By Ben Meiselas
Hi all, Ben here. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This has been a very difficult week.
Let me walk you through what just happened so far this Friday. I’ll try to keep this brief.
We have just obtained shocking footage from what appears to be the Jonathan Ross’s cellphone camera — that’s the ICE agent who murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis. In the video, you can hear Good’s final words to the officer: “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you.” As she tries to drive away, he shoots her, then mutters: “F*cking bitch.”
I will post it here, but please note, viewer discretion is advised:
Our partner Status Coup is live on the ground documenting today’s protests. You can watch their coverage live here.
In other news, we finally have the full picture of the 2025 jobs market, and even if you take the numbers at face value (which is hard to do under this regime), the economic collapse is undeniable. December added only 50,000 jobs. That’s a month that normally sees a seasonal hiring boost, and instead we got a number that signals deep weakness. When you zoom out at the year as a whole, it gets even more alarming: the U.S. added a mere 584,000 jobs in all of 2025. That is the worst year for job creation outside of a recession since 2003. And nearly all of those gains, about 85 percent, happened before April. On what Trump calls “Liberation Day,” the job market effectively stopped functioning.
You can look directly at the charts economists like Justin Wolfers and Heather Long are sharing, which I’ve featured in my video report above. Since April, the U.S. has averaged only 12,000 jobs a month while Canada, one-tenth our size, has grown at almost double that pace. Every single month of 2025 has now been revised downward. Every. Single Month. October didn’t lose 105,000 jobs as originally reported. It lost 173,000. November wasn’t 64,000 jobs gained. It was 56,000, and that was one of the “better” months.
And then we learned that Donald Trump appears to have illegally leaked this confidential jobs data the night before. He posted financial figures that can move markets, hours before they were legally allowed to be released. Meanwhile, his economists are out there on state-run propaganda channels claiming everything is rosy. When confronted with the revisions, his top economic advisor shrugged and said the problem was the numbers themselves. Then he pointed to the unemployment rate, which only “dropped” because fewer people are looking for work. Unemployment is still up since Trump took office.
Manufacturing is also collapsing. Another 8,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in December, continuing a trend that shows the so-called “tariff strategy” is doing exactly what economists warned: hurting American workers, shrinking demand, and pushing the country toward a recession-level slowdown. We have a manufacturing recession layered on top of a broader jobs recession, and the only response from the Trump regime is more propaganda and more chaos.
Meanwhile, Trump’s puppet, who calls himself Speaker of the House, MAGA Mike Johnson, was on a fringe podcast insisting he should be called “Miracle Mike,” not “Magic Mike,” because the latter “may be pornographic.”
Weird. But it gets weirder.
According to the New York Times, Trump calls Rubio and Vance his “kids,” buys them shoes, and watches them show off the pairs he gifted them. These are grown men, United States senators, being infantilized by a president who publicly admits that the only thing constraining his global power is “my own morality, my own mind.”
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Back to the protests across Minneapolis and across the country: Even conservative commentators are expressing shock at what they’re seeing. And more horrifying footage keeps emerging, as I showed you earlier. While people protest Renee Good’s execution, Trump’s paramilitary forces point guns at unarmed civilians, including at the heads of women standing with their hands raised.
Independent journalists, including our partners at Status Coup, captured multiple incidents this morning alone where ICE and Border Patrol agents drew weapons on peaceful protesters. Trump’s forces are escalating, not deescalating. And the data we’re seeing on ICE detentions makes it even worse. Ninety-two percent of detention growth this year is among people with no criminal convictions or charges. ICE’s detention population has reached a record high of nearly 69,000 people. And already, in the first days of January, there has been another reported death in custody.
If you want to understand how far the United States’ global standing has fallen, look at the polling out of Europe. Germans now distrust the United States about as much as they distrust Russia. Our closest allies no longer believe America is a stable or responsible partner. While Trump is threatening invasions and undermining economic stability at home, the European Union just signed one of the largest free-trade agreements in modern history with major South American nations. They are moving forward with cooperation on a scale that includes more than 700 million people. The U.S., under Trump, is retreating into isolation, coercion, and belligerence. Other nations are forming alliances without us because the American president keeps openly telling the world he recognizes no checks on his power.
And that brings me to the final point: this regime is not just incompetent. It is dangerous. It creates chaos, profits from instability, and then lies to the American people about its consequences. Whether it’s manipulating economic data, weakening institutions, unleashing paramilitary forces on civilians, or bragging about its own power to act without limits, the Trump apparatus is operating with zero accountability.
We’ll continue bringing you the truth every day. We’ll show you the documents, the footage, the charts, and the receipts.
Here’s some other news we’re tracking:
The Nobel Committee confirmed that a Nobel Peace Prize cannot be revoked or reassigned after Trump claimed he wanted to “take” Maria Corina Machado’s prize.
House Republicans are growing frustrated with Kristi Noem after her lies about the murder of Renee Good, per a scoop from our DC bureau reporter Pablo Manríquez.
No Supreme Court opinion is coming today on Trump’s tariffs case, despite swirling rumors.
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith is expected to testify before the House Judiciary Committee this month.
Representative Garcia told MeidasTouch that there is significant new information about Mar-a-Lago’s role in Epstein’s trafficking network.
France delayed this year’s G7 summit to avoid a scheduling conflict with a UFC fight Trump plans to host at the White House on his birthday. That’s not satire.
We’ll keep covering all of it. Stay loud, stay focused, and stay with us. Thanks for subscribing, liking, and spreading the word.
