Background Briefing: December 21, 2025

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Trump’s Deteriorating Mental and Physical Health

We begin with the dam breaking in response to Trump’s disgusting remarks following the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife as tolerance for this sick, stupid, cruel and vulgar man’s behavior even upset some in MAGA world while Trump’s poll numbers crater and his public appearances are reduced by 40%, leading to concerns about his deteriorating mental and physical health. Joining us is Moira Donegan, writer in residence at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in The London Review of Books, Bookforum and The Paris Review. She is the co-host of the podcast In Bed With The Right and a columnist at The Guardian where her latest article we discuss is, “What’s going on with Donald Trump’s health?”

 

Trump’s DoJ Releases 10% of the Heavily Redacted Epstein Files Trying to Shift the Focus From Trump to Clinton

Then we examine Friday’s release of some of the Epstein files by Trump’s lackies at the DoJ who are trying to shift the focus away from Trump to Bill Clinton while redacting huge portions of the limited release claiming they are protecting victims but appear to be shielding perpetrators. Joining us is James Zirin, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and the host of the critically acclaimed television talk show, Conversations with Jim Zirin, which airs on PBS. He is the author of Supremely Partisan: How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States Supreme Court and Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3500 Lawsuits. He is a contributing editor at The Washington Monthly where his latest article is “Brown, Bondi Beach, and the Reiners: The Murderous December.”

 

Ending the Oligarch-Friendly Illegitimate Rule of the Supreme Court 

Then finally we speak with Samuel Moyn, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history, human rights history and law, including Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War and Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. His forthcoming book is Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It and we discuss his op-ed at The Guardian, “It’s time to accept that the US supreme court is illegitimate and must be replaced.”