POLITICO:
Why voters may not buy Trump's messaging on food prices
The president says Thanksgiving food prices are down. But Americans are still feeling stretched thin by their grocery costs.
Sure, consumers are seeing savings on their table centerpiece, with retail turkey prices having dropped 16 percent since last year, per the American Farm Bureau Federation. Supermarkets like Target and Aldi revealed a price decline on popular side dishes. But the hidden reality is that grocers are eating some of those costs just for the holiday season, and several food industry groups and supply chain analysts predict prices will increase as soon as January — especially as bird flu resurges.
Annie Lowrey/The Atlantic:
Donald Trump’s War on Christmas
It’s a bad year for shoppers. It’s a terrible year for small-business owners.
Holiday shoppers might not notice that things are a little less merry and bright than they would have been otherwise. The average family is expected to spend $132 more this year because of tariffs—not nothing, but not enough to break the bank, either. But wage growth has been cooling. The unemployment rate has been rising. Consumer confidence has been falling sharply. Rent, co-pays, mortgages, car payments, and utilities remain brutal for average families to afford—and health insurance is about to get radically more expensive. In recent weeks, customers have started shopping at cheaper outlets, buying fewer items, and putting off major expenses.
POLITICO:
Americans are buckling under medical bills. It could get worse.
Charities that help people pay for care say demand is way up. That’s before scheduled Medicaid and Obamacare cuts take effect.
Charities that help people cover their medical bills say they’re seeing an alarming increase in requests for help.
Worse yet, they say, it’s coming even before cuts to Medicaid in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act take effect and the potential expiration of Obamacare subsidies at year’s end. The charities are warning of exploding medical debt and lower survival rates for diseases like cancer if Congress doesn’t act.
Jack Jenkins/Religion News Service:
How one conservative Christian family is pushing back against ICE
A coalition of activists, everyday citizens and people of faith — including theologically conservative Christians — who have pooled resources and learned new technologies to mount an effort they say is designed to protect immigrants in their neighborhoods and around Chicago.
Of all the Luhmanns, Ben and Sam have had the most direct encounters with federal agents — mostly on purpose. They’re part of a complex network of “rapid response” volunteers who monitor the movement and actions of federal agents, with everyday residents crisscrossing the Chicago suburbs daily to keep an eye on unmarked cars typically used by ICE when making arrests.
The idea, Ben said, is to document what federal agents — who often represent a range of agencies, but which activists generally refer to collectively as ICE — are doing and to alert the community. If they come across an ICE vehicle, especially one conducting an arrest, the brothers film what they can, sometimes ask questions of the officers and then blow whistles to alert people nearby about the presence of ICE.
The duo rolled through a series of neighborhood “hot spots” where arrests have happened in recent weeks. It was quieter than normal, they said, likely because U.S. Border Patrol had announced plans that week to pull out of the city and relocate many of its personnel to Charlotte, North Carolina. Several weeks ago, they said, they could have heard about or come across more than a dozen ICE arrests by midmorning.
But federal agents are still active in the city and, per reports, isn’t planning on leaving anytime soon.
One of these tweets is thoughtful and respectful. Then there’s the one about Trump.
Molly Jong-Fast/New York Times:
Trump’s Greedy Thanksgiving
Donald Trump has never been much for gratitude or giving back. The notion that he owes anybody anything for his success is anathema to his winners-gonna-win Trumpiness.
This philosophy is, of course, the opposite of the myth and meaning of Thanksgiving, a holiday meant to acknowledge the generosity of the Indigenous people who helped keep the colonizers alive. (Maybe, in retrospect, they might think they made the wrong decision.) The holiday has evolved since then, to be mostly about overeating while trying not to let long-simmering family resentments erupt into a messy food fight, but under all of that there is a sense that we need to take a moment to acknowledge what we have, and be reminded to help others less fortunate than ourselves.
Trumpsgiving is not about that. The spirit of this season is always Trumpstaking. For himself, his family and the various oligarchs in his circle, alternately grateful for his patronage and fearful that he might turn on them. In just under a year since Mr. Trump returned to power, this has been the lesson again and again. We’re living in the age of what I call reverse philanthropy:instead of giving, you get (See: his free 747.) And in setting this example, Mr. Trump is making our country’s rich people worse, by emboldening them to embrace his transactional style of governing.
POLITICO:
‘I never want to hear again that the Democratic Party has a problem with young men’
Democrats stormed back with young men in off-year elections. But the biggest test will come next year.
In Virginia, Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger won men aged 18-29 by a larger margin than any other age group of male voters, per network exit polls. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill beat GOP opponent Jack Ciattarelli by a 14-point margin with the demographic. And in New York City, more than 6 in 10 men in the youngest age group went for democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.
Democrats’ strong showing with young male voters comes amid constant worries from within the party that the economic anxiety, cultural alienation and the allure of conservative manosphere content pulled young men toward the Republican Party in recent years.
But the across-the board wins paper over an ideological divide that’s brewing in the party: Will young men be won back by moderation, or by Mamdani?
Mamdani attracted praise from all corners of his party for his ability to reach young men by exploiting the media landscape that catapulted Trump to political success. Still, not all Democrats are convinced that his approach should be a blueprint for Democrats heading into 2026.
Lucas Holtz, a senior political adviser at the center-left group Third Way, said Sherrill’s and Spanberger’s decisions to position themselves as moderate alternatives will be more effective at reaching young male voters in key swing states next year.
New York Times:
Intelligence on U.S. Military’s Boat Strikes Is Limited
The U.S. military has killed more than 80 people since the campaign began in early September. But it does not know who specifically is being killed.
While the United States had successes (in the so-called War on Terror], it also made mistakes, sometimes hitting the wrong target or causing collateral damage, angering local populations and creating more opponents than were eliminated.
As a result of those errors, the United States worked to create detailed intelligence dossiers so that civilians approving the strikes could have confidence in who was being targeted and more clearly see the potential unintended consequences of a strike.
But those lessons of the long war against terrorism appear to have been cast aside as the Trump administration attacks boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that it says are carrying drugs.
