WASHINGTON — Four centrist Republicans broke with Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday and signed onto a Democratic-led petition that will force a House vote on extending for three years an enhanced pandemic-era subsidy that lowers health insurance costs for millions of Americans.
The stunning move comes after House Republican leaders pushed ahead with a health care bill that does not address the soaring monthly premiums that millions of people will soon endure when the tax credits for those who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act expire at year’s end.
Democrats led by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York needed 218 signatures to force a floor vote on their bill, which would extend the subsides for three years.
Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Robert Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie, all from Pennsylvania, and Mike Lawler of New York signed on Wednesday morning, pushing it to the magic number of 218. A vote on the subsidy bill could come as soon as January under House rules.
“Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.” Fitzpatrick said in a statement.
Johnson told reporters Wednesday that “I have not lost control of the House” and he noted that Republicans have a razor-thin majority that allows a small number of members to employ procedures that would not usually be successful in getting around leadership.
The revolt against GOP leadership came after days of talks centered on the health care subsidies.
Johnson had discussed allowing more politically vulnerable GOP lawmakers a chance to vote on bills that would temporarily extend the subsidies while also adding changes such as income caps for beneficiaries. But after days of discussions, the leadership sided with the more conservative wing of the party’s conference, which has assailed the subsidies as propping up a failed marketplace through the ACA, which is widely known as “Obamacare.”
House Republicans pushed ahead Wednesday a 100-plus-page health care package without the subsidies, instead focusing on long-sought GOP proposals designed to expand insurance coverage options for small businesses and the self-employed.
Fitzpatrick and Lawler tried to add a temporary extension of the subsidies to the bill, but were denied.
“Our only request was a floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected. Then, at the request of House leadership I, along with my colleagues, filed multiple amendments, and testified at length to those amendments,” Fitzpatrick said. “House leadership then decided to reject every single one of these amendments.
“As I’ve stated many times before, the only policy that is worse than a clean three-year extension without any reforms, is a policy of complete expiration without any bridge,” Fitzpatrick said.
Lawler, in a social media post, similarly said that “the failure of leadership” to permit a vote had left him with “no choice” but to sign the petition. He urged Johnson to bring the plan up for an immediate floor vote.
Jeffries, for several weeks, had called on Republicans to sign his discharge petition. He particularly challenged Republicans in competitive congressional districts to join the effort if they really wanted to prevent premium increases for their constituents.
“Mike Johnson needs to bring the bill to the floor today,” Jeffries said. “Our position from the very beginning was that we are standing on the right side of the American people who want to see the Affordable Care Act tax credits extended, and we’re appreciative that we now have the bipartisan coalition to get that done.”
Path ahead is uncertain
Even if the subsidy bill were to pass the House, which is far from assured, it would face an arduous climb in the Republican-led Senate.
Republicans last week voted down a three-year extension of the subsidies and proposed an alternative that also failed. But in an encouraging sign for Democrats, four Republican senators crossed party lines to support their proposal.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., argued against the Democratic extension as “an attempt to disguise the real impact of Obamacare’s spiraling health care costs.”
With the midterm elections 11 months away, Vice President JD Vance visited one of the most closely watched swing districts in the country to ask Pennsylvania voters to aim their anger over the economy at Democrats rather than the Trump administration.
During a speech at Uline Shipping Supplies in Alburtis in the Lehigh Valley, Vance blamed immigrants for the housing shortage and invoked the name of notorious killer and cult leader Charles Manson as he doubled down on President Donald Trump’s rhetoric from the week before in the Poconos.
Vance’s visit was to U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie’s district, while Trump’s speech last week at the Mount Airy Casino Resort was in U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan’s district. Both freshman Republicans won their seats by roughly a percentage point last year and are among the most vulnerable incumbents in Congress headed into 2026.
Both speeches were billed as being focused on the economy — as Trump and Vance seek to counter Democrats’ message on affordability ahead of next year’s election. But both delved into an assortment of topics.
Though Vance’s remarks were wide-ranging, the vice president hewed to the White House message that while the price of eggs might still be high, the administration is working to improve pocketbook issues and restore confidence in the economy.
“Even though we’ve made incredible progress, we understand that there’s a lot more work to do, and the thing that I’d ask from the American people is a little bit of patience,” Vance said.
Affordability
Vance didn’t say the affordability crisis is a “Democratic hoax,” as Trump did.
He just said it’s the Democrats’ fault.
“When I hear the Democrats talk about the affordability crisis they created,” Vance said, “it’s a little bit like … Charles Manson criticizing violent crime. Look in the mirror, my friend, you are the cause of the problem.”
It’s a variation of Trump’s line from last week that “Democrats talking about affordability is like Bonnie and Clyde preaching about public safety.”
Democrats started criticizing the price of eggs when Trump was in office for less than a week, Vance said.
A woman asked Trump about it, and according to Vance, the president responded, “’Lady, we’ve been here for three days. It takes a little bit of time to fix something that was so fundamentally broken.’”
Every “single affordability crisis” in the United States — food, housing, medicine, gas — is because we “inherited a nightmare of an economy from Joe Biden,” Vance told the crowd.
In an unusual explanation of how Biden sent housing costs soaring, for example, Vance explained that the previous administration’s immigration policies were to blame.
Vance said “20 million illegal immigrants … took homes that, by all rights, go to American citizens, and to the people of this great state.”
It’s a line that he’s used before, which fact-checkers have flagged. Politifact pointed out that there are around 12 million to 14 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. And the housing shortage comes from a lack of construction of a sufficient supply of affordable homes, experts say.
Beyond that, Politifact said, immigrants often share housing with friends or relatives, making their average housing consumption “far smaller than is typical.”
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is up for reelection next year, hit back at Vance on social media and made the case that Trump’s policies, including cuts to Medicaid and tariffs, are exacerbating the cost-of-living headaches for Pennsylvanians.
“Donald Trump and JD Vance’s economic policies are hurting Pennsylvania. They have raised prices at the grocery store, screwed over our farmers, and gutted healthcare funding,” Shapiro said on X. “I know this Administration thinks the cost of living is a ‘hoax’ — but it’s not, and Pennsylvania families know it.”
Firing federal workers
In his speech, Vance made much of the just-released November jobs report, delayed by the government shutdown. Around 64,000 jobs were added to the economy, an improvement over the more than 100,000 jobs lost in October.
Putting a good face on the big October job loss, Vance told a reporter after his speech that those were federal government jobs eliminated by the Trump administration — with a plan in mind.
“That is, in a lot of ways, what we’re trying to do under President Trump’s leadership,” Vance said. “We wanted to fire bureaucrats and hire these Americans out here,” Vance said to applause.
As he spoke, Vance praised Mackenzie for his “dedication to American workers.”
Asked about the 4.6% November unemployment rate, the highest since 2021 during the pandemic, Vance was able to put a good spin on that as well.
Many of the unemployed may have lost their jobs two years ago, under Biden, and stopped looking for work, Vance said. Those people aren’t counted in the official unemployment statistics. Now, however, as we see wages rise and more investment into the United States, Vance said, the people sitting out the job search under Biden are getting “off the sidelines” and once again seeking jobs. As they do, they’re being counted as unemployed.
The high unemployment rate, then, is “exactly what we want,” Vance said. “That is happening under President Trump’s leadership.”
As he spoke, Vance explained Trump’s ideas to help Americans get by, including omitting taxes on tips and overtime, as well as creating a tax deduction for interest on auto loans.
These will lead to significant tax refunds, Vance said, adding that middle-class Pennsylvanians will see “the best tax season in 2026 that you’ve ever had.” That’s a result of Americans having “a president and Congress fighting for you for a change,” Vance said.
Vance responds to Vanity Fair article
In a tough question from a reporter, Vance was asked about a Vanity Fair article in which Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, described some of the people in the administration in less-than-flattering ways.
She said Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality”; Elon Musk is an ”avowed ketamine user” and an ”odd, odd duck”; Budget Director Russell Vought is “right-wing, absolute zealot”; and that Attorney General Pam Bondi ”completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files.
As for Vance, Wiles said he’s “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and that Vance’s crossover from a Trump critic to an ally was based on political expediency.
While Vance didn’t address the latter description, he agreed that he “sometimes” is a conspiracy theorist, but that he only believes “in conspiracies that are true.”
As an example, he said, he believed in “this crazy conspiracy theory that the media and government were covering up the fact that Joe Biden was clearly unable to do the job.”
Vance said it turns out that such conspiracy theories are just things that he discovered to be true “six months before the media admitted it.”
He hastened to add that if anyone in the Trump administration learned a lesson from the Vanity Fair article, it’s that “we should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream media.”
In the first year of President Donald Trump’s administration, Palantir Technologies has secured major contracts to compile data on Americans, assist the president’s federal immigration enforcement, and play a key role at the height of the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to shrink the federal government.
But just a few years ago, it seemed unlikely that billionaire Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir — a publicly traded data software company that Karp described in 2011 as “deeply involved in supporting progressive values and causes” — would ever strike such deals with Trump.
Karp grew up in the Philadelphia area in a politically left-leaning household and was critical of Trump during his first White House term. But over time, and catalyzed by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, his opinion and habits shifted. Quickly, he went from being a major Democratic Party donor to writing a big check to Trump’s 2024 inaugural committee.
Palantir is a publicly traded data analytics software company that was cofounded by Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Nathan Gettings, Stephen Cohen, the company’s president, and Peter Thiel, a billionaire tech investor and cofounder of PayPal. Thiel is a libertarian and is a staunch supporter of right-wing ideology.
Palantir, based in Denver, grew out of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and a desire to help improve national security.
According to The Daily podcast guest Michael Steinberger, who spent six years interviewing Karp for a book, one of Palantir’s major contractors has been the CIA, which was also one of its early investors. Palantir’s technological products also played a key role in assisting Ukraine during the early months of Russia’s war on the country.
The company started its partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during former President Barack Obama’s administration, but that contract did not draw controversy until Trump’s first term in the White House, when his immigration crackdown became a key priority, Steinberger, a contributing writer to the Times, said.
Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, has roots in Philadelphia
Karp was born in New York but grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, he told the World Economic Forum in 2023. He went on to attend Central High School.
As Steinberger describes it, “He’s a Philly kid. He grew up in Philadelphia. Grew up in a very left-wing household.” Karp is the son of a Jewish pediatrician and a Black artist. And he’s dyslexic, Steinberger said.
“It’s like I have this weirdly structured brain,” Karp said in an interview with Steinberger. “The motor is just structured differently.”
Karp and his younger brother spent time going to antiwar and antinuclear protests, and the older Karp attended Haverford College, Steinberger said. There, he closely identified with his Black heritage, getting involved with Black student affairs and organizing an antiracism conference at Yale University.
Karp insists that he did not put much effort into his schooling at Haverford, but Steinberger, who was a classmate of Karp’s in college, appears to think otherwise.
“I think his path in life would suggest otherwise. I think the library saw a lot more of him than it did of me, which may go some way to explaining why he became a billionaire and I did not,” Steinberger said.
After Haverford, Karp attended Stanford Law School, where he met and became close with Thiel — whose political views were the opposite of Karp’s. Years later, Karp and Thiel reunited after 9/11. Thiel was looking for a CEO for Palantir.
“Thiel interviews a couple of people for the CEO position, but then he and the other people involved in founding Palantir realized Karp is probably the right guy for the job,” Steinberger said.
In an interview with Steinberger, Karp admitted that his background made him an unlikely choice for CEO.
“I wasn’t trained in business. I didn’t know anything about start-up culture. I didn’t know anything about building a business. I didn’t know anything about financing a business,” Karp said.
From a Philly liberal to a staunch Trump defender
In Steinberger’s telling, Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, gave rise to a political environment that would solidify Karp’s rightward shift.
Over time, Karp had become discouraged with the left’s criticisms of Palantir, but that reached a fever pitch when Palantir offered its services to Israel as the country began its military invasion of Gaza amid protests, including internal dissent from employees, Steinberger said.
Steinberger said Karp — once a protester himself — became increasingly troubled by college campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
“He thinks the protests are riddled with antisemitism,” Steinberger said. “They’re very dangerous and he sees this as reflective of a broader rot in his mind on the left.”
Karp continued to back then-President Joe Biden, who was supportive of the Israeli government, but in December 2023, Karp posed a sort of ultimatum at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California regarding liberals’ stance on Israel and a desire for the Democratic Party to denounce the college campus protests.
“I’m one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party and, quite frankly, I’m calling it out, and I’m giving to Republicans. If you keep up with this behavior, I’m going to change. A lot of people like me are going to change. We have to really call this out. It is completely beyond the bounds,” Karp said.
Over time, Karp started donating more “aggressively” to Republicans, Steinberger said, and made clear his support for Trump. Karp wrote a $1 million check to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee and later began publicly praising Trump on national security.
Karp, for his part, still thinks of himself as a progressive.
“I didn’t shift my politics,” Karp said. “The political parties have shifted their politics. The idea that what’s being called progressive is any way progressive is a complete farce.”
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday the Pentagon will not publicly release unedited video of a U.S. military strike that killed two survivors of an initial attack on a boat allegedly carrying cocaine in the Caribbean, as questions mounted in Congress about the incident and the overall buildup of U.S. military forces near Venezuela.
Hegseth said members of the Armed Services Committee in the House and Senate would have an opportunity this week to review the video, but did not say whether all members of Congress would be allowed to see it as well.
“Of course we’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth told reporters as he exited a closed-door briefing with senators.
President Donald Trump’s cabinet members overseeing national security were on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to defend a campaign that has killed at least 95 people in 25 known strikes on vessels in international waters in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Overall, they defended the campaign as a success, saying it has prevented drugs from reaching American shores, and they pushed back on concerns that it is stretching the bounds of lawful warfare.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters the campaign is a “counter-drug mission” that is “focused on dismantling the infrastructure of these terrorist organizations that are operating in our hemisphere, undermining the security of Americans, killing Americans, poisoning Americans.”
Lawmakers have been focused on the Sept. 2 attack on two survivors as they sift through the rationale for a broader U.S. military buildup in the region. On the eve of the briefings, the U.S. military said it attacked three more boats believed to have been smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing eight people.
Lawmakers left in the dark about Trump’s goal with Venezuela
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said Hegseth had come “empty-handed” to the briefing, without a pledge to more broadly release the video of the Sept. 2 strike.
“If they can’t be transparent on this, how can you trust their transparency on all the other issues swirling about in the Caribbean?” Schumer said.
Senators on both sides of the aisle said the officials left them in the dark about Trump’s goals when it comes to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or sending U.S. forces directly to the South American nation.
“I want to address the question: Is it the goal to take him out? If it’s not the goal to take him out, you’re making a mistake,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who defended the legality of the campaign and said he wanted to see Maduro removed from power.
The U.S. has deployed warships, flown fighter jets near Venezuelan airspace, and seized an oil tanker as part of its campaign against Maduro, who has insisted the real purpose of the U.S. military operations is to force him from office. Maduro said on a weekly state television show Monday that his government still does not know the whereabouts of the tanker’s crew. He criticized the United Nations for not speaking out against what he described as an “act of piracy” against “a private ship carrying Venezuelan oil.”
In a social media post Tuesday night, Trump said he is ordering a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” entering and leaving Venezuela. Trump alleged Venezuela was using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes and vowed to escalate the military buildup.
Trump’s Republican administration has not sought any authorization from Congress for action against Venezuela. The go-it-alone approach has led to problematic military actions, experts say, none more so than the strike that killed two people who had climbed atop part of a boat that had been partially destroyed in an initial attack.
“If it’s not a war against Venezuela, then we’re using armed force against civilians who are just committing crimes,” said John Yoo, a Berkeley Law professor who helped craft the George W. Bush administration’s legal arguments and justification for aggressive interrogation after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “Then this question, this worry, becomes really pronounced. You know, you’re shooting civilians. There’s no military purpose for it.”
Yet for the first several months, Congress received little more than a trickle of information about why or how the U.S. military was conducting the operations. At times, lawmakers have learned of strikes from social media after the Pentagon posted videos of boats bursting into flames.
Hegseth now faces language included in an annual military policy bill that threatens to withhold a quarter of his travel budget if the Pentagon does not provide unedited video of the strikes to the House and Senate Committees on Armed Services.
The demand for release of video footage
For some, the controversy over the footage demonstrates the flawed rationale behind the entire campaign.
“The American public ought to see it. I think shooting unarmed people floundering in the water, clinging to wreckage, is not who we are as a people,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who has been an outspoken critic of the campaign.
But senators were told the Trump administration will not release all of the Sept. 2 attack footage because it would reveal U.S. military practices on intelligence gathering, said Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. She said the reasoning ignores the fact that the military has already released footage of the initial attack.
“They just don’t want to reveal the part that suggests war crimes,” she said.
Some GOP lawmakers are determined to dig into the details of the Sept. 2 attack. Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who ordered the second strike, was expected back on Capitol Hill on Wednesday for classified briefings with the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. The committees would also review video of the Sept. 2 strikes, Hegseth said.
Still, many Republicans emerged from the briefings backing the campaign, defending their legality and praising the “exquisite intelligence” that is used to identify targets. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) called the strike in question “certainly appropriate” and “necessary to protect the United States and our interests.”
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.
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.
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 Continuesbegan 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:
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.
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.
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.”
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’
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.
More than two years ago, a Chester County Voter Services employee made a dire prediction.
In an eight-page grievance against Voter Services Director Karen Barsoum, the employee described a hostile work environment in which election workers were subjected to “bullying” from the department’s director.
At the time of the complaint, the employee wrote, 15 people had left the 25-person department since Barsoum was hiredin 2021.
“I have very legitimate fears that there will be a mass exodus from voter services in the coming months,” the employee, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, wrote in the grievance document he provided to The Inquirer. “My concern is how this will impact the 370k voters of Chester County.”
Two years later, it appears that his prediction had come true. The number of staff departures since Barsoum took over grew to 29 by November of this year, according to a Chester County spokesperson.
Election offices across the nation have experienced a high level of turnover and staff burnout in recent years in the face of election denialism and threats, but Chester County’s churn-rate is nearly double the number of departures in Montgomery and Delaware Counties’ elections departments that have lost 16 and 15 people respectively in the same time period. Both departments are larger than Chester County’s election office.
Accounts and records from three former staffers at Chester County Voters Services Department, two of whomasked not to be named, paint a picture of a hostile work environment where employees were often made to feel as though management had placed a target on their back.
These concerns have been raised to elected and non-elected county leaders for more than two years.
Barsoum saidin an interview that she couldn’t respond to allegations from employees but described her management style as collaborative.
Employees, she said, had left for a variety of reasons including jobs in other Southeast Pennsylvania election offices that pay better than Chester County. Others, she said, left to pursue other opportunities or for family reasons.
Some, she said, left because of the increased pressures of election work as state law changes and the intensity increases.
“I encourage everyone to do what is the best for them,” Barsoum saidThursday.
Though Barsoum acknowledged it was challenging for the office when people left, she said she and other managers were very hands-on in training staff and ensuring that staff members knew the ins and outs of various positions.
Karen Barsoum, Chester County’s director of voter services, at the Chester County Government Services Building in 2022.
The employee who filed the grievance said he feared that the attrition would leadto mistakes during the 2024 presidential election, when the eyes of the nation were on Pennsylvania.
Ultimately, everyone who wanted to vote was able to, county officials said. But the error created a chaotic scene as the county kept polls open two additional hours and more than 12,000 voters were asked to cast provisional ballots — which require more steps from election workers and voters to be counted.
The county hired a WestChester law firm to investigate how and why the poll book error occurred.
Chester County’s CEO David Byerman, the county’s top unelected official, said that turnover across all departments can be attributed to a variety of factors in the county including pay and managers.
He described working in elections today as a “pressure cooker” as a result of the political climate.
The investigation, he said, would look closely at management in the department and whether factors existed that would have hindered staff from identifying or reporting concerns.
“The very fact that we’re doing an investigation into what happened last month … indicates that we want to learn more about what happened in this particular election,” Byerman said. “Part of that investigation is looking at the performance of our management team in voter services.”
It’s unclear at this stage whether the error can be attributed to the turnover and environment in voter services, but Paul Manson, a professor at Portland State University who researches challenges faced by election workers, said the turnover seen in Chester County is unusual and alarming.
Often, Manson said, staff tends to be relatively stable in election offices because they care deeply about the work. Stressors of reduced staffing and the toxic environment described by threeformeremployees, he said, could create a dynamic that makes mistakes more likely.
“When we have these periods of turnover local election officials really sort of grit their teeth because they worry about these small errors turning into big errors,” he said.
Election workers process mail ballots for the 2024 general election at the Chester County, administrative offices in West Chester. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Allegations of ‘hostility’ toward staff
Barsoum, who came to Chester County from Berks County in 2021, has earned respect in the election field nationally and within Pennsylvania. Barsoum had been the assistant director in the Berks election office.
“Karen Barsoum has an extraordinary knowledge that is a resource both statewide here in Pennsylvania and has been a resource nationally. I don’t think anyone doubts her knowledge of election processes,” said Byerman, the Chester County CEO.
“At the end of the day I think any manager needs to combine two abilities. An ability to manage an office effectively and an ability to be knowledgeable and an expert.”
Byerman said each manager in the county is evaluated on these criteria regularly, but when asked whether Barsoum possessed both qualities, Byerman did not respond.
Former county employees said Barsoum’s high reputation outside Chester County did not align with what they experienced in their jobs.
The employee who filed the grievance against Barsoum said he got along with her well when she started and he received high marks on performance reviews, according to documents provided to The Inquirer.
But after a reorganization in the department in 2022, he said, he noticed that more and more staff members were leaving. The employee was promoted to a new role and during the 2022 election did that job while maintaining responsibilities from his prior role.
He said he expressed concern about being overworked and received little support in the new role. After the employee said he dropped the ball on a minor item and reported it to Barsoum, she began treating him differently.
“In Karen’s eyes you’re either 100% right or 100% wrong,” he said in an interview.
The employee filed his grievance in August of 2023 after a meeting where, he said, Barsoum listed accomplishments of staff members and refused to acknowledge any of his work.
Barsoum’s “hostility” toward him in the meeting was so noticeable, he wrote in the complaint, that eight colleagues approached him afterward to say they noticed it.
“After so many months of mistreatment and disrespect in such a hostile work environment, it eventually gets to the point that something needs to be said. If the Presidential Election were to not run smoothly next year and ChesCo voters were disenfranchised due to the Voter Services, I would forever regret not sending this grievance,” the employee wrote in his grievance.
That employee left the department the next year. He was placed on a performance-improvement plan weeks after submitting his grievance, and, after completing that plan, he was placed on another as a result of a low performance review and quit before he could be terminated.
Elizabeth Sieb, who worked at the election office for eight years before leaving in 2022, said she had similar experiences with Barsoum to those detailed in the grievance. For the past year and a half she has been telling county officials about her concerns.
In 2022, Barsoum reorganized the office to respond to the new stressors of elections and new responsibilities that come with mail voting. Since then, she said, she and staff work to evaluate after each election what worked and what didn’t so adjustments can be made.
But Sieb said Barsoum didn’t take constructive criticism well when changes were made and stifled discussion among staff members.
Sieb was fired from the department in 2022. She said she was placed on a personal-improvement plan that demanded that she seek mental health treatment and subsequently placed on a three-day unpaid suspension.
Following the suspension, Sieb said, she was directed not to speak to her colleagues if it was not directly related to her work. She said she was fired for violating that rule when she reported to a lower-level manager concerns about another manager speaking disparagingly about a job applicant in earshot of other employees.
Sieb, who at times questioned Barsoum’s decisions, said she felt that the director was threatened by long-term staff and was prone to outbursts when employees would correct her.
“She was slowly but surely wearing down and getting rid of all the people that had been there a long time,” Sieb said.
Jennifer Morrell, the CEO of the Elections Group, a company that assists local election officials, said turnover in election offices happens for a variety of reasons — including the long hours and relatively low pay civil servants receive.
She noted that training programs from state agencies and associations are designed to help prevent errors as a result of turnover and that a larger department, like Chester County, may be able to fill rolls with election workers from other counties.
“Karen is highly respected in the election community, super professional,” Morrell said. “Our hearts just ached with what happened because it could have happened to anybody.”
Commissioners respond to concerns
After leaving the department, Sieb said, she believed she suffered from PTSD related to her experience.
Beginning in 2024 she began reaching out to Republican Commissioner Eric Roe with her concerns. Roe, Sieb said, investigated the complaints and brought them to the other commissioners, Democrats Josh Maxwell and Marian D. Moskowitz. The commissioners also serve as the county’s election board.
“I have had a lot of people come to me with various concerns throughout county government, and voter services is certainly one of them,” Roe told The Inquirer, explaining that his role as minority party commissioner makes him a frequent recipient of workforce complaints.
Chester County Commissioners (from left) Eric M. Roe, Josh Maxwell, and Marian D. Moskowitz at a board meeting in September.
But a year and a half later, Barsoum remained in her role and Sieb continued to hear from her former colleagues with concerns. Twice this year, Sieb went before the Chester County Election Board to raise public concerns about turnover under Barsoum.
Maxwell, who chairs the Chester County Election Board, said the county reviews reports from departments when they receive them. He said he was unable to comment on specific departments or personnel matters but said the county needed to do everything it could to support its election workers.
“We need to do a better job, I think, making sure that people feel valued. Including the folks that unfortunately we’ve lost,” he said.
Election work in Pennsylvania and elsewhere has gotten increasingly fraught. The work itself is more intense than it once was with more mail voting, and workers now deal with threats, longer hours, and a camera on them when they’re working with ballots.
“We were seen as clerical people, maybe, in the past; now we are wearing many different hats,” Barsoum said.
Moskowitz attributed much of the turnover in the county to burnout and noted the threats that election employees have faced in her years on the job.
Barsoum became emotional as she said she had worked to ensure that her staff had the resources they needed to feel safe, including mental health resources through the Human Resources department, team building outside election cycles, and a space for workers to step off camera.
“We can count on each other; we lean on each other. It’s a strong bond, a camaraderie,” she said.
When hiring new staffers, Barsoum said she warns them of what’s to come — that they’re not walking into a normal 9-to-5 job, that they won’t be able to plan vacations through about half of the year, and that they’ll be asked to take phone calls from irate people.
It’s a lifestyle, she said, that isn’t right for everyone — including some parents.
“If you’re leaning on a daycare and that is your sole, the go-to, it will be very hard to work in the department because there is 24/7 operations, and there are so many things that are going off and beyond the regular work schedule.”
Josh Maxwell, chair of Chester County Commissioners and the county Elections Board, presides over a September commissioners meeting.
Maxwell and Moskowitz declined to comment specifically when asked if they were confident in Barsoum’s leadership, but Maxwell has repeatedly asked residents to direct their anger at November’s error at him rather than Barsoum or her staff.
“I think it’s important that we protect these folks and we empower them to make the best decisions possible,” Maxwell said at an election board meeting last week.
Speaking to The Inquirer, he reiterated that point.
“We want to make sure that people feel welcomed and empowered and are in a working environment they appreciate,” Maxwell said in an interview.
“Elections have changed so much in five years it’s not surprising to me that some people want to find something new to do.”
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The same week Republican National Committee chair Joe Gruters said history predicted “almost certain defeat” for his party in the 2026 midterms, Pennsylvania Republicans partying in Midtown Manhattan projected relative calm about the election cycle.
Gruters, President Donald Trump’s handpicked chair to run the party, said on a conservative radio station last week: “It’s not a secret. There’s no sugarcoating it. It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way. We are facing almost certain defeat.”
He added that the goal is to win and he “liked our chances in the midterms,” but noted “only three times in the last hundred years has the incumbent party been successful winning a midterm.”
Pennsylvania could decide which party controls the U.S. House next year, as Democrats eye four congressional districts that Republicans recently flipped while the GOP fights to maintain its majority.
But Pennsylvania Republicans in New York City for the annual Pennsylvania Society glitzy gathering of politicos last weekend had a less hair-on-fire view.
“At this point when I was running [for Senate in 2024], the betting market said there was a 3% chance I was going to win,” Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) said after addressing a bipartisan audience at the Pennsylvania Manufacturer’s Association luncheon on Saturday.
“We’re a million miles from Election Day, and we’ve got a great track record of things to talk about and a great vision for how the president’s policies are going to make life better for working families,” McCormick said. “We just got to go out and make that message happen, but also continue to make the policies that are going to make that a reality happen.”
The political environment was, of course, far more favorable to Republicans in 2024, when Trump won Pennsylvania by a larger margin than he did in 2016. But with Republicans in power and popular Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro on the ballot for reelection, the headwinds in 2026 in the Keystone State are different.
Pennsylvania GOP chair Greg Rothman, in an interview outside the PMA event on Saturday, called Shapiro “one of the greatest politicians of my generation” but noted that upsets have happened across various political environments in state history.
“Anything can happen and the voters are smart, and all I can do is prepare the party to ride the waves and ignore the crashes, but I’m optimistic,” he added.
Meanwhile, Rothman predicted that the four Pennsylvania congressional incumbents running for reelection in swing districts will sink or swim based on how Trump and his policies land with voters come November.
“They will be judged by the national economy and by immigration,” he said, and by Trump’s ability to end some international conflicts.
But U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan, a GOP incumbent running for reelection in Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District, which includes Scranton, had a more local view of how to win in 2026.
“Everything about our job as a member of Congress is about northeastern Pa.,” Bresnahan said.
“Northeastern Pennsylvania has always been our North Star. We know our district. We are out in our district. We’ve done over 250 public events. Our constituency case work is, in my opinion, one of the best offices in the country.”
Bresnahan appeared at a rally with Trump in Mount Pocono last week. He was also one of just 20 House Republicans to sign a successful discharge petition to force a vote for collective bargaining to be restored for federal workers.
“At the end of the day that might have been going against party leadership, but it was what’s right for northeastern Pennsylvania,” he said.
Democrats have begun a full court press. That was evident at the Pennsylvania Society, where attendees seen mingling with other politicians included: Janelle Stelson, who is running for a second time against U.S. Rep. Scott Perry in the 10th Congressional District, as well as firefighter Bob Brooks and former federal prosecutor Ryan Croswell, both of whom are running for the Democratic nomination to take on U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in the Seventh.
Bresnahan’s challenger, Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, also attended the soiree and walked through the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center with U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.) on Friday night. Coons said the time is now for Democrats to get involved in these races.
“Given the margin, if there were to be four new Democrats in the House this cycle, as there were in 2018, that’d be the difference maker for the country,” Coons added.
Staff writer Gillian McGoldrick contributed to this article.
NEW YORK — Pennsylvania’s political class schmoozed their way across Midtown Manhattan this past weekend, bouncing from cocktail parties to swanky receptions organized to woo the elite ahead of a big midterm election year.
Four Inquirer political writers were among those who traveled to the Pennsylvania Society gathering, chatting with lawmakers and interviewing candidates inside the moody bars and penthouse parties. Here are our takeaways.
Maybe Shapiro doesn’t need Pa. Society anymore
Gov. Josh Shapiro this year has hosted fundraisers in New Jersey and Massachusetts for his unannounced reelection campaign.
But he didn’t need to make the rounds this weekend among Pennsylvania’s political elite as he emerges as a top contender for the 2028 Democratic nomination for president.
Shapiro traveled to New York City only to deliver his annual speech to the Pennsylvania Society and honor former U.S. Ambassador to Canada, David L. Cohen, who received the society’s top award.
Instead of handshaking and fundraising like most incumbent governors would, Shapiro has largely avoided Pennsylvania Society mingling during his time as governor. His reelection campaign did not appear to change that.
Pennsylvania politicians (from left) Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, Gov. Josh Shapiro and State House of Representatives Speaker Joanna E. McClinton last January attending the swearing-in ceremony of Attorney General David W. Sunday, Jr. in Harrisburg.
Instead, Lt. Gov. Austin Davis hosted a solo fundraiser for their joint reelection ticket.
“There’s a lot of demands on the governor’s time,” Davis said following a speech at the annual luncheon hosted by the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association.
The Third Congressional District race was the talk of the town
Three of the candidates vying to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans in the Third Congressional District had a busy weekend in New York. State Sen. Sharif Street, pediatric surgeon Ala Stanford, and State Rep. Morgan Cephas made the rounds.
Sharif Street speaks from the pulpit of Mother Bethel A.M.E. church Sunday, Nov. 2, 2025 as the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity holds a press conference with other community and political leaders to discuss the negative impacts of the ongoing government shutdown. Mother Bethel Pastor Rev. Carolyn Cavaness is at left.
Stanford held a somewhat star-studded fundraiser Thursday evening, hosted, according to a posted listing for the private event, by Hamilton actor Leslie Odom Jr. (who did not attend but lent his name).
Not spotted: StateRep. Chris Rabb, who is running as an anti-establishment progressive.
“That’s not really my thing,” he said in a text message.
The Parker-Johnson relationship was a hot topic
Philadelphia City Council wrapped up its final meeting of the year the day before the Pennsylvania Society began, and the lawmakers gave the chatterati plenty to talk about in Manhattan, with a dramatic close to the session.
One major topic of conversation in New York: What did Council’s recent conflict with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker over her housing plan mean for the unusually tight relationship between Council President Kenyatta Johnson and the mayor?
The consensus: Mom and Dad were fighting, but they’ll probably patch things up.
“Disagreements between Council and mayor — it happens,” said Larry Ceisler, a Philadelphia-based public affairs executive whose firm hosted a packed party in Midtown on Saturday. “It’s the way the system is set up.”
City Council president Kenyatta Johnson speaking with Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker in June 2024.
Johnson, he said, likely improved his standing with members by holding firm against a last-minute amendment Parker proposed to alter Council’s version of the housing plan’s budget.
Parker and Johnson both made the trek to Manhattan, along with Councilmembers Rue Landau, Nina Ahmad, Jamie Gauthier, Jeffery “Jay” Young Jr., Kendra Brooks, Katherine Gilmore Richardson, Jim Harrity, Cindy Bass, and Quetcy Lozada.
At the PMA luncheon, Parker embraced former Gov. Tom Corbett and gave a warm greeting to Auditor General Tim DeFoor, both Republicans.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker (left) and former Gov. Tom Corbett at the luncheon hosted by the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association on Saturday in New York.
At the same event, Republican U.S. Sen Dave McCormick shouted out Parker multiple times during his prepared remarks. The pair have forged a working relationship despite their partisan differences.
“We talk about challenges in the city that we’re facing right now, and the hope is that we can count on some folks as allies,” Parker said of meeting with members of the GOP.
She added: “It’s great to try to maintain those lines of communication.”
Special interests woo political elite
Many of the events were hosted by special-interest groups and corporations that have business with the government and are looking to win influence over glasses of Champagne.
There were the usual suspects and big law firms: Duane Morris always hosts a marquee late-night event on Friday in the sprawling Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center. Other firms including Cozen O’Connor, Ballard Spahr, and Saul Ewing also hosted cocktail parties.
The company, which has spent millions on political contributions and lobbying, threw a cocktail reception Thursday night at an Italian restaurant attended by a sizable contingent of state lawmakers.
But solutions seemed possible at the Pace-O-Matic party, as Central Pennsylvania Republicans and Philadelphia Democrats milled about the bar in an unlikely alliance.
Another bipartisan event — this one in a sunny room atop the vintage Kimberly Hotel — was hosted by Independence Blue Cross and AmeriHealth Caritas, insurance companies that have Medicaid contracts with the state.
Lawmakers often credit the weekend of partying in New York as a time for civil conversations in a neutral territory that ultimately benefit a philanthropic cause at the Pennsylvania Society’s annual dinner.
But Rabbi Michael Pollack, who leads the government accountability group March on Harrisburg, said the civility seems to come only when special interests are footing the bill.
“It’s absolutely embarrassing that our legislators can only interact with each other when a lobbyist sets up a playdate for them,” he said.
A Christmas budget ballad by DJ Ward
Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward debuted a hidden musical talent on stage at the annual bipartisan Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry breakfast: She canwrite a Harrisburg holiday hit.
“I did live in Nashville for six years and no one discovered me,” she joked, before launching into a three-minute budget balladto the tune of “Deck the Halls.”
Ward (R., Westmoreland) debuted her song after an ugly budget battle that lasted 135 days and ended just last month. Punctuated by fa-la-las, she called out each of the top leaders who were in the closed-door budget talks.
Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) speaking in February 2024 at the Capitol in Harrisburg.
Ward is among Shapiro’s top critics. The two had hardly spoken since 2023 until Ward joined in-person budget negotiations at the end of October.
Shapiro will propose a new budget in February, restarting the budget negotiation process.Ward urged the group of leaders to take a break from fighting during the holiday season.
It’s Christmas and we’re all here together
Republicans and Democrats, and all who matter
Let’s celebrate the birth of Jesus
For the next three weeks, let’s not be egregious
Perhaps next budget season will inspire a mixtape.
In the last six months, President Donald Trump has sent troops, immigration agents, or both to Democratic cities from coast to coast. The list includes Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Memphis, Portland, Ore., Charlotte, N.C., New Orleans, and Minneapolis.
But not Philadelphia.
The city that seemed an obvious early target, condemned by Trump as the place where “bad things happen,” has somehow escaped his wrath. At least so far.
That has sparked speculation from City Hall to Washington over why the president would ignore the staunchly Democratic city with which he has famously feuded. Here we offer some insight into whether that’s likely to change.
Why has Philadelphia been spared when smaller, less prominent cities have not?
Nobody knows. Or at least nobody knows for sure. But lots of people in government and immigration circles have ideas.
There’s the weather theory, that it’s hard for immigration agents who depend on cars to make arrests in cities that get winter snow and ice. Except, of course, the administration just launched Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minneapolis, which gets 54 inches of snow a year.
Then there’s the swing-state theory, that Trump is staying out of Philadelphia because Pennsylvania ranks among the handful of states that can tip presidential elections. But that doesn’t explain Trump’ssurge into North Carolina, where he sent immigration forces last month.
While the Tar Heel State voted for Trump three times, elections there can be decided by fewer than 3 percentage points.
U.S. Rep. BrendanBoyle, a Democrat whose North and Northeast Philadelphia district includes many immigrants, suggested a blue-state theory, that Trump has mostly targeted cities in states that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. But Boyle acknowledged that North Carolina and Tennessee are exceptions.
“It could just be that they’re working their way down the list,” Boyle said.
Has Mayor Cherelle L. Parker had a hand in keeping troops out of Philadelphia?
It depends on whom you talk to.
For months she has passed up opportunities to publicly criticize the president, turning aside questions about his intentions by saying she is focused on the needs of Philadelphia. Some believe her more passive approach has kept the city out of the White House crosshairs.
People close to the mayor point out that big-city mayors who land on the president’s bad side have faced big consequences. For instance, in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass frequently clashed with Trump ― and faced a National Guard deployment.
Some point out that Parker has good relationships with Republicans who are friendly with the president, including U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania, who has praised the mayor on multiple occasions.
On the other hand, some in the city’s political class ― especially those already skeptical of Parker ― say the suggestion that she has shielded the city gives her too much credit.
One strategist posited that the lack of overt federal action has more to do with Trump’s trying to protect a razor-thin Republican majority in the House, and that targeting Philadelphia could anger voters in the Bucks County and Lehigh Valley districts where Republicans hold seats.
What does Trump say about his plans for Philadelphia?
Trump suggested there should be a “permanent pause” on immigration from “hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries,” declared Washington the safest it has been in decades, and praised ICE as “incredible.”
“I love Philadelphia,” Trump declared. “It’s gotten a little rougher, but we will take it.”
That was a marked change from a decade ago, when Trump called Jim Kenney a “terrible” mayor, and Kenney called him a “nincompoop.”
Kenney fought Trump in court and won in 2018, when a U.S. District Court judge ruled that the president could not end federal grants based on how the city treats immigrants. After the ruling, the Irish mayor was captured on video dancing a jig and calling out “Sanctuary City!”
More recently, in May, Philadelphia landed on Trump’s list of more than 500 sanctuary jurisdictions that he planned to target for funding cuts. That was no surprise. Nor was it surprising that in August, when the administration zapped hundreds of places off that list, Philadelphia was among the 18 cities that remained.
“I don’t know why they’re not here yet,” said Peter Pedemonti, codirector of New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia. But the larger point is that “ICE is in neighborhoods every day, they are taking away people every day,” and he urged those who support immigrants to prepare.
“Now is the time to get involved with organizations that are organizing around this,” Pedemonti said. “There are neighbors who need us.”
Has Gov. Josh Shapiro helped dissuade federal action in Philadelphia?
It’s hard to say. Shapiro has challenged Trump in court multiple times, including when he was the state attorney general during Trump’s first term.
As governor,Shapiro sued the administration over its move to freeze billions in federal funds for public health programs, infrastructure projects, and farm and food bank contracts. He also joined a multistate suit challenging an executive order that restricted gender-affirming care for minors.
On immigration, however, Shapiro has been careful not to directly engage in the sanctuary city debate, saying his job is to provide opportunity for all Pennsylvanians. But he has been critical of Trump’s enforcement tactics, calling them fear-inducing and detrimental to the state’s economy and safety.
Still, Trump has not lashed out at Shapiro, a popular swing-state governor. At his rally in Mount Pocono last week, in which he criticized several Democrats, Trump didn’t mention Shapiro ― or the Republican in attendance who is running against the governor in 2026, Stacy Garrity.
Why is the president sending troops to American cities in the first place? Isn’t that unusual?
Highly unusual ― and fought in court by the leaders of many of the cities that have been targeted. On Wednesday, a federal judge blocked Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles, saying it was “profoundly un-American” to suggest that peaceful protesters “constitute a risk justifying the federalization of military forces.”
Trump says the National Guard is needed to end violence, to help support deportations, and to fight crime in Democratic-run cities. Last week he declared that Democrats were “destroying” Charlotte, after a Honduran man who had twice been deportedallegedly stabbed a person on a commuter train.
Two members of the West Virginia National Guard were hospitalized in critical condition ― one subsequently died ― after being shot by a gunman in Washington the day before Thanksgiving.
That the attack was allegedly carried out by an Afghan man who had been granted asylum helped spark a wave of immigration policy changes, all in the name of greater security. For some immigrants who are attempting to legally stay in the country, that has resulted in the cancellation of citizenship ceremonies and the freezing of asylum processes.
So what happens next?
It’s hard to say. Immigration enforcement will surely continue to toughen.
But it’s difficult to predict when or whether troops might land on Market Street.
“I’ve heard so many different theories,” said Jay Bergen, the pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church, who has helped lead demonstrations against courthouse arrests. “It’s probably all of them ― a little bit of the way Shapiro has positioned himself, the way the mayor has positioned herself, a little bit the electoral map of Pennsylvania, a little bit, more than a little bit, Trump’s own personality.”
That Philadelphia has been ignored to date doesn’t mean it won’t be in Trump’s sights tomorrow, Bergen said.
“This administration thrives on being unpredictable, and on sowing as much exhaustion and pain as possible,” Bergen said. “We don’t do ourselves a favor by getting panicked in advance, but we also need to be ready.”
President Donald Trump is expected to push the government to dramatically loosen federal restrictions on marijuana, reducing oversight of the plant and its derivatives to the same level as some common prescription painkillers and other drugs, according to six people familiar with the discussions.
Trump discussed the plan with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) in a Wednesday phone call from the Oval Office, said four of the people, who, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The president is expected to seek to ease access to the drug through an upcoming executive order that directs federal agencies to pursue reclassification, the people said.
The move would not legalize or decriminalize marijuana, but it would ease barriers to research and boost the bottom lines of legal businesses.
Trump in August said he was “looking at reclassification.” He would be finishing what started under President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, which followed the recommendation of federal health officials in proposing a rule to reclassify marijuana; that proposal has stalled since Trump took office.
“We’re looking at it. Some people like it, some people hate it,” Trump said this summer. “Some people hate the whole concept of marijuana because it does bad for the children, it does bad for the people that are older than children.”
Trump cannot unilaterally reclassify marijuana, said Shane Pennington, a D.C. attorney who represents two pro-rescheduling companies involved in the hearing. But he can direct the Justice Department to forgo the hearing and issue the final rule, Pennington said.
“This would be the biggest reform in federal cannabis policy since marijuana was made a Schedule I drug in the 1970s,” Pennington said.
The president was joined on the Wednesday call with Johnson by marijuana industry executives, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Mehmet Oz, three of the people said.
Johnson was skeptical of the idea and gave a list of reasons, including several studies and data, to support his position against reclassifying the drug, two of the people said.
Trump then turned the phone over to the executives gathered around his desk, who rebutted Johnson’s arguments, the people said.
Trump ended the call appearing ready to go ahead with loosing restrictions on marijuana, the people said, though they caution the plans were not finalized and Trump could still change his mind.
A White House official said no final decisions have been made on rescheduling of marijuana.
The Department of Health and Human Services referred questions to the White House. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.A representative from Johnson’s office declined to comment.
Marijuana is currently classified as a Schedule I substance, the same classification as heroin and LSD. Federal regulations consider those drugs to have a high potential for abuse and no accepted use for medical treatment.
Trump would move to classify marijuana as a Schedule III substance, which regulators say carry less potential for abuse and are used for certain medical treatments, but can also create risks of physical or psychological dependence.
Other Schedule III drugs include Tylenol with codeine, as well as certain steroid and hormone treatments.
Democrats and Republicans alikehave been interested in reclassifying marijuana, with some politicians citing its potential benefit as a medical treatment and the political popularity of the widely used drug.
Marijuana has become easier than ever to obtain, growing into an industry worth billions of dollars in the United States. Dozens of states and Washington, D.C., have legalized medical marijuana programs, and 24 have approved recreational marijuana.
The Biden administration pursued efforts to ease access to the drug, with health officials recommendingreclassification to Schedule IIIin 2023. But health officials have said that those recommendations were slowed down by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which took months to undergo required administrative reviews and were not completed before the end of Biden’s term.
The Drug Enforcement Administration was supposed to hold an administrative hearing on the proposal, with a judge hearing from experts on the health benefits and risks of marijuana. But the hearing has been in legal limbo since Trump took office, amid allegations from cannabis companies that the DEA was working to torpedo the measure.
