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- Losing My Perspicacity, November 21, 2025
Losing My Perspicacity, November 21, 2025
Trump has a terrible day in court, crashes out on social media
Julie DiCaro
November 21, 2025
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Good morning and Happy Friday! Thanks for starting your day with me.
I spent much of yesterday up to my ears in legal filings and live-posting hearings. And while I certainly don’t mean to turn this into a legal newsletter, there’s no doubt that court cases against the Trump administration are dominating the news right now. I realize that this is only a fraction of the news that broke yesterday, but beehiiv only allows me so many words before this newsletter gets snipped by Gmail. (Also, I’ve been sick all week, and the Sudafed is making a lot of things fuzzy.)
We’ll get to the legal news in a moment, but I wanted to start with the story I feel should have been leading off every news broadcast yesterday: The President of the United States calling for the arrest and execution of Democrats.
Trump is calling for the six Democratic lawmakers who urged the military not to follow any illegal orders to be arrested, and he’s reposting replies saying they should be hanged and calling them terrorists.
— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com)2025-11-20T14:23:11.939Z
We’ve now advanced to the timeline where the POTUS is calling for the imprisonment and execution of his political opponents, and it barely makes the news.
What prompted all this, you ask? It appears to be the video I shared yesterday, where several Democratic lawmakers reminded US military members that they do not have to obey unlawful orders. (Frankly, given the awful state of civics education in this country, asking our rank and file military to know the difference between a lawful and an unlawful order is probably a bit optimistic. Per my social media experience, around half the country can’t even accurately describe the First Amendment.)
Anyway! This all led Karoline Leavitt to crash out during yesterday’s White House press briefing.
As Karoline Leavitt makes a dash for the exit, you can hear the voice of Kaitlan Collins of CNN, saying: "You misquoted Democrats in that video. That's actually not what they said."
— Mjkwho (@mjkwho.bsky.social)2025-11-20T20:41:45.137Z
Shout out to Kaitlin Collins, one of the few good journalists left in the White House press corps, for calling out Leavitt’s intentional falsehood. No one is asking troops to disobey lawful orders. The video tells them explicitly to disobey unlawful orders. But Trump has never been one to let facts stand in the way of a good hanging (ask Mike Pence), and Leavitt has never met a lie she won’t tell for Trump.
Sadly, I don’t know how long Kaitlin Collins is for the WH press corps. According to The Guardian, the White House has already discussed programming changes at CNN with Larry Ellison, whose Paramount Skydance is said to be making a bid to buy Warner Bros Discovery.
Senior White House officials have discussed internally their preference for Paramount Skydance to acquire Warner Bros Discovery in recent weeks, and one official has discussed potential programming changes at CNN with Larry Ellison, the largest shareholder of Paramount.
The discussions, according to people familiar with the matter, come as Paramount portrays itself as the best bid for Warner Bros Discovery, after the company announced last month it was open to offers, because it would have an easier time getting through regulatory review.
As I keep saying, we discussed this exact scenario — a few billionaires buying up the big media outlets and using them to curry favor with politicians — in journalism school in the mid-1990s. That’s how long we’ve had to prepare for this scenario. And yet.
In other news, it was a bad day for Donald Trump on the legal front, with a federal judge ordering his administration to end federal guard deployment in Washington, DC., and a blistering request for a Bill of Particulars in the James Comey case, which I live-posted about here. The TL; DR is that the government has been so vague about what Comey allegedly said and when that the defense can’t figure out what he’s alleged to have done. That’s never a good sign for the prosecution.
Meanwhile, in Maryland, Judge Paual Xinis was less than thrilled with the witness the government brought into court to testify that Costa Rica will no longer accept the transfer of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. After the witness admitted that he had no personal knowledge of the situation and that he only put what his superiors told him to say in his declaration, Xinis exclaimed, exasperated, “He doesn’t even know the meaning of the words in his affidavit!” We’re now waiting for her ruling on the stay that’s blocking the government from removing Abrego Garcia to Liberia.
Elsewhere yesterday: Judge Sara Ellis drops a hammer on Greg Bovino and company; The Coast Guard brings back swastikas; JP Morgan seems to have been up to its ears in the Jeffrey Epstein mess; and The High Note.
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