Congress members came back to Washington, D.C., yesterday after the midterm earthquake. The membership of the current Congress remains the same, but the mood of the country and the momentum of the parties has shifted so completely it feels like the country lived through a decade of change in the past week. As if in illustration of that change, Democrats have announced they are going to move the plaque honoring the law enforcement officers who defended the Congress and the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—including 250 who were injured—to a more prominent spot. Congress authorized the plaque, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to put it up, and Republicans in the Senate finally buried it on a basement wall. Yesterday morning, Trump tried to resurrect the Big Lie—that any election he loses is rigged—for the midterms, but the power of that lie to conjure news reports is apparently gone. Right-wing personality Megyn Kelly posted a response: “Just stop.” Today pictures of the big incoming class of new Democratic senators circulated on social media. While the Democrats will remain in the minority in Congress until January, they are making it clear they intend to hit the ground running. Already they are putting forward measures to address both affordability and accountability. Yesterday a group of sixteen Democratic senators reiterated their determination to get rid of the dramatic cuts Republicans made to Medicaid in their so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” of July 2025. In the short term, they asked the Republican chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Mike Crapo of Idaho, and the Senate majority leader, John Thune of South Dakota, along with their Democratic counterparts, to delay the Medicaid work reporting requirements set to go into effect on January 1, 2027. They note that such work requirements have never increased participation in the workforce. Instead, they have caused eligible people to lose coverage when they can’t navigate the new red tape. New inflation numbers today showed prices rising faster than economists expected. Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported that by Schwab’s estimates, the year from October 2025 to October 2026 saw consumer prices rise 12%. Inflation is a direct result of Trump’s tariffs, war on Iran, and deportation of undocumented immigrants, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) today called Trump’s economic agenda “a failure.” In a speech today, she called for a higher federal minimum wage and banning congressional stock trading and “surveillance pricing,” the practice of tailoring prices to individual consumers. Expected to become the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Warren said she will push back against bad actors in the financial industry and in crypto ventures. Louise Radnofsky, Emily Glazer, C. Ryan Barber, and Lindsay Ellis of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Democrats from a variety of committees have already asked certain corporations, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, to produce records concerning their ties to potentially corrupt administration schemes—including Trump’s legacy projects—by January 4, the first day of the new Congress. Administration figures are already trying to distance themselves from possible wrongdoing. Yesterday, Trump told reporters that he had not heard about the relationship between Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang and a Chinese spy who was transmitting information about the company and its protected chips directly to Beijing before he invited Huang to travel to China with him aboard Air Force One in May. But in the New York Times today, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian E. Barnes, Ana Swanson, and Tripp Mickle reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had indeed informed Trump about the intelligence concerning Huang and that Rubio’s conversation with Trump “marked at least the second time in seven months that the president had been told of intelligence about Mr. Huang’s involvement with the woman.” As political scientist Elizabeth N. Saunders pointed out, the Trump administration’s refusal to do anything about the Nvidia case follows directly from Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the case concerning Trump’s mishandling of classified documents. Between that and his willingness to employ people who could not get security clearances, he has demonstrated his contempt for national security. Yesterday Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) filed eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Speaker Johnson sent the House home in October rather than having to bring Massie’s articles to a vote, but Massie has not backed down. The first three articles accuse Hegseth of violating the War Powers Act, not only by continuing the conflict for longer than the 90 days the law permits without obtaining congressional authorization, but also by launching the war without congressional authorization or an immediate threat, the language the law requires for the president to act on his own. Article IV accuses Hegseth of ignoring laws to limit civilian casualties; Article V accuses Hegseth of extrajudicial killings of at least 221 people with the strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Article VI accuses Hegseth of illegally suppressing free speech with his retaliation against Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for questioning unlawful military orders. Article VII accuses Hegseth of kidnapping a sovereign leader—Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro—and Article VIII accuses Hegseth of launching an unlawful war in Yemen. Hegeseth held a press conference today, his first in about six months. Lara Seligman and Michael R. Gordon of the Wall Street Journal noted that he didn’t talk about the ongoing war on Iran, but about his own impeachment. He claimed the impeachment effort was political and that criticism of his management of the military was an attack on the troops. While he tied himself closely to Trump, he did note that everything he did was “ordered by the commander in chief.” According to Aidan McLaughlin of Vanity Fair, before the briefing, an official told reporters that if anyone “gets out of line” they would be “removed physically.” Journalist Dan Lamothe reported that Hegseth would only take questions from right-wing media. The Trump administration is rushing forward with his legacy projects in Washington, D.C.—the triumphal arch, changes to Lafayette Square, the East Potomac Golf Links, and development of the Tidal Basin—to get them far enough along that they will be hard to stop when Democratic oversight begins in January. Sunlen Serfaty and Annie Grayer of CNN reported today that “multiple” whistleblowers have warned the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Jared Huffman of California, that administration officials are already destroying records. The House Natural Resources Committee oversees the national parks and federal lands Trump is trying to take over for his projects. While a spokesperson for the Interior Department said the whistleblower claims were “100% false,” Huffman has sent letters to the many different agencies involved in the various construction projects reminding them they must “preserve existing records collections and productions,” “[i]dentify and recover any deleted information,” and “suspend any destruction and deletion practices.” “Everything is coming; it’s all coming,” Huffman told Serfaty and Grayer. “It’s just going to be an entirely new day.” Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans appear to have decided to double down on the same ideology that voters overwhelmingly rejected last Tuesday. House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that “voters made the wrong choice” in the midterms. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) issued a call for Christians to meet the “shocking and historic” election with a “historic” response: an hour-long fast on December 15 at the Capitol. In Jack Hopkins Now, Jack Hopkins noted Saturday that Trump’s elevation of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff after he forced out former chief of staff Susie Wiles will take away whatever restraints Trump has on his behavior. Hopkins noted that Wiles had said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality” in that he operates as if “there’s nothing he can’t do.” Wiles grew up with an alcoholic father and learned to manage that personality with structure, staying out of the media and controlling who had access to Trump, managing his impulses. Miller, Hopkins notes, is the opposite. He loves the media, and rather than managing Trump’s impulses, he amplifies them. Seeing provocation as a way to get rewarded, he has described the U.S. as a scene of “American carnage” and wants to create a white nation through violent deportations and the crushing of internal dissent. When Trump appeared to bow to popular revulsion over Miller’s immigration extremism in an interview on 60 Minutes last night, suggesting amnesty for hardworking immigrants whose only offense was entering the country without documentation, MAGA exploded. On the right-wing OAN channel, former director of Project 2025 Paul Dans cheered on the elevation of Stephen Miller to the position of White House chief of staff, suggesting that Miller would understand that “there is no appetite for the American public for amnesty.” As Media Matters reported, Dans told former Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who left office after the House Ethics Committee found he had paid for sex with a minor and used illicit drugs as a member of Congress: “We just drove away a historic coalition, young men were completely disenfranchised. And our first response to them can’t be, Hey, let’s give away your jobs to a bunch of foreigners. The first response has to be, We’re doing away with the H-1B program. We have to let young white men take the wheel again of the American economy. That is the way out of this. And they need hope, this is their birthright, their country. And it’s time to put America and Americans first.” The Make America Healthy Again movement and an apparently high Donald Trump Jr. have both come out in support of personality Russell Brand, who on Monday was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison in the U.K. for rape and sexual assault. As Brandy Zadrozny of MS NOW reported today, Brand was a prominent spokesperson for MAHA, and today the online publication of MAHA Action Inc, a key advocacy group for the movement, came out with a 3,700-word screed challenging the fairness of the trial and suggesting a political motivation for the four weeks of witnesses testifying that Brand had sexually assaulted four women between 2004 and 2009. Later today, an apparently high Don Jr. posted a video suggesting that Brand’s conviction for rape was due to his embrace of “conservative life,” “when no one had a problem with it in the prior 27 years.” Today on the Fox News Channel, Attorney General Todd Blanche doubled down on the idea that he would consider prosecuting Democrats for saying they’re going to enforce accountability. Also today, news broke that a federal appeals court has refused the attempt of the Department of Justice to gain access to 18 months of journalists’ records on LinkedIn, saying the “overbroad” demand threatened the freedom of the press. On Monday the U.S. Department of Agriculture revived a plan that would cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits from those who qualify for other programs, affecting about 6.3 million people in fiscal year 2029. Marcia Brown of Politico noted that such cuts were outlined in Project 2025. Alex Nguyen of the Texas Tribune reported that as the Texas attorney general’s office moves from the hands of Republican Ken Paxton to Democrat Nathan Johnson, the Department of Justice is joining a lawsuit Paxton launched against Planned Parenthood in an attempt to bankrupt the organization. House Republicans today elected Trump loyalist Ohio congressman Jim Jordan to lead their conference. Jordan is a firebrand most famous for shouting down opponents, pushing MAGA rhetoric, and having been accused of turning a blind eye to accusations of sexual abuse of students by a team doctor when he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State University. Republicans demonstrated their loyalty to Trump tonight when they voted overwhelmingly—Massie was the only one who voted no—to send Massie’s impeachment measure to the Judiciary Committee, where Republicans will bottle it up. Rather than making the issue go away, killing this fast impeachment measure has likely guaranteed a slower process when the Democrats take control of Congress in January, with hearings that will expose the details of Hegseth’s tenure at the Defense Department and make clear to the American people why Hegseth must go. Meanwhile, Trump yesterday contrived a press conference to try to dig out from his apparent misunderstanding of a list of potential candidates for White House press secretary. He seems to have confused spokesperson Dana White with the Ultimate Fighting Championship promoter Dana White, offering the promoter a job for which he has no qualifications. At the press conference, Trump introduced the UFC promoter as if the whole suggestion were a big joke. This morning, he called in to C-SPAN with a woman (not Melania) laughing in the background, then launched into his fantasy version of the world until the host nudged him off the line. — Notes: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/11/09/congress/jan-6-plaques-future-01155916 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/10/new-democratic-leaders-2028-elections-01157824 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/us/politics/democrats-elizabeth-warren-economic-plan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/us/politics/trump-china-trip-nvidia.html https://www.npr.org/2026/11/09/nx-s1-6034483/thomas-massie-impeachment-pete-hegseth https://massie.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=395853 https://massie.house.gov/uploadedfiles/articles_of_impeachment_sec._hegseth.pdf 
https://www.ms.now/news/maha-stands-by-russell-brand-following-rape-sentence https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/09/usda-food-aid-snap-01156715 https://www.texastribune.org/2026/11/08/texas-planned-parenthood-lawsuit-justice-department/ https://abcnews.com/amp/US/rep-jim-jordan-turned-blind-eye-sex-abuse/story?id=104060698 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/us/politics/house-hegseth-impeachment-vote.html Trump’s truth: X: megynkelly/status/2119819056916070904 Bluesky: out5p0ken.bsky.social/post/3mzvokejyzs2z justinwolfers.bsky.social/post/3mzxl2tomtm2r carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3mzxmzp63c22w warren.senate.gov/post/3mzy26ogems2h profsaunders.bsky.social/post/3mzyd3bk44s25 atrupar.com/post/3mzxjoddtbp2z newsjennifer.bsky.social/post/3mzxre7cmxk2o ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mzxl3tfj2s2m atrupar.com/post/3mzvpqbmra22c editorialboard.bsky.social/post/3mzxnbncxak2i atrupar.com/post/3mzyb35eoas2g kyledcheney.bsky.social/post/3mzxrvnjhcu2u justinbaragona.bsky.social/post/3mzvw42ebnk22 You’re currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. If you need help receiving Letters, changing your email address, or unsubscribing, please visit our Support FAQ. You can also submit a help request directly. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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