The Friday Brief, December 5, 2025

Inside

Firing Season
MAGA Drinks The Poison
The Meritocracy Is Broken
Olivia Nuzzi and the Secrets of Butler, PA
The Corruption Is The Point
How The Bad AI Guys Win
Mean Girl Stefanik Stabs Mike Johnson
Jamie Harrison…Gets It?
American Psycho: Christmas Movie
I Wasn’t Going To Prejudge Bari Weiss. I Am Now.
What I’m Reading
Scenes From The Home Front

Hey folks…don’t forget our Christmas promotion! Click below to get 25% off for a full year of Against All Enemies!

The Big Picture

FIRING SEASON

When Trump retook office 11 months ago, he decided not to let the media “win” by firing any of the boobs, incompetents, grifters, cranks, conmen, reprobates, skells, Russian agents, and now war criminals he jammed through a compliant U.S. Senate or simply elevated by the political necromancy of designating them as “special government employees.”

The chaos, the fear, the power to snap his fingers and ruin a career on live television has been tempting him as his disastrous first year comes to a close. Firing Friday is calling his name.

For Trump, The Apprentice never ended; it just moved into the Office of Personnel Management. People forget that Trump’s favorite drug is not money, not sex, not even attention. It is humiliation, particularly the humiliation of his closest allies and sycophants. He finds firing the perfect display of his power and cruelty. He likes to see them grovel. He likes to watch the light behind their eyes fade to black when they realize the deal they made with him is going to end the way it always ends.

For Trump, in his physical decline, it replaces the power he once had to golf, carouse with Jeffrey Epstein, and give women the 3.8 seconds of pleasure only he could deliver.

But this time, it’s different.

This time, the stakes are higher, the failures are bigger, and the crashing of his polling numbers and MAGA’s power is well underway. He is surrounded by scandals large and small, with leaks now pouring out of his administration like water through a screen door, and for the first time in a long time, he is not having fun.

In the terms he knows best, the show is terrible, the ratings are slipping, and even the supporting cast is quietly looking at their agents and asking, “So what comes after this?”

Welcome to firing season.