Good evening, everyone. Today may have been a quieter news day, but there’s something important we need to talk about. This update focuses on a series of Truth Social posts Donald Trump released this afternoon—posts that include an image depicting himself as a king, along with fresh threats to prosecute sitting U.S. senators. The result? Those members of Congress have since been inundated with thousands of threats, including death threats and bomb threats directed at their homes.
You won’t find all of this covered across major media outlets. And there’s a reason for that: too many organizations have grown comfortable sane-washing Trump’s behavior—normalizing it, downplaying it, or pretending it’s simply part of the background noise. As of this moment, I haven’t found a single outlet reporting on Trump’s self-coronation image with Democrats kneeling at his feet.
And I can’t help but ask: What if any other elected official posted something like this? The outrage would be immediate—and justified. But when Trump does it, the reaction is too often a collective shrug, a tired “that’s just Trump.”
I refuse to treat it as normal. I won’t minimize it. And that’s the difference you get here: journalism that doesn’t bend, doesn’t excuse, and doesn’t look away. Reporting grounded in facts, focused on truth, and fully aware of the moment we are living through.
Donald Trump spent the afternoon on Truth Social posting about imprisoning and arresting Democratic lawmakers, including posting an AI generated meme of himself as king, sitting on a throne, with three Democratic Senators kneeling at his feet.
Donald Trump further posted additional calls to prosecute Democratic lawmakers:
Senator Mark Kelly urged Republicans to denounce Donald Trump’s posts calling for Democratic lawmakers to be executed after they reminded military personnel they can refuse illegal orders; Kelly warned that Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, increases threats against lawmakers, and is intended to intimidate them, while other Democrats, including Amy Klobuchar and House leadership, similarly condemned Trump’s remarks and defended the lawmakers’ message.
President Donald Trump publicly accused Ukraine’s leadership of showing “zero gratitude” for U.S. assistance during ongoing Geneva-based negotiations over a controversial 28-point peace proposal aimed at ending the war with Russia, while also criticizing European allies for continuing to purchase Russian oil.
According to NBC News, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said a change in his medication caused a nervous breakdown and hallucinations, which led him to tamper with his ankle-monitoring device and prompted his preemptive arrest as a flight risk.
Rand Paul criticized rhetoric labeling political opponents as traitors deserving the death penalty, calling it reckless, inappropriate, irresponsible and harmful to the country.
Trump claimed that the Republican Party has never been as united than it is now:
Donald Trump is preparing to unveil a health-care framework that would ask Congress to stop looming Affordable Care Act premium spikes by replacing ACA subsidy rules with his “Healthcare Price Cuts Act,” which would end zero-premium subsidies, require minimum payments to curb alleged fraud, create incentives for choosing lower-premium plans through HSA deposits, and separately push Congress to codify “Most Favored Nation” drug-pricing policy. This, according to MS Now.
New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani reaffirmed his past statements that Donald Trump is a “fascist” and “despot” during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, even after the two had an unexpectedly cordial White House meeting where they agreed to work together on housing, food prices and cost-of-living issues.
A shooting at Two Brothers Roundhouse in Aurora, Illinois left two people dead including the suspected shooter and one man critically injured in what police say appears to be a domestic-violence-related incident, with witnesses describing the chaos during a live band performance as terrifying.
A series of shootings in downtown Chicago during holiday festivities left a 14-year-old boy dead and eight other teens injured near State Street and Dearborn, prompting Mayor Brandon Johnson to cite concerns over a rumored “teen takeover” and deploy hundreds of additional police officers while no suspects are yet in custody.
A shootout that began with an argument at a large party in southwest Houston left one woman dead and five others injured, with police detaining a possible person of interest and continuing to interview witnesses while no weapons have been recovered.
Today, the Telegraph released a 24-point plan European countries are pushing as a counter-proposal to the controversial US-backed Ukraine peace plan, removing provisions that favored Russia, affirming Ukraine’s sovereignty, rejecting forced territorial concessions, proposing a ceasefire starting from current frontlines, and calling for frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction, while US-Ukraine talks in Geneva continued amid confusion over authorship of the original Trump-supported plan and backlash from European leaders and some US lawmakers.
According to The Guardian, ICE agents stopped 17-year-old U.S. citizen Christian Jimenez during his lunch break in McMinnville, Oregon, broke his car window after he asserted his citizenship, detained him for hours at a Portland ICE facility, then released him while seeking possible obstruction charges; his school district confirmed the incident, and advocacy groups say multiple U.S. citizens were similarly detained in the region that same week.
Kash Patel is facing sharp criticism after assigning an entire SWAT team from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Atlanta field office to protect his 27-year-old girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, at a performance — a move critics call an abuse of power and misuse of taxpayer resources.
Reuters has confirmed that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was quietly shut down eight months early after reports showed it had wasted more than $21.7 billion, froze projects, rehired thousands it had fired, and ultimately increased federal spending despite its mandate to cut it, while former DOGE staff were quietly reassigned across the government and Trump and Musk publicly fell out over policy and personal disputes.
