What Happened Today - 17 Dec 2025
What Happened Today – 17 December 2025
Susie Wiles Interview…
Watch all these boats get BLOWN UP!....except not this one….this one is Top Secret
Trump’s Address to the Nation Tonight
Venezuela Update…
Gun Violence…
Trump’s climate hit job
The health care bill and tax credit time bomb
Jack Smith Testimony Today
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Wiles Interview…
Susie Wiles basically stripped the paint off Trump World while still trying to present herself as the loyal fixer who keeps the chaos on the rails. She described Trump as having “an alcoholic’s personality” – not because he drinks, but because he’s compulsive, needs constant stimulation, and can’t let go once he’s locked in on something, and she essentially admitted that he sees prosecutions and government power as tools for “score settling,” saying the quiet part out loud about the revenge project at the core of MAGA. At the same time, she framed her own role as the enabler, saying her job is to “facilitate” whatever Trump wants because he’s the one voters chose, not to slow him down or moderate him, which is pure cult‑logic: his will is the mission, everyone else is just staff.
She painted his second‑term operation as a crew of “disruptors” and hard‑right loyalists that normal people would call extremists, but she dressed them up as brave anti‑establishment warriors, and she talked about the MAGA base as this stew of Joe Rogan listeners, conspiracy‑soaked people, and folks radicalized by Epstein‑style content, openly saying the goal is to turn them into permanent Republican/MAGA voters, not just Trump‑only fanatics. She also went in on people around Trump: saying J.D. Vance spent a decade as a conspiracy theorist and that his MAGA flip was “somewhat political” and opportunistic, even as she predicted he’ll be the 2028 nominee and bragged she’d be one of the first in his corner; calling Russell Vought a “right‑wing zealot”; saying Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the handling of the Epstein files; and blasting Elon Musk as “an avowed ketamine user” whose slash‑and‑burn approach to foreign aid left her “aghast.” She even admitted she pushed Trump not to pardon the most violent January 6 rioters and tried to slow‑roll some of his tariff stunts because the economic fallout would be brutal.
The fallout was exactly what you’d expect: the political world’s jaw hit the floor, and the Trump operation went straight into spin mode. Trump, instead of firing her, wrapped his arms around her, publicly defending her, shrugging off the “alcoholic’s personality” line, and making it clear she’s too essential to be sacrificed, which tells you how deep her hooks are in this administration. Wiles jumped online whining that the whole thing was a “disingenuously framed hit piece” designed to smear her, Trump, and the team by ripping her quotes out of context, and Karoline came in hot attacking the magazine, screeching about bias and insisting they left out all her praise of Trump, the staff, and their fantasy of having the “best cabinet in history.” Inside Trump World, staffers were stunned that she went this hard on the record and couldn’t understand why anyone green‑lit it, but outside, reporters and anti‑MAGA Republicans looked at it as confirmation from inside the house: yes, it’s vindictive, yes, it’s stacked with zealots, yes, it’s a vehicle for payback. And the key tell in all of it is that after she aired all that dirty laundry, Trump still chose to ride with her, which basically proves she isn’t just another aide — she’s one of the core engineers of the MAGA machine.
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Watch all these boats get BLOWN UP!....except not this one….this one is Top Secret
Pete’s “of course we will not release a Top Secret video of this” line is exactly the kind of tell that makes this whole thing stink.
He’s talking about the September 2 strike on that suspected drug boat in the Caribbean, where the U.S. hit the vessel once, killed nine people, then came back roughly 40 minutes later and ordered a second strike that killed the last two survivors who had climbed onto the overturned hull. After that, they launched additional strikes just to sink what was left of the boat, which is why people are using phrases like “double‑tap” and asking if this edges into war‑crime territory. Congress has seen the second‑strike video in classified briefings, and multiple lawmakers who are not exactly wild peaceniks walked out saying it was “deeply disturbing” and that those two survivors didn’t look like an imminent threat at all.
Meanwhile, the Trump crew has had zero problem blasting out all the “cool” clips of earlier boat hits — grainy black‑and‑white footage of “narco‑terrorist” vessels getting blown to hell, which they pushed all over social media and right‑wing TV as propaganda for how “tough” they are. That’s why Hegseth’s sudden “long‑standing policy” speech about classification is so bogus: they were more than happy to declassify and distribute everything that made them look badass, right up until they got to the one video that apparently looks like we executed two guys clinging to a flipped boat. Even Republicans like John Cornyn are saying out loud that this is exactly how conspiracy theories get born — you brag about the sexy edited footage and then slam the door on the one clip everyone’s asking to see.
Hegseth’s line yesterday — “Of course we’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public” — came right after a closed‑door Senate briefing where he refused to commit to any public release and ducked questions. At the same time, he’s pushing this “we followed long‑standing Department of Defense policy” line while Trump, who two weeks ago was saying “no problem, we’ll release it,” has now backed off and punted the whole decision to Pete: “Whatever Hegseth wants to do is OK with me.” Lawmakers who saw the video are openly saying the quiet part — that the Pentagon “has issues” with what’s on that tape and is clearly trying to bury it — and they’re now talking about open hearings and even threatening Hegseth’s travel budget to force more transparency.
So yeah, what are you hiding, Pete? You can’t spend months turning boat‑strike footage into MAGA hype reels and then suddenly pretend you’ve discovered sacred classification rules the moment we get to the clip that might show your guys killing unarmed survivors. If the video really backed up his story about an imminent threat, they’d have it on Fox by tonight. The fact that they’re locking it down and praying “top secret” shuts everyone up tells you exactly how bad it looks.
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Trump’s Address to the Nation Tonight
Trump’s Oval Office show tonight is basically a year‑end MAGA infomercial with a side of “don’t worry about the chaos, I’ve got this.” He’s scheduled to speak at 9 p.m. Eastern from the White House, framed as a big “address to the nation” as he wraps up his first year back in power and tries to stop his approval from bleeding out in the low 40s.
Karoline has already previewed the script: he’s going to brag about his so‑called “historic accomplishments” on the economy, border, and inflation, paint the last 11 months as some kind of roaring comeback, and then tease new policy moves for next year. Expect him to hit the usual beats — “we inherited a mess from Biden,” “worst inflation in history,” “I fixed it,” and a lot of chest‑thumping about being tough on the border and “narco‑terrorists” at the same time he’s catching heat over those boat strikes.
Officially, the White House is selling it as a broad “agenda and accomplishments” address, not a single‑issue speech, but it’s clearly also about changing the narrative: his approval is stuck around 39–42 percent, people are still pissed about prices, and he’s under fire on Venezuela, the blockade, and that boat‑strike video Hegseth won’t cough up. Network notes say he’ll talk up border crackdowns, tariffs, and energy as proof he’s “bringing the country back to greatness,” and might drop hints about new immigration and economic moves in early 2026.
So, bottom line: tonight is Trump trying to reset the story before Christmas — wrap himself in “great year, best is yet to come” rhetoric, plaster over the scandals and war‑crime questions, and lock the base in front of the TV while he sells them on another three years of this circus.
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Venezuela Update…
Trump’s having an absolute meltdown online because he just escalated from “tough talk” to an actual naval blockade around Venezuela, and he’s trying to sell it like some heroic anti‑terror operation instead of what it is: a dangerous act of war with zero real plan behind it. In that rant, he branded Maduro’s government a “FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” claimed Venezuela “stole” U.S. oil and land, and bragged that the country is now “completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America,” promising a “TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE” of all “sanctioned oil tankers” going in and out until they hand over “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets they previously stole from us.”
What that actually means on the ground (and water) is the U.S. is moving from sanctions and one‑off seizures to actively stopping certain oil tankers headed to or from Venezuela, with a big naval and air presence already in place in the Caribbean. A blockade like this is not some symbolic gesture; under international law, it’s widely considered an act of war, which is why people are freaking out — you’re talking about U.S. ships potentially intercepting or even firing on foreign‑flagged tankers, including those tied to Russia, China, or other countries that are not going to shrug that off. Oil traders and markets already reacted: prices bumped up as analysts started gaming out what happens if Venezuelan supply gets squeezed harder or if there’s an incident at sea that drags in other countries.
For Venezuela, this is existential. Venezuelan officials are calling it a “grotesque threat” and a “reckless, serious violation of international law” aimed at “stealing the riches that belong to our homeland,” and they’ve already said they’ll denounce it at the U.N. Maduro has mobilized his military, moved more forces around the coast, and is clearly preparing for a long siege dynamic — not necessarily full‑scale war with the U.S., which they can’t win, but a mix of heightened internal repression, militia activity, and asymmetric responses if this drags on. Regionally, other Latin American governments are spooked because any misstep — a misidentified ship, a shot fired at the wrong tanker — can spiral into a broader crisis and spill instability across borders.
For us, this is where the “are we at war?” question comes in. A naval blockade, even one limited to “sanctioned oil tankers,” is by definition a step toward armed conflict; you can’t enforce it without being ready to threaten, board, or sink ships that don’t comply. Anti‑war groups and foreign‑policy people are saying out loud that this is essentially Iraq‑war energy in South America, especially combined with the boat‑strike campaign that’s already killed nearly 100 people in “drug” operations and is under fire for that double‑tap strike on survivors. Even if Trump never sends Marines onto Venezuelan soil, you’re already in a low‑grade, undeclared war dynamic: economic strangulation, armed interdictions at sea, covert and “surgical” strikes, and a real risk of miscalculation.
Congress, meanwhile, is mostly behind the curve and ducking responsibility. A bunch of Democrats and a handful of Republicans have been warning for weeks that the tanker seizure and ramping boat strikes were sliding us toward war and tried to push a war powers resolution to block unauthorized military action against Venezuela; Senate Republicans killed it, with only people like Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski crossing over. Now that Trump has openly declared a blockade and called it what it is, some in the House — folks like Joaquin Castro — are saying this is “unquestionably an act of war” and pushing another war powers vote, but leadership in the GOP‑run Congress has mostly looked the other way while cheering the tough‑on‑Maduro optics. So at this moment, you’ve got Trump unilaterally edging us into a confrontation, the Pentagon dodging detailed questions and hiding key videos, oil markets jittery, Venezuela dug in, and Congress doing what it does best in MAGA era: talking big on cable while letting the president play war on his phone.
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Gun Violence…
The Bondi Beach terror attack in Australia is still front and center, with authorities now formally charging a suspect with murder and terrorism after the December 14 massacre that targeted the local Jewish community and left at least 15 dead and many more injured. Investigators are also talking about possible ISIS-inspired motives and training links abroad, which is ramping up political pressure around security and extremism.
In the U.S., there’s a fresh shock out of academia and tech: an MIT fusion scientist, Nuno Loureiro, was shot and killed at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and police have opened a homicide investigation but aren’t naming a suspect yet, which has people on edge in that community. On top of that, Brown University is still dealing with the fallout of a deadly campus shooting, with two students killed, a suspect still being hunted, and events and games canceled while law enforcement chases new leads and images of a person of interest.
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Trump’s climate hit job
The move on the National Center for Atmospheric Research isn’t some minor “reorg”; the White House budget guy Russ Vought is openly bragging that NSF will “break up” NCAR in Boulder because he sees it as a major source of “climate alarmism,” with a plan to shut down the Mesa Lab and scatter only the pieces they consider “vital,” like some weather modeling and supercomputing, to other entities. They’re explicitly targeting anything they label “green new scam research” and “woke” projects — including Indigenous climate work, community-focused climate justice, and even research on how weather and climate affect offshore wind — which tells you the goal is to kneecap long-term climate science, not just trim fat.
Scientists and Colorado lawmakers are already sounding the alarm because NCAR is one of the core hubs for global climate and weather research, running aircraft campaigns, a big federal supercomputer in Wyoming, and employing more than 800 people through UCAR, with about half the budget coming from NSF alone. On top of that, this comes right after Trump moved to slash NOAA’s research arm and kill $100+ million in Colorado transportation grants tied to EVs, rail upgrades, and hydrogen R&D, so this isn’t a one-off — it’s a coordinated gutting of anything that looks like serious climate or clean-energy work, with Boulder and Colorado squarely in the crosshairs because he’s also feuding with the state’s Democratic governor over the prosecution of a 2020 election denier.
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The health care bill and tax credit time bomb
Over in Congress, Republicans are doing the same “burn it down” routine on health care subsidies: House GOP leaders are pushing a health care package that keeps a bunch of standard programs going but very deliberately leaves out the enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits that have been holding down marketplace premiums for more than 20 million people. If they let those tax credits die at year’s end — which is exactly where their current position points — average premiums are projected to spike by over a thousand dollars a year in 2026, with some estimates saying they’ll more than double, while Republicans keep saying they won’t do a “clean” extension and instead demand “reforms” like tighter income limits and eliminating zero-premium plans.
Democrats are trying to lock in a multi-year extension of the credits, moderates are floating half-measure one- or two-year deals, and GOP leadership in both chambers is basically holding the subsidies hostage to force structural changes that make coverage sting more for low-income people in the name of fighting “fraud.” Bottom line, Trump world is squeezing long-term climate science on one side and affordable coverage on the other, and they’re doing it in the most performative way possible — publicly sneering at “alarmism” and “free” plans while the people who actually rely on this stuff are the ones set to eat the fallout in the next couple of years.
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Jack Smith Testimony Today
Jack Smith is basically being hauled in today so House Republicans can beat up on the ghost of the Trump prosecutions and rewrite the story in Trump’s favor — and he actually pushed for this to be out in the open, not behind closed doors.
The closed‑door grilling he wanted public
Today he’s sitting for a closed‑door deposition with Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee, after they subpoenaed him for testimony and a pile of documents about his Trump probes during the Biden years, even though Smith signaled he preferred a public hearing where everyone could see the exchanges instead of selective leaks and spin. Republicans are framing this as an “abuse of power” and “political persecution” spectacle, while Smith’s camp is making it clear he’s there to correct their narrative and walk through what his office actually did in the Jan. 6/election case and the Mar‑a‑Lago documents case, and would have gladly said it all on camera.
He’s expected to talk about both investigations but draw a hard line on anything that touches grand jury material or still‑protected evidence, so he’s not going to turn it into a circus just because they want clips. GOP members want to hammer him on phone records and subpoenas involving Republican lawmakers, and Smith is reportedly ready to flatly say they’re misrepresenting what he did and why — which is exactly why he wanted the public to see the back‑and‑forth instead of only their curated version.
How we got here
Smith isn’t special counsel anymore; he wrapped his work in early January 2025, filed a long final report laying out the evidence in both the election‑subversion and classified‑documents cases, and then resigned before Trump was sworn back in. The Jan. 6/election case got kneecapped when the Supreme Court handed presidents broad immunity for “official acts” and DOJ later dropped it after Trump’s reelection, while the documents case died when Judge Aileen Cannon tossed it on technical grounds.
That’s why Trump world and House Republicans are so focused on Smith personally now: they can’t undo the indictments he filed, but they can drag him in, scream about “weaponization,” and try to turn the whole thing into a warning shot against anyone who might prosecute a president like Trump again. Smith, for his part, is basically stuck doing cleanup duty — defending the legitimacy of the investigations on their turf and their terms — and the one thing he clearly wanted was sunlight, which they refused so they could control the narrative.
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America seems so great right now….
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.