What Happened Today - 12 Dec 2025
What Happened Today – 12 December 2025
Trump, messaging, and approval
Policy moves and White House spin
Markets and economic backdrop
Legal, accountability, and ICE‑type issues
Who’s cheering, who’s fuming
Epstein Update
Two Public Speeches last night…the lies he told
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Trump, messaging, and approval
Over the last couple days, the big through‑line is Trump trying to sell this whole “affordability” and “I fixed the economy” tour while his numbers are still underwater and, if anything, getting softer on the economy itself. One of the latest national polls has his overall approval stuck in the high 30s to low 40s, with disapproval firmly in the mid‑50s to 60 range, and separate polling specifically on his handling of the economy shows a new low around the mid‑30s, which is brutal for a sitting president who never shuts up about being a “business genius.” The only semi‑bright spot for him is a tiny bump inside the Republican base on cost‑of‑living questions, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the broader public, more people think he’s screwing this up than fixing it.
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Policy moves and White House spin
Policy‑wise, the recent pattern is Trump leaning into splashy, made‑for‑TV economic and education announcements while the underlying numbers and legal hits keep undercutting the narrative. You’ve got him bragging about things like big agreements with major institutions and pharma companies and promising cheaper meds and new training programs, all while new polling shows his economic approval hitting a second‑term low and public frustration over costs still running hot. The official White House output in the last day has been the usual mix of statements and talking points trying to frame everything as “historic wins” even though the data is screaming that people simply don’t buy it.
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Markets and economic backdrop
On the markets side, the last 12 hours have been a weird split: the Dow and S&P 500 just tagged fresh record highs, but futures this morning are mixed, with the Dow slightly green and the S&P and Nasdaq leaning down as traders look like they’re locking in some of those gains. The S&P 500 hit a new all‑time high yesterday and is now wobbling a bit pre‑market, while Nasdaq futures are down around half a percent as tech names get picked over, which undercuts Trump’s constant bragging that the market is an uncomplicated “report card” on him. The overall vibe is frothy retail enthusiasm on one side and more cautious “maybe it’s time to take profits” energy from Wall Street on the other, not exactly the stable, boring prosperity he keeps trying to claim credit for.
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Legal, accountability, and ICE‑type issues
On the accountability front, the broader Trump orbit is still boxed in by courts and watchdogs, especially around immigration and civil liberties. One recent ruling smacked down an administration policy of detaining and deporting foreign scholars over pro‑Palestinian views, calling it unconstitutional and clearly aimed at punishing speech, which fits the same pattern as his hard‑line ICE posture and the hostile climate for immigrants and critics in general. Even when there isn’t a headline‑grabbing ICE death in the last 12 hours, the legal and policy landscape around detention, deportation, and politically targeted enforcement is still very much in play, and judges are not buying some of the more nakedly repressive moves.
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Who’s cheering, who’s fuming
Inside his orbit, the usual lineup of loyalists and right‑wing media are hyping his “affordability” push and the record Dow as if he single‑handedly willed it all into existence, even while the actual polling says voters are not rewarding him for any of it. On the other side, critics are leaning hard on the gap between his swagger and reality: weak approval, economic anxiety that hasn’t gone away, constitutional smackdowns on his more authoritarian instincts, and a foreign‑policy posture that has him blasting allies as “weak” and “decaying” while trying to play global strongman. No giant new flameout from Karoline or a single viral post in the last 12 hours that completely resets the narrative, but the accumulated picture is the same: Trump yelling that everything’s great, the numbers and the courts saying “no it isn’t,” and the country basically split between die‑hard MAGA backers and everyone else who’s exhausted or furious.
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Epstein Update
Yeah, there’s a real Epstein wave hitting today, and it’s aimed straight at the powerful crowd that’s been pretending this would all stay buried.
What just dropped today
House Democrats on the Oversight Committee just dropped a fresh batch of Epstein material pulled from his estate, including a new round of photos showing Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Woody Allen and other big‑name types in Epstein’s orbit at various events and locations over the years. It’s exactly the kind of visual evidence that blows up the “we barely knew the guy” routine, even if the outlets are careful to say none of these photos, by themselves, prove criminal activity. The timing is deliberate: they’re using this photo dump to crank up pressure on Trump’s DOJ ahead of a looming legal deadline to cough up the real meat of the government’s Epstein files.
The law forcing DOJ’s hand
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act last month, and Trump signed it, which now forces his own Justice Department to release unclassified records on Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell by December 19, with limited redactions for victims and ongoing investigations. That means flight logs, internal communications, witness interviews, immunity deals, and a whole lot more can’t just sit in some dark archive anymore, no matter how uncomfortable it gets for the rich and connected. Trump dragged his feet and even mocked people demanding the files earlier this year, then flipped once it was clear this bill had massive support and he’d look like he was openly protecting Epstein’s world if he fought it.
Judges blowing the doors open
On top of the congressional pressure, federal judges in both Florida and New York have now ordered grand jury materials from the old Epstein and Maxwell cases to be unsealed, explicitly citing this new law as the reason they can override the usual secrecy. You’re talking hundreds of thousands of pages when you add up all the DOJ investigative files and these grand jury records, with releases expected to start rolling out ahead of that December 19 deadline. The courts are building in protections for victims’ identities, but they’re not buying any excuse to keep the broader story locked up, which is a big win for transparency and a big problem for anyone whose name shows up in those networks.
Where Trump fits into this
Media coverage is already highlighting Trump’s long, uncomfortable proximity to Epstein: the old social photos, the “friend” phase, the later attempt to distance himself, and now his signature on a law that forces his own administration to open the vault. The outlets are basically all making the same point: Trump hasn’t been charged with anything in the Epstein mess, but this new wave of documents, grand jury material, and photos guarantees his ties to that world are going to be back under a microscope at exactly the moment he wants the story to be about his “law and order” image. Between the committee releases and the court orders, today is basically the pre‑game show for a much bigger Epstein document flood that could embarrass a lot of powerful people, including this White House.
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Two Public Speeches last night…the lies he told
Lie 1: “We obliterated Iran’s nuclear program”
In the signing‑ceremony Q&A he bragged again that the U.S. “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites and supposedly wiped out their ability to make nukes. That’s not true: U.S. and allied intel assessments say the strikes did damage and set parts of the program back, but key underground centrifuges, stockpiles, and infrastructure survived, and nobody serious in the intel world is saying the program was “completely and totally obliterated.” It’s damaging as hell because he’s lying about the success of a risky act of war – it misleads the public, signals to Iran and others that he doesn’t even accept his own intel, and makes it easier to sell more escalation later by pretending the last round of bombs solved everything when they clearly didn’t.
Lie 2: “The world is safer because of those strikes”
He rolled this into his usual line that his Iran strikes made the world “far safer” and basically eliminated the nuclear threat. Reality check: experts say Iran’s capabilities were degraded, not erased, and the attack raised the risk of wider conflict, triggered retaliatory moves, and pushed Tehran to harden and adapt its program rather than abandon it. That’s dangerous because it sells Americans a feel‑good superhero story about bombing solving complex nuclear issues, when in fact it can make diplomacy harder, encourage copycat “preventive” strikes by other countries, and normalize presidents sidestepping Congress on acts of war.
Lie 3: “We passed the largest spending and regulation cuts in American history”
At the Congressional Ball he boasted that “we passed the largest spending cuts in American history” and “the largest regulation cuts by far in American history.” Independent budget and policy analyses have repeatedly debunked that kind of line: the actual spending picture under him is nowhere near the biggest cut ever, and while he has slashed a lot of rules, other administrations have done comparable or larger changes when you account for scale and impact. This matters because it turns the whole legislative record into pure branding – if people believe those lies, it hides the real trade‑offs in his budgets and deregulatory moves, including cuts or rollbacks that hit health care, workers, the environment, and consumer protections.
Lie 4: “Open borders” and “criminal aliens” everywhere
In the Ball speech he leaned back into the fantasy that Democrats support “open borders” and that his pet laws are why “criminal aliens” aren’t out there “killing” and “slicing up our people.” There is no open‑borders law and crime data does not support the idea that immigrants, documented or undocumented, are the uniquely driving force behind violent crime; in many places, immigrants commit crime at equal or lower rates than native‑born citizens. This is corrosive because it weaponizes fear and racism as policy – it feeds support for ICE crackdowns, mass detention, and deportations, and it dehumanizes entire communities so abuse becomes easier to justify and harder to stop.
Lie 5: “150 years they tried to build this ballroom”
He also claimed at the Congressional Ball that people have been trying to add a White House ballroom for about 150 years and only he is finally getting it done. There have been occasional proposals over the decades, but not some continuous, 150‑year crusade that only “strong” leadership could achieve; that’s him inflating a vanity construction project into some epic, historic mission. It seems small, but it fits the pattern: he constantly rewrites recent and distant history to center himself as the lone savior, which slowly trains people to distrust boring reality and accept his version of events as the only one that counts.
Why this pattern is so toxic
Across both appearances, the common thread is the same: he lies about war and nuclear risk to look tough, lies about policy and budgets to look like a super‑effective dealmaker, and lies about immigrants and Democrats to keep his base angry and scared. That nonstop distortion is dangerous because it wrecks any shared baseline of facts, makes informed oversight and voting nearly impossible, and gives cover for extreme policies – from reckless foreign strikes to ICE abuses to gutting protections at home – all sold on stories that simply aren’t true.
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Well folks, have a good weekend. Here’s to surviving another week of insanity.
Speak Truth! Keep speaking TRUTH!
Don’t Give up the Ship!
Go Cause Good Trouble, with Your Elbows Up!
These are facts that I researched and verified – AI helped put together some sentence structure, but the words and tone are mine. These are my views based upon facts, research and thoughtful consideration using logic. I own the copyright to any images used. I’m comfortable to stand alone to uphold truth. Feel free to check me, but do not attack me. I am only causing good trouble.