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Retailers Call Holiday Sales ‘Mixed,’ Their Word for Bad

Cody Thompson
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Retailers Call Holiday Sales ‘Mixed,’ Their Word for Bad

NEW YORK — Major retailers told investors Friday that post-Christmas sales were “mixed,” industry shorthand that has historically translated to “fine,” “concerning,” “we are closing 400 doors in March,” and, in one 2008 case, “please acquire us for a dollar.”

Macy’s reported a 0.4% comp decline it attributed to weather, the calendar shift, and “consumer behavior.” Kohl’s posted a 6% drop and blamed the same three things in a different order. Best Buy, somehow up 1.1%, credited an air fryer.

“When a retailer says ‘mixed,’ what they mean is that the categories they wanted to sell didn’t sell, and the categories no one was tracking did,” said Marcus Veit, a consumer-discretionary analyst at Bowline Research who has spent two decades writing notes that contain the phrase ‘underlying trends remain healthy.’ “It’s a word designed to do nothing in particular, which is what makes it useful.”

The pullback was concentrated in “discretionary spending,” a category that retail analysts define as everything in the store, and that households define as the stuff their spouse bought.

Inside a Bridgewater, New Jersey mall on Friday morning, a Kohl’s district manager named Dana ate half a Cinnabon in the food court while explaining over speakerphone to a regional VP that the 60%-off rack was now 75% off, and that the 75%-off rack had been wheeled out by the dumpster because there wasn’t room for it inside the store. The VP told her to call it post-holiday momentum.

At a Best Buy in Paramus, the returns line stretched past the Geek Squad counter and into a corner where a lone demo OLED played the same six-second loop of an aurora borealis. A man in the line, holding a sealed Ninja Creami still in its retail bag, declined to comment except to say that his daughter had specifically asked for cash. Behind him, a woman returned a $48 throw pillow at 9:14 a.m. and was photographed at the Target across the parking lot at 9:31 buying the same throw pillow at $19, a maneuver economists call “rational” and that her husband called “what is wrong with you.”

The National Retail Federation, which in October projected holiday growth of 3.5% to 4.5%, on Friday revised the projection to 3.5% to 4.5%, noting the range was wide enough to accommodate any outcome short of a meteor strike. A footnote clarified that gift card redemptions, BNPL chargebacks, and returns made in cash but refunded to a Visa would each be counted in the quarter most flattering to the retailer.

Shares of most major chains closed roughly flat on the day, which analysts described as mixed.

NBA Sells LeBron vs. Curry as ‘Marquee Matchup’ for 19th Straight Christmas

Tara Sparks
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NBA Sells LeBron vs. Curry as ‘Marquee Matchup’ for 19th Straight Christmas

LOS ANGELES — The NBA on Thursday unveiled what it described as a “marquee Christmas Day matchup” between the Lakers and Warriors, marking the 19th consecutive holiday on which the league has packaged a regular-season game involving LeBron James and Stephen Curry as something fans have not yet, technically, seen.

Promotional materials called the contest “must-watch,” “generational,” and “the rivalry that defines an era,” phrasing the NBA has used continuously since 2009, when both players were already employed by their current teams’ rosters or close enough that nobody can remember the difference.

“This is the one we’ve been waiting for,” said Greer Mancini, a senior broadcast partnerships executive at Hearthline Media, reading from a statement she has issued, with minor edits, every December since the Obama administration. “Two titans. One floor. Christmas Day. You’re going to want to clear your schedule.”

A leaked ESPN graphics package obtained Wednesday revealed that the network had simply re-rendered the 2017 Christmas Day intro at higher resolution, with the words “FATHER TIME” added in the lower third and an additional sparkle effect applied to LeBron’s headband, which has not changed.

The matchup is being marketed as potentially the final Christmas Day meeting between the two future Hall of Famers, a designation the league has also applied to every Lakers-Warriors Christmas game since 2018, including one in which Curry did not play and James was officially listed as questionable with a hangnail.

Asked whether fans should be concerned this is the last chance to witness the rivalry live, an NBA spokesperson said the league “is not yet in a position to confirm that this is the last one,” but expressed confidence that next year’s matchup, already tentatively scheduled, would also be the last one.

Reached at his living room recliner during the third quarter, longtime viewer Mark Drysdale of Cincinnati briefly looked up from his phone to remark that “this is a good one,” a sentence his daughter Jessie confirmed he has said, verbatim, every Christmas afternoon since 2014, sometimes during commercials.

Drysdale’s wife, who has been asking him to help bring the ham to the table since approximately tipoff, said she was “not optimistic” about the ham’s prospects and noted that her husband had also pledged to help during the 2019, 2021, and 2023 Christmas Day broadcasts, none of which featured a ham that arrived warm.

The game itself, which tipped off at 2:37 P.M. Pacific and is expected to conclude sometime before the New Year, featured 14 lead changes, three timeouts called specifically so Charles Barkley could finish a sentence, and one Stephen A. Smith monologue in which the host declared the rivalry “officially over” before clarifying it would resume Tuesday in Phoenix.

At press time, the NBA had announced that next Christmas’s marquee matchup would once again feature the Lakers and the Warriors, pending only the minor formality of both players continuing to be alive.

TSA Sets Christmas Eve Travel Record; Woman in Boarding Group 7 Already Crying

Tara Sparks
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TSA Sets Christmas Eve Travel Record; Woman in Boarding Group 7 Already Crying

PHOENIX, AZ — The TSA confirmed Wednesday that Christmas Eve travel had reached an all-time record, with 3.1 million Americans voluntarily entering an airport at sunrise to fly toward people who will, within nine hours, ask why they aren’t married yet.

Sky Harbor’s C concourse, described by one passing custodian as ‘a mall food court but everyone is grieving,’ processed travelers at a rate not seen since the agency began tracking the metric, the holiday, or human suffering.

The record was set, officials said, somewhere between 6:14 a.m. and the moment a woman in Boarding Group 7 sat down on a Cinnabon napkin and began silently weeping into a Stanley cup that had, until very recently, contained a hot toddy she made in the cell phone lot.

‘We’re seeing extraordinary throughput,’ said Marcy Pell, a TSA shift lead at PHX who agreed to speak only if this newspaper acknowledged she had been awake since Tuesday. ‘Bin volume is up. Loose-Funko volume is up. The number of grown men trying to gate-check a wreath is, frankly, alarming.’

Industry analysts at Beacon Mobility — a transit research desk that, by its own admission, only exists three weeks a year — projected that 41 percent of today’s travelers were carrying a wrapped gift they had been told not to wrap, 28 percent were carrying a casserole the FAA does not legally recognize as food, and roughly 12 percent were already in an active text fight with a sibling about pickup.

At Hartsfield-Jackson, a Spirit gate agent reportedly looked at a boarding pass, looked at the passenger, looked back at the boarding pass, and quietly said ‘Merry Christmas’ in the tone people normally reserve for last rites. The passenger, identified only as a man transporting an unboxed air fryer in a CVS bag, nodded once and boarded.

Delays cascaded through the system in ways the agency described as ‘seasonally appropriate.’ A ground stop in Denver was attributed to weather. A ground stop in Charlotte was attributed to one (1) gentleman who insisted his emotional support beagle was named Doug and could ‘absolutely’ sit in 14B without a carrier. A ground stop in Newark was attributed to Newark.

By midmorning, the Cinnabon line at Terminal 4 had achieved what aviation officials are calling ‘critical mass,’ meaning it now had its own micro-climate, two informal leaders, and a man near the front explaining the airline industry to a woman who had not asked.

‘I just need to get to Buffalo,’ said one passenger, Trevor Aiken, 34, who was holding a poinsettia, a duffel bag, a child’s car seat containing no child, and a printed-out itinerary from 2019. ‘My mom said don’t bring anything. Then she said bring the good rolls. Then she said don’t bring the good rolls. I have the good rolls.’

The TSA, for its part, urged calm, patience, and the immediate removal of all liquids over 3.4 ounces, a category that this morning included gravy.

By 4 p.m. local time, the woman in Boarding Group 7 had reportedly stopped crying, boarded her flight, and was watching ‘The Holiday’ on a phone propped against a tin of homemade fudge — which, sources confirmed, she will not be sharing with the man in 22C, no matter how loudly he sighs.

The Dulse Lady at the Co-op Saw the Drilling News and Locked the Cooler

Brooke Ellery
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The Dulse Lady at the Co-op Saw the Drilling News and Locked the Cooler

I walked into the co-op on Monday for the usual — kelp flakes, a half-pound of dulse, the shaved bonito Cleo will only eat if I tell her it’s “ocean confetti” — and Pamela was just standing behind the seaweed counter with both hands flat on the glass, looking at the tray like she was saying goodbye to a pet. She didn’t say hi. She said, “Did you see what he signed.” And then she clicked the little brass lock on the cooler and walked into the back.

I had not, in fact, seen what he signed. I learned in the parking lot, sitting in the Subaru with a paper bag of chaga mushrooms on my knees, that the President had expanded offshore drilling leases. More coast. More platforms. More of whatever it is they do down there with the drills and the steel and the ancient pressurized things that are not supposed to be touched. I read the article twice. Then I drove straight to Marlene’s because Marlene, as always, was already three steps ahead of me.

Marlene had her dehydrator going and a Costco-sized box of sea moss capsules on the counter, and she said, without looking up from her label-maker, “The fish know. They’ve known since Friday.” Marlene believes — and her source on this is a marine herbalist she follows on a podcast called Brine Witch Hour — that fish carry generational memory in their fat, and that any new drilling event “imprints” on the next four years of catch. She bought out the co-op’s sea moss at 4 p.m. yesterday. She left two jars on my porch with a note that just said before the imprint.

I called my sister-in-law Renee, who works the front desk at a pediatric office and is basically a nurse, and she confirmed what I was already feeling, which is that iodine “absorbs differently” once a coast has been disturbed. She said the body can tell. She said you can sometimes taste it in canned tuna within forty-eight hours. I don’t fully understand the mechanism and Renee admits she doesn’t either, but she said her chiropractor’s wife has a chart.

The Facebook group I’m in — Seafloor Memory & The Fish That Remember, about 14,000 of us, mostly moms, very kind, occasionally a retired oceanographer who keeps trying to correct everyone and gets put on a 24-hour mute — lit up overnight. A woman in Mobile posted a photo of her shrimp “looking tired.” Someone in Ventura said her son’s pediatrician (an MD, she stressed, twice) recommended switching to Baltic sources “until the Atlantic settles.” There was a long thread about whether scallops can grieve. The consensus was: a little.

So I’m pivoting the pantry. We are out of Atlantic sardines, effective Tuesday. I found a small Lithuanian brand at the Polish grocery in West Asheville that a coach’s newsletter recommended last spring, packed in unrefined sunflower oil, which is technically a seed oil but the woman who runs the newsletter says cold-pressed Lithuanian sunflower “behaves like an olive,” so we are making an exception. Cleo will not notice. Cleo cannot tell a sardine from a key on a keychain.

My husband, who is a wonderful man and also a structural engineer who thinks I’m being a lot right now, asked me at dinner whether I really believed a lease signed in Washington could change the chemistry of a fish in three days. I told him I didn’t think it. I knew it. He asked how. I said the same way you know when one of the kids has a fever before you touch them. He chewed his rice.

The salt is fine, by the way. I want to be clear about that. Himalayan pink salt is sealed-in ancient ocean — it’s basically a time capsule, the drilling cannot reach it, it’s been waiting under a mountain for 250 million years and a man with a pen in the Oval Office is not its problem. Same for our Redmond Real Salt. Same, Marlene insists, for the gray Brittany flakes, although I’m watching those.

I went back to the co-op this morning to apologize to Pamela for not knowing on Monday. She’d unlocked the cooler. The tray was half-empty. She slid me a packet of dulse over the counter, didn’t ring it up, and said, very softly, “Tell Cleo it’s the last clean batch.” I nodded like I understood, which I did, completely, and I drove home with it on the passenger seat like a person.

Russia Bombs Ukrainian Power Grid Again, Right on Christmas Schedule

Nash Grayson
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Russia Bombs Ukrainian Power Grid Again, Right on Christmas Schedule

KYIV, UKRAINE — Russia launched a massive missile and drone barrage against Ukrainian energy infrastructure early Monday, marking the fourth consecutive winter in which the Kremlin has demonstrated its commitment to seasonal consistency by trying to freeze a country of 38 million people three days before Christmas.

The strikes, which targeted substations, thermal plants, and the natural gas network across at least seven oblasts, arrived with the punctuality of a Hallmark Channel premiere. Air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv at 4:17 a.m., a window the Russian Aerospace Forces have now hit so reliably that Ukrainian utility workers describe it as “the shift.”

The Kremlin, for its part, characterized the operation as a strike on “military-related energy objects,” a category that under current Russian doctrine appears to include kindergartens, an apartment building in Kharkiv, and the lights.

“At this point it isn’t really a campaign, it’s a recurring calendar event,” said Lior Vansten, a Eurasia analyst at the Atlantic Heartland Project. “They’ve done this in 2022, 2023, 2024, and now 2025. The only escalation left is a save-the-date.”

The barrage involved roughly 250 drones and several dozen cruise and ballistic missiles, according to Ukraine’s Air Force, which said it shot down most of them and politely requested that someone in Washington consider sending the other Patriot battery currently sitting in a warehouse in Poland for reasons no one will explain on the record.

European leaders responded with the full diplomatic toolkit available to them in late December, which is to say a series of tweets, a joint statement drafted at the staff level, and one foreign minister who interrupted a ski vacation long enough to say the strikes were “unconscionable” before returning to the lift.

The White House condemned the attack in a written statement that did not mention Russia by name until the seventh paragraph, where it appeared in a clause about “all parties.” A senior administration official, asked whether additional air defense would be expedited, said the matter was “under active review,” a phrase that in this administration has the same operational meaning as “lost.”

In Kyiv, residents began the day the way they have begun roughly forty such mornings: by checking which neighborhood still had electricity, charging power banks at the cafés that did, and explaining to children that Saint Nicholas can in fact deliver presents in the dark, because he has been doing it here since 2022.

One power engineer in Dnipro, reached by phone during a four-hour repair window, said his crew had rebuilt the same transformer station three times this year and was preparing to do it a fourth. Asked how morale was holding up, he laughed for several seconds and then hung up to go back to work.

Vladimir Putin is expected to address the nation on Thursday in a holiday message emphasizing peace, family, and the unbreakable spirit of the Russian people, delivered from a palace that, sources confirm, will have its heat on.

The Solstice Is for Sitting in the Dark. Marlene’s Got 600 LEDs Going.

Brooke Ellery
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The Solstice Is for Sitting in the Dark. Marlene’s Got 600 LEDs Going.

We turned every light off at 4:47 p.m. — sundown, on the dot — and Cleo asked if the wifi counted as light, which is the kind of question I want her asking on the longest night of the year.

Solstice rules in our house are simple. From sundown to sunup, no overhead bulbs, no screens, no anything that hums. The body needs thirteen uninterrupted hours of true dark once a year to reset what a man on a Telegram channel my husband forwards me without comment calls “the mitochondrial clock.” You don’t get that in February. You don’t get it in October. You get it tonight, or you wait til 2026.

I am told this sounds intense. It is not intense. It is one night. The Norwegians have been doing it for ten thousand years. Wyatt had a friend over and I gave them a bowl of soaked almonds and a beeswax taper and they were thrilled, eventually.

Across the cul-de-sac, Marlene has put up six hundred LED icicles and a projector that throws moving snowflakes onto her siding. I love Marlene. I love her husband Greg, who shimmies up the ladder every November and overshoots by about four hundred bulbs every year. But cheap LEDs flicker — they pulse at a frequency the human eye can’t quite see and the human nervous system absolutely can. There is a Facebook group called PWM and Our Children that has posted side-by-side pulse oximeter readings I will not link here because I respect your evening, but Marlene’s boy Brody had a nosebleed at the tree lighting last Thursday and I’m not saying.

My sister-in-law Tara works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville and is basically a nurse. She told me cortisol stays elevated for forty-seven minutes after exposure to any blinking light source brighter than the moon, which is a sentence I think about constantly during December. The moon tonight is a waning crescent. The moon tonight is doing its job. Marlene’s inflatable reindeer is doing somebody else’s job.

I am not anti-light. Fire is good. Fire is, technically, a mineral process — it’s just oxidation, which is the same thing rust does, and nobody is afraid of rust. Beeswax is a food. The tapers on my mantle right now are rendered in cast iron by a woman named Honey-Anne in Marshall and they smell like absolutely nothing, because they are not supposed to smell like anything. Cinnamon-scented candles are made with cassia oil and a chemical called coumarin that the European Union banned in chewing gum. We are burning it in our living rooms. Anyway.

Cleo asked at 6:15 if Santa could still see us with the lights off and I said Santa is the one being who can. She accepted this. She is four. She also asked if the solstice is when the sun dies and I said no, sweetie, the sun is just resting, and she said “like Pop-Pop,” and I said yes, baby, like Pop-Pop, and we both moved on.

We made a list — by candlelight, which is the only correct way to make a list — of one thing each of us is going to release with the dark. Cleo is releasing the idea that the cat wants to be held. Wyatt is releasing fluoride, which he picked himself; I did not lead him there. My husband is releasing his fantasy football league, which he has been losing since September. I am releasing the version of me that used to buy almond milk in a Tetra Pak.

At about 8:40 Marlene came over with a tray of cookies that I think had Crisco in them and she stood in our doorway, lit only by my taper, and said “it’s so dark in here, is everything okay,” and I said yes Marlene, yes, this is the whole point. She left the cookies. I will compost them in the morning, lovingly.

The sun comes back tomorrow. It comes back about a minute more, technically, which Tara says is enough to kick the pineal gland back into rhythm if you’re outside barefoot for the first hour of it. I will be. Cleo will be in her muck boots, which are barefoot-adjacent. The grass is frozen. The mitochondria don’t care.

Greg’s projector is still going. It will still be going at sunup. Some people are not ready for the dark.

12-Team Playoff Made Saturday Eleven Hours of Mostly Halftime

Duke Holloway
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12-Team Playoff Made Saturday Eleven Hours of Mostly Halftime

I sat down at noon Saturday with a sandwich and a notepad, the way a man does when he’s been told there are three College Football Playoff games on the same day and somebody’s expecting a column out of him by Sunday. The opening kickoff was scheduled for 12:00 sharp. I saw a football at 12:34. In between, I watched a flyover, a coin-toss ceremony involving four people I could not identify, a ‘hype film’ narrated by an actor whose voice I associate with car insurance, and a corporate partner being thanked twice before anyone in pads jogged onto the field.

This is the 12-team playoff we asked for. I want to be clear about that. Somebody asked. It might have been a committee. It was not me.

The format is that the top four seeds get a bye and everybody else plays first-round games at the home stadium of the higher seed, which sounds charming until you realize the home stadium has been rented out, sponsored over, and rebranded for the occasion by a credit-card company, a sports book, and a streaming service that exists primarily to advertise itself during games on other streaming services. By the second commercial break I had been pitched a parlay, a pickup truck, a heated mattress topper, and the next round of the same playoff I was currently trying to watch.

Coach DiMaggio used to say the only halftime show worth watching was the one where the band played and went home. He coached me in 1974, when halftime was twelve minutes long and consisted entirely of a man with a clipboard yelling at a defensive end. Saturday’s first game had a halftime that ran twenty-four minutes by my watch, featured a ‘special performance’ by a country singer I have never heard of, and ended with confetti cannons that fired during a dead ball in the third quarter because someone forgot to unplug them. Coach is dead. I don’t know whether that’s a mercy or a missed opportunity.

The football itself was fine. That’s the part nobody wants to admit. Underneath the eleven hours of branded scaffolding, there were actual eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old men playing a hard sport extremely well. One quarterback in the second window — I will not name him because he’ll be at a different school by February — threw a corner route into a four-inch window in a snow squall and I watched it three times. That was a beautiful thing. It lasted six seconds. Then we went to a sideline reporter who asked the head coach what his team needed to do in the second half, and the head coach said ‘execute,’ and we cut to an ad for a different network’s pregame show.

Ray Kowalczyk called me during the third game. Ray was a guard at Bucknell in ’68 and now mostly calls me to complain about pickleball. He wanted to know why the kicker in the night game was wearing a single black glove. I told him I didn’t know. He said in his day, gloves were for the wide receivers and only because their hands were cold. I said in his day kickers were Romanian. He said that was a good point and hung up. This is what passes for sports analysis between men our age now.

The third game went to overtime, which used to be a reward and is now a scheduling problem. By the time it ended I had seen the same insurance commercial eleven times, watched a coach get a Gatorade bath that the broadcast cut to in slow motion from three angles, and listened to a former player in a studio explain that the losing team ‘just wanted it more, but the other team wanted it more-er.’ I wrote that down. I’m not making it up.

There’s a kid down at the Y named Petey Corrigan, late twenties, plays in a Sunday flag-football league and watches every snap of every game like it’s going to be on a test. I asked him Monday what he thought of Saturday. He said it was ‘a lot.’ I asked what that meant. He said he loved it. He said he watched all three games on his phone and his TV at the same time and posted thirty-one times about it. He said it was the best Saturday of the year. I believed him.

I think that’s the column. The kids are fine. The sport is fine. It’s the eleven hours around the sport that have gotten away from us. Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says it’s a recipe she got from a podcast about football.

Iowa Data Center Hits 100% Uptime Through Storm That Darkened The Town Around It

Lena Wexler
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Iowa Data Center Hits 100% Uptime Through Storm That Darkened The Town Around It

COUNCIL BLUFFS, IA — A 1.2-million-square-foot hyperscale data center on the western edge of Iowa reported zero service interruptions during this week’s winter storm, an achievement its operator called “a testament to grid resilience” and the 41,000 customers without power for fourteen hours in the surrounding county called “noticed.”

The facility, which trains generative AI models on behalf of three Fortune 50 clients, drew its standard load throughout the storm — roughly the same draw as the Pottawattamie County residential grid that failed Tuesday at 3:18 a.m., according to filings with the Iowa Utilities Commission. Crews restored residential power Wednesday afternoon. The data center never required restoration.

“Mission-critical infrastructure is engineered to ride through events of this magnitude,” said Greta Hollins, a senior fellow at the Beacon Grid Policy Center, clarifying that “mission-critical” in this context means “training a chatbot to write more confident-sounding LinkedIn posts.”

A regional spokesperson confirmed that during the peak outage window, the facility’s primary workloads included generating holiday marketing emails for a Midwestern grocery chain, drafting autocomplete suggestions for developers in three time zones, and processing an estimated 4.3 million user queries about whether poinsettias are poisonous to cats. None of these workloads were paused, deferred, or load-shed at any point during the storm.

Backup diesel generators activated twice during the outage, burning enough fuel in roughly four hours to heat a midsize elementary school for the remainder of winter. The campus’s evaporative cooling system, which draws from the Missouri River under a 2021 allocation agreement local residents were told would be “revisited soon,” continued to operate at full capacity.

“We were boiling snow on a Coleman stove,” said Linda Petersen, 64, who lives in a subdivision two miles from the campus. “My husband kept turning to me and saying, well, at least the AI is doing okay over there. He meant it as a joke the first time.”

The operator’s regional sustainability officer issued a statement Friday noting the company has pledged to be water-positive by 2030, carbon-negative by 2030, and “a good neighbor to the communities that host us” by no specified date. The statement did not address the outage directly, but did include a link to a 78-page ESG report and a stock photograph of a wind turbine in a field that does not appear to be in Iowa.

State regulators told reporters Thursday that the facility’s grid-priority designation is “under review,” a phrase the agency has now used in connection with the same campus in 2022, 2023, and 2024. The data center is currently undergoing a 40% expansion, with completion projected for late 2026.

Shutdown Deadline Sneaks Up on Congress Like It Does Every December

Nash Grayson
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Shutdown Deadline Sneaks Up on Congress Like It Does Every December

WASHINGTON — Members of the 119th Congress emerged from a closed-door leadership meeting Wednesday visibly shaken to learn that the federal government once again requires funding, a recurring fiscal phenomenon lawmakers said they had not seen coming despite the calendar warning them about it for the past eleven months.

The looming Friday deadline, which appears in the same place on the same calendar every single year, was described by aides as “a real curveball,” “the kind of thing nobody could have predicted,” and “weirdly, exactly when this happened in 2024.”

House leadership has reportedly settled on a strategy of passing a short-term continuing resolution that funds the government through late January, at which point Congress will once again be ambushed by the unforeseeable arrival of late January.

“There’s a structural rhythm to legislative crisis management,” said Pierce Halloway, a senior fellow at the Beacon Institute for Procedural Studies, who has spent six years tracking what he calls “the December Surprise.” “They know it’s coming. They schedule around it. They book the flights home for the 19th. And then on the 17th, somebody in leadership goes, ‘Wait — does the government still need money?’ It’s almost spiritual at this point.”

Sources inside the Speaker’s office confirmed that the working draft of the CR runs 1,140 pages, of which roughly 90 actually pertain to government operations and the remaining 1,050 contain provisions that one Republican aide described as “things people slid under the door at 4 a.m. and we just sort of let happen.”

Senate Democrats announced they would oppose the bill on principle, then support it on pragmatism, then issue strongly worded statements about the next bill, in what observers called “a flawless execution of the standard four-step.” Senate Republicans countered by demanding spending cuts, agreeing to spending increases, and getting on a plane.

President Trump, asked about the shutdown threat during a Rose Garden event honoring a Florida cardiologist who had recently endorsed him, said the shutdown would be “the best shutdown ever, if it happens, which it won’t, unless I want it to, which I might.” He then returned to discussing the cardiologist.

By Thursday afternoon, House leadership had pivoted to a new plan: a one-week stopgap to give negotiators time to negotiate the longer stopgap that would give negotiators time to negotiate the actual bill. A staffer described the structure as “a Russian nesting doll, but for failure.”

Outside the Capitol, federal workers — who have been through this in 2013, 2018, 2019, 2023, and earlier this year — went about their day with the resigned bearing of people who have stopped buying Christmas gifts before December 22 on principle. “I’ve got a go-bag,” said one EPA scientist on her lunch break. “It has my mug, a phone charger, and a printed-out list of which credit card payments I can defer. I update it every November.”

Congress is expected to pass something Friday afternoon, declare victory, hold a press conference featuring at least one member describing the moment as “a win for the American people,” and then immediately leave town for a holiday recess that will end approximately four days before the next deadline they have not yet noticed.

Trump’s New Immigration Orders Cut Out the Middleman, Which Was the Law

Nash Grayson
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Trump’s New Immigration Orders Cut Out the Middleman, Which Was the Law

WASHINGTON, DC — President Trump signed a fresh stack of immigration executive orders Wednesday morning, eliminating what aides described as “redundant procedural layers,” the most redundant of which turned out to be a 240-year-old layer called the judiciary.

The package, unveiled in the Roosevelt Room before a backdrop of three flags and one visibly nervous Cabinet secretary, expands ICE arrest authority into hospitals, schools, courthouses, places of worship, and “any other location where individuals may be physically present,” a category aides confirmed was meant to be exhaustive.

A second order creates a new tier called “expedited expedited removal,” which administration officials clarified differs from regular expedited removal in that it skips the part where anyone writes anything down.

A career attorney in the DHS general counsel’s office, who has been reassigned this month to a desk that validates parking, said the orders read “like someone described the Constitution to a guy at a tailgate and then asked him to fix it.” The attorney noted that one provision instructs asylum officers to deny applications “on a rolling basis prior to receipt,” a phrase she said her supervisor refused to define over email.

Stephen Miller, who reportedly drafted the orders during what aides described as “a normal Tuesday for him,” appeared at the signing wearing the expression of a man who has finally been allowed to do the thing. Miller declined to take questions but was overheard telling a junior staffer that the courts would “figure themselves out,” a sentiment the staffer wrote down and then immediately deleted.

The third order directs federal agencies to share immigration status data with one another, with state governments, with local governments, with landlords, with utility companies, and, in a clause that a Treasury official said was “definitely in there but we’re hoping no one notices,” with the IRS.

Senator Alex Padilla called the orders “a constitutional crisis with a cover sheet,” while Senator Tom Cotton praised them as “a long-overdue corrective” and suggested the administration go further by designating the Ninth Circuit a sanctuary jurisdiction and deporting it. House Speaker Mike Johnson, asked whether Congress would respond, said lawmakers were “watching closely,” which is the phrase Congress uses when it has gone home for the year.

An ICE field director in Phoenix, briefed on the new authorities Wednesday afternoon, told agents the guidance was simple: “If you think you can, you can.” Asked what the standard for probable cause now was, he reportedly paused for a long time and then said, “Vibes.”

The orders take effect immediately, retroactively, and, according to a footnote on page 31, also prospectively, in case anyone was thinking of being born here later.

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