’s increasingly right-wing tech titans and investors like Peter Thiel or Google co-founder Larry Page who’ve threatened to move to red states like Florida or Texas.

    Newsom, who is term-limited and leaves the governor’s mansion at year’s end, has long walked a tightrope between boosting his White House ambitions by relentlessly needling Donald Trump on social media while — with considerably less fanfare — catering to the high-tech poobahs who’ve funded his campaigns and who, Newsom insists, would damage the Golden State economy by leaving. On Monday, the governor told the New York Times that he firmly opposes the proposed wealth tax and will use his bully pulpit to fight the measure if it reaches the ballot.

    “Hey idiots: You’re rich,” the independent journalist Hamilton Nolan wrote in a riposte to Thiel and Co. posted hours before Newsom’s decision. “Enjoy your lives. Pay your taxes and count your blessings. Is this the perfect life that you dreamed of for yourself — performatively kissing the ass of a dictator, giving up your home to flee the taxman, earning the enmity of your fellow man, all in service of money you will never spend?”

    Nolan’s piece may have targeted the 0.1%, but it also seemed to carry a message that Newsom and any other Democratic presidential hopefuls need to hear. Running as a performative kind of center-left Trump with viral social media posts will get you attention but not the White House. The core of rank-and-file Democrats — especially the 7 million who took to the streets last summer for the No Kings protest — wants radical changes they’re not seeing in Newsom’s California. These include limits on artificial intelligence, a major overhaul of the Supreme Court, and — especially — an end to the gross unfairness of economic inequality. Hopefully Newsom’s pals in Silicon Valley can find him new work, because 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. already looks above his future pay grade.

    What I wrote on this date in 2019

    One of the many similarities between today and the United States seven years ago is that Democrats and other progressives were already deeply divided over how best to respond to Donald Trump and threats against democracy. On this date in 2019, I put forth my own idea that I’m not sure I’d endorse in hindsight: that Bernie Sanders was the most inspiring figure in U.S. politics, yet should stand down from the 2020 election. I wrote about “a sense that white dudes from the baby-boomer-and-older generation have been running things for far too long, and that America needs some new blood.” Instead, we got the two oldest presidents in American history. Read the rest: “Bernie Sanders is the leader America needs now. Just NOT by running for president in 2020.”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • Late last year, I predicted that Trump’s plummeting popularity would cause him to double down on autocracy. For once, I was right. In my Sunday column, I wrote about the shocking ICE Minneapolis murder of 37-year-old poet and mom Renee Nicole Good and the broader war for the truth that was defined by the Trump regime’s instant smears against the victim. Over the weekend, I looked at how 2026’s shocking start from Caracas to the Twin Cities was punctuated by Trump’s jarring comments to the New York Times — that nothing can stop him but “my own mind” and “my own morality.” I stressed that he can and will be stopped — by our morality.
    • The nation remains on edge nearly one week after the ICE agent gunned down Good in the streets of Minneapolis, and already the resistance movement to ICE has seen some twists and turns. None has been more dramatic in Philadelphia than the unexpected return of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, an iconic social movement that thrived in the late 1960s and early ‘70s before a government crackdown. When several armed members of the Black Power group demonstrated against ICE near City Hall on Thursday, The Inquirer’s Brett Sholtis jumped on the story and followed up with an in-depth profile of the small group, whose Philly leader, Paul Birdsong, said Good’s killing “wouldn’t have happened if we were there.” Sholtis is part of the paper’s jacked-up weekend news coverage that is supported by your subscription dollars. Local journalism is a bulwark against tyranny. Become a part of it by subscribing to The Inquirer today.

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer‘s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

  • The en(bleep)ification of the Epstein Files | Will Bunch Newsletter

    In the beginning, God created the 12 days of Christmas and the bacchanalia of New Year’s Eve to get us through the dark and frigid endless nights of winter. That wasn’t nearly enough for us shivering and depressed humans, so God sent us the NFL playoffs. The hope is that the Eagles last long enough to get us to the balmy breezes of baseball’s spring training.

    If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

    Delay, deny, distract, divert attention: Inside the Epstein Files coverup

    Pages from a totally redacted New York grand jury file into Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, released by the U.S. Justice Department, are photographed last month in Washington.

    I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else if it’ll save it — save the plan.

    — Richard Nixon, White House tapes, March 22, 1973

    The newish word that best captures the 2020s is one that I’m not allowed to use in a family newspaper like The Inquirer. In 2022, the social critic Cory Doctorow coined this scatological term that I’m calling “en(bleep)ification” (it won’t take much imagination) to describe the way that products, but especially consumer-facing websites, gradually degrade themselves in pursuit of the bigger goal, higher profits.

    For example, writer Kyle Chayka wrote a popular New Yorker essay in 2024 about what he called the, um, en(bleep)ification of the music site Spotify as it devolved, in his opinion, from a place for the songs and albums you want to hear to pushing playlists that they want you to hear.

    In the political world, no product rollout had been more anticipated than the December release, forced by law upon the Donald Trump regime’s Department of Justice, of the Jeffrey Epstein Files — the investigative trail of documents about the late financier and indicted sex trafficker who also palled around with Trump in the 1990s and early 2000s.

    No one with any familiarity of Trump’s modus operandi should have been shocked by what happened when the congressionally mandated deadline for release of all of this massive cache of paperwork finally arrived on Dec. 19 — or by what has happened in the two-and-a-half weeks since then.

    Needless to say, the Epstein Files have not offered the seamless user experience that its readers — especially those hoping for bombshells that would expose the tawdry secrets of Trump’s friendship with a man who allegedly abused more than 1,000 young and sometimes underaged women — had anticipated. In the hands of the president’s minions at Justice, the Epstein Files have been en(bleep)ified.

    How so? Here’s the diabolical part. The MAGA Gang that normally can’t shoot straight managed to hit the coverup bullseye this time, not with one dramatic act to rile people up — like Nixon during Watergate with his notorious Saturday Night Massacre — but with a blend of tactics and dodges designed to frustrate and exhaust truth-seekers.

    Delay. The law, which Trump signed to avoid an embarrassing defeat on Capitol Hill, required the release of every single document — with appropriate blacked-out redactions to protect things like the names of Epstein’s victims — by that December deadline. But suddenly the Justice Department — which once had as many as 200 staffers combing the papers last spring before its original botched plan to squelch the files — lacked energy and manpower, claiming it was working as fast as it could in an initial release of just about 40,000 pages, which would seem to be a tiny fraction of more than 5 million pages believed to exist.

    The DOJ’s small-batch cooking came in two small servings right before Christmas, when most Americans consume the least news, and information about any new releases in the new year has suddenly dried up, with maybe 99% of the files still outstanding.

    Deny. The papers that have been released have included major redactions — including the completely blacked-out pages of Manhattan grand jury testimony pictured above — that violate the spirit if not the letter of the law, which demanded that any hidden passages only protect victims and not Epstein’s powerful associates and clients.

    Stunningly, DOJ actually took back and attempted to bury some 16 files from the first release, including a photo of a photo that included Trump, before a public outcry led to that file’s republishing. Meanwhile, the department also claimed that 1 million additional Epstein files were discovered in New York after the legal deadline — an incredible claim that was immediately punctured by experts.

    Deflect. The initial batch was also larded with photos of Epstein with celebrities like Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Walter Cronkite as well as several of a Trump predecessor and longtime enemy, Bill Clinton. The pictures were dumped without any explanation and seemed to prove only that there’s a good reason the government normally doesn’t release raw investigatory files, especially about those not charged with any crime.

    The second batch also included a lurid and bizarre apparent letter from Epstein to a fellow famed accused sex offender, the gymnastic coach Larry Nassar, penned right around the time of his August 2019 jail-cell death. It seemed unbelievable, and just hours later the FBI said: Oh yeah, we looked at this and it’s a fake. The not-subtle subtext was essentially: “We don’t know what to believe in these files, and neither should you.”

    Nearly 53 years ago, Nixon’s plan to cover up Watergate with a mix of denials, delays, purchased silence and outright lies didn’t work. But Team Trump’s efforts to “save it — save the plan” by stonewalling the Epstein files is going just swell so far.

    If this moment feels familiar, it is very much like 2018 and the long-awaited Robert Mueller report on Russian influence in the 2016 presidential campaign and potential links to Moscow’s preferred candidate, Trump. There was a Mueller Report — much like there has been a “release” of the Epstein Files — that contained damning evidence, especially about potential obstruction of justice. But the information was dribbled out, downplayed, denied, and ultimately went nowhere.

    The Epstein Files have been destined to fail from Day One. It was always what Trump himself might call a “rigged deal” — with the papers in the possession of those with the most to lose, with many ways to make sure the worst stuff stays buried until at least 2029, if it hasn’t already been shredded. But the biggest truth has already been revealed.

    The outright defiance of the law demanding full release of the Epstein Files has exposed the utter brokenness of our democracy.

    The reason that Nixon’s coverup plan failed is because America had institutions stronger than his lies, including a Congress that cared more about its strength and independence than party ID, newspapers that were not just widely read but believed, and Supreme Court justices with an allegiance to the law and not the man who appointed them.

    Trump and his DOJ are daring a comatose Congress, a cowed news media, and a judiciary already in their back pocket to do something, but so far there is no indication that the en(bleep)ification of the Epstein Files can be undone. For now, they are more like the X Files, because the truth about Trump and his Palm Beach pal is out there…but beyond our weakened grasp.

    Yo, do this!

    • These days I find “vacation” is often just another word for catching up on household chores, but during my long December break I did watch a slew of movies, including some of the ones I’d recommended previously like One Battle After Another (very good, but flawed) and Eddington (meh). I ventured to an actual theater on New Year’s Eve and saw probably my favorite movie of 2025: Song Sung Blue, the bittersweet, based-on-a-true-story saga of a Neil Diamond cover band at the end of the 20th century. As the title implies, the movie is more than just a rousing feel-good pop musical, despite cathartic moments of exactly that. Kate Hudson deserves an Oscar for her Wisconsin Nice accent.
    • If you miss the glory days of not-formulaic-or-cartoonish movies — in the spirit of Song Sung Blue or One Battle After Another, only better — you should check out a new documentary on Netflix called Breakdown: 1975, by filmmaker Morgan Neville. The film spotlights an all-too-brief golden age of the mid-1970s with clips from the era’s classics like Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network, and interviews with the likes of Martin Scorsese and Albert Brooks. They could have done much more with this, but I’d still recommend it.

    Ask me anything

    Question: Do you think that there is enough of a media firestorm over Grok’s nude filter to kill it? — BCooper (@bcooper82.bsky.social) via Bluesky

    Answer: The recent, shocking news about the artificial-intelligence tool called Grok that was created for Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter) is a classic example of an important story that so far has befuddled and fallen through the cracks of the mainstream media. In recent days, X users have been asking Grok to create partially clothed and sexualized AI photos of real, everyday people, including images of underage adolescents. And Grok has complied, in what would seem to be a violation of laws regarding child pornography, among other legal and ethical problems. Musk needs to shut down Grok immediately — arguably for good — but that is not enough for the harm that’s already been caused. In a nation that routinely prosecutes citizens for having this kind of material on their computers, Musk, his co-creators of Grok, and X as a corporation need to be hauled before a judge.

    What you’re saying about…

    The half-dozen or so of you who responded to December’s open-ended call for 2026 predictions had one big thing in common: Boundless pessimism. Readers of this newsletter expect the new year to bring economic collapse and a disastrous midterm election in November, either from Donald Trump stealing it to Democrats somehow blowing it in the ways that only Democrats can. Stephen R. Rourke predicted: “I believe that the American economy, and perhaps the world economy, will slide into a second Great Depression, the almost inevitable consequence of an over leveraged economy, and a lack of willingness across the board to make tough choices about how to address the American addiction to borrowed money…” Oof. Nonetheless, Kim Root stole my heart with this: “I think the Philadelphia Union will rise even with the personnel changes because they are a developer of young talent. DOOP.”

    📮 This week’s question: A no-brainer: Donald Trump’s lethal assault on Venezuela and his seizure of that country’s strongman leader, in defiance of U.S. and international law, marks a turning point in American foreign policy. Are you OK with Trump’s actions because a bad guy has been removed from power, or are you alarmed by a military assault with the stated goal of pumping more oil? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Venezuela attack” in the subject line.

    Backstory on the growing crisis of ICE custody deaths

    The Federal Detention Center in Miami.

    Marie Ange Blaise, a citizen of Haiti, was 44 years old when she was arrested last February by Customs and Border Patrol officers as she attempted to board a commercial flight in Charlotte — one of the thousands swept up during 2025 amid the mass deportation drive of the Donald Trump regime.

    Just 10 weeks later, Blaise died inside a federal immigration detention center in Broward County, Fla. A South Florida public radio station reported that the Haitian woman had spoken to her son, who later told the medical examiner that “she complained of having chest pains and abdominal cramps, and when she asked the detention staff to see a physician, they refused her.” Another detainee reported Blaise’s care was “severely delayed,” even as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) insisted she’d been offered blood-pressure medication but refused.

    Blaise’s death was not an isolated incident. There was a sharp spike in ICE custody deaths during 2025, with the final tally of 31 fatalities nearly triple the 11 deaths posted during 2024, the last year of the Biden administration. Given the surge in immigration arrests after Trump took office last January, some increase was inevitable. Two of the 31 were killed by the gunman who fired on an ICE facility in Dallas. But immigration advocates say the crisis has been greatly exacerbated by inadequate medical care, bad food, and unsanitary conditions at detention centers.

    “This is a result of the deteriorating conditions inside of ICE detention,” Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, told the Guardian, which recently published a comprehensive rundown of all 31 custody deaths. Many died from heart attacks or respiratory failure, with a few apparent suicides — although, in a number of cases, family members are disputing the official account. Only a few of those who died were senior citizens.

    There’s a bigger picture here. History has shown that authoritarian regimes can be hazardous to your health, and there is no American Exceptionalism. The MAGA movement’s low regard for the sanctity of human life is breaking through on multiple fronts, from the more than 100 deaths of South Americans on boats blown up by U.S. drones to the global crisis caused by the decimation of foreign aid through USAID (blamed for as many as 600,000 deaths by health experts) to the rising concern about fewer vaccinations and shrinking health insurance. A new generation is witnessing a grim reality: Dictatorship can be deadly.

    What I wrote on this date in 2021

    Jan. 6, much like Dec. 7 or Sept. 11, is a date which will live in infamy for most Americans. I had some health concerns five years ago that kept me from traveling to Washington to report on the insurrection — which I’ll always regret — but I did dash off an instant column before the smoke from Donald Trump’s failed coup had dissipated. I wrote, “When the future 45th president of the United States egged on the most violent thugs at his Nuremberg-style campaign rallies, when he yelled “get him the hell out of here” as white supporters roughed up a Black man in Birmingham, when he promised to pay the legal fees of brownshirts who beat up anti-Trump demonstrators, and when he said “I’d like to punch him in the face” to one rally insurrectionist, why are people still shocked when a riled-up mob takes Trump up on his own toxic words?” Read the rest: “Trump told us he would wreck America. Why didn’t we believe him the first time?”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • I returned from a long Christmas break this weekend with something brand new to write about: the Trump regime’s illegal attack on Venezuela, which killed as many as 80 people, including civilians, and resulted in the capture of that nation’s strongman leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife. I wrote that Trump’s war without the required constitutional approval or public support, in violation of international law against unprovoked military aggression, fulfills his ambitions to rule as a dictator. And a new world order based not on the rule of law but brute force makes all of us less safe.
    • Last June, the partially unclothed body of a young woman was discovered by police under a pallet in an overgrown lot in Philadelphia’s Frankford neighborhood. For weeks, the identity of this murder victim was unknown, which didn’t deter one determined homicide detective, the missing woman’s anguished family who’d been initially told not to file a missing-person report — or The Inquirer’s Ellie Rushing, who has written a moving account of the life and death of the woman eventually learned to be Anastasiya Sangret. This kind of essential local reporting takes time and resources, which means it needs your support. You do exactly that, and unlock all the journalism of one of America’s best newsrooms, when you start 2026 with a subscription to The Inquirer.

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer‘s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

  • In 2026, America needs an anti-AI party | Will Bunch Newsletter

    Sometimes a terrible year can end with a moment of uplift. This actually happened in the last days of 1968, when Apollo 8 took the first humans in orbit around the moon and sent wonder back to a planet struggling with assassinations and riots. Alas, 2025 seems not such a year. A world already reeling from two mass shootings half a world apart learned Sunday night that Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had been murdered in their home, allegedly by their own son. Boomers like me saw our own journey in that of Reiner — playing a young campus liberal, then taking down the pomposity of classic rock before both an unprecedented streak of classic movies and unparalleled social and political activism. He had more to give, and leaves a void that can’t truly be filled.

    If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

    Americans fear AI and loathe its billionaires. Why do both parties suck up to them?

    Time’s 2025 person of the year are the architects of AI, depicted in this painting by Jason Seiler. The painting, with nods to the iconic 1932 “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photograph, depicts tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg, Lisa Su, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Fei-Fei Li.

    “This is the West, sir. When the facts become legend, print the legend.” — journalist in the 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

    The top editors at Time (yes, it still exists) looked west to Silicon Valley and decided to print the legend last week when picking their Person of the Year for the tumultuous 12 months of 2025. It seemed all too fitting that its cover hailing “The Architects of AI” was the kind of artistic rip-off that’s a hallmark of artificial intelligence: 1932’s iconic newspaper shot, “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” “reimagined” with the billionaires — including Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman — and lesser-known engineers behind the rapid growth of their technology in everyday life.

    Time’s writers strived to outdo the hype of AI itself, writing that these architects of artificial intelligence “reoriented government policy, altered geopolitical rivalries, and brought robots into homes. AI emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.”

    OK, but it’s a tool that’s clearly going to need a lot more work, or architecting, or whatever it is those folks out on the beam do. That was apparent on the same day as Time’s celebration when it was reported that Washington Post editors got a little too close to the edge when they decided they were ready to roll out an ambitious scheme for personalized, AI-driven podcasts based on factors like your personal interests or your schedule.

    The news site Semafor reported that the many gaffes ranged from minor mistakes in pronunciation to major goofs like inventing quotes — the kind of thing that would get a human journalist fired on the spot. “Never would I have imagined that the Washington Post would deliberately warp its own journalism and then push these errors out to our audience at scale,” a dismayed, unnamed editor reported.

    The same-day contrast between the Tomorrowland swooning over the promise of AI and its glitchy, real-world reality felt like a metaphor for an invention that, as Time wasn’t wrong in reporting, is so rapidly reshaping our world. Warts and all.

    Like it or not.

    And for most people (myself included), it’s mostly “or not.” The vast majority understands that it’s too late to put this 21st-century genie back in the bottle, and like any new technology there are going to be positives from AI, from performing mundane organizing tasks that free up time for actual work, to researching cures for diseases.

    But each new wave of technology — atomic power, the internet, and definitely AI — increasingly threatens more risk than reward. And it’s not just the sci-fi notion of sentient robots taking over the planet, although that is a concern. It’s everyday stuff. Schoolkids not learning to think for themselves. Corporations replacing salaried humans with machines. Sky-high electric bills and a worsening climate crisis because AI runs on data centers with an insatiable need for energy and water

    The most recent major Pew Research Center survey of Americans found that 50% of us are more concerned than excited about the growing presence of AI, while only 10% are more excited than concerned. Drill down and you’ll see that a majority believes AI will worsen humans’ ability to think creatively, and, by a whopping 50-to-5% percent margin, also believes it will worsen our ability to form relationships rather than improve it. These, by the way, are two things that weren’t going well before AI.

    So naturally our political leaders are racing to see who can place the tightest curbs on artificial intelligence and thus carry out the will of the peop…ha, you did know this time that I was kidding, didn’t you?

    It’s no secret that Donald Trump and his regime were in the tank from Day One for those folks out on Time’s steel beam, and not just Musk, who — and this feels like it was seven years ago — donated a whopping $144 million to the Republican’s 2024 campaign. Just last week, the president signed an executive order aiming to press the full weight of the federal government, including Justice Department lawsuits and regulatory actions, against any state that dares to regulate AI. He said that’s necessary to ensure U.S. “global AI dominance.”

    This is a problem when his constituents clearly want AI to be regulated. But it’s just as big a problem — perhaps bigger — that the opposition party isn’t offering much opposition. Democrats seem just as awed by the billionaire grand poobahs of AI as Trump. Or the editors of Time.

    Also last week, New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul — leader of the second-largest blue state, and seeking reelection in 2026 — used her gubernatorial pen to gut the more-stringent AI regulations that were sent to her desk by state lawmakers. Watchdogs said Hochul replaced the hardest-hitting rules with language drafted by lobbyists for Big Tech.

    As the American Prospect noted, Hochul’s pro-Silicon Valley maneuvers came after her campaign coffers were boosted by fundraisers held by venture capitalist Ron Conway, who has been seeking a veto, and the industry group Tech:NYC, which wants the bill watered down.

    It was a similar story in the biggest blue state, California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2024 vetoed the first effort by state lawmakers to impose tough regulations on AI, and where a second measure did pass but only after substantial input from lobbyists for OpenAI and other tech firms. Silicon Valley billionaires raised $5 million to help Newsom — a 2028 White House front-runner — beat back a 2021 recall.

    Like other top Democrats, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro favors some light regulation for AI but is generally a booster, insisting the new technology is a “job enhancer, not a job replacer.” He’s all-in on the Keystone State building massive data centers, despite their tendency to drive up electric bills and their unpopularity in the communities where they are proposed.

    Money talks, democracy walks — an appalling fact of life in 2025 America. In a functioning democracy, we would have at least one political party that would fly the banner of the 53% of us who are wary of unchecked AI, and even take that idea to the next level.

    A Harris Poll found that, for the first time, a majority of Americans also see billionaires — many of them fueled by the AI bubble — as a threat to democracy, with 71% supporting a wealth tax. Yet few of the Democrats hoping to retake Congress in 2027 are advocating such a levy. This is a dangerous disconnect.

    Time magazine got one thing right. Just as its editors understood in 1938 that Adolf Hitler was its Man of the Year because he’d influenced the world more than anyone else, albeit for evil, history will likely look back at 2025 and agree that AI posed an even bigger threat to humanity than Trump’s brand of fascism. The fight to save the American Experiment must be fought on both fronts.

    Yo, do this!

    • I haven’t tackled much new culture this month because I’ve been doing something I so rarely do anymore: Watching a scripted series from start to finish. That would be Apple TV’s Pluribus, the new sci-fi-but-more-than-sci-fi drama from television genius Vince Gilligan. True, one has to look past some logistical flaws in its dystopia-of-global-happiness premise, but the core narrative about the fight for individualism is truly a story of our time. The last two episodes come out on Dec. 19 and Dec. 26, so there’s time to catch up!
    • The shock and sorrow of Rob Reiner’s murder at age 78 has, not surprisingly, sparked a surge of interest in his remarkable, and remarkably diverse, canon of classic movies. His much-awaited sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues began streaming on HBO Max just two days before his death. Check it out, or just re-watch the 1984 original, which is one of the funniest flicks ever made, and which is also streaming on HBO Max and can be rented on other popular sites. Crank it up to 11.

    Ask me anything

    Question: What news value, not advertising value, is accomplished by publicizing every one of Trump’s insane rantings daily? — @bizbodeity.bsky.social via Bluesky

    Answer: This is a great question, and the most recent and blatant example which I assume inspired it — Trump’s stunningly heartless online attack against a critic, Hollywood icon Rob Reiner, just hours after his violent murder — proves why this is a painful dilemma for journalists. I’d argue that Trump’s hateful and pathologically narcissistic post was a deliberate troll for media attention, to make every national moment about him. In a perfect world, it would indeed be ignored. But it was highly newsworthy that his Truth Social post was so offensive that it drew unusual criticism from Republicans, Evangelicals, and other normal supporters. We may remember this is as a political turning point. Trump’s outbursts demand sensitivity, but that Americans elected such a grotesque man as our president can’t easily be ignored.

    What you’re saying about…

    It’s been two weeks since I asked about Donald Trump’s health, but the questions have not gone away. There was not a robust response from readers — probably because I’d posed basically the same question once before. Several of you pointed to expert commentary that suggests the president is experiencing significant cognitive decline, perhaps suffering from frontotemporal dementia. Roberta Jacobs Meadway spoke for many when she lambasted “the refusal if not the utter failure of the once-major news outlets to ask the questions and push for answers.”

    📮 This week’s question: We are going to try an open-ended one to wrap up 2025: What is your big prediction for 2026 — could be anything from elections to impeachment to the Eagles repeating as Super Bowl champs — and why. Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “2026 prediction” in the subject line.

    Backstory on how I covered an unforgettable year

    Rick Gomez, who travelled 65 hours by bus from Phoenix, Ariz., holds an AI photo composite poster of Donald Trump, in Washington, the day before Trump took the Oath of Office to become the 47th president of the United States.

    Barring the outbreak of World War III — something you always need to say these days — this is my final newsletter, or column, of 2025, as I use up my old-man plethora of vacation days. To look back on America’s annus horribilis, I thought I’d revive a feature from my Attytood blogging days: a recap of the year with the five most memorable columns, not numbered in order of significance. Here goes:

    1. A year that many of us dreaded when the votes were counted in November 2024 began for me with a sad reminder that the personal still trumps the political, when my 88-year-old father fell ill in the dead of winter and passed away on March 11. I wrote about his life, but also what his passion for science and knowledge said about a world that, at the end of his life, was slipping away: Bryan H. Bunch (1936-2025) and the vanishing American century of knowledge.
    2. Still, Donald J. Trump could not be ignored. On Jan. 19, I put on my most comfortable shoes (it didn’t really help) and traipsed around a snowy, chilly Washington, D.C. as the about-to-be 47th president made his “forgotten American” supporters wait on a soggy, endless line for a nothingburger rally while the architects of AI and other rich donors partied in heated luxury, setting the tone for a year of gross inequality: American oligarchy begins as Trump makes billions while MAGA gets left out in the rain.
    3. One of the year’s biggest stories was Trump’s demonizing of people of color, from calling Somali immigrants “garbage” to his all out war on DEI programs that encouraged racial diversity, when the truth was always far different. In February, I wrote about the American dream of a young man from Brooklyn of Puerto Rican descent and his ambition to become an airline pilot, who perished in the D.C. jet-helicopter crash. His remarkable life demolished the MAGA lie about “DEI pilots.” Read: “Short, remarkable life of D.C. pilot Jonathan Campos so much more than Trump’s hateful words.”
    4. If you grew up during the 1960s and ‘70s, as I did, then you understand the story of our lifetimes as a battle for the individual rights of every American — for people to live their best lives regardless of race or gender, or whether they might be transgender, or on the autism spectrum. I wrote in October about the Trump regime’s consuming drive to reverse this, to make it a crime to be different: From autism to beards, the Trump regime wages war on ‘the different’
    5. A grim year did end on one hopeful note. Trump’s push for an authoritarian America is faltering, thanks in good measure to the gumption of everyday people. This month, I traveled to New Orleans to chronicle the growing and increasingly brave public resistance to federal immigration raids, as citizens blow whistles, form crowds and protest efforts to deport hard-working migrants: In New Orleans and across U.S., anger over ICE raids sparks a 2nd American Revolution

    What I wrote on this date in 2021

    On this date four years ago, some of us were still treating Donald Trump’s attempted Capitol Hill coup of Jan. 6, 2021 like a crime that could be solved so that the bad guys could be put away. On Dec. 16, 2021, I published my own theory of the case: that Team MAGA’s true goal was provoking a war between its supporters and left-wing counterdemonstrators, as a pretext for sending in troops and stopping Congress from finishing its certification of Joe Biden’s victory. That didn’t happen because the leftists stayed home. More than 1,000 pardons later, check out my grand argument: “A theory: How Trump’s Jan. 6 coup plan worked, how close it came, why it failed.”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • Only one column this week, as this senior citizen was still recovering from that grueling trip to New Orleans. On Sunday, I reacted with the shock and sadness of seeing a mass shooting at my alma mater, Brown University. I wrote that in a nation with 500 million guns, it’s a virtual lock that some day our families — nuclear or extended, like the close-knit Brown community — will be struck by senseless violence. And I took sharp issue with Trump’s comment that “all you can do is pray.” There is much that can and should be done about gun safety.
    • Sometimes the big stories are the ones that play out over decades, not days. When I first started coming regularly to Philadelphia at the end of the 1980s, the dominant vibe was urban decline. The comeback of cities in the 21st century has altered our world, for good — but a lot of us old-timers have wondered: Just who, exactly, is moving into all these new apartments from Center City to Kensington and beyond? Last week, The Inquirer’s ace development reporter Jake Blumgart took a deep dive into exactly that — highlighting survey results that large numbers are under 45, don’t own a car, and moved here from elsewhere, and telling some of their stories. Local journalism is the backbone of a local community, and you are part of something bigger when you subscribe to The Inquirer. Plus, it’s a great Christmas gift, and you’ll get to read all my columns in 2026. See you then!

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer‘s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

  • The Trump regime murders that aren’t on video | Will Bunch Newsletter

    There’s this idea in the sports world that when your team wins a championship like the Super Bowl, fans can’t really complain about whatever happens in the next season or two. The author of that maxim has obviously never been to Philadelphia, which is experiencing a 1776-level revolt over the Eagles’ three-game losing streak and the increasingly erratic play of the Super Bowl MVP, quarterback Jalen Hurts. So much for brotherly love, pal.

    If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

    Trump’s body count is a lot higher than two men on a wrecked ship

    A malnourished child receives treatment at Banadir Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia, in May.

    You might have thought it would have happened when hundreds of men — in apparent conflict with a judge’s order, and often based on nothing more than a misreading of their tattoos — were shackled and flown to a notorious El Salvador torture prison.

    Or maybe it would have been making billions of dollars on crypto investments or real-estate deals with foreign dictators while running the government. Or pretending that climate change doesn’t exist. Or pardoning hundreds of bad guys, including those who launched an insurrection against the United States on Jan. 6, 2021. Even the president’s friendship with the world’s most notorious sex trafficker wasn’t exactly it.

    No, the thing that finally caused the mainstream media to go all Watergate all the time on Donald Trump and his Pentagon chief was a lot more simple, if harder to stomach: the early September murder by drone strike of two men — their identities still unknown to the world, or most of it — clinging to a piece of ship-wreckage in the Caribbean Sea near Venezuela.

    Flip on the favorite show of the Beltway set — MS Now’s Morning Joe — and there practically is no other story than the second attack on the seemingly helpless victims of an initial drone strike that killed their nine comrades. The media is demanding to learn what did self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth know about the strike, and when did he know it. Commentators are calling the killing a war crime at best, a murder at worst. An unnamed lawmaker who saw a video of the second strike told reporters that the film is nauseating.

    Pressure on the Trump regime to release this 45 or so minutes of footage of the boat attack is intensifying, and it’s not hard to understand why. It’s a bit like 2020’s video of the excruciating cop murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which made a problem that activists had been talking about for decades — police brutality — so real for everyday folk that millions took to the streets.

    Likewise, people have been calling Trump names — including the “f-word,” fascist — ever since the Manhattan real-estate mogul descended the escalator at Trump Tower to run for president in 2015. But somehow the mental image of men reportedly begging to be saved seconds before an admiral gives the order to obliterate them has captured the angry imagination in a way that past Trump outrages did not. No wonder Trump has flip-flopped on releasing the video.

    Look, I’m glad the media and Congress, including some Republicans, are finally taking seriously the idea that major felonies are being committed in Trump World. Still, the two men killed in what’s called the double-tap strike came after nine other people had already been blown up, in an attack against civilians of a nation America is not at war with, who were accused of committing a crime — drug trafficking — that is not a capital offense.

    There is no legal, let alone moral, justification for this attack — and it was the first of a series of drone strikes that have killed at least 86 people. There’s a strong case that every one of these is a war crime. It’s just that the killing of the two men clinging to debris appears even more egregious.

    This highlights an even weightier issue. From Day One of Trump’s second term, there has been a callous indifference to human life — a hallmark that the current U.S. government unfortunately shares with many other authoritarian regimes throughout history. But the media, and the watchdogs, have struggled to convey this reality with so many of the deaths taking place off camera.

    So far, the worst crime has been the rash move back in the first weeks of the new administration by Trump’s billionaire then-ally Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — a once-thriving $34-billion-a-year agency that funded food, medicine, classrooms and other aid in developing nations.

    The Musk team labelled USAID as inefficient and out of whack with Trump’s new priorities like curbing immigration. This despite the fact that experts saw the American agency as the best projector of “soft power” around the globe as it saved literally millions of lives, especially for children under age 5.

    “We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’ which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century,” Atul Gawande, a surgeon who worked with USAID in the Joe Biden years, wrote last month in the New Yorker. Gawande estimated that the wanton destruction of USAID programs that offered vaccines and fought AIDS and infectious disease outbreaks caused 600,000 needless deaths in the first 10 months of the Trump regime, with millions more to come.

    This week, the philanthropic Gates Foundation reported that for the first time in the 21st century, mostly preventable deaths of children under age 5 are rising instead of falling, and the main culprit is cuts in development aid, led by the United States. “We could be the generation who had access to the most advanced science and innovation in human history,” the billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said, “but couldn’t get the funding together to ensure it saved lives.”

    The MAGA comebacks to cries that Trump is a fascist dictator often claim that innocent people aren’t getting slaughtered as happened under Adolf Hitler or Mao Zedong or other historic despots. The truth is that the regime’s cruelty-is-the-point demagoguery is inevitably becoming a death cult, epitomized by Musk’s chainsaw DOGE shtick. The murder happens in small batches, on boats off South America, and it also happens in big lots in places like famine-plagued South Sudan, as children die from aid cuts to badly needed health centers.

    And increasingly, Trump’s death cult is taking root here at home, from the 25 humans, and counting, who’ve died in ICE’s overcrowded detention centers this year, to individuals like Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, who was struck by cars while running away from immigration agents who raided a Home Depot parking lot in Southern California. This is before we know the full and likely lethal impact of alarming health policy changes from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department, and the toxic anti-vaccine culture he promotes.

    We should be just as outraged by the deaths that take place out of sight, in dusty and remote places on the other side of the world, as by two premeditated murders captured in a MAGA snuff film. Understanding the nature of Trump’s cult of death is critical for folks to find the courage to rise up and stop this before it gets much, much worse.

    Yo, do this!

    • The one thing that truly sets MS Now’s Rachel Maddow apart from her peers as an opinionated late-night cable-news host is her love for history, and her ability to put today’s crisis in the context of what came before. In her second life as a top podcaster, Maddow’s sweet spot has become America before, during, and immediately after World War II, and what memory-holed stories from that era tell us about today. Her new audio series, Burn Order, is about immigration, paranoia and demagoguery — not now, but in the unconscionable internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. Two episodes in, it’s her best podcast yet.
    • I’ve never really kept my promise to include great restaurants and bars in this space, but here goes. During last week’s fairly frantic journalistic sojourn to New Orleans, I took one night off and grabbed a beer in what might be the greatest American dive bar, Jake and Snake’s Christmas Club Bar. This shotgun shack of a watering hole in the middle of an otherwise residential street has to be seen to be believed, both on the ramshackle outside and in the dark interior pumping 1950s rockabilly and lit only by — what else? — Christmas lights. There is no better way to kick off your holiday season.

    Ask me anything

    Question: All things considered, the U.S. has weathered this first year of the second Trump regime OK. But three more years of this? Any guesses as to what happens between now and then? — Shawn “Smith” Peirce (@silversmith1.bsky.social) via Bluesky

    Answer: Weathered? Just barely. But I do exit 2025 slightly more optimistic than I began the year, thanks to the size of the No Kings protests and the growing resolve of citizen resistance to immigration raids. What happens in the next three years? I think 2026 will be pivotal. Trump will surely look at his sagging polls and double down on dictatorship, which could include misguided foreign wars, more aggressive use of troops at home, and efforts to somehow nullify next November’s midterms. I also think these will fail, which means a Democratic Congress in 2027 and 2028 that will certainly impeach Trump and restrain his worst impulses. If not, I may be writing this newsletter from my prison cell.

    What you’re saying about…

    The question I posed here two weeks ago about the John F. Kennedy assassination was a good, evergreen topic ahead of a long break. Maybe it was my boomer-heavy readership, but all but one respondent didn’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. “I also saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald on live television, another searing memory,” wrote Laura Hardy, who was 8 in 1963. “Nothing ever added up in my mind. Still doesn’t. Was it the Russians? The CIA? The mob?” The one naysayer was Armen Pandola, who argues that “JFK was a fairly conservative Democrat at the time…Where is the motive?”

    📮 This week’s question: This has been asked before, but it’s still the most important thing going. Trump is appearing in public with a bruised, bandaged hand, prone to weird digressions or outbursts. So what is the deal with his health? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Trump’s health” in the subject line.

    Backstory on an all-too fitting venue for Trump’s Pa. speech

    The Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pa.

    Donald Trump may be constitutionally ineligible to run again for president — no seriously, he can’t — but that factoid apparently isn’t stopping the 47th POTUS from campaigning in the critical swing states. Why else did Trump choose Pennsylvania — a state he visited a gazillion times as a candidate — as the location for a major speech on the economy, to convince citizens that what they are seeing in supermarket aisles is not what’s happening? I can’t even imagine what Trump will say Tuesday night, but I was stunned to learn the regime’s choice of venue: The Mount Airy Casino Resort, the former honeymoon haven in Mount Pocono.

    It’s not just that Trump is touting economic security in a casino, which seems way too fitting in an America where so many folks have decided that the only way they’ll ever get rich is through gambling, whether that’s a get-rich-quick investment in crypto or meme stocks, or by an addiction to the betting sites like DraftKings that are devouring the sports world. Or that the backdrop might remind people that Trump was the rare entrepreneur who drove his own Atlantic City casinos — supposedly a license to print money — into bankruptcy.

    The real problem is that the Mount Airy Lodge is the epitome of the real Trump economy: Public corruption. Like Trump’s real-estate empire, the original Mount Airy Lodge fell on hard times in the 1990s, and its longtime owner died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1999. The supposed savior was the state’s headlong rush into casino gambling and northeastern Pennsylvania’s landfill magnate Louis DeNaples, long dogged by allegations of ties to Scranton’s organized crime family. In 2008, DeNaples was indicted on four counts of perjury tied to his casino permit application; ultimately the politically connected businessman turned over the casino to a trust chaired by his daughter and saw the charges dropped. But the Mount Airy Resort Casino remains dogged by controversy, including a recently proposed $2.3 million settlement with its table-games dealers who accused the owners of years of wage theft.

    But Trump considers DeNaples “a close friend,” and the Mount Airy casino nabbed a $50 million federal bailout loan during the COVID-19 pandemic in the final year of Trump’s first term. Five years later, is there a positive story about the Trump economy that can be told from this stage of dropped felony charges, alleged wage theft, and government largesse for the well-connected? Don’t bet your nest egg on it.

    What I wrote on this date in 2015

    Ten years ago, I was fascinated by the decades-long political rise of Vermont senator and then-White House hopeful Bernie Sanders. This left-wing curmudgeon and relic of the 1960s didn’t capture the White House but changed America, for good. On Dec. 9, 2015, I touted my Amazon Kindle Single e-book about Sanders (The Bern Identity…it’s still available!) and offered highlights. I wrote: “Politics mattered then, before Chicago and Kent State and Watergate and all the cynicism, and the unvarnished, authentic voice of Bernie Sanders is bringing that feeling back for many.” Read the rest: “5 things I learned writing an e-book about Bernie Sanders.”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • Did I mention that I went to New Orleans? I wrote two columns from the scene of Homeland Security’s immigration raid that the Trump regime has branded “Catahoula Crunch” in a gross homage to the Louisiana state dog. The first piece looked at Day One of the operation — the Big Lie behind the raids that claim to target criminals but instead go after day laborers, usually without criminal records — and the fear that pervaded the Latino community. The second column was a much more hopeful look inside the growing citizen resistance, as I profiled the everyday folks who are taking risks to blow whistles, chase cars, and generally impede Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
    • Last week — if you could somehow make it through the sickening bromance between Donald Trump and FIFA, the world governing body of soccer — we finally learned the key groupings and early-stage matches of the 2026 men’s World Cup finals across the United States as well as our now frenemies Canada and Mexico. You won’t be surprised to know that The Inquirer’s soccer writer extraordinaire Jonathan Tannenwald was all over the key developments. We learned who the U.S. team will play: Paraguay, a to-be-determined European qualifier, and Australia, in a June 19 Seattle match I still want to attend if I can start a GoFundMe (kidding…maybe) for the astronomical ticket prices. The Philadelphia matches include perennial contenders France and Brazil as well as a Curaçao-Ivory Coast showdown that I’m excited for because I might be able to afford it. The World Cup is going to be one of the biggest stories of 2026, and you know the Inquirer will cover this like an Italian center back. This alone will be worth the price of a subscription, so what are you waiting for?

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer‘s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

  • The Catch-22 around Trump’s illegal orders | Will Bunch Newsletter

    There’s an old saying — well, there ought to be one — that the surest way to jinx something is to write, “I don’t want to jinx it…” My Border Patrol tornado-chasing trip to Charlotte was doomed the moment I posted about it here — frantically canceled when I learned 17 hours before takeoff that the BP had abruptly ditched North Carolina. There is a Plan B but no way will I jinx it a second time.

    If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

    It’s better to stop Trump’s illegal orders than hope troops will disobey them

    Lt. William L. Calley Jr., center, and his military counsel, Maj. Kenneth A. Raby, left, arrive at the Pentagon for testimony before an Army board of investigation hearing into the My Lai Massacre in December 1969. Calley led the U.S. soldiers who killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the most notorious war crime in modern American military history.

    A U.S. Army helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson Jr. may be the greatest American hero you’ve probably never heard of. On March 16, 1968, Thompson — a warrant officer serving in Vietnam — and his crew were dispatched to support a “search and destroy” mission supposedly targeting the Viet Cong in a tiny hamlet called My Lai.

    Instead, the Georgia-born soldier came up upon arguably the most notorious war crime in U.S. history — with thatch hutches ablaze and countless villagers, including women and children, laying dead or dying in an irrigation ditch.

    Thompson landed and found the commander on the ground, Lt. William Calley. “What is this?” he asked. “Who are these people?”

    “Just following orders,” Calley replied. After some more back and forth, the flustered Thompson replied: “But, these are human beings, unarmed civilians, sir.”

    What Thompson and his helicopter crew did next was truly remarkable. Holding Calley and their other U.S. comrades at bay, they shielded a group of Vietnamese women, children and old men as they fled. Eventually, he loaded 11 villagers into the helicopter, and then Thompson and his men thought they detected movement in the ditch. Two fellow solders found a boy, just 5 or 6, hiding under the corpses, “covered in blood and obviously in a state of shock.” After safely evacuating the boy to a military hospital, Thompson reached a lieutenant colonel who ordered Calley to stop the killings.

    Near the end of his life, Thompson — who died in 2006 — and two comrades were recognized for their courage and the many lives they saved at My Lai, awarded the Army’s highest award for bravery not in conflict with an enemy (the Soldier’s Medal), as well as the the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award. He even returned to My Lai for an emotional reunion in 1998.

    But it wasn’t like that in real time. During the war, a prominent congressman demanded that Thompson be court-martialed. “I’d received death threats over the phone,” he told CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2004. “Dead animals on your porch, mutilated animals on your porch some mornings when you get up.”

    A generation after Thompson’s death, the kind of bold action he took that day in 1968 — disobeying what he correctly understood as an illegal order — is yet again on America’s front burner. This time, the debate is fueled by a video from six veterans who now serve as Democrats in Congress ― reminding today’s soldiers about their sworn duty to disobey unlawful commands.

    That every expert in military law agrees with this principle hasn’t stopped President Donald Trump or his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, from going ballistic — calling the Democrats “traitors” or even reposting calls for their death by hanging.

    On Monday, Hegseth kicked things up a notch by endorsing a plan for one of the six — Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and decorated Navy fighter pilot — to return to active duty, so that he can be court-martialed for taking part in the video. A statement from the Pentagon, which Trump and Hegseth call “the Department of War,” insisted that “orders are presumed to be lawful. A servicemember’s personal philosophy does not justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.”

    Even as the growing controversy dominates the headlines, there is one aspect to the illegal-orders debate that practically no one is talking about. Actions like Thompson’s refusal at My Lai don’t only stand out for the soldier’s gumption. It is also the stuff of peace prizes and 60 Minutes profiles because it is so incredibly rare.

    Do your own research. It’s very difficult to find examples in America’s 249-year history of troops disobeying orders because they are believed to be illegal. To be sure, there are famous incidents of soldiers who disobeyed an order and heroically saved lives — but almost all of them were because the command was reckless or just plain stupid, which isn’t the same as illegal or unconstitutional.

    It’s not like there haven’t been opportunities. There have been American war crimes from Wounded Knee to Abu Ghraib, what Barack Obama famously called “dumb wars” like the 2003 assault on Iraq, and moments of intense moral agony, like dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These did produce a few whistleblowers or conscientious objectors, of course, but cases of actually refusing an order are few.

    It’s not hard to understand why. Most military orders — even ones later reviled by history — come with some veneer of legality, whether it’s an opinion from a military lawyer or a congressional authorization vote, as happened with Vietnam, Iraq, and other conflicts.

    The video recorded by Kelly and the others (including Pennsylvania Reps. Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio) focuses only on the widely accepted principle that military men and women must follow the law and the Constitution above all else, and doesn’t mention Trump or any specific disputed orders. In interviews, though, Democrats like Kelly and Houlahan have criticized Trump’s ongoing attacks on boats off South America that the regime claims are smuggling drugs.

    While almost every expert on military laws describes these attacks — which have killed at least 83 people— as extrajudicial killings lacking legal justification, the Office of Legal Counsel in Trump’s Justice Department has nonetheless written a secret classified memo to justify them. Any officer or lower-level troop ordered to blow up these boats and kill all the people on board hasn’t seen the memo. And they won’t get a medal for saying “no” — at least not in 2025. They will be court-martialed and vilified by MAGA.

    New York Times opinion writer David French, a Harvard Law grad who served as an Army lawyer in Iraq, notes the congressional video didn’t advise troops on what exactly is an illegal order, and adds: “Individual service members don’t have sufficient knowledge or information to make those kinds of judgments. When time is of the essence and lives are on the line, your first impulse must be to do as you’re told.”

    Not always, as Thompson showed at My Lai, but military matters are rarely that black and white. The Trump regime’s sending of National Guard units and even active-duty military into cities such as Los Angeles may be an unnecessary and inflammatory violation of democratic norms, but experienced judges continue to debate its legality. Expecting the rank-and-file troops to decide is asking a lot.

    It is very much in the spirit of Joseph Heller’s World War II novel and its legendary Catch-22: A soldier must disobey an illegal order, yet orders, in the heat of the moment, are almost never illegal.

    That doesn’t mean Trump and Hegseth threatening Kelly and the other Democrats with jail and possibly the noose isn’t utterly outrageous. After all, they did nothing more than remind soldiers of their obligation to the law in the same language their drill sergeants use in boot camp.

    I do also think — understanding the limitations of a MAGA-fed Congress — that good people of both parties on Capitol Hill should be doing a lot more to invoke the War Powers Act, hold hearings, debate impeachment, and do whatever else they can to prevent Trump’s reckless acts in the Caribbean and elsewhere. In other words, stop illegal orders before they’re given.

    That said, as the Trump regime deteriorates, there may come a day when right and wrong feels as obvious as it did that 1968 day in the rice paddies of Vietnam. If, heaven forbid, this government ever ordered troops to put down a protest by firing on citizens, we will need a platoon full of Hugh Thompsons and no William Calleys, “just following orders.”

    Yo, do this!

    • The writer Anand Giridharadas is the best of today’s public intellectuals, with a laser focus on the 1 Percent and the devastating role of income inequality in works such as Winners Take All, which rips apart the facade of modern philanthropy. So who better to pour through the late financier-and-sex-fiend Jeffrey Epstein’s emails and find the true meaning? His recent, masterful New York Times essay — “How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails” — parses the small-talk and atrocious grammar of America’s rich and powerful to decipher how they rule. It is a must read.
    • Saturday was the 62nd anniversary of the day that changed America, for bad: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as his motorcade rolled through downtown Dallas. It was also the day I was savaged by several dozen people on Bluesky for expressing an opinion shared by 65% of Americans: that we haven’t been told the whole truth about what really happened on Nov. 22, 1963. Kudos to ABC News for a new special that aired Monday looking at both sides of the endless controversy — Truth and Lies: Who Killed JFK? — that included skeptics like veteran journalist Jefferson Morley of the excellent site JFK Facts. The one hour-special is now streaming on Hulu.

    Ask me anything

    Question: Why is the Trump administration uncritically regurgitating the Russian “peace plan”? — @kaboosemoose.bsky.social via Bluesky

    Answer: That’s a great question as our president has consistently told us that the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” scandal around Vladimir Putin’s U.S. election interference and his seeming sway over the 45th and 47th president is all a massive hoax. How to explain, then, that the supposedly-Trump-drafted 28-point peace plan to end the fighting in Ukraine was translated from its original Russian, with its details hashed out in Florida by corrupt and contented Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Kirill Dmitriev, a U.S.-sanctioned Russian envoy? It’s probably true that liberals were naive during Trump’s first term to believe the strange ties between MAGA and the Kremlin would bring down his presidency, but it’s also true that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We all want peace in Ukraine, but Trump and his U.S. government simply are not honest brokers.

    What you’re saying about…

    Last week’s question about the Jeffrey Epstein files, and whether they’ll ever see the light of day despite enactment of the law calling for their release, was kind of open-ended, and thus it drew an array of responses. But most agreed with my view that it’s highly unlikely we’ll see the files, or see very much. “They won’t release them because they are now investigating the Democrats in the files, thus they won’t be able to release them due to the investigation,” Rosann McGinley wrote. “Also they’d be heavily redacted, ‘nothing to see here.’” Added Judy Voois: “I would not be surprised if he declared war on Venezuela just to steer the media and public interest away from continued scrutiny of the Epstein saga.”

    📮 This week’s question: The heated reaction I received online about the JFK assassination now has me wondering what newsletter readers think. Do you believe Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone killer of John F. Kennedy, or do you think there was a conspiracy? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “JFK assassination” in the subject line.

    Backstory on Pennsylvania’s budget deal with the devil

    Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro speaks at a news conference at the United Association Local 524 union building in Scranton, Pa. in March 2024.

    Saturday was the 62nd anniversary of the JFK assassination, but on Nov. 22, 2025 it was the entire planet that was under fire. One researcher declared that globally it was the hottest Nov. 22 ever recorded. It didn’t feel that way at my windswept dog park in Delco, but it did from the American Southeast — experiencing a record heat wave — to Tehran, where an epic drought has seen water fountains run dry. And yet the world’s leaders were on a full-fledged retreat from climate action, from the White House, where U.S. CEOs toasted the oil dictatorship of Saudi Arabia at a posh dinner, to Brazil, where a global summit on climate change failed to take on the hegemony of fossil fuels, to Harrisburg.

    In a state that’s kowtowed to Big Oil and Gas interests since the days of John D. Rockefeller, Pennsylvania Republicans used the shame of the nation’s longest state-budget impasse to finally ram home their most cherished agenda item: gutting efforts in the Keystone State to work with our neighbors to control the greenhouse-gas pollution behind climate change. The GOP-run state Senate backed Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro into a corner. Pennsylvania had to withdraw from Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a regional pollution-control system, or the money wouldn’t resume flowing to schools and other vital services.

    To be clear, the drivers of this giant step backward were state lawmakers who’ve been swimming in Big Oil’s tainted campaign cash for a couple of decades now. But the capitulation, even at political gunpoint, was not Shapiro’s finest hour — especially as the Democrat with apparent ambition for higher office continues to push for polluting and energy-devouring data centers that he claims will boost the economy. As the American Prospect noted in a new piece, Pennsylvania’s environmental retreat came at the same time Virginia was electing a Democratic governor in Abigail Spanberger who’d promised to restore her state to the RGGI. If Shapiro does run for president in 2028, he may struggle to explain this deal to climate-minded voters.

    The real problem, though, is that the best way to tackle climate change is by going on offense, with aggressive programs to promote alternative energy such as wind (there seems to be a lot of that around here) and solar that aren’t not only cleaner but a better deal for beleaguered consumers. While Pennsylvania — second only to Texas in natural-gas production — went all in on fracking, a 2024 survey found the commonwealth was 49th on expanding wind power and energy efficiency. With RGGI in the rearview mirror, the Shapiro administration needs to work a lot harder on green energy. That would be good for our governor’s White House dreams, but it would be a lot better for the planet.

    What I wrote on this date in 2020

    In the late fall of 2020, when I wasn’t trying to warn people that Donald Trump was planning a coup, I turned my attention to the incoming president, Joe Biden — and it’s both fascinating and sad to read how naive we were in the giddy aftermath of Trump’s defeat. In writing about Biden’s early Cabinet picks, the subhead read: “America is seeing the start of something it’s not used to: A White House that’s experienced, qualified … and boring. Could Biden’s ploy work?” NO! The answer turned out to be “no.” But still read the rest: “Biden’s Cabinet is ‘delightfully boring.’ Can reality-TV-addled America deal with it?”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • Only one column last week as I spent time both preparing for and then canceling the Charlotte trip that never happened. In that piece, I vented my rage at the lavish White House shindig for a monster: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was behind the brutal bone-saw murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The man that Joe Biden all too briefly promised to make “a global pariah” was feted by the CEOs of Apple, Nvidia, GM and just about any big business entity you can think of, in a stunning embrace of corruption that should end the myth of “woke corporations.”
    • There are two things, more than anything else, that keep local news in America alive: Hometown sports teams, and restaurants. Here in Philly, it was a lousy week for the former but a remarkable moment for the latter, as restaurants in the City of Brotherly Love competed for the very first time for recognition from the world’s ultimate dining survey, the Michelin Guide. In a glitzy ceremony at the Kimmel Center, Michelin bestowed its coveted star on three Philadelphia restaurants and honored more than 30 others — and Inquirer readers were obsessed. Four of the newsroom’s top seven most-read articles online last week were about the Michelin madness — including the bittersweetness of one eatery cited just before its closing, the cheesesteak shop that was honored but not invited, and other various snubs and surprises. The Inquirer has amped up its food coverage this year, and if you live and eat in this region I don’t know how you’d survive without it. If you don’t subscribe, please sign up today.

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer‘s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

  • College journalism exposes the rot of ‘grown-ups’ | Will Bunch Newsletter

    I’m always reluctant to talk about upcoming columns, because in this twisted era everything changes at the drop of a MAGA hat, and I hate to jinx things. But as of now, I’m booked for a trip to Charlotte (or Raleigh?…I’ve already jinxed it, maybe) this coming weekend, where I hope to report from the front lines of the Border Patrol’s latest big-city invasion that has terrorized the immigrant community in North Carolina. So I’m going to spend a couple days reading up on what to do in a tear-gas attack, and I’ll see you again this weekend.

    If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

    Fearless college kids are saving journalism. Grown-ups? Not so much

    Editions of the Indiana Daily Student in the student media area in Franklin Hall on Indiana University’s campus on Oct. 14.

    In American journalism’s year of the bended knee, nobody would have been surprised if the student editors of the Harvard Crimson followed the sorry example of major outlets like CBS News or the Washington Post in groveling before the rich and powerful — in this case, their ex-university president and still plugged-in professor Larry Summers.

    Earlier this month, Summers took to social media (the Elon Musk-owned X, of course) with a rant against the student-run paper at the Ivy League school he once helmed, linked to an article by conservative commentator (and former Crimson editor) Ira Stoll accusing the Crimson of biased coverage in favor of Palestine. Summers said ominously, “I do hope alumni trustees will investigate and take any necessary steps lest a problematic situation deteriorate any further.”

    But instead of backing down, Harvard’s student journalists stepped up. When the emails of the late financier and sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein, released last week by a House committee, proved to be riddled with his communications with Summers — long after Epstein had pleaded guilty to teen sex trafficking in Florida — the Crimson produced the most in-depth takedown of any media outlet, anywhere.

    “As Summers Sought Clandestine Relationship With Woman He Called a Mentee, Epstein Was His ‘Wing Man’” was the blistering headline on the article by undergraduates Dhruv T. Patel and Cam N. Srivastava. It described, in excruciating detail, the married Summers’ missives to Epstein about his efforts to woo a much younger Chinese economist on campus whom he was mentoring (and whom the former U.S. treasury secretary and his felonious friend code-named, with a racism they thought would remain forever private, as “peril.”)

    Take that to the alumni trustees, Mr. Summers!

    With a devastating kicker that shows Summers still emailing Epstein up until 1:27 p.m. of the day before his pal was busted on new federal sex charges in 2019, the Crimson article went viral over the weekend. By Monday morning, Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was calling for Summers’ ouster from his faculty post. By Monday night, a “deeply ashamed” Summers announced that he’s pulling back from his public commitments, although he plans to continue teaching.

    The students’ reporting was another win for truth, justice, and the American way — but not an isolated incident. In recent years, as mainstream journalism looks increasingly weak and flabby in the face of U.S. authoritarianism, and with college campuses on the front lines of a culture war, scribes in their teens and early 20s — burning with youthful idealism and the freedom of not much to lose — have raced into the void.

    Some 3,000 miles from Harvard Square, the student journalists at the Stanford Daily stood their ground after one of its reporters was charged with three felonies, at the behest of a top university administrator, for attempting to cover a pro-Palestinian protest on the California campus. Under increasing public pressure, the charges were dropped in March — another triumph for the paper whose 2022 investigative reporting into research irregularities took down the university president.

    In the heartland, the editors of the Indiana Daily Student at that state’s flagship public university last month stood up to school administrators banning their print editions, blasting the move in a front-page editorial that said “telling us what we can and cannot print is unlawful censorship.” The students, who worked with their peers at nearby Purdue University to publish a special issue that circumvented the ban, rallied support from prominent alums and got the school to reverse course.

    “I think that many of these college journalists are laser-focused on their beats, are developing great sources among administrators, faculty and students, and are unfazed by the possibility that their stories might piss off a valued source or two,” Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin, who covered the Stanford fracas for Columbia Journalism Review, told me Monday. “In other words, they’re doing the things that the best reporters do. They’re just not able to buy a beer (legally, at least) when their story shakes up the world.”

    I know what some of you are thinking here. Investigating corruption or misconduct among university leaders, or fighting for a free press…aren’t these college students just doing what any journalist worth their salt would do? Well, yes and no.

    Consider those Epstein emails that continue to dominate the news. It turns out that two prominent journalists corresponded frequently with the convicted sex creep: the “palace intrigue” access journalist Michael Wolff, and a soon-to-be-fired New York Times business reporter, Landon Thomas Jr. The missives suggest they had zero interest in reporting on Epstein’s proclivity for underage girls but very much wanted the access to the rich and famous that jeevacation@gmail.com offered.

    And it gets worse. Thomas actually solicited a $30,000 donation from Epstein to a favored charity — a severe ethical breach that cost him his job in America’s most prestigious newsroom. Wolff, meanwhile, was offering Epstein advice on how to leverage — in essence, blackmail — the sitting U.S. president, Donald Trump. At the same time, he was pushing a business venture that would link him not only with Epstein but another man later convicted of sex crimes, filmmaker Harvey Weinstein. It seems like both conflicted journalists wanted to play in the big leagues with the much richer people they were supposed to watchdog.

    This is something that too many elite journalists share with the increasingly conflicted corporations that employ them: a desire to comfort the comfortable in return for access, or prestige, or money — and to avoid getting sued, which might jeopardize those first three things.

    How else to explain major TV networks like CBS or ABC, owned by corporations with myriad issues before the federal government, settling frivolous lawsuits by Trump for millions of dollars, or the similarly conflicted Jeff Bezos telling his Washington Post to spike its endorsement of Kamala Harris, or the mealy-mouthed “both sides” reporting on rising authoritarianism that plagues so many elite newsrooms of the traditional media?

    The late, great Kris Kristofferson told us that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, and maybe that simple explanation has a lot to do with the bravery of college journalists — that they are freer to question authority than folks with a mortgage and worries about paying for their own kids to attend a top school.

    Still, it’s important to understand that most of the rot in modern mainstream journalism — too much consolidation in the hands of too few conglomerates with too much at risk to be seen as anti-regime — is institutional. We should strive to make something great out of the fact that the next generation of American journalists has arrived with smarts, savvy, and a moral compass yet to be worn down by late-stage capitalism.

    Our challenge, as a society, is to tear down the decrepit structures of the corrupted old media and build a new one that rewards independent journalists who actually afflict the comfortable, and offers them incentives to keep doing that instead of cutting venture-capitalism deals with the folks they allegedly cover. Most of today’s college journalism majors would never trade emails with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein — except to take him down.

    Yo, do this!

    • The stroke of timing behind Ken Burns’ latest documentary epic, The American Revolution, which is currently running this week on PBS stations like WHYY here in Philadelphia and also streaming, was supposed to be the 250th anniversary of the conflict that created the United States. But the project has taken on much greater relevance in a fraught present, when folks are heatedly arguing just what the Founders’ American Experiment is really all about. Critics have praised Burns and his skilled team for blending the ideals and leadership of the George Washingtons and Thomas Paines with the realities faced by everyday folk, including indigenous and enslaved people.
    • Personally, I’ve been embroiled in my nostalgia for a more recent revolution — the cultural and musical explosions that occurred in 1966. I’ve been listening to the audiobook about that tumultuous year — 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded — by the British author Jon Savage, whose later book on the year 1971 was the basis for an outstanding but largely ignored documentary series on Apple TV, But 1971’s classic rock wouldn’t have happened without the cultural pioneers and a youthful clamor for liberation that came five years earlier. The book is an engrossing reminder that change is possible.

    Ask me anything

    Question: Now that People Magazine has revealed the disgusting “piggy” story, why isn’t this atop every news outlets coverage? We spent 3 full weeks on Biden’s age, a week on his pardon of his son with such moral outrage from every outlet. This doesn’t even get covered? — BigTVFan (@bigtvfan.bsky.social) via Bluesky

    Answer: The episode that BigTVFan is referring to occurred with a gaggle of journalists about Air Force One, but just started getting viral attention Monday night. It is, indeed, shocking to watch. When a Bloomberg woman journalist pressed Donald Trump on the Epstein files, the president erupted. “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy!” Yes, this should be a front-page story in the traditional media, and not only because of the stunning sexism (when the subject is Epstein, no less!) and the regal arrogance, but also this: the man who’s followed around by the nuclear suitcase seems to be losing his grip on reality. Monday afternoon, Trump spoke to a gathering of franchisees of the fast-food addiction that may be just one reason why nobody believes he only weighs 16 ounces more than Jalen Hurts, McDonald’s, and was at times beyond incoherent. Yet Trump’s rapidly deteriorating mental state remains mostly off-limits for the elite media. It’s a massive error of omission that the world will look back on and regret.

    What you’re saying about…

    It’s funny how one week can feel like a decade in 2025. Last week’s question about the eight senators (seven Democrats and an independent) who cut a deal to end the long government shutdown drew a huge response from folks fired up about an issue that now almost feels like ancient history after the Epstein email release. Readers were passionate but divided. Certainly many felt the eight senators had caved in the worst possible way. An outraged Freddi Carlip wrote that “most people wanted to do what was best for Americans who are hurting and that is to stand up to bullies.” But a number of you thought the opposition had few real options but to deal from a weak hand. “This was always going to end with the government opening under the black flag of the Big Ugly Bill,” wrote Kent Dietz. “Oft repeated but true: elections have consequences.”

    📮 This week’s question: It’s all Epstein all the time, so let’s talk about it. Do you think Trump has sincerely flip-flopped and the relevant files will soon be released? Or is the White House still playing a long game aiming to keep Epstein’s secrets buried with him? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Epstein files” in the subject line.

    History lesson on ‘Charlotte’s Web’…and fascism

    U.S. Border Patrol Commander at large Gregory Bovino, right, looks on as a detainee sits by a car Monday, in Charlotte, N.C.

    Nobody reads any more, at least not to the end. That’s been driven home this autumn by several efforts from tech bros and other leaders of our dystopia falling flat on their face with their attempts at literary allusions. A viral post on Bluesky recently mocked the Icarus Flying Academy, whose founders may be blissfully unaware that their Greek mythological namesake flew too close to the sun and crashed. On Monday, gazillionaire Jeff Bezos also invoked ancient Greece by announcing his AI startup Project Prometheus, invoking an inventor who was ultimately bound to a rock by Zeus for his overreaching. Then there’s the bad people behind the U.S. Border Patrol and its inhumane mass deportation drive, who took their horror show to North Carolina this past weekend with their “Operation Charlotte’s Web.”

    The “brains” behind the BP’s masked goon squad, Gregory Bovino, named the operation — which netted 81 detainees in its first Saturday during a chaotic surge through suburban lawns and Home Depot parking lots — after the 1952 classic children’s novel by E.B. White about a farm, a pig, and the compassionate spider, Charlotte, who saves the pig’s life. Why? Because Bovino’s secret police force are ensnaring scores of immigrants in their web. In Charlotte, N.C. Get it? Bovino even took to social media’s X with a wildly out-of-context quote from the novel: “Wherever the wind takes us. High, low. East, west. North, south. We take to the breeze, we go as we please.”

    In a viral essay, the writer Chris Geidner of the excellent site LawDork demolished Bovino’s literary aspirations for his police-state operation. His piece went well beyond the obvious point that a children’s novel that centers on a spider’s quest to protect someone different from her — a pig — from his human predators is the 180-degree polar opposite from the web of inhumanity that Team Bovino is spinning in Charlotte, terrorizing the Latino community there. Geidner notes that much of E.B. White’s wider work was in opposition to the very fascism that’s behind the mass deportation drive of Bovino and his ultimate boss, Donald Trump.

    Geidner quotes White from a 1940 essay, as Adolf Hitler’s stormtroopers were advancing across Europe: “I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.”

    White, and his fictional Charlotte, would have done more than pinch their nose from the stench of this operation in a proud city that shares its name with a heroic spider. For sure, Bovino’s crimes against literature pale in comparison to his ongoing crimes against humanity. But he may discover that the rapidly spinning American thread of community and common decency that is resisting mass deportation is the true sequel to Charlotte’s Web.

    What I wrote on this date in 2018

    It was Mississippi’s most famous writer, William Faulkner, who wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Seven years ago on this date, I wrote about how a justice-denied 1955 murder of a Black man trying to deliver absentee ballots to the county courthouse in Brookhaven, Miss., haunted the modern Senate campaign of that town’s GOP U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. I wrote: “Four years after [Lamar Smith] was killed, a baby girl was born in Brookhaven named Cindy Hyde. Over the next 59 years, she immersed herself in the politics of a community that bitterly refuses to concede the just cause that Lamar Smith died for.” Read the rest from Nov. 18, 2018: “Why the blood of a 1955 Mississippi murder drenches today’s U.S. Senate race.”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • Only one column this week, and as you might expect it drilled deeply into the true meaning of the Jeffrey Epstein emails that have dominated the headlines. I went beyond the suggestive comments about Donald Trump to look at the deeper moral decay of the rich and famous who continued to seek out Epstein and his connections years after his Florida guilty plea to child prostitution charges. The missives from billionaires and political insiders also reveal their growing — and justified — worries that the public may be reaching for pitchforks.
    • The John Fetterman saga never ends, nor does Pennsylvania readers’ bottomless fascination with his decade-plus odyssey from outspokenly progressive mayor of struggling Braddock, Pa., to the U.S. Senate, where he is increasingly at odds with his fellow Democrats about practically everything. The Inquirer’s coverage of revelations in Fetterman’s new autobiography, including his long-running feud with Gov. Josh Shapiro, was one of the most widely read stories last week. So was what happened next, as renewed heart problems caused Fetterman to fall flat on his face and again be hospitalized. There’s three more years until the end of Fetterman’s term and an all-but-certain primary challenge from his political left. No one is going to cover this better than The Inquirer, so why not subscribe today?

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer‘s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

  • Did a $10M bribe break the soul of America? | Will Bunch Newsletter

    The sense of loss that has permeated 2025 struck again this weekend when we learned of the sudden death of a Philly journalism legend, Michael Days, who guided the Philadelphia Daily News during most of its last dozen freewheeling and Pulitzer-winning years before we merged with The Inquirer in 2017. He was just 72, far too young. The top-line of Mike’s obituary was how, as the first African American to lead a newsroom in America’s founding city, he paid it forward by mentoring the next generation of rising Black journalists. But people like me who worked for him remember him more simply as the wisest and most empathetic human being we ever had as a boss. He leaves right when the nation’s newsrooms need decent souls like Mike Days more than they ever did.

    If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

    What a $10M bribe rumor says about Trump, Middle East peace, and America’s fall

    President Donald Trump talks with Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi during a summit to support ending the more than two-year Israel-Hamas war in Gaza after a breakthrough ceasefire deal, Oct. 13 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

    The thing about being a 79-year-old president is that sometimes you just blurt stuff out, with no filter as to whether your words might be embarrassing, undiplomatic — or potentially incriminating.

    Consider the case of Donald John Trump, the 47th U.S. president and the oldest one on the day of his election. Last week, in what may prove to be a fleeting moment of triumph as Trump celebrated a Gaza peace deal that included the release of 20 Israeli hostages, POTUS arrived at an Egyptian resort town for a Middle East summit. He kicked off the day with a one-on-one sit-down with Egypt’s strongman ruler, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

    “There was a reason we chose Egypt [for the summit] because you were very helpful,” Trump said as a gaggle of reporters and photojournalists entered their meeting room.

    Really? Helpful in what way?

    “I want to thank you,” the American president told Sissi, who seized power in a 2013 coup. “He’s been my friend right from the beginning during the campaign against Crooked Hillary Clinton. Have you heard of her?”

    Here Trump was pushing, ever so absurdly, for the Nobel Peace Prize, and then he had to spoil it all by saying somethin’ stupid like, you bribed me. Well, he almost spoiled it, if more journalists — aside from MSNBC’s brilliant Rachel Maddow, who seized on the remark hours later — had grasped the potential import of this presidential prattle.

    It’s certainly legal, if gross, for Trump to be close pals with Sissi, even if Human Rights Watch reports that the Egyptian dictator is “continuing wholesale repression, systematically detaining and punishing peaceful critics and activists and effectively criminalizing peaceful dissent.” What would not be legal is the Middle Eastern nation interfering in the 2016 election, in which Trump narrowly defeated Clinton in the handful of swing states that tipped the Electoral College.

    What made Trump’s comments last week so jaw-dropping is that U.S. federal investigators worked for several years trying to prove exactly that scenario. In August 2024, days after Trump was nominated by the GOP for his second reelection bid, the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department investigated a tip that Sissi’s Egypt provided Trump with $10 million the candidate desperately needed in the 2016 homestretch to defeat Clinton. That happened right before Trump, as 45th president, reopened the spigot of foreign aid that had been halted because of Sissi’s human rights abuses.

    It’s known that Trump did put $10 million into the campaign, which he listed as a loan. The Post in 2024 offered a tantalizing, if circumstantial, piece of evidence — that the Cairo bank had received a note from an agency believed to be Egyptian intelligence to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million in two, 100-pound bags full of U.S. $100 bills, five days before Trump took the oath of office.

    But the investigative trail ran cold. In 2019, then-special counsel Robert Mueller turned the matter over to Trump’s appointees in the Justice Department, who of course didn’t pursue the president’s bank records. Neither — inexplicably — did Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, as the statute of limitations expired in January 2022. That’s where things stood last week before Trump started blathering in Sharm El Sheikh.

    One reason I’m writing about this is the sheer frustration that Trump — yes, allegedly, possibly — might have gotten away with bribery to the point where he’s almost bragging about it in public. But I also think the mysterious case of the Egyptian bags of cash speaks to the present, dire American moment in a couple of ways.

    For one thing, it casts a light on what’s really behind what Trump hopes will be viewed as the signature achievement of his second presidency. That would be the fragile peace deal that aims to end the last two years of bloodshed in Gaza that started with the Hamas terror attack of Oct. 7, 2023 and has resulted in at least 67,000 dead Palestinians and the utter destruction of their seaside homeland.

    How did Trump get a deal that had eluded his predecessor Biden, in a region that has vexed every American president from both parties? It certainly helped that most of the power brokers with the clout and the cash to help end the fighting in Gaza are repressive strongmen — or, as Trump might call them, role models. And they all seem to speak the same language of corrupt back-scratching.

    If those bags with $10 million in greenbacks did make their way to Trump in 2017, it looks like small change in today’s cross-Atlantic wheeling-and-dealing. After all, a key go-between in the negotiations — Qatar, which has good relations with Hamas and has hosted its exiled leaders — gifted America a $400 million jet that Trump plans to use not just as Air Force One but in his post presidency, while his regime has promised to protect the Qatari dictators if they are ever attacked.

    Another key supporter of the plan is the United Arab Emirates, which also backs the UAE firm that recently purchased a whopping $2 billion in cryptocurrency from a firm owned by Trump’s family as well as the family of Steve Witkoff, the regime’s lead Middle East negotiator. At the same time, Trump’s U.S. government allowed UAE to import highly sensitive microchips used in artificial intelligence.

    Witkoff’s negotiation end–game brought in Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who forged close ties during his father-in-law’s first term with Saudi Arabia’s murderous de facto ruler Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who pulled the levers for a $2 billion investment in a hedge fund created by Kushner despite no prior expertise.

    Those Saudi ties could prove critical to future stability in the region, and in a joint interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes Sunday night, Kushner and Witkoff made no apologies for mixing billion-dollar deals with the pursuit of world peace. “What people call conflicts of interest,” Kushner said, “Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships.”

    OK, but those “trusted relationships” are built on a flimsy mountain of cash that could collapse at any minute. Look, I’m thrilled like everyone else that 20 Israeli hostages are finally reunited with their loved ones, and to the extent Trump and his regime deserve any credit, I credit them. But the art of the deal that the president is bragging about is all about the Benjamins — more worthy of applause on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange than a Nobel Peace Prize.

    Real peace is based on hard work and trust, not Bitcoin — so is it any wonder that the ceasefire is already collapsing with two dead Israeli soldiers and fresh, lethal airstrikes in Gaza? The only thing with any currency among a rogues’ gallery of world dictators is currency, and that transactional stench has fouled everything from Cairo to K Street.

    Is it any surprise that a regime whose origin story allegedly includes bags of Egyptian cash would do absolutely nothing when it was told that its future border czar, Tom Homan, was captured on an audiotape accepting $50,000 in a fast-food bag from undercover FBI agents who said they wanted government contracts?

    In hindsight, the failure to pursue that report of the $10 million Egyptian bribe opened up a floodgate of putrid corruption, wider than the Nile. It signaled a sick society where everything is for sale — even world peace — but nothing is guaranteed.

    Yo, do this!

    • The 1970s and ‘80s are having a cultural moment right now, and this boomer is here for it! On Apple TV (they’ve dropped the “+,” probably after paying some consultant $1 million for that pearl of wisdom) comes the long-awaited five part docuseries about the life and times of filmmaker Martin Scorsese, the savior who rose from NYC’s mean streets to give us Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and so much more. Watching Mr. Scorsese is going to make the eventual death of the baseball season so much easier to take.
    • The earthy, urban musical equivalent of Scorsese would have to be Bruce Springsteen, who has been marking the 50th anniversary of his breakthrough Born to Run LP with all kinds of cool stuff, capped with Friday’s long-awaited release of the first-ever biopic about “The Boss,” Deliver Me from Nowhere. Staring The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen, the film’s unlikely narrative — focusing on the making of 1982’s highly personal and acoustic Nebraska as the rock star seeks release from a bout of depression — sounds like exactly the uplift that America needs right now.

    Ask me anything

    Question: As someone living in Ireland and looking across the ocean. Trump won’t be in power forever, but how is anyone going to deal with the MAGA crowd that helped elect him? That level of stupidity, hatred and racism cannot be fixed. How is [t]he USA ever going to heal? — Stephen (@bannside@bsky.social) via Bluesky

    Answer: That’s a great question, Stephen, and like most great questions there’s no easy answer. Although I’m optimistic that the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election will happen and that the anti-Trump coalition that we witnessed at “No Kings” will prevail, I agree with you that it’s only a partial and temporary fix. I’d fear an Iraq-level resistance could rise up in the regions we call “Trump country.” My long-term solution would be along the lines of what I proposed in my 2022 book After the Ivory Tower Falls: Fix higher education — broadly defined as from the Ivy League to good trade schools — to made it a public good that reduces inequality instead of driving it. And promote a universal gap year of national service for 18-year-olds, to get young people out of their isolated silos. There are ways to prevent the next generation from becoming as stupid or hateful or racist as the Americans who came before them, but it will take time and patience that we seem to lack right now.

    What you’re saying about…

    Remember the Philadelphia Phillies? When I last saw you here two weeks ago, their annual postseason collapse and the fate of manager Rob Thomson was a hot topic. As expected, there was minimal response from you political junkies, and opinions were split — even before the team defied the conventional wisdom and announced he’ll be returning in 2026. Thomson’s supporters were more likely to blame the Phillies’ inconsistent sluggers, with John Braun asking “who could you hire who could guarantee clutch hits?” Personally, I’m with Kim Root: “I follow the Philly Union, who just won the Supporters Shield — that is all.”

    📮 This week’s question: Back to the issue at hand: I’m curious if newsletter readers attended the “No Kings” protest last Saturday, and what you see as the future of the anti-Trump movement. Are more aggressive measures like a nationwide general strike needed, or is the continued visibility of nonviolent resisters enough? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “No Kings future” in the subject line.

    Backstory on who the “No Kings” protesters really were

    Demonstrators gather for a ’No Kings’ rally in Philadelphia on Saturday.

    They clogged city plazas and small-town main streets from San Diego to Bangor on Saturday, yet the more than 7 million Americans who took part in the massive “No Kings” protest — the second-largest one day demonstration in U.S. history, behind only the first Earth Day in 1970 — seemed to mystify much of the befuddled mainstream media. Just who were these people protesting the Donald Trump presidency, and why are they here?

    Instead of a journalist, it took a sociologist to get some answers. Dana Fisher — the Philadelphia-area native who teaches at American University and is the leading expert on contemporary protest movements — was out in the field Saturday at the large “No Kings” march in Washington, D.C., collecting data with a team of researchers. She’s shared her early top-line results with me, aiming to both give a demographic and ideological snapshot and also compare Saturday’s crowd with her findings at other recent rallies.

    If you were among the 7 million on Saturday, some of this data won’t surprise you. The protesters were, on the whole, older than the average American, with a median age of 44 (compared to 38 for the nation as a whole.) Once again, the “No Kings” participants were overwhelmingly white (87%) with women (57%) in the majority. But it’s also worth noting that men (39%) were more likely to take part than earlier protests tracked by Fisher, and the 8% who identified as Latino is double the rate of Hispanic participation in the 2017 Women’s March.

    That last finding may reflect the passions of the “No Kings” protesters, who listed immigration as a key motivation at a rate of 74%, second only to their general opposition to Trump (80%, kind of a no brainer). That certainly jibed with the demonstrators at the rally I attended in suburban Havertown, who again and again mentioned the sight of masked federal agents grabbing migrants off the street as what compelled them to come out.

    Fisher’s most telling findings may have been these: The people out in the streets are mad about what they see happening to America, with 80% listing “anger” as an emotion they are feeling, trailed closely by “anxiety” at 76%. Yet few of those who spoke with her team believed that will translate into violence. The number of demonstrators who agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so off track, Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” was only 23% — lower than other protests her team has surveyed. It seems like the larger the public show of resistance to Trump’s authoritarianism, the more optimism that the path back to democracy can be nonviolent.

    What I wrote on this date in 2021

    I hate to say I told you so but… On this date four years ago, Joe Biden was still clinging to dreams of a presidential honeymoon after ousting Donald Trump in the 2020 election, but there were dark clouds on the horizon. On Oct. 21, 2021 I warned that sluggish action on key issues was starting to hurt his standing with under-30 voters. I wrote that “while the clock hasn’t fully run out on federal action around issues like student debt or a bolder approach on climate — the disillusionment of increasingly jaded young voters could change the course of American history for the next generation, or even beyond.” How’d that turn out? Read the rest: “From college to climate, Democrats are sealing their doom by selling out young voters.”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • I returned from a much-needed staycation this weekend by leaving the sofa and spending a glorious fall morning at the boisterous “No Kings” protest closest to home in Delaware County, which lined a busy street in Havertown. I wrote about how the protests are winning back America by getting under the skin of Donald Trump and the GOP, who can no longer pretend to ignore the widespread unpopularity of their authoritarian project.
    • Every election matters, even the ones that are dismissed as “off-year” contests. In today’s heated and divisive climate, even what used to be a fairly routine affair — the retention of sitting judges on the state and local level — has taken on greater importance. Here in Pennsylvania, the state’s richest billionaire, Jeff Yass, is spending a sliver of his vast wealth to convince voters to end the tenure of three Democrats on the state Supreme Court. The Inquirer’s Editorial Board is here to explain why that’s a very bad idea. On the other hand, some judges up for retention in the city of Philadelphia — where jurists haven’t always lived up to the promise of America’s cradle of democracy — deserve closer scrutiny. The newsroom’s Samantha Melamed revealed a leaked, secret survey detailing what Philadelphia attorneys think of some of the judges on the November ballot, and it is not pretty. The bottom line is that you need to vote this year, and subscribing to The Inquirer is the best way to stay informed. Sign up today!

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer‘s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.