Secret communications are the sine qua non of spycraft, and surprisingly, they were also quite in vogue at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) not too long ago. It’s been six years since Covid-19 arrived on our shores, and from the time we began hearing about this deadly coronavirus, many in the public assumed that the NIH would be working overtime to discover its origins and develop therapies. So it came as a shock to discover that some of the executives at NIH spent a great deal of time trying to cover up what was going on behind closed doors. It’s a sordid tale that proves it’s long past time for Congress to ensure that such potentially dangerous research is subject to the public scrutiny needed to keep Americans safe and experts accountable.
A few election victories aside, the Democratic Party remains adrift in the Donald Trump era, searching for a reconnection to voters. The mere hint of a shift away from pure progressivism isn’t sitting well with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She on Monday came out swinging at D.C.’s National Press Club, with a speech designed to reassert far-left dominance, stamp out rebels, and lay the table for the 2026 midterms. The lecture was long on scorn and finger-pointing, short on explanations for past failure and evidence that hers is a winning formula. The question is whether the party now meekly succumbs to the browbeating.
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What does Warren want? The same thing she’s always wanted: giant (socialistic) governance. Yet she and Sanders are this year offering a strategic twist: Taking a leaf from Trump, they are pushing the party to stoke class divisions and wrap their standard progressive fare in populist language, presenting it as an agenda for “working people.” Warren laid out an agenda that includes all the top progressive goals, though modified to sound more benign (“universal health care”); more class-warfare (“cracking down on corporate landlords”); and more, er, blue-collar (“guaranteeing the right to repair your own cars, machines and business equipment”). Read through this list, however, and pretty much all her ideas were exactly those pushed or enacted by the Biden team and Democrats—an agenda for which they were tossed from office in 2024.
Trump, still smarting from his Nobel rebuke, declared in his post-operation press conference that [Maria] Machado didn’t “have the support” of her country to lead, and instead stated that he himself would run Venezuela until such time as he saw fit to hold elections. (Later he described Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, current head of the regime and longstanding Chávista, as a “wonderful woman.”)
That leads us to Thursday, when Machado arrived with a gift for America’s (and, apparently, Venezuela’s) benevolent leader: her Nobel Peace Prize, which she of course insists properly belongs to him. Trump was happy to agree, posing with a broad grin next to his newest framed trinket. As far as people celebrating trophies they didn’t and never could win goes, it’s not quite like that time when Vladimir Putin stole Bob Kraft’s Super Bowl XXXIX ring — but it has that stench regardless. (Machado, clearly, knows how to “take one for the team.”)
Once again, there is nothing to be done about it except lament the unspeakably small-souled trashiness of our president, a man who needs to be bribed and publicly flattered to maybe do the right thing. Spare me your defense of “She gave it to him! She even said he earned it!” Nobody is fooled by the pretense. Donald Trump took office in 2025; Machado has devoted her entire adult life to opposition to Chávez and Maduro, and her party won an overwhelming election long before he retook power. Trump earned this prize in the same way that he earned the addition of his name to the Kennedy Center: by being vain enough to demand it beyond all reason.
Introducing the highest U.S. tariffs since the Great Depression, President Donald Trump made a clear promise in the spring: “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.”
They haven’t.
Manufacturing employment has declined every month since Trump declared “Liberation Day” in April, saying his widespread tariffs would begin to rebalance global trade in favor of American workers. U.S. factories employ 12.7 million people today, 72,000 fewer than when Trump made his Rose Garden announcement.
The trade measures that the president said would spur manufacturing have instead hampered it, according to most mainstream economists. That’s because roughly half of U.S. imports are “intermediate” goods that American companies use to make finished products, like aluminum that is shaped into soup cans or circuit boards that are inserted into computers.
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“2025 should have been a good year for manufacturing employment, and that didn’t happen. I think you really have to indict tariffs for that,” said economist Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.
Small and midsize businesses have found Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs especially vexing. Fifty-seven percent of midsize manufacturers and 40 percent of small producers said, in a November survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, that they had no certainty about their input costs. Only 23 percent of large manufacturers shared that complaint.
Smaller companies also were more than twice as likely to respond to tariffs by delaying investments in new plants and equipment, the survey found. One reason could be that taxes on imports raise the price of goods used in production much more than they do for typical consumer items, according to a study by the San Francisco Fed.
The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report offers a stark reminder that US manufacturing continues to struggle. Manufacturing employment fell again in December 2025, marking the third consecutive year with negative net annual job growth. This persistent decline comes despite the Trump administration’s stated goal of revitalizing domestic manufacturing, and data increasingly suggest that the administration’s own policies — particularly, its erratic use of tariffs — are a significant part of the problem.
Andrew Stuttaford criticizes Trump’s reckless use of tariffs to compel a ‘sale’ of Greenland. A slice:
Ultimately, the only people who will decide whether Greenland should be sold, and to whom, are the Greenlanders. If they want to be a part of the U.S., that would be great, but that is something they should decide in a referendum (with, of course, a secret ballot: peer pressure is a thing, especially in small societies). But Trump’s antics are making it less likely that the U.S. will ever get to that point or even a very good second best, such as a compact of association akin to the agreements the U.S. has with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau.
Currently, Greenland is an autonomous part of Denmark. Are Danish exporters to be punished because their government wishes to keep the Danish kingdom in one piece? Really?
And then let’s look at the other objects of Trump’s wrath: Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Finland, none of which have any formal role to play in this matter. In effect, these sovereign nations are being threatened with a “fine” for sending a (very) small number of their troops to an ally’s territory — and with the agreement of that ally. Trump writes that this force has been sent to Greenland (a “sacred piece of Land”), “for purposes unknown,” a melodramatic turn of phrase. Is Perfidious Albion, eager to avenge past humiliation in North America, planning to use the one officer it is sending to Greenland as the first wave of a British North American Reconquista?
