The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reported a grim milestone this week: In Fiscal Year 2025, for the first time in history, the U.S. spent more than $1 trillion servicing the national debt. And the problem’s only getting worse: Given current spending trends, the group projects that annual interest payments will hit $1.5 trillion by 2032 and $1.8 trillion by 2035. Now might be a good time for one of these parties—or hey, why not both?—to start treating this like the massive systemic problem that it is. Happy Friday.
District of Trumplumbiaby Andrew Egger Donald Trump arrived back in the White House with Caesarian aspirations, eager to bring the power of the entire government under his personal control. But lately, with his domestic political project on the rocks, he’s been acting more like Caligula—spending more and more time on a series of empty gestures intended to spite his enemies and feed his own ego. Much of this is taking place at the White House itself, which Trump is busy tricking out as his own personal palace/man cave, paving over the Rose Garden to make himself a Mar-a-Lago-style patio and knocking down the East Wing to build himself a ballroom. This week, the president amused himself by installing trollish plaques beneath a row of presidential portraits at the residence, sketching out a brief narrative that reads all of U.S. history as mere prelude to the capstone project of his reign. (Sample text: President Andrew Jackson “was unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly and President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.”) But even the White House has not presented a sufficiently large playground for Trump’s ego. His lackeys are suddenly splashing his name everywhere around D.C. Yesterday, Trump’s hand-picked board of the Kennedy Center, which he himself chairs, announced it would rename the historic venue the Trump-Kennedy Center. Earlier this month, the State Department announced it had renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace—or what remains of it after its dismantling by DOGE earlier this year—the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. And in true Roman fashion, they’re scheming up plans to put him on a $1 coin next year, which would break a century-old precedent against putting living presidents on U.S. currency. The Kennedy Center renaming is a classic Trump-era story: One where the facts are so openly clownish that one struggles to know how seriously to take it. On the one hand, it’s silly frippery of the sort your correspondents have heartily endorsed Trump spending his time on. As I wrote back in March: “Every minute spent critiquing the upholstery in the Kennedy concert hall is one less minute the president has to search out new beefs with Canada or personally vet FBI agents to no-knock Liz Cheney’s home.” On the other hand, there is something sinister here that goes beyond the ridiculous ego-polishing. It isn’t just that all this puts a torch to modest and noble old notions that the president is merely a citizen chosen to serve a term as the chief executive of the government. These renamings are also just the latest assertion of a particular kind of presidential authority over truth itself. The name of the Kennedy Center isn’t supposed to be up to the president; it was established in U.S. law by act of Congress (just like the name “Department of Defense,” which Trump also claims to have changed). But in the strange law-optional world into which Trump is trying to usher us, that simple fact—words in the U.S. code—isn’t what matters. What matters is that the White House controls the actual power in question: They can update the Kennedy Center website to read “Trump-Kennedy Center.” They can put “Trump-Kennedy Center” up in big letters on the building. They can instruct staffers to start printing it on playbills and tickets. It’s a silly example of the phenomenon—but isn’t this how they’re running everything these days? Even if he’s determined to stay in Caligula mode, Trump might want to pace himself. At the rate he’s going, he’s going to run out of satisfying things to rename long before he’s set to leave office. Things could get silly quick. Will we suddenly be looking at a Trump-Washington Memorial Highway running through Northern Virginia? The Trump-Lincoln bedroom in the White House? Trump’s name festooned on D.C.’s various golf courses? Or on the Pentagon McDonald’s? We’re only a year down, after all. Who knows how far his ambitions will reach in three more? Let’s get the big guy’s name on the moon. The Epstein Reckoningby William Kristol The Jeffrey Epstein files are scheduled to be delivered by the Trump administration to Congress today, pursuant to legislation passed urgently and almost unanimously a month ago. But neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate will be in session to receive or discuss them. Congress has gone home for the holidays. This seems appropriate, in a way. The political establishment has never been interested in dealing with the Epstein matter. Nor have our elites in general. Over the past two decades, they’ve been conspicuously uninterested in knowing more. They certainly haven’t been eager to do more. Part of this is that the whole thing is so tawdry and disgusting. It’s not pleasant to think about Epstein’s life and deeds, and so people are happy to avoid doing so. But of course that’s not all of it. The establishment doesn’t want to think about Epstein because they don’t want to think about how he got away with all of it, at such a scale, and for so long. This is one reason—perhaps the main reason—why Epstein matters. Epstein matters in more immediate ways, to be sure. Today will be yet another test of whether and to what extent the Trump administration will comply with the law. We’ll have to try to determine if we’re getting all the files we should be getting. We’ll have to try to see how much has been left out or even tampered with. So the compliance question will be a test of the Trump administration. And the substance of the files may provide yet another glimpse into the life and times of Epstein’s good friend, Donald Trump. But it will also provide a window into the lives of many others, of many who helped Epstein, who enabled him, who had no problem consorting with him. It will provide a view of the lifestyles, of the mores and morals of what Rep. Ro Khanna has been calling—after someone used the term in conversation with him—“the Epstein class.” Some people shy away from that term. But there was a class effort to protect Epstein. Some people are made uncomfortable by the fervor of those who have criticized the Epstein cover-up. But outrage over the decades-long coddling of Epstein is justified. Some people are put off by all the conspiracy theories swirling about Epstein. Some of those are worth shunning. But there were conspiracies to cover up Epstein’s deeds. So, yes, a real reckoning with Epstein would mean a real re-thinking of questions of gender, wealth, and power. So be it. Real reckonings are uncomfortable. That’s what it means to come to a reckoning. People say, correctly, that we need a political reformation, a civic revival, a moral awakening. None of those happens without a reckoning first. We owe the release of the Epstein files to the efforts of the survivors. As Julie Brown, the journalist who almost single-handedly brought the Epstein scandal back to attention less than a decade ago, remarked yesterday, “So while lawmakers will be celebrating their holidays early, Epstein’s survivors won’t be having a jolly time; they will be reliving the trauma of their abuse at the hands of a man the Justice Department should have put in prison decades ago.” We can seek to honor the survivors by coming to grips, honestly and forthrightly, with what Epstein did. We can seek to build a more decent society by coming to grips, honestly and forthrightly, with the fact that we let him get away with it. AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsLETTING THE PERFECT BE THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD: Pediatric cancer advocates, including a former patient now in remission and siblings of patients who died, left the Senate gallery in stunned dismay on Wednesday evening after a bill to restore funding for pediatric cancer therapies failed to pass the chamber. The provision had been originally blown apart in December 2024 by Elon Musk in a seemingly random pre-DOGE drive-by. Over the course of this year, the pediatric cancer community—hardly a lobbying powerhouse—urged lawmakers to pass a bill restoring the funding; one patient, teenager Mikaela Naylon, literally spent her last hours on earth lobbying for it. Despite the urgency of the issue and strong bipartisan support for the measure, the legislative process dragged on with maddening slowness. And then, on Wednesday, just as success seemed finally at hand, Sen. Bernie Sanders announced he wouldn’t support the bill unless other health care measures killed off by Republicans were also restored. Over on the homepage, Sam Stein, who has been reporting on this story all year, explains what happened and what might come next. A NOBEL SOUVENIR FOR THE BIG GUY: When Donald Trump returned to office, world leaders quickly settled on a seemingly foolproof strategy for staying in his good books: buttering him up outrageously at every opportunity. But this soon became an arms race. With everyone equally willing to sniff the president’s throne, enterprising leaders needed to find better ways to stand out from the crowd. The latest innovation in this field has been awarding Trump prizes, as with the “FIFA Peace Prize” soccer honcho Gianni Infantino gave him earlier this month. But while making up new fake prizes to give Trump is a good strategy, handing over real ones might be an even better one. When Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this year, she achieved a PR coup—in Trump’s eyes—by publicly saying he should have gotten it instead. And now she may soon be coming to the White House—where, Semafor reports, she may “present [Trump] with her Nobel medal,” dedicating her prize to him “to show the world that strength is a force for peace.” The contrast here is remarkable. Machado plainly sees the honor of her prize as a means to an end—diplomatic capital she can spend to secure Trump as an ally in her fight against the Maduro regime. Meanwhile, Trump sees such prizes as ends in themselves: Whoever is bringing them to him must thus be allies whose causes he is happy to support. WHAT’S YOURS IS YOURS: While Wednesday night’s presidential primetime speech was mostly a greatest-hits of applause lines and grievances, Trump did seem to make one major announcement: $1,776 Christmas bonuses—sorry, “warrior dividends”—for 1.45 million U.S. troops. But the bonuses weren’t necessarily what they seemed. As Tom Novelly of Defense One¹ reported yesterday, the money to fund them is being taken from a line item in the Defense Department budget already earmarked for military compensation: specifically, money “intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members.” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) confirmed the money wasn’t new in a statement yesterday—albeit one framed to let the president down easy: “I commend President Trump’s swift action to implement the additional funding Congress provided to help offset housing costs for service members,” Wicker said. Cheap Shots
1 Andrew’s former editor at the Hillsdale Collegian, funnily enough. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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