“President Trump is expected to host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Mar-a-Lago on Sunday to try and reach agreement on the U.S. peace plan,” Axios reports.
“The meeting is a sign of significant progress in the talks. Trump said previously that he’d only meet Zelensky if he felt a deal was close.”
“The Trump administration celebrated Christmas on Thursday by posting a series of religious messages from official government accounts, using language that drew criticism from those who pointed to the country’s separation of church and state,” the New York Times reports.
“While many lawmakers in both parties posted universal messages of love, joy and peace on the holiday, a number of cabinet members and agencies made references to Jesus and the religious meaning of Christmas.”
“U.S. forces struck Islamic State targets in northwestern Nigeria on Thursday evening, the U.S. and Nigerian governments said, acting after threats by President Donald Trump to attack the country in an effort to stop killings of Christians,” the New York Times reports.
Our boys are home for the holidays and it’s best gift Sara and I could ask for.
Whatever you celebrate, I wish you a very peaceful holiday.
And thank you for gifting me your precious attention each day.
I truly love doing this.
Wall Street Journal: “During a meeting with GOP lawmakers at the White House over the summer, Trump berated House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris for raising concerns about the president’s signature tax-and-spending legislation. Trump demanded that Harris fall in line—then the president abruptly left the room, according to people who attended the meeting.”
“With Trump gone, Harris turned his ire to James Blair, one of the president’s top advisers. Harris accused Blair of wanting to find a Republican primary challenger to unseat him.”
Said Blair: “I just work for the president, sir.”
President Trump, on Truth Social:
“Merry Christmas to all, including the Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country, but are failing badly. We no longer have Open Borders, Men in Women’s Sports, Transgender for Everyone, or Weak Law Enforcement…”
“The Justice Department said on Wednesday that it had discovered over a million more pages of material potentially related to the investigation of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — doubling the amount previously known and lengthening the time it will take to release the material,” the New York Times reports.
New York Times: “For Mr. Trump, there is no risk, only reward, posed by the dawning and disruptive new age of computing. Over the past year, the president and his top aides have fully embraced A.I., and showered its leading corporate backers with money and regulatory support, as the administration looks to supercharge one of the primary areas of growth in an otherwise precarious U.S. economy.”
“The administration’s unqualified support contrasts starkly with the more cautious tone struck by economists and even some technologists in Silicon Valley.”
“The reason he’s hanging on is because President Trump wants a weak speaker. He wants a speaker that essentially functions like a staff member, which is what Mike Johnson does.”
— A House Republican, quoted by The Atlantic, about Speaker Mike Johnson.
Jonathan Lemire: “His party has been battered in recent elections. His poll numbers on even his signature issues—the economy, immigration—have tumbled. He’s seemingly lost touch with what got him elected, instead focusing on projects both petty and self-aggrandizing. As Americans worry about affordability, Trump and his family have profited wildly from his time in office. Republicans have begun to openly and repeatedly defy him. Democrats have started to outmaneuver him. Today, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal once more erupted with embarrassing revelations and unanswered questions. And every now and then, Trump seems to have a hard time even staying awake.”
“Every president is inherently a lame duck the moment he takes the oath of office for the second time. But many presidents have been at least able to delay their diminishment until after the midterm elections, at which point—political capital largely exhausted, the political world turning to the race to pick a successor—they tend to focus on things over which they still have control, such as foreign policy and legacy building. Remarkably, Trump, not even a full year into his second term, seems to have already gotten there.”
NBC News: “As a result of the various threats and intimidation, judges have had to adapt their daily lives, according to NBC News interviews with six sitting judges, as well as former judges and others familiar with the current threat landscape.”
“One judge moved house. Another had to freeze her credit cards after a security breach.”
“Other judges have taken actions to adapt to the changing landscape by upgrading home security systems, changing the route they drive to work and ensuring family members limit personal information they post online, according to the current and former judges.”
The Guardian: “In the shifting political climate of the second Trump administration, where the FBI has openly rerouted resources away from investigations of far-right extremists, the Base appears free to organize and prepare for their stated objective of fomenting an armed insurgency against the US government.”
Rachel Bade: “When Rep. Elise Stefanik last week notified President Donald Trump of her decision to drop out of the New York gubernatorial race, the commander-in-chief and his team made a soft, 11th-hour appeal to change her mind.
After Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman declared his candidacy days before, the president had raised eyebrows by publicly demurring from choosing a horse in the primary. But his equivocation, close Trump allies tell me, was to avoid embarrassing an old friend. And on the phone, the president and his team reminded Stefanik that he planned to endorse her eventually, these people say. He hoped to do so, I’m reliably told, around the state’s February primary convention.”
“By then, it was too late. Stefanik — aware that some Long Island Republicans she thought would have her back were instead digging for negative oppo — decided she didn’t need this.”
“More than 400,000 Russian soldiers are estimated to have been killed or wounded in 2025, according to a British defence intelligence update on Ukraine,” the Telegraph reports.
“In October 2025, defense intelligence put the overall number of Russian casualties throughout the full-scale war at 1,118,000, higher than the entire size of its army before the full-scale invasion. Russia has thrown men into ‘meat-grinder’ assaults to seize land in eastern Ukraine inch by inch.”
Mark Cancian: “On December 22, President Trump announced a new class of ‘battleships’ that will be 100 times more powerful than previous battleships and larger than any other surface combatant on the oceans. The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion.”
“However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail. It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”
“Concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing is taking extraordinary steps to keep it under control,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Although China’s government sees AI as crucial to the country’s economic and military future, regulations and recent purges of online content show it also fears AI could destabilize society. Chatbots pose a particular problem: Their ability to think for themselves could generate responses that spur people to question party rule.”
“The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to allow President Trump to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops in the Chicago area over the objection of Illinois officials, casting doubt on the viability of similar deployments in other American cities,” the New York Times reports.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.