Coffee Talk with Tiff

December 18, 2025 1:00 pm EST Tiff Coffee Talk with Tiff 0
Coffee. Photo by Jonathan Thursfield.

It’s Thursday…

President Shitshow’s public schedule for…

12/18/2025:

9:00 AM – In-town pool call, The White House
Translation: cameras nearby, nothing said, everyone pretends this counts as transparency.

11:00 AM – Intelligence briefing, closed press
He receives information. Whether it’s processed is a separate, ongoing experiment.

1:30 PM – Signs an executive order, Oval Office, closed press
The Sharpie makes its daily appearance. Details TBD. Spin guaranteed.

4:15 PM – Christmas reception, Grand Foyer, closed press
Smiles, handshakes, ornaments, and absolutely no policy relevance.

6:00 PM – Signs the National Defense Authorization Act, Oval Office, press pool allowed
The one moment today where questions might sneak in before handlers tackle the microphones.

8:15 PM – Another Christmas reception, Grand Foyer, closed press
Same party, later hour. Nothing learned.


President Unhinged took to the airwaves Wednesday night for a prime-time national address that mostly amounted to an old man yelling at the sky. He did, however, manage to announce a brand-new bribery scheme. This time it comes dressed up as a so-called “military dividend” of $1,776, timed to coincide with the country’s 250th birthday in 2026.

President Please Follow My Unlawful Orders said:

BECAUSE OF TARIFFS, ALONG WITH THE JUST PASSED ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL, TONIGHT I AM PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THAT MORE THAN 1,450,000 MILITARY SERVICE MEMBERS WILL RECEIVE A SPECIAL — WE CALL — DIVIDEND BEFORE CHRISTMAS.

IN HONOR OF OUR NATION’S FOUNDING IN 1776, WE ARE SENDING EVERY SOLDIER $1776.

THINK OF THAT.

THE CHECKS ARE ALREADY ON THE WAY.

NOBODY UNDERSTOOD THAT ONE UNTIL ABOUT 30 MINUTES AGO.

WE MADE A LOT MORE MONEY THAN ANYONE THOUGHT BECAUSE OF TARIFFS AND THE BILL HELP US ALONG.

NOBODY DESERVES IT MORE THAN OUR MILITARY AND I SAY CONGRATULATIONS, EVERYBODY.

C-SPAN YouTube of remarks. It’s all caps cause the “show transcript” is in all caps. 12/18/2025.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegshit repeated President Sky Yeller’s words from last night.

1776. As you know, our great nation was founded in the crucible of revolution in that year. Now, as we enter the Christmas season some 250 years later, we are proud to provide 1776 with a whole new modern meaning for our joint force.

As he announced to the nation last night. Thanks to President Trump’s unwavering commitment to our warriors and the provisions provided in the one big beautiful bill, more than 1.45 million service members will, in the coming days, receive a one-time tax-free bonus of $1,776.

This has never happened before. Every member of our military—E1 to O6.

We’re calling it the Warrior Dividend. A direct investment in the brave men and women who carry on the legacy of our armed forces every single day.

This Warrior Dividend serves as yet another example of how the War Department is working to improve quality of life of our military personnel and their families. I can think of no better Americans to receive this check right before Christmas.

Whether it’s for pay, housing, base support—all elements of what we’re doing are to rebuild our military.

So, to the American warrior: President Trump and I, and the entire War Department, we have your back. We thank you for your service and thank you for your sacrifice. We love you and your families and wish you a happy new year and a very merry Christmas.

Thank you.

It’s the tweet. I used Grok to transcribe, chat gpt to make it readable, and my own ears to verify Grok’s work. 12/18/2025.

The big question following President Yells at the Sky announcement was how the hell is this being paid for. Hint; it’s not out of tariff money.

Defense One.com (12/18/2025):

President Donald Trump’s $1,776 checks for more than a million troops, announced Wednesday, come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior administration official confirmed.

[snip]

The senior administration official told Defense One in an emailed statement late Wednesday evening that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to “disburse $2.6 billion as a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement” to all eligible service members ranks 0-6 and below.

“Congress appropriated $2.9 billion to the Department of War to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement within The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the senior official said. “Approximately 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 Reserve component military members will receive this supplement.”

Defense One.com (12/18/2025).

Daniel Dale has a fact-check on last nights “address” it’s paywalled right now.

Flash News

The BLS released the long awaited CPI report on Thursday.

The chart:

We now turn to the economists…

Justin Wolfers:

Ben Casselman:

Jed Kolko:

Jason Furman:


In Case You Missed It; like I did.

This story, of course, tracks with that of countless others who arrived in the United States as part of the great migration, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, between the 1880s and the 1910s, which numbered as high as 20 million. As the book notes, they were out to “escape economic hardships and religious persecution” to build a “better life for themselves and their children.”

[At the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race. this is the bold text in the photo]

Yet at the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race—it was rooted in the “scientific racism” of the day. But it also involved a somewhat different claim: that the new arrivals suffered from a “social degeneracy” or “social inadequacy”—two typical phrases at the time—which rendered them a threat to the “civilization” the United States was in the process of becoming. In this telling, as prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross declared in a 1914 broadside, these new immigrants were inferior to Americans who descended from the “pioneer breed” who’d given birth to the American nation. The new arrivals, Ross said, had “submerged” that ancestral connection to the “pioneer breed,” setting the nation on a path to the “extinction that surely awaits it.”

“There is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World,” declared one congressman not long after. As historian Gary Gerstle, author of the great book American Crucible, noted in an email to me, many nativists at the time lamented the “civilizational vulnerability” of the United States, believing that “white, Christian, and western European culture” stretching back to “ancient Greece and Rome” represented the “summit of human achievement” and the core of American civilization. This was under dire threat from “groups outside that culture” who were “unassimilable, with Jewish ranks full of Bolsheviks and Italian ranks full of anarchists.”

More than a century later, those diatribes about people like Miller’s ancestors are very similar to claims Miller makes today about the threat to “civilization” supposedly posed by those emigrating from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. To be sure, it is not a new move to bring up Miller’s ancestry in the context of his current nativism, and many aspects of Miller’s worldview are well-known in a scattershot way: his disdain for multiculturalism, his hatred of mass migration, his affinity with white nationalists.

But in a series of tweets, interviews in right-wing media, and statements made elsewhere, Miller has outlined something more comprehensive and sinister—an elaborate worldview that has escaped notice in the mainstream media. It centers immigrants as a threat to “civilization” in terms that echo the rhetoric of those determined to exclude people like his ancestors.

New Republic. 12/15/2025.

The Intellectual Roots of Miller’s Ethno-Nationalism

“If you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” Stephen Miller declared as the presidential campaign heated up in 2024, in a quote flagged by Media Matters for America. “Elect Joe Biden, and America becomes the Third World.”

This is one of the single most revealing quotes Miller has ever uttered. At the core of Miller’s worldview is the idea that the immigration levels and humanitarian resettlement programs that existed under Biden posed an existential threat to American civilization, whereas those that now exist under Trump will preserve it from ruin and even outright extinction. During a Cabinet meeting in October, Miller gushed to Trump: “This was a country on the verge of dying, and you alone saved it.” This was widely mocked, but Miller meant it quite literally.

Cull through lots of Miller quotes, and a clearer picture of this emerges. “Why would any civilization that actually wants to preserve itself allow for any migration that is negative to the country as a whole?” Miller seethed last spring. He also pointedly asked: “Do you know what happens to a civilization that allows for the large-scale migration of people who hate it?” Miller regularly describes migration as an “invasion” and insists that getting rid of undocumented immigrants would free up emergency rooms, playing on longtime tropes depicting migrants as bearers of disease. During the 2024 campaign, he told a right-wing podcaster that reelecting Biden would represent “the assisted suicide of Western civilization.”

Note that Miller treats it as self-evident that most immigrants to the United States are either “negative to the country” or “hate” it. You see, it’s where these immigrants are coming from that determines whether they pose this existential, civilizational threat. As Miller himself put it: Import the Third World, and you become the Third World.

When I asked Steve Bannon, a longtime Miller ally, which writers most influenced Miller’s view that migration threatens American or Western “civilization,” he texted me some names. The top three were Pat Buchanan, Samuel Huntington, and Oswald Spengler. I was unable to confirm from Miller himself whether he’s read these three authors. However, Miller plainly draws sustenance from a strain of right-wing thought that loosely includes those writers, as well as David Horowitz, who mentored Miller as he came of age politically in a diversifying high school in Santa Monica.

[snip]

For Miller, it all started to go wrong with the 1965 immigration act. Miller has long lamented what this law and its impacts supposedly “did” to the United States. In 2022, Miller declared that the act’s legacy has been to destroy “social cohesion” in the country. “There cannot be social trust,” Miller continued. “There cannot be civic bonding. There cannot be a shared culture, a shared language, a shared education, a shared experience.”

But all of this is wrong. And it’s a terrible basis for U.S. immigration policy.

New Republic. 12/15/2025.

Miller’s Civilizational Charmed Circle Is Absurd

Let’s return to the fact that Miller’s own ancestors were subjected to similar claims: They, too, were deemed unfit to participate in the inheritance of Western civilization that the United States represented at the beginning of the twentieth century. Obviously history disproved this, as does Miller’s own story. To use Miller’s own frame, this would have to mean that Southern and Eastern Europeans actually did have the cultural genus to carry on the inheritance from Greece and Rome as it was transmitted via (Northern and Western) Europe to Thomas Jefferson’s pen in Monticello and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, whereas today’s immigrants do not.

New Republic. 12/15/2025.

Miller Is Wrong About “Social Trust”

“You cannot have migration without consent,” Miller insists. “That is a fundamental principle of having a civilization.” The second that undocumented immigrants settle in our communities, our social contract instantly dissolves, and our civilizational epoxy has come apart.

But immigration—including undocumented migration—spawns new forms of community and solidarity. You know who understands this perfectly well? Joe Rogan does, when he calls it “horrific” to arrest “normal, regular people that have been here for 20 years” in “front of their kids.” So do the residents of a small Missouri town when they rebel against the arrest of a 20-year resident whom they now see as a local “mom.” So do majorities of Americans when they tell pollsters that they don’t support deporting undocumented immigrants who have jobs or have been here for a number of years.

In saying these things, Rogan and all these others are articulating a deeper idea: As time passes and outsiders contribute to—and associate with—local communities, their original illegal entry loses significance, and they develop a claim to belonging. We recognize this because we see them as human, and human life is messy and complicated. Most people understand this intuitively: Communities are dynamic things; their boundaries are not fixed and rigid and unchanging. Polities can decide collectively to grant amnesty to people who didn’t enter perfectly by the book but have since demonstrated good intentions after a democratically determined amount of time has passed. And they are often made stronger by it.

It should go without saying that if immigrants were dissolving our social bonds in any sense that most normal people care about, Miller and his allies would not have to lie constantly about immigrants committing crimes, about immigrants stealing social welfare benefits, and about immigrants adopting alienating social habits like eating people’s pets.

New Republic. 12/15/2025.

[snip]

Miller Is Wrong About Cosmopolitanism

Miller has long harbored particular venom for “cosmopolitanism.” He draws heavily on a tradition on the far right that treats cosmopolitanism as a threat to a model of Western civilization constructed upon the building blocks of ancient nations whose volkish identities stretch deep into the mists of the past.

But our understanding of cosmopolitanism is itself partly an inheritance from Miller’s beloved “Western civilization.” It originated with the Stoic philosophers of the ancient world and was developed by the Roman statesman Cicero. It passed via him and others to European philosophers like Immanuel Kant, who elaborated on it further. Its conception of common humanity informed the human rights ideals that emerged after World War II, which the United States signed on to.

In short, there are plenty of resources in our “Western inheritance” that run directly counter to, and are far more admirable than, Miller’s ideology of ethno-nationalist self-preservation. The 1965 immigration act that Miller hates so much—by ending the idea that some ethnicities are more “fit” to be American than others—itself carried forward some of those “Western” inheritances.

New Republic. 12/15/2025.

Ultimately, Miller’s goal of net-negative migration is itself a recipe for decline. Miller’s claim that this was responsible for our postwar successes overlooks the role of the U.S. victory in World War II combined with Europe lying in ruins, which helped enable the United States to establish global industrial dominance. It also overlooks the strength of unions in boosting worker power and in building the American middle class, which Trump is trying to destroy.

What’s more, demographers like William H. Frey have gamed out what a scenario of net-negative migration will look like over time, and it’s not pretty. It results in population decline, a dangerously aging workforce, and depleted tax revenues to pay for social insurance for our aging population.

At this point, someone will note that Biden’s policies resulted in an unusually large percentage of foreign-born residents and an out-of-control asylum system that encouraged nativist backlash, leading to Trump. That story is far too simplistic. Indeed, the ferocious public opposition to Trump’s mass deportations suggests that the “nativist backlash” is a mirage: Polls show that Americans are reaffirming their very wide support for immigration as good for the country. Some restrictionist writers have claimed to discern a broad societal backlash to the world the 1965 act made, but it just isn’t materializing.

That aside—even if the politics of the issue are brutal and we liberals haven’t solved that conundrum—the answer is not to throw immigration into reverse. As Jordan Weissmann puts it, “The fact that it is hard does not take away from one fundamental point: There is no real plan for economic stability or for a generous welfare state without more immigration. Full stop. Period.”

New Republic. 12/15/2025.

[snip]

We need more immigrants, and there absolutely are ways to limit asylum and end the system’s failures while opening up more channels for orderly legal migration and for those here illegally to get right with the law. Miller’s project is to persuade you that immigration cannot be managed in the national interest. It can, and it’s on us to show how. Because at the end of the day, Miller is trying to restore ethnic engineering to the center of immigration policy. In so doing, he’s denying to millions the blessings that his ancestors and he himself have been so fortunate to enjoy.

On this point, we’re giving the last word to Miller’s cousin on his father’s side, Alisa Kasmer. Over the summer, Kasmer posted a scalding Facebook takedown of Miller that made big news. She refused all subsequent interview requests. But she agreed to talk to me for this piece.

“We’re Jewish—we grew up knowing how hated we were just for existing,” Kasmer told me. “Now he’s trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from: that ability to create a life for themselves, to prosper, to build community, to have successful businesses—to live a rewarding life.” This—not “saving” our “dying” country, as Miller absurdly claims Trump is doing—will be Miller’s ugly legacy.  

New Republic. 12/15/2025.

Bingo was his name-O is out in January as the FBI deputy Director.

Show more =’s God bless America, and all those who defend Her.

And that’s finally a wrap; today was me and my limping along broken hard drives fault.

This is an open thread

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About Tiff 3423 Articles
Member of the Free Press who is politically homeless and a political junkie.