REALITY CHECK
Monday, December 22, 2025
Hundreds of Big Post-Election Donors Have Benefited From Trump’s Return to Office
The president’s team has created a highly unusual fund-raising apparatus for causes he favors. The Times analyzed more than half a billion dollars in contributions from 346 donors. Some have received pardons, jobs, access to the president, and other valuable gains.
Dec. 22, 2025
Illustration by the New York Times
Photos by Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times;
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters; The White House
Since President Trump was elected a second time, he and his allies have raised nearly $2 billion for his favored political causes and passion projects. That total, which was confirmed by four people involved in the fundraising, likely eclipses the amount raised to support his 2024 campaign.
Sunday, December 21, 2025
CBS News chief Bari Weiss pulls '60 Minutes' story, sparking outcry
Just a day and a half before it was set to be broadcast, new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled a planned 60 Minutes investigative segment centering on allegations of abuses at an El Salvador detention center where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants last March.
BBC: At least 13 photos removed from Justice Department Epstein files website (pics)
December 21, 2025
Items from the Epstein files, including a photo of Donald Trump, were removed by the Justice Department from its website because of concerns raised by victims, the deputy attorney general said on Sunday.
Todd Blanche rejected criticisms that the removal was related to the US president and said the photo that included him also showed unredacted images of women.
America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’
Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level
In his first year back in the White House, President Trump has greatly expanded executive power while embracing the trappings of royalty in ways not seen in the modern era.
The world this year 2025
Dec 18th 2025|10 min read
PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES
The first year of Donald Trump’s second term turned domestic and international politics on its head. The president withdrew America from the Paris accord on climate change, deployed the armed forces to crack down on migration at the border, ordered the National Guard into cities to help arrest illegal migrants, scrapped all diversity programmes in government, cancelled policies supporting renewable energy, attacked judges he disagreed with, and renamed the Defence Department the Department of War. The fractious mood in America worsened with the murder in public of Charlie Kirk at a college in Utah, where students had come to debate his conservative politics.
The first year of Donald Trump’s second term turned domestic and international politics on its head. The president withdrew America from the Paris accord on climate change, deployed the armed forces to crack down on migration at the border, ordered the National Guard into cities to help arrest illegal migrants, scrapped all diversity programmes in government, cancelled policies supporting renewable energy, attacked judges he disagreed with, and renamed the Defence Department the Department of War. The fractious mood in America worsened with the murder in public of Charlie Kirk at a college in Utah, where students had come to debate his conservative politics.
They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can't find a job
A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.
The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.
Roomba’s bankruptcy may wreck a lot more than one robot vacuum maker
Published Sat, Dec 20 2025
Key Points
- The bankruptcy of robot vacuum Roomba maker iRobot represents a relatively small but high-profile casualty of years of big tech antitrust scrutiny in both the U.S. and Europe.
- Amazon’s acquisition of the company was abandoned in early 2024 after EU regulators signaled their intent to block the deal.
- Major technology companies including Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are finding ways to structure deals to avoid M&A review, but for startups, the risks of being left in bankruptcy or as a zombie company are growing.
Maria Shriver’s Tweet About Renaming The Kennedy Center Is Seriously Chilling
Fri, December 19, 2025 at 11:05 AM PST
Remember way back in July when Republicans advanced an amendment to rename the "John F. Kennedy Opera House" to the "First Lady Melania Trump Opera House?"
How Warren Buffett did it
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Warren Buffett has long been known and admired around the world for doing something that is, at its essence, mundane. He is not a brilliant artist or a great inventor or a record-setting athlete. Instead, his brilliance—a low-key, midwestern type of brilliance—found expression in the prosaic art of investing: buying this stock and avoiding that one. Buffett himself has called this task “simple, but not easy.” While millions upon millions of people buy and sell investments every day, no one has a record of doing it better than he has, as consistently as he has, and for as long as he has.
Saturday, December 20, 2025
Trump expands access to cannabis in a major shift in drug policy
at the White House
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that will expand access to cannabis, a long-anticipated move that would mark the most significant shift in US drug policy in decades.
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that will expand access to cannabis, a long-anticipated move that would mark the most significant shift in US drug policy in decades.
Epstein victims express shock and outrage over incomplete release of files
Sunday 21 December 2025 05:47, UK.
Several victims of Jeffrey Epstein have told Sky News that the incomplete release of the files relating to the dead paedophile financier has left them feeling shocked, outraged, and disappointed.
Trump says Venezuela stole U.S. oil, land and assets. Here’s the history.
Today at 3:13 p.m. PT
By Tobi Raji and Leo Sands
In 1976, the government of oil-rich Venezuela assumed control of the country’s petroleum industry, nationalizing hundreds of private businesses and foreign-owned assets, including projects operated by the American giant ExxonMobil.
Fellini no longer lives at Fontana di Trevi
20.12.25
Theodoros Andreadis - Syngellakis
It seems to be a matter of time before a 2-Euro entrance fee is imposed for access to the famous fountain in the center of Rome ● The justification is the reduction of overtourism, but the reality is probably different.
The fight over the next Fed chair is spilling out across DC and Wall Street
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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
President Trump told aides and allies in early December that he wasn’t sold on picking former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh to lead the central bank, according to people familiar with the matter.
Inside the 17-year lawsuit between a Trump official and his interior designers
Today at 2:00 a.m. PT
By Rachel Kurzius
On a Friday afternoon in November 2015, a message arrived in the inbox of the owners of Design & More, a small Tallahassee interior design firm. The married couple behind the local business, Russell and Rose Marie Brabec, had been entangled in a bitter lawsuit for the better part of a decade. The email, addressed primarily to their defense attorney, began:
“DO NOT THREATEN OR UNDERMINE MY ATTORNEY YOU BELLIGERENT COWARD. HE HAS SHOWN YOU COURTESY AND DIGNITY YOU DO NOT DESERVE. I AM YOUR ENEMY. FACE ME YOU PATHETIC MORON.”
The sender? Pete Marocco, who later became a Trump administration official best known for his work in the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development this year.
Democrats Just Won Seats in Mississippi. The Supreme Court Could Block a Repeat
POLITICO
By Josh Gerstein
12/20/2025
The beleaguered Voting Rights Act is on the ropes again — and it may soon suffer a crippling strike.
The Supreme Court seems on the verge of making it much harder to use the landmark civil rights measure to force states to draw districts where minority candidates stand a strong chance of winning. And a key provision that lets private groups sue under the 60-year-old law could be the next to fall.
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