On this week’s final Daily Show episode of the week, Josh Johnson discusses some of Trump’s campaign promises, and how he seems to have kept them all ... but only if he was talking to himself and not to the American public. The most stunning one was how he promised everyone that his administration would make them rich. Whereas, in reality, he’s managed to enrich himself to the tune of 1.4 billion dollars. Billion. With a “B.” That’s over 18 thousand times the average annual salary of Americans that live in my state; it’s closer to 30 thousand times the average salary of Americans in Mississippi, which happens to have the lowest average salary in the country. Now, on the one hand, that’s nothing compared to how much Elon Musk made in 2025. But Musk’s “job” is billionaire, so that’s what you’d expect. Trump’s jo
The real story, of course, is the shooting of a second bystander in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti. The absolute best coverage of this, in my opinion, was from an unexpected quarter: Legal Eagle has a video from just earlier today where Devin breaks down while breaking down the incident. Powerful, emotional, and excellent legal perspective. Journalist Jamelle Bouie also has an excellent summary (including some historical context) on his new “Takes” series. Much like the shooting of Renee Good, I’m sure you’ve seen the video by now: it’s everywhere on the Internet. Pretti is the fifth person shot and killed by ICE agents while observing or fleeing from them. He is the second white person, and, unlike Renee Good, the die-hard MAGA supporters can’t even claim lesbianinsm or “pronouns in her bio!” as justifications for the murder. He was a VA hospital intensive care nurse, which has had the adminstration really scrambling to figure out how to make him out to be the bad guy. The only thing they’ve been able to settle on is that he was carrying a concealed weapon, but this is even more problematic for them that in the Renee Good case: he had a permit for the weapon, and he never unholstered it. And the MAGA base are Second Amendment fanatics: being able to be armed in order to protect yourself from being attacked by tyrannical govermnent overreach is what they fucking live for. So this is a death that has even the NRA on the side of the victim, and maybe that finally signals some changes on the horizon. It’s disgusting to me that it’s only once the white people starting getting killed that anyone payed any attention, but that’s the country we live in, so maybe it will finally make a difference. But let’s not also forget the 3 people killed by ICE last year: Silverio Villegas González and another Mexican immigrant whose name was never even released, and Keith Porter, a black man shot on New Year’s Eve. As Devin says: “they’ll come for the best of us, but ... we can fight back.”
Other things you need to know this week:
- Speaking of Jamelle Bouie’s “Takes”: he had one on the Insurrection Act, and one on why we need to treat ICE the same way we we treated the KKK..
- Jon Stewart’s episode of The Daily Show this week gives us a very moving assessment of our current situation.
- Another good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.
- Let’s also not forget that this week was the Davos debacle, where Trump told German-speaking Swiss onlookers that if it wasn’t for the United States they’d all be speaking German now, and also called Greenland “Iceland” about 4 times in a row. Seth Meyers has a pretty good summary in his first Closer Look on the topic. He followed that up with second Closer Look later in the week, where he notes that, after all that bluster, we now appear to have “made a deal” which is exactly the same deal we had before all the insanity started. But, seeing as how that’s exactly what he did with China and Canada and Mexico, I’m not sure why we should be surprised.
- Owen Jones also covered Davos, including Candian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s incredible speech declaring the end of American hegemony.
Over in the UK, the Greens are now the third largest party in the country, beating the Conservatives (a.k.a. the Tories), who used to be one of the two largest parties by a large margin. But the Greens are on the way up and the Tories are on the way down, and they apparently just passed each other. Now, before progressives get too excited, the Reform party (that’s the one that’s even farther right than the Tories) has become number one, so it’s not like it’s progressive utopia over there. But (as I’ve said before), if Labour is the Democrats and the Conservatives are the Republicans, then Reform is the MAGA movement: it’s just that they can actually have a separate party over there rather than having to hollow out the Repubs/Tories from the inside out. So the UK is lagging a bit behind us, but they’re well on their way to getting there.
Except ... what the UK has that we don’t, apparently, is a corresponding movement on the progressive side. And their new(ish) leader, Zack Polansk
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