A federal grand jury refused to convict a protester for throwing a sandwich at an armor-clad border agent. As the saying goes, “A grand jury will indict a ham sandwich.” But the Trump administration can’t convince a regular jury to convict a protester for throwing a ham sandwich at a member of Trump’s personal police force.

The prosecution was no laughing matter. But the jokes write themselves—and are emblematic of the Trump administration’s out-of-touch, Keystone Cops response to their electoral catastrophe on Tuesday.

Trump has one move: Counterpunch—with more of the same. In following that strategy, Trump is compounding the loss and proving that voters were right to rebuke Trump and his policies. While we can’t count on Republicans to defeat themselves, there is nothing wrong with speaking the truth. And the truth is that Trump is expanding the scope and inflaming the sting of Republican losses on Tuesday.

Incredibly, congressional Republicans and administration officials are following Trump down a path paved with hubris that leads to inevitable self-destruction. Good. Republicans overplayed their hand with Trump’s narrow plurality in 2024 and deserve to pay the political price for decades to come.

But that will happen only if we drive home every arrogant, narcissistic, greedy decision that Trump, JD Vance, and Pam Bondi make in the face of a humiliating defeat.

Yes, it feels good to win. Yes, it feels good to be able to breathe more freely after the outsized Democratic victories on Tuesday. See Jon Margolis on Substack, The Exquisite Pleasure of Breathing. We should “Dance like no one is watching” as we celebrate our accomplishments.

But we must redouble our efforts, sharpen our message, and expand our tent. We have started a movement—with emphasis on “started.” We should feel energized and confident as we begin in earnest the work of winning the 2026 midterms by a landslide. That is an aspiration, not a guarantee. But after our astounding victories and Trump’s ham-fisted response over the 48 hours following his defeat, we should set our sights high, indeed.

I host a Substack livestream every Saturday to provide perspective on the events of the previous week. We have endured many tough weeks, even as we understood that we were making steady gains. Some of those livestreams felt like pep talks given as we trailed at halftime. But this Saturday will be unbridled joy. Join me to celebrate on Saturday, November 8, at 9:00 am Pacific / Noon Eastern. Instructions on how to join the livestream can be found here. Hope to see you there!

File these moves under “gratuitous cruelty and abject stupidity.”

People are suffering from the shutdown—a factor acknowledged by Trump in his “blame someone else” post-mortem of the Republican drubbing on Tuesday. Missed paychecks, higher healthcare premiums, and suspended SNAP food subsidies lead the list of Trumpian miseries being visited on the American people.

On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to make full SNAP payments for the month of November. The Trump administration will appeal the ruling to ensure that food-insecure Americans remain insecure. And the oozing essence of smugness stuffed into a suit—JD Vance—called the ruling “absurd.” See Black Information Network, JD Vance Says Court Ordering Administration To Fully Fund SNAP Is ‘Absurd’.

Vance’s political instincts are unmatched. And that is not a compliment. Telling anxious, food-insecure Americans—especially families with children—that it is “absurd” to continue food subsidies during a shutdown is the height of callous cluelessness. JD Vance is the future of the Republican Party. And that is not a compliment to Vance—or the GOP.

Trump made matters worse by lying to the American people about something he called “the affordability.” Trump has never purchased “a grocery” in his life, but wants price-stressed Americans to believe that prices for Thanksgiving dinner will be substantially less in 2025 than in 2024. He lied about a Walmart survey that managed the year-over-year price reduction by eliminating nearly 30% of the items from the 2025 Thanksgiving shopping list and swapping in Walmart’s generic brands for higher-priced name brands. See HuffPo, Trump Claims Walmart Lowered Its Thanksgiving Meal Price — And Is Instantly Owned.

Trump then claimed that “the affordability” is better under Republicans. He said,

So I don’t want to hear about the affordability. We had the worst inflation in the history of our country. Now we have virtually no inflation at all. It’s now at a very low number and a very normal number. So, the affordability is much better with the Republicans.

It appears that Trump learned the word “affordability” only minutes before meeting with the press on Thursday. Moreover, anyone who eats, shops for food, or cooks—or knows someone who does one of those things—knows that Trump is lying when he says, “We have virtually no inflation.”

Trump supporters may forgive him when he lies about others, but when he lies to them about their first-hand experience at the grocery store, they feel like chumps.

The cruel and ignorant strategy of opposing the reinstatement of SNAP benefits is happening at a time when unemployment is likely increasing. We can’t know for sure because reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics have been suspended during the shutdown. But private sources indicate that October brought mass layoffs of historic proportions. See Financial Content, S&P 500 Defies Gravity as Mass Layoffs Surge: A Paradoxical Market in November 2025.

Per Financial Content,

The scale of recent job losses is striking. U.S. employers announced 153,074 planned layoffs in October 2025, an astonishing 183% increase from the previous month and 175% higher than October 2024. This brings the year-to-date total to over 1.1 million job cuts, a level not seen since the 2008-2009 financial crisis and the highest since the pandemic’s initial shock in 2020. This “layoffs jump” is not confined to a single industry but is a broad-based phenomenon impacting major sectors of the economy.

The economy is being buffeted by missed government paychecks and record private sector layoffs, so Trump’s solution is to cut food subsidies to 42 million Americans who are food insecure.

There is no cause for celebration or schadenfreude in the cavalcade of bad news. My point is simply this: Neither Trump nor his enablers has the human decency or political savvy to understand that doubling down on their cruelty after the damning losses on Tuesday is cruel, stupid, and self-defeating.

Our goal is to hasten the day when the GOP’s defeat becomes permanent and irreversible. Trump is doing everything in his power to see that we achieve our goal in the shortest timeframe possible.

Flight cancellations add to Trump’s image as the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving

The shutdown has dragged on long enough that the FAA has ordered airlines to begin reducing air traffic in forty markets. See NYTimes, Flight Cancellations Begin Ahead of FAA Air Traffic Cuts.

With no end to the shutdown in sight, there is a low-level possibility that readers traveling home to their families for Thanksgiving may be affected. Again, Trump could authorize congressional Republicans to negotiate for the resumption of government paychecks any time he manages to wake from his nap in the Oval Office.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announces she will not seek re-election

Nancy Pelosi will rightly be remembered as one of the most effective and accomplished Speakers of the House in modern American history. On Thursday, she announced that she would not run for reelection.

Pelosi’s accomplishments will require time and distance to adequately assess. She improved the lives of all Americans and single-handedly changed the course of our nation’s history on multiple occasions. A reflection by her former Chief of Staff, published in The New York Times, begins the process of doing her justice. See Nancy Pelosi Is an American Political Giant by John A. Lawrence. (Article is accessible to all).

Lawrence writes,

Few modern political leaders will be as carefully evaluated for their historical significance as Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as the speaker of the House, who announced on Thursday that she will retire from Congress at the end of her current term.

She’ll be remembered as an American political giant.

A nearly 40-year veteran of the House of Representatives, Ms. Pelosi already occupies a larger-than-life place in the political firmament both for her two-decade tenure as the Democratic leader and for the essential role she played in the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, as well as the 2009 stimulus bill, the 2021 infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included significant investments in renewable energy.

After a forty-year career in Congress, much of it in Democratic leadership, there will also be understandable and inevitable criticism of some aspects of her tenure. We should discuss those observations at an appropriate time, which is not on the day she announced her retirement from Congress. Today, there is ample reason to be grateful for her remarkable career of public service.

Concluding Thoughts

My analysis in yesterday’s newsletter received criticism from a reader who felt that I failed to acknowledge Mamdani’s ability to motivate young men to turnout to vote. Another reader sent a note with a link to an analysis by Harvard researcher John Della Volpe. The reader (Susan S.), wrote

I wanted to be sure you see this analysis from John Della Volpe, the Harvard researcher who’s been talking to young people - especially men - for a couple decades. He applauds the election results AND cautions that we cannot assume that young men are now reliable Democratic voters.

I believe his research should be at the forefront for us in the coming year. He uses Mamdani’s campaign as a template for reaching out to Gen Z men. I hope you find this as thought-provoking as I did.

The reader then cited John Della Volpe’s thesis, published in JDV on GenZ+ (on Substack), Young Women Are the Foundation. Young Men Are the Hinge.

Della Volpe writes:

Tuesday night didn’t secure young men. It made them available. Young women are the foundation of Gen Z’s progressive advantage—delivering 60+ point Democratic margins without hesitation. Young men are the hinge that determines whether that advantage holds.

In each race, young voters changed the outcome. But the story underneath those numbers reveals something more fragile than a Democratic resurgence.

Young women voted Democratic by 60+ points across all three races — an ironclad progressive base. Young men? Closer to 55-45, sometimes narrower.

Young women are the foundation. Young men are the hinge.

And hinges swing

The new coalition that emerged on Tuesday has many moving parts. Democrats must understand and support every constituency that contributed to our victories. That process will take some time, recognizing that we must act with urgency. The 2026 midterms began in earnest this week. Zohran Mamdani’s success is a good starting point for understanding how to replicate his achievement.

The good news is that our challenge is to recognize where we made progress and how we can repeat it. That is a good problem to have—certainly a better problem than Republicans face in trying to understand why so many constituencies abandoned them on Tuesday.

No worries. We will be reminding voters every day for the next year why they rejected Trump and the GOP on Tuesday!

Good job, everyone!

Talk to you on Saturday morning, 9:00 am Pacific / Noon Eastern.

Pro-democracy protest photos

From reader Malissa R., “My post-election sign . . . .”

From reader Janet L., “I have attached below photos I took yesterday at my biannual trip to the Massachusetts National Cemetery (Bourne, Cape Cod, Massachusetts). I do this on Veterans Day and Memorial Day holidays. I started this tradition at Arlington National Cemetery when I began my 22-year USAF military service at Andrews AFB in 1984. At that time, I was a proud 2nd Lieutenant with only ONE solitary training ribbon on my dress blues uniform, which I wore to these ceremonies."

To me, my Arlington Cemetery visits were respectful, and I deeply felt that it was important to honor all veterans’ service. I still do. The partial closure of services at National Cemeteries is a slap in the face to our veterans, their families, and to all citizens.I am aggrieved that this lengthy shutdown is seriously impacting many citizens by limiting government services, losing SNAP benefits (which does include some active duty military members), jobs and more. .

Contra Costa, CA: As part of a national call to action led by the Detention Watch Network, Indivisible ReSisters Contra Costa held a memorial and march at Todos Santos Plaza in Concord, CA for those who have died at the hands of ICE in 2025, including in detention centers, in the shooting at the ICE facility in Dallas, and the man shot and killed in Chicago by ICE.

The event included song, spoken word, and speakers who are local leaders in the immigrant community, then a reading of the names. Attendees held signs with the names of the departed, decorated with colorful images and paper marigolds.

Santa Monica, CA, on No Kings Day:

Daily Dose of Perspective

I gave a presentation on Thursday to the Southern Maine Astronomers’ Association. I shared my process of taking and processing images of deep sky objects. One of the objects I shared was the image of the Eagle Nebula, below. When I displayed the image, I realized it was an “incomplete, in process” image that has the starfield removed. Still, it’s beautiful, no?

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