Many posts have dealt with news media
The share of Americans who say they follow the news all or most of the time has decreased since 2016, according to nearly a decade’s worth of Pew Research Center surveys. This shift comes amid changes in the platforms people use for news and declining trust in news organizations.
Previous posts have discussed the president's pardon power.
From a U.S. prison cell, Honduras' ex-president secured a likely pardon for drug trafficking thanks to a letter he penned praising President Trump — whom he called "Your Excellency" — and a persistent lobbying campaign by longtime Trump pal Roger Stone.
Why it matters: The surprise announcement of Juan Orlando Hernandez's looming pardon is a window into the unorthodox, norm-shattering way Trump grants clemency.
Driving the news: Trump announced Friday that he planned to pardon Hernandez ahead of Sunday's elections in Honduras, where the White House backed the right-wing National Party that Hernandez led as president from 2014-2022.National Party candidate Nasry "Tito" Asfura is narrowly leading a center-right candidate as votes are being counted in a three-way race, according to the BBC.
Zoom in: Shortly after Trump took office in January, Stone wrote three separate Substack posts calling for the pardon of Hernandez, who was indicted the day he left office in 2022 and extradited to the U.S. to face cocaine-trafficking and weapons charges.
Stone cast Hernandez as a victim of leftist "lawfare" in Honduras and in President Biden's administration.Stone told Axios that on Friday he reached out to Trump and reiterated those points. Stone claimed a pardon announcement would energize the National Party and called Trump's attention to Hernandez's four-page letter begging for clemency.
Hours later, at 4 p.m., Trump posted on Truth Social that he'd endorse Asfura. Less than 20 minutes later, he posted that he'd pardon Hernandez.
"It was a Biden setup," Trump told reporters Sunday about the case against Hernandez, who's serving a 45-year sentence.
Except that the first Trump administration launched the Hernandez investigation:
Jonah E. Bromwich at NYT:When President Trump pardoned the former leader of Honduras this week, he erased the crowning achievement of years of work by one of his own former criminal defense lawyers and top Justice Department officials, Emil Bove III.
Mr. Bove, a firm believer in the prerogatives of executive power, became known for defending Mr. Trump against several prosecutions, and his profile rose further when, at the Justice Department, he oversaw the firing of dozens of prosecutors and F.B.I. agents Mr. Trump perceived as enemies. In May, the president nominated him as a federal appeals court judge and the Senate confirmed him in July.
But before that, Mr. Bove was a hard-charging prosecutor in Manhattan bent on convicting members of a Honduran drug-trafficking conspiracy.
From 2015 to when he left the job in 2021, Mr. Bove helped lead the investigation that identified Honduras as a key conduit for cocaine shipments into the United States. The inquiry revealed the violence that had cleared a pathway for the drugs through Honduras, as the country’s officials mowed down anyone who sought to thwart them. And it ultimately led to the conviction in 2024 of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who prosecutors said had been at the center of the conspiracy.
Many posts have discussed demographic trends, especially the decline of births and the aging of the population.
A silver tsunami is washing across our shores, as record numbers of Americans start hitting retirement age. The U.S. isn't ready.
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About 45% of Americans will experience retirement-funding shortfalls if they retire at 65, according to Morningstar's projections from last year.
....Out-of-pocket medical expenses are escalating, the cost of in-home care is growing more than three times faster than inflation, and an increasing share of the elderly are spending more than a third of their income on real estate too.
...Only about 14% of Generation X (those ages 45-60) have a pension plan, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security.
....On paper, retirement accounts might make older Americans appear wealthy. There are an increasing number of 401(k) millionaires, after all.
But with costs and debts rising — and lifespans lengthening — older Americans might run out of money, she says, or be forced to severely cut back spending. "We have shades of the retirement crisis right now."
Between the lines: There's massive inequality when it comes to retirement readiness — workers earning more than $150,000 a year contribute nearly 13 times more toward retirement than those earning under $50,000, a report out in November found....
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About 56 million Americans age 65 and older receive Social Security benefits, per federal data.
The lowest-earning workers rely on it. Social Security is the primary source of income for retirees with household incomes below $50,000, according to Transamerica's 2025 retirement survey.A cut of 20% to 25% in Social Security benefits would have a devastating impact on retirees who rely heavily or solely on those payments," said Kristi Martin Rodriguez, who leads the Nationwide Retirement Institute. "61% of current recipients say missing even half of a payment would leave them unable to survive financially."
Former US military lawyers speak out
— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) November 29, 2025
"The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both"
Statement on Media Reports of Pentagon “No Quarter” Orders in Caribbean Boat Strikes pic.twitter.com/eXo0bs4zyb
Tyler Pager at NYT:The president of the United States may not order offensive military action in or against Venezuela without congressional approval.
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) November 29, 2025
Not the Constitution nor the War Powers Resolution nor past AUMFs authorize such hostilities.
Any such orders are unconstitutional and unlawful. https://t.co/jo6UVS6K1y
President Trump and his top aides have said that drug cartels present one of the most pressing dangers to the United States, and have promised to eradicate them from the Western Hemisphere.
As part of that effort, Mr. Trump signaled on Saturday that he was ratcheting up his campaign against drug cartels, saying in a social media post that airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
Less than 24 hours earlier, Mr. Trump had announced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who had been convicted in the United States of drug trafficking charges in what was seen as a major victory for authorities in a case against a former head of state. That pardon has not yet been officially granted.
The two posts displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.” In fact, prosecutors said that Mr. Hernández, for years, allowed bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
Customary International Humanitarian Law:
Several posts have discussed naturalization and denaturalization.
Denaturalization is in the news.
Faiza Patel, Margy O’Herron, and Kendall Verhovek at the Brennan Center:
Under the law today, the government may seek denaturalization proceedings either when naturalization is obtained illegally or disqualifying facts on citizenship applications are concealed. But throughout much of the 20th century, it was much easier to achieve.
More than 22,000 Americans lost their citizenship between 1907 and 1967 based on political affiliations, race, and gender, according to denaturalization scholar Patrick Weil. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration began denaturalizing German- and Asian-born citizens during World War I, along with anarchists and people who spoke out against the war. During World War II, a push for denaturalization of naturalized citizens from Germany, Italy, and Japan intensified. A primary target included members of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund for disloyalty and insufficient attachment to the principles of the Constitution.
After the war, the Second Red Scare took hold of a country fearful of domestic communism amid its emergence abroad. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led witch hunts, with denaturalization often used as a tool against accused communists or sympathizers. Among those targets was Harry Bridges, an Australian-born, nationally known labor leader accused of being a communist, who faced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to revoke his citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, not once, but twice.
Throughout the 20th century, the Court’s jurisprudence evolved to protect naturalized citizens — even those with unpopular views during wartime — against efforts to strip them of citizenship. The Court established constraints on the government’s ability to revoke citizenship in a case challenging an attempt to denaturalize Russian-born William Schneiderman over ties to the Communist Party. The Court wrote, “We believe the facts and the law should be construed as far as is reasonably possible in favor of the citizen.” It also emphasized that citizenship should not be rescinded lightly: “[The United States] must sustain the heavy burden which then rests upon it to prove lack of attachment by ‘clear, unequivocal, and convincing’ evidence.”
A few years later, the Supreme Court warned against using denaturalization proceedings as a political weapon. “Ill-tempered expressions, extreme views, even the promotion of ideas which run counter to our American ideals, are not to be given disloyal connotations in absence of solid, convincing evidence that that is their significance,” the Court’s majority wrote. “Any other course would run counter to our traditions, and make denaturalization proceedings the ready instrument for political persecutions.”
In 1967, the Court found that under the 14th Amendment, the government cannot forcibly deprive a naturalized American of citizenship without the citizen’s consent, except when citizenship is “unlawfully procured.”
In the succeeding decades, denaturalizations declined significantly. Between 1990 and 2017, the Justice Department filed an average of just 11 cases per year. Only during the Obama administration did they climb, when new technology allowed the government to search decades of data for indicators of possible fraud. In 2016, the yearly average rose to 15. During the first Trump administration, the program expanded, increasing the average to 25 per year.
Yet the Supreme Court remained resistant to easing limits on denaturalization. In 2017, the Court unanimously ruled that citizenship was “unlawfully procured” only if the unlawful act, such as making a false statement, had a causal connection to the acquisition of citizenship. The Court wrote that a prosecutor should not be able to “scour her paperwork” and bring a charge because doing so would “give prosecutors nearly limitless leverage — and afford newly naturalized citizens precious little security.”