November 19, 2025

Wednesday, November 19, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.

Trump behavior last week and this.

The Epstein Files.

Trump was dead set against releasing the Epstein files until he realized there were enough votes in the House to release them with or without him - though, of course, he was and is free to release the files without a Congressional vote at all.

Then this happened in the Senate.

Here is the Public Service Announcement the Epstein Victims released. Touch to watch.👇

---

Ongoing but shocking insults for journalists.👇

New York magazine reacted.

Then praise for the murderer of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.👇

Remember- US intel under Trump in 2018: "The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi."

New York Times reports:

Hosting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, President Trump brushed off the murder of a journalist by Saudi agents, saying, “Things happen.”

Trump also slandered Khashoggi, with the lie that the journalist was an "extremely controversial" man who a "lot of people didn't like."

A reporter asked about the finding by U.S. intelligence officials that Prince Mohammed had ordered the killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump interjected and asked who the reporter was with, then began defending the crown prince. “He knew nothing about it. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking something like that.”

Trump completely happy. Touch to Watch.👇

Trump’s war against journalists and his adoration of the murderous Prince of Saudi Arabia came today in Trump’s attack yesterday on ABC Mary K.Bruce.

Touch to watch. 👇

The Associated Press reports -

President Donald Trump berated an ABC reporter Tuesday after she asked a question about the release of the Epstein files, calling her “a terrible person and a terrible reporter” and threatening to have the FCC look into revoking the network’s license.

---

The Gerrymandering Fight.

Trump is losing another fight against Democracy.

Indiana.

![Trump’s fight against Democracy continues]
(https://assets.buttondown.email/images/8ccb0f94-b313-4c44-aad2-a84c87e24ced.jpeg?w=960&fit=max)

Utah.

Texas.

Democracy Docket reports.

A panel of three federal judges ruled to block Texas from using its new gerrymandered congressional map in the upcoming 2026 election — dealing a significant blow to President Donald Trump’s national effort to rig the 2026 election by creating more Republican congressional seats, at the expense of minority voters.
The state is expected to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

---

Antisemitism, supported by the White House.

Trump defends Tucker Carlson, whose interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes split Republicans.

“You can’t tell him who to interview,” the president said of the podcast host, who gave a platform to the 27-year-old “groyper”

President Donald Trump defended Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes, weighing in on a debate over antisemitism that has roiled the Republican party.

“I’ve found him to be good. He’s said good things about me over the years,” Trump told a reporter over the weekend who asked about Carlson’s interview. “You can’t tell him who to interview. If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out.”

The president’s comments were his first on a growing divide within the Republican party over Carlson giving a platform on his top-rated podcast to Fuentes and over the growth of the antisemitic Fuentes-led “groyper” movement on the right.

Jewish conservatives and some of their allies have expressed alarm at explicit antisemitism within the movement.

Conservative writer Rod Dreher recently estimating that as many as 40 percent of young GOP staffers in Washington, D.C. are followers of the 27-year-old Fuentes, who complained to Carlson that “organized Jewry” undermines American unity.

Yet neither Trump nor Vice President J.D. Vance has joined the chorus of condemnation for Fuentes’ brand of white supremacy. Vance, who employs Carlson’s son Buckley on his staff, in recent days defended Buckley from a right-wing Jewish activist’s accusations of antisemitism without directly addressing the Fuentes controversy. The vice president was also criticized for responding to a college student’s question about Israel and Jews without acknowledging the question’s antisemitic underpinnings.

The debate over Carlson was stoked when the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation defended Carlson. A growing number of Heritage Foundation staffers and associates, both Jewish and not, have since distanced themselves from the think tank. Legal fellow Adam Mossoff, who is Jewish, and former board member Robert George, a Princeton University professor and prominent public intellectual, recently left Heritage, citing its handling of Carlson.

And in the cultural sphere, the actress and podcaster Dasha Nekrasova was also dropped by her agent on Friday over a weeks-old interview with Fuentes that she and her co-host conducted on the podcast “Red Scare.” “Nekrasova had a recurring role on HBO’s “Succession,” and “Red Scare” was initially a thought leader on the young left before lurching hard to the right in recent years.

Carlson campaigned with Trump for his 2024 reelection and has significant influence within his administration, while Trump dined with Fuentes and the antisemitic rapper Ye in Mar-a-Lago in 2022, an incident that prompted criticism from staunch Jewish Republican allies. Trump has since claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was at the time.

Meanwhile, Paul Ingrassia, a Trump administration staffer who attended a Fuentes rally last year and recently withdrew his nomination from a Cabinet-level post over the revelation of texts in which he said he had a “Nazi streak,” remains in the administration. Instead Ingrassia found a new position as deputy general counsel of the General Services Administration.

Carlson, for his part, has doubled down, even as some sponsors have quietly exited his show. Last week he disparaged Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi pastor who was executed in 1945 for his involvement in the German resistance movement. Carlson also compared the Israel Defense Forces to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

The GOP’s fault lines over Fuentes and antisemitism aren’t breaking as cleanly as those over other issues. Even a newly minted Trump adversary on the right, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, declined to condemn Carlson or Fuentes in a recent CNN interview.

“I defend every single person’s free speech rights. I think that’s incredibly important. So I don’t apologize for that. And I don’t believe in cancelling people. And I think it’s important for people like Tucker Carlson and yourself to interview everyone,” Greene told Dana Bash over the weekend.

On CNN Greene noted that she had spoken at a Fuentes-led conference in 2022, but claimed, “I don’t know Nick Fuentes. He’s someone I’ve never exchanged text messages with or phone calls.”

Asked specifically about Fuentes’s past antisemitic comments, Greene continued, “You should have Nick Fuentes on your show, and you can ask him questions about that. I myself am not antisemitic. I have never criticized the Jewish people or said anything about them in particular. I am critical of the government of Israel.” (The Forward)

JD Vance sidesteps college student’s antisemitic question while defending Trump’s ‘America first’ Israel stance.

“Their religion … openly supports the prosecution of ours,” one MAGA student told the vice president.

Vice President JD Vance fielded skeptical questions about American support for Israel, including one conspiratorial remark about Judaism, from conservative college students while headlining Wednesday’s stop on the right-wing group Turning Point USA’s nationwide tour.

The event, at the University of Mississippi, was a further sign of shifting priorities among young conservatives when it comes to support for Israel, a long-held GOP tenet that has seen sharp erosion since Oct. 7 and the Gaza war.

Following the talk, Vance — who recently declined to condemn a group chat of Young Republican leaders joking about Hitler and gas chambers — received criticism from Jewish conservatives for failing to take another opportunity to condemn antisemitism.

Charlie Kirk, the murdered conservative activist and TPUSA founder whose legacy on Israel has been sharply debated since his death, was invoked by both Vance and his questioners.

“I’m a Christian, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something, or that they’re our greatest ally, or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion dollar foreign aid package to Israel, to cover this, to quote Charlie Kirk, ‘ethnic cleansing in Gaza,’” one student wearing a MAGA hat asked the vice president.

That student went on to assert, of Judaism, “Not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.” The student did not elaborate, though young right-wing Christians have taken Israel to task for recent videos of Jewish Israeli extremists spitting on Christians in the country.

His was the second critical Israel-related question of the night. An earlier questioner had asked Vance, “Do you think it’s a conflict of interest for Miriam Adelson, an Israeli donor, to give millions of dollars to his campaign, and then Trump have pro-Israeli policies?” (Adelson, a major pro-Israel GOP donor, is Israeli-American.)

The questions mirrored a growing anti-Israel flank within the MAGA movement, as polls reflect a growing antipathy for the Jewish state among young Republicans. The movement is fueled by figures including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who maintains an influential presence on YouTube and X. Carlson in particular spoke at Kirk’s funeral, and has platformed open antisemites — most recently including Nick Fuentes — while also headlining other stops on the current TPUSA college tour and maintaining close ties with Trump and Vance.

At Ole Miss, Vance responded to both Israel questions in an America-first framing — and suggested that his own support for Israel was not unequivocal.

“He pursues the interests of Americans first,” Vance said about his boss to the student who had asked about Christian allyship with Israel. “That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have alliances, that you’re not going to work with other countries from time to time.”

Vance continued, ”Israel, sometimes they have similar interests to the United States, and we’re going to work with them in that case. Sometimes, they don’t have similar interests to the United States.”

In praising the recent ceasefire and hostage return deal brokered by Trump, Vance said the president succeeded by “actually being willing to apply leverage to the state of Israel” — something many left-wing activists had pressured former President Joe Biden to do, largely unsuccessfully.

That “leverage,” Vance said, proved that Trump was acting in America’s interests, not Israel’s. He then hinted at a conspiracy theory of his own. “So when people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not manipulating or controlling this president of the United States,” he said.

He then attempted to address the student’s comments about the divide between Jews and Christians.

“Jews disagreeing with Christians on certain religious ideas, yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the realities, is that Jews don’t believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. Obviously Christians do believe that,” he said. “My attitude is, let’s have those conversations. Let’s have those disagreements when we have them.”

Vance named protecting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a holy Christian site, as an area “I really, really care about” and wanted to work with Israel on. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, attended mass at the church during his state visit to Israel last week. The church is primarily tended to by Palestinian Christians, and has been the site of contested real-estate disputes as far-right Israeli settlers have sought to secure control of historical Christian sites in Jerusalem.

To the student who asked about Adelson, the vice president denied that Trump was influenced by her Israel views — even as he acknowledged that Israel appeared to be her primary cause as a top Republican donor.

“She is very clear about the fact, she doesn’t hide the fact, that she really loves Israel, and that is part of what motivates her political giving. That is a reality. At the same time, the president of the United States is America first, through and through,” Vance said, adding that he, too, had “a very good relationship” with Adelson. The widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was present at Trump’s Knesset address announcing the Gaza ceasefire, and received several shout-outs from the president.

Vance also said that Trump’s anti-war critics, some from his own party, hadn’t given him enough credit for the ceasefire.

“I remember when people said that the president of the United States was going to get us into a multi-hundred-thousand troop, regime-change war for Israel,” the vice president said. “I wonder if they stepped back and said, ‘You know what, we were wrong about that.’”

Vance’s performance has attracted ire from Jewish conservatives who increasingly have been warning of rising, unchecked antisemitism on the right.

“Tonight the vice president had an opportunity to denounce antisemitism amid its historic surge,” Jewish conservative activist Sloan Rachmuth wrote on X. “He could’ve set an example for the young people who are steering in that direction. JD Vance chose not to.” Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg wrote that Vance was “a profile in cowardice.”

“At a Turning Point USA event this week, a young man said something that should have been met with instant moral outrage,” the pro-Israel commentator Daniel Mael wrote on his Substack. “Instead, the Vice President of the United States treated it as a legitimate question.”

Mael took issue with several of Vance’s phrasings, including his remark about Trump not being “controlled by Israel.”

“The meaning was obvious. It implied that past presidents—Biden, Obama, and George W. Bush—were controlled by Israel,” he wrote. “With one careless phrase, the Vice President of the United States echoed one of the most poisonous lies in history: that Jews secretly control governments and act against others for their own gain.”

Vance’s failures to respond to claims that Israel was committing “ethnic cleansing” and to the remark about Judaism targeting Christians were also troubling, Mael wrote. “The claim that Judaism attacks Christianity is not ignorance; it is the sewage of the alt-right media machine…. If conservatives do not confront this now, the movement will rot from within. The world’s oldest hatred has returned, speaking the language of patriotism and pretending to defend faith. ”

At the conclusion of his Q&A, Vance —- who also raised eyebrows by stating he hoped his Hindu wife, Usha, would convert to Christianity — thanked the Israel critics in the audience for strengthening the conservative movement.

“We don’t need, in our political movement, people who agree with us on every single issue. We got a couple of questions about Israel,” he said. “What we need is people of good faith who love the United States of America and are willing to work hard to save it.” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

---