Here come the holidays, and with them that perennial sense of nostalgia. Like, remember when the news cycle used to slow down from Thanksgiving to Christmas?

Go ahead and stuff that turkey. Trim the tree. But don't expect the news to ease up. Not with Donald Trump in so much trouble.

This November, in the first year of the president's second term, has piled up losses and embarrassments on top of defeats and disgraces. Trump is irascible in the best of times. Now he's in full meltdown mode.

So brace yourself for a steady wave of Trump's distraction tactics as 2025 nears its conclusion.

Trump is already calling to execute members of Congress, lashing out a journalists who ask legitimate questions, and demanding that his complicit appointees at the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute anyone he perceives as an enemy.

He's just getting started. So much is going wrong. And his knee-jerk instinct here is to deny reality while kicking up a ruckus to distract attention. But reality is starting to win that war.

Trump, with the assistance of U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, spent four months trying to dodge a congressional push for his administration to release the Epstein files, a massive tranche of documents detailing the terrible crimes attributed to Trump's former buddy, the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

He failed. In the House,

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