This Week in Patriotic Grift

Redactions galore, the Trumpanzee gives us Patriot Games, Bovino gets the boot from Chicago, and more

Protester confronting Bovino and his poorly trained troops; Image by Paul Goyette from Chicago, USA, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; titling by author

Here’s a list of some of this week’s highlights from the gift given to America by the 75 million Americans who gave us Trumpy’s grifty troglodytes.

If you’re one of those Americans, please report to the infirmary for your lobotomy. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

These items are not necessarily in chronological order.

Justice Department releases Epstein Files — NOT

Friday, December 19, was the deadline for the Justice Department to release the Epstein Files. Attorney General Pam Bondi broke the law by not meeting the deadline, but instead released a trillion gigabytes of an initial dump full of black Sharpie redactions. Early scans of the files have suggested that most of the photos feature Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger, and Michael Jackson, so Bondi obviously didn’t take the law Congress passed to release the files seriously. Her teams have been busy trying to remove Trump from the files, but they clearly need more time.

Congressional democrats expressed frustration and promised sternly worded memos, while Republican congress critters tried to avoid scrutiny by talking about Bill Clinton.

So now, Bondi’s newly corrupted Justice Department is saying, screw the law, we’ll ship the rest out after we wipe more files clean.

The New York Times reports:¹

One of the redacted files, containing 119 pages and entitled “Grand Jury NY,” is entirely blacked out.

Sidebar: The Bondi Justice Department wants Americans to focus on Clinton being in the Epstein files. We don’t care, Pam. Arrest him if you need to. He was already irrelevant. That would make him more so. Arrest whoever is in those files. It’s not going to help Kiddy Cuddler Cankles wiggle out of this one.

Epstein survivors are seething and will hopefully find a way to express their unhappiness in court.

Bovino shows up in Chicago again, then leaves

Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino showed up in Chicago again this week and was met with Chicagoans blowing whistles (to alarm neighbors of arriving stormtroopers), snapping photos and videos with their smartphones, and generally harassing the hapless idiots as they tried unsuccessfully to snatch innocent people off the street.

I love how the Chicago Tribune reported this news. This was not in a column, but a straight-up news story:²

During the two-month Operation Midway Blitz this fall, Bovino and his agents terrorized Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs in their often discriminatory hunt for immigrants without legal documentation. But after the first snowfall of the season, Bovino and many of his agents left for operations in other states.

Bovino heard a few whistles this second time and high-tailed it out of town faster than a school bus doing a U-turn when it accidentally takes the I-95 Mar-a-Lago exit.

The Groyper Wars get intense at Turning Point conference

Ben Shapiro wet his pants on stage at the first Turning Point USA conference since its founder, Charlie Kirk, was relieved of his duties by an unknown marksman (I’m assuming the gamer they hauled in to the hooskow was framed, but hey, I could be wrong).³

Staring down at his newly soaked pants, Shapiro yelled at people for not being pure enough in their right-wing hate. Among those he singled out were such nationalist luminaries as Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon, all of whom he called “frauds and grifters.” He’s not wrong.

He accused Owens, who makes millions on her podcast by pushing right-wing nuttery, of pushing conspiracy theories like the one I just did. Welcome to my world, Candace. Let’s do lunch? Also, again, Shapiro is not wrong.

For those of you not familiar with the Groyper Wars, it’s an internecine civil war among crazed white nationalists (please don’t ask me how Candace Owens fits in). It isn’t possible to really tell who’s who in this battle, or which side they're on, although it seems to be loosely based on Nick Fuentes, a Groyper⁴ who has been getting a lot of airtime in the media landscape lately, which makes other white nationalists sad.

True Sociopath goes nuclear

If you want to experience the joy of business journalists sanewashing all things Trump, I recommend a Google search to review their posts about Trump’s social media company merging with fusion energy company TAE Technologies, which is just weird. Substack’s own Dean Blundell covers this story here:

BREAKING: Russia Is Buying Trump for $6 Billion — And It’s Happening in Plain Sight

The whole situation is preposterous, but what involving the Grifter in Chief isn’t?

Kennedy Center teases an exciting near future for Americans

Somebody found contractors to add Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center so that it is now called, “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” The word “Memorial” gives us hope that King Cankles knows something we don’t.

King Cankles announces Patriot Games

This week, King Cankles also announced something he calls the Patriot Games. With a theme reminiscent of the Hunger Games, one high school boy and girl from each state will compete in an athletic competition of some kind, presumably to the death. Details are sketchy, much like most things he does. He has also said he wants a UFC fight at the White House for the U.S.’s 250th birthday celebration. Hopefully, this will be a melee event in the ruins of the East Wing.

Hopped-up Mad Clown tries to give address on national TV

Caligulus Trumpus also showed up on national TV networks, interrupting the ends of such beloved shows as “Survivor.” It was an amphetamine fueled shout fest where he talked about how drug manufacturers would pay us to take their drugs off their hands. He said he worked out deals with pharmaceutical companies to cut drug costs “as much as 400, 500, and even 600 percent.”

Math experts tell me this means the drug companies pay us.

In the speech, he also said he’d drop $1776 into the accounts of military personnel by using tariff money. The money landed in the accounts of active-duty U.S. military members in pay grades O-6 (Colonel/Captain) and below, plus reserve members on orders of 31+ days by Nov. 30, 2025, but the money had already been earmarked by Congress, and some military personnel noted that it was taken out of a previously earmarked housing fund that actually allocated a higher amount ($2,000).⁵

The grifter took full credit for it, of course.

“Inside the Trump Administration’s Man-Made Hunger Crisis”

ProPublica, one of the few remaining reliable journalistic outlets in this age of Putinized media, dropped a report this week on the impact of the foreign aid freeze (USAID) by Crazy Cankles on his first day in office. ProPublica sent reporters to a refugee camp in Kakuma, in Kenya, where 308,000 people are now under threat of starvation because of severe food rationing.⁶

Imagine all of Pittsburgh or St. Louis on the verge of starving. And this is just one example of the impacts stemming from the regime’s attack on foreign aid. Many other parts of the world were affected.

Foreign aid is vending machine money relative to the U.S. budget. It has no real impact on your taxes, if that really matters to you.

Sony buys Charlie Brown

Sony is paying the owner of the Peanuts comic assets $457 million to acquire the majority of all Peanuts content.⁷ According to Variety magazine:

With Sony taking an 80% stake, Peanuts Holdings LLC (including Peanuts Worldwide), will become a consolidated subsidiary of the Sony Group.

No word yet on Piggy Pen’s reaction to a Japanese company owning Peanuts, but we can imagine much toxic regurgitation once someone like Stephen Miller tells him about it.

Hegseth blows stuff up in Syria

Fresh off a bender, Pentagon Director of Homicide Pete Hegseth fired up a “large-scale” assault on Syria, hitting approximately 70 targets in response to an ISIS attack that killed two Americans.

On social media, Kegsbreath stammered, “This is not the beginning of a war — it is a declaration of vengeance.” Atta boy! Good, old-fashioned Old Testament shit.

After a long whisky burp, he continued: “The United States of America, under President Trump’s leadership, will never hesitate and never relent to defend our people.” I’m comforted, Pete. Thanks.

To be clear: This is the same ISIS that Caligula Cankles previously said he had defeated, right? When it’s over, will that be nine wars he’s ended?

Also, please don’t get so drunk that you launch attacks on ISIS cells in Providence, Rhode Island. Thanks for your attention to this matter.

Everyone is waiting for the War on Venezuela

Meanwhile, fresh off a different bender, Hegseth killed more boaters off the Venezuelan coast. Everyone thought that Kooky Cankles was going to use his nationally televised chat to tell us that he’s invaded the place in one final desperate bid for a Nobel Peace Prize, but instead, he just went off the rails about random stuff and sounded insane.

The current body count off the Venezuelan coast was 105 last I checked, but don’t hold me to that.

EU to loan Ukraine $105 billion

You couldn’t quite see any European leaders sticking a middle finger at Cuckoo Cankles in a photo shoot, but you could feel the vibe anyway as European Union leaders finally figured out how to put together a much-needed cash infusion for Ukraine.

They had originally planned to use seized Russian assets for the loan money, but Belgium belched, then balked, afraid the Russians would do nasty things to them (a legit concern), so the Europeans found money elsewhere. Many European leaders still want to use the $300 billion in Russian assets seized after Russia invaded Ukraine, but they needed to do something to inject the country with cash in a hurry, so they settled for a temporary solution.⁸

Caligulus Trumpus suspends immigration program in response to Brown shooting

What do you do when a Portuguese nationalist shoots people? You suspend another immigration program! This time, the unstable genius suspended the green-card lottery program. The program, created by Congress and therefore not susceptible to the whims of a madman, was created to help attract immigrants from countries that normally don’t send a lot of migrants to the U.S. The program often attracts a nation’s best and brightest, like the MIT professor specializing in nuclear fusion studies who was also a Portuguese national and who was, you know, shot by another Portuguese national just after the Brown shootings.

Can we start deporting incels who gun down people with their AR-15s, too, Cankle Brain?

Dan Bongino packs his things and goes home

Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino has skedaddled.⁹

Unable to spread conspiracy theories as easily and thoroughly as he could as a podcaster, and discovering just how utterly unqualified he was for the job, Bongino had a moment of Zen and packed his things up, then left like a hyena running away from a beady-eyed warthog.

Kash Patel, public domain

Bongino had previously made a valiant attempt to spread conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 pipe bomb case while holding his FBI job, but they were mostly falling on the deaf ears of the bulk of career FBI agents who probably feel like they’re in a hostage situation and are just hoping Patel leaves next.

This is obviously not a comprehensive review of all the week’s news regarding the fading orange puddle of toxicity. I’ve mostly just included the things I noticed. Aside, of course, from the awful shootings, which would require a separate post that many others have already written sufficiently well that I don’t have much to offer.

Thanks for reading, stay safe, and enjoy this holiday season as best you can.

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Footnotes

1. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/12/19/us/epstein-files-release/15d25b10-1fb8-5d13-8f8c-6590079c4098

2. Pratt, Gregory Royal, Alice Yin, and Talia Soglin. “Chicago Remains Alert, Even as Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino and His Agents Sweep in and out of Town.” Chicago Tribune, December 18, 2025. 🎁 Ruminato Gift Link https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/18/chicago-border-patrol-immigration-prepared/?share=dpdo22grp2o2iargrobc 🎁

3. Sorry, this says nothing about him wetting his pants. I may have made that part up.

Howard, Andrew. “MAGA Infighting Erupts at Turning Point USA Conference.” POLITICO. Politico, December 19, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/18/maga-infighting-erupts-at-day-one-of-turning-point-usa-conference-00699665.

4. Don’t know what a Groyper is? Lucky you!

5. Reddit.com. “Well I’ll be damned” 2025. https://www.reddit.com/r/navy/comments/1pq4950/well_ill_be_damned/.

6. Peter.DiCampo@propublica.org. “Inside the Trump Administration’s Man-Made Hunger Crisis.” ProPublica, December 17, 2025. https://www.propublica.org/article/kenya-trump-usaid-world-food-program-starvation-children-deaths

7. Spangler, Todd. “Sony to Own Control of Peanuts in $457 Million Deal with WildBrain.” Variety, December 19, 2025. https://variety.com/2025/film/news/sony-acquire-peanuts-457-million-deal-1236612363/

8. https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukraines-zelensky-warns-of-dire-battlefield-if-europe-doesnt-tap-russian-assets-15b390f0?st=etMDAg&mod=1440&user_id=685abd745c0646daec02c939

9. Svirnovskiy, Gregory, and Jacob Wendler. “Dan Bongino Is out at the FBI after Less than a Year.” POLITICO. Politico, December 17, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/17/dan-bongino-fbi-resignation-00696112.

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