Closing tabs, closing tabs, closing all the tabs ...
"Long story short," concluded Arthur, "Trump II has the will prior administrations lacked to enforce the law in the interior, has a large population of removable aliens to choose from (thanks to non-enforcement under Biden), has the detention space to hold them (thanks to the Big…
— Byron York (@ByronYork) December 24, 2025
... has the detention space to hold them (thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill Act), and has willing federal and state partners to lend a hand. Consequently, it is setting removal records previously thought impossible."
Ed: That's true even with the obstruction of federal district court judges. It turns out that self-deportation actually works at scale when you set the incentives properly, and that immigration enforcement is also possible at scale when you actually try it.
===
Kimberly Strassel at WSJ: As 2025 comes to a close, consider this remarkable fact: Not a day passed this year in which Donald Trump didn’t dominate headlines. Joe Biden would disappear for weeks at a time. Trump? There’s no hiding from him. His White House was a perpetual-motion machine, reaching into every corner of Washington and beyond. Some actions were consequential; others amounted to little more than pokes in woke America’s eye. But they were all loud, and nonstop. This was a president rejecting lame-duck status, demonstrating he intends to wring the life out of every day remaining to him in the Oval Office.
The volume was so huge—and so wide-reaching—that it’s hard to step back and evaluate the bigger goals. Yet here’s an attempt at just that—a packaging of the bigger themes of this first year, and an evaluation of the highs, the lows and the yet-to-be-determined.
Ed: Love him or hate him, or even if you're lukewarm on him, Donald Trump was clearly the most consequential person of 2025. Trump learned a lot from his first term, and has applied the correct lessons in most aspects.
===
Jimmy Kimmel goes on UK television to call America a fascist country as the UK is locking up UK citizens for social media posts.
— C3 (@C_3C_3) December 26, 2025
Kimmel is a traitor to his country.pic.twitter.com/OB1Q6FNy4s
Ed: Jimmy Kimmel couldn't recognize fascism if it bit him in the ass. Yes, this is unintentional irony, but the scores of people locked up in the UK this year social media posts aren't laughing. That gives them something in common from the 95% of TV viewers who don't watch Kimmel in the US. Kimmel postured as a free speech martyr for months, then went where the government is arresting dissenters to cry about tyranny in the US.
===
Axios: 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, Ukrainian officials say.
Why it matters: 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.
What they are saying: "We are not losing a single day. We have agreed on a meeting at the highest level — with President Trump in the near future. A lot can be decided before the New Year," Zelensky wrote on X on Friday morning after receiving a briefing from his top negotiator, Rustem Umerov.
Ed: Worth noting, but don't read too much into this. If Trump and Zelensky get on the same page for a proposal, that will be good news, but that doesn't mean Putin will accept it.
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🚨 WOMAN LOSES IT AFTER SEEING HER STUDENT LOAN TRIPLE - “WHAT TYPE OF CRACK ARE THEY SMOKING??”
— HustleBitch (@HustleBitch_) December 26, 2025
An American woman is going viral after breaking down the numbers on her Temple University student loan - and the math is insane.
She borrowed $40,922 for school.
Sallie Mae says… pic.twitter.com/1Iu5MSkMvR
Ed: If you get a college degree and still don't understand compound interest, perhaps the issue is more about the crack you've smoked rather than your lender. Not to mention the quality of the education you received. Let's not forget that Barack Obama nationalized the student loan industry, so perhaps the woman here should take it up with The One.
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The Free Press: We all know that the news tends toward bleakness. Wars, terror attacks, violent crime—these are the kinds of stories that tend to make headlines.
Yet there are also those moments when the news is, from an objective standpoint, quite funny. The local curiosities, alcohol-fueled wildlife, and embarrassing relatives of prominent figures all lend a bit more color to our lives.
So with the end of the year approaching, and with Nellie Bowles’s beloved TGIF off until the New Year, we asked some of our journalists to highlight the humorous stories that have given us a little hope—or at least a laugh—in this otherwise grim year.
Ed: It's worth reading as a kind of weird review of 2025, but I think only Oliver Wiseman understood the assignment. Olivia Nuzzi doesn't make a single appearance, surprisingly. Oddly, Trump only gets three mentions.
===
THERE GOES MY SPRING BREAK PLANS, THANKS A LOT DONALD DRUMPF
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) December 26, 2025
I HAD A FULL ITINERARY OF GETTING KIDNAPPED AND RANSOMED AND CATCHING AIDS ALL PLANNED OUT
AND NOW IT’S RUINED https://t.co/9DqB3GQpxm
Ed: Interesting to see Niger using this diplomatic rebuke while Europe screeches about Trump using the same mechanism.
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Kira Davis: With the election of the Obama administration, there was a more concerted effort from official government channels to mute “Christmas” at Christmas-time and push the more generic aspects of the winter holiday season. We wouldn’t want to offend all those diverse diversity people with our Christian traditions. How colonial!
These days, you’ll be roundly ridiculed (at least in the online universe) for suggesting there is a “war on Christmas,” and even for being too enthusiastic about reclaiming the “Merry Christmas!” greeting.
The truth is, we most certainly have been warring against Christmas in this country for quite some time now…because we war against God. Christmas is the season in which we acknowledge the arrival of God.
Ed: We live in rebellion against God. It is no surprise that this has muted into two forms when it comes to Christmas and Easter. First, we try to secularize both, and whatever is left of these religious celebrations is actively suppressed or ignored.
===
Say it louder
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) December 26, 2025
“Who are the real colonizers” (Muslims)
Without Arab imperialism:
- Egyptians would be Coptic
- Moroccans would be Berber
- Libya and Algeria would be Amazigh
- Syria and Lebanon would be Aramaic speaking and partly Phoenician
- Iraq would be Mesopotamian
-… pic.twitter.com/uPjj5JmLNO
Ed: I've made this argument a number of times when discussing the attempts to paint Jews as colonizers of "Palestine." The opposite is true; Arabs colonized vast swaths of territory long before the Scandinavians began doing the same thing from northern Europe. In fairness, the Romans got there before the Arabs. But before all of this, the Jews were in Judea, and they remain the only people in the world who live in the same place and worship the same God as they did 3500 years ago.
===
Tim Graham at Newsbusters: Hunter Biden is a shameless liar. It’s just as true today as it was in the midst of his binges on crack and hookers. It’s also true that the elitist media have long shown a deep desire to ignore him entirely, and when they couldn’t, it was a sad family tragedy, so head for the handkerchiefs.
The Daily Caller reports that Hunter went on “The Shawn Ryan Podcast” to unload more whoppers, and no lie was more shameless than this: “What I can tell you about the laptop is that there is no laptop. That’s bulls--t.” Ryan replied, “There was no f--king laptop?”
Hunter implausibly claimed “There is an actual physical laptop that somebody had, but the guy that had, that said he had the laptop, the existence of the search for the laptop came before he was even a twinkle in Rudy Giuliani’s eye.” He started babbling about how Lev Parnas “literally went to Ukraine to get a laptop “four months before John Paul Mac Isaac ever even… existed. And so, what they did is they cobbled together [a] stolen, concocted, fabricated mishmash of digital information, largely, which is, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of emails…from 25 years. I mean, no laptop could have held all of that.”
Ed: That's a weird flex, given that (a) everyone has now conceded that the laptop was genuine, and (b) Hunter's own lawyers had to admit it in order to argue (unsuccessfully) that the material was inadmissible in his criminal case. Graham has taken the proper measure of Hunter. And of the whole Biden clan, for that matter.
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.@POTUS: "What would you like Santa to bring?"
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) December 24, 2025
KID: "Not coal!"@POTUS: "You mean 'clean, beautiful coal.'"
🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/K15IqUMxzA
Ed: I missed this one. I laughed out loud, because I have often joked that a lump of coal might not be so bad of a consolation prize.
===
Democrats: The evil, patriarchal Republicans want to force women into subservience like in The Handmaid’s Tale.
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) December 26, 2025
Also Democrats: pic.twitter.com/stXpwtnDDk
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