Donald Trump wants to crush The Swamp. The leaks, the sneaks, and the secrets are all there. Our writers, David Gardner, Farrah Tomazin, and Sarah Ewall-Wice, are sifting through the ooze so you don’t have to. Don’t miss out.
In this week’s…. Pete Thiel, Katie Miller, Bret Baier, Joseph Schnitt, Olivia Nuzzi,
Thank you to everyone who gave us the two best Christmas gifts: Reading us every week, and passing on delicious tittle-tattle about your enemies (who foolishly think they’re your friends.) The Swamp will be back in 2026 to skewer DC’s most brazen hypocrites and reveal the hidden secrets you need to know.
The Miller’s Tale and a Chaucerian Hypocrisy
Ruth Glosser felt an obligation, both to her family and to the immigrants who blended into the melting pot that makes up the United States, to tell her story.
Glosser’s unpublished memoir, A Precious Legacy, details how her ancestors survived the horrors of the Russian pogroms and the Holocaust was by emigrating to the U.S.
Wolf Laib Glosser was the first family member to make the journey to America from Antopol—in what is now Belarus—and had brought all his immediate family over by 1920. All but seven of the 2,000 Jews who lived in Antopol would later be murdered by the Nazis.
“It’s up to our generation to leave a testimony that affirms what our grandparents experienced,” wrote Glosser. ”And to help us all to give thanks that our forbears were wise enough and lucky enough to have made that dangerous journey so that we could live in peace and freedom,” she added.
Ruth Glosser’s grandson knows something about immigration to the U.S. His name is Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s controversial crackdown on immigrants who are hoping to find the same freedoms his family found in the land of the free.
Ruth died in 2020 aged 97. It seems unlikely that she would look favorably on Miller’s hardline stance. After all, not all those hoping to start new lives are murderers, rapists, and gang members, as Miller and his cronies might have you believe. Many immigrants are escaping the kind of repressive regimes that his great-great-great-grandfather fled at the turn of the last century.
Wolf spoke not a word of English when he arrived in New York. He made money to keep his family by selling bananas on a street corner. But he was an American success story, and his descendants helped turn a Philadelphia haberdashery into a chain of supermarkets and department stores.
The Swamp has a terrific interview idea for the Trumpy podcast by Miller’s wife, Katie, whose YouTube views are hardly spectacular.
Retired neuropsychologist Dr. David S. Glosser is a former member of the Neurology faculties of Boston University School of Medicine and Jefferson Medical College. He is also Stephen Miller’s uncle.
“If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago,” Dr Glosser told Politico in August, ”Our family would have been wiped out.”
No need to credit us when this finally makes you a hit, Katie.
MAGA by day, MARA by night:
AmericaFest 2025 was supposed to be the conservative movement’s victory lap—a four-day MAGA jamboree billed as a tribute to the late Charlie Kirk. Instead, the annual Turning Point USA conference doubled as a Festivus-style Airing of Grievances inside Trump’s fracturing coalition. BenShapiro took direct aim at fellow conservative stars like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly for amplifying conspiratorial voices; Donald Trump Jr. declared the Republican Party effectively “dead”; and Vice President J.D. Vance attempted to smooth things over with a unity message of sorts except when telling Jen Psaki and Nick Fuentes to “eat s–t.” But the biggest unofficial event of the weekend was James O’Keefe’s “Make America Rave Again” party, held at The Duce in downtown Phoenix. (Somewhat awkwardly, the only other use we can find of the word “Duce” is the title Benito Mussolini assumed.) Part political after-party, part EDM blowout, the event featured roughly a dozen costume changes and multiple DJ sets by O’Keefe, fire twirling theatrics by the MAGA faithful and even a dance routine set to Above & Beyond’s trance classic, Blue Sky Action.
O’Keefe, a longtime conservative activist and provocateur, rose to prominence as the founder of Project Veritas, the undercover outfit known for secretly recorded sting operations targeting media organizations, nonprofits, and government officials. His work has generated viral moments—and sustained controversy—with critics accusing the group of deceptive editing and unethical tactics. O’Keefe himself was ousted from Project Veritas in 2023 following internal disputes, only to reemerge with a new operation, O’Keefe Media, and a familiar appetite for dubious gotcha moments. Most recently, his organization released undercover footage of Joseph Schnitt, identified as a Deputy Chief of Special Operations at the Department of Justice, suggesting that if the Epstein files were ever released, they would be “heavily redacted.” When the long-awaited Epstein documents finally emerged on Friday—pages upon pages blacked out — O’Keefe’s supporters were quick to declare the sting prophetic. O’Keefe used the America Fest as a chance to recruit undercover journalists from the conservative movement, promising that anyone who filled out an application to join his team got into the rave free. He was spotted leaving Phoenix with friends on Monday. “Can’t wait to do it all again next year!” quipped DJ and ally Robyn Balliet.
Spotted
Dining at Mar-a-Lago feet away from Trump: Rapper and Fox News anchor Bret Baier, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, fresh from denying he runs an independent agency, and someone who looked very like disgraced Fox anchor Eric Bolling. How cozy!
Survivor Blow as Trump Says, ‘“You’re Fired!”
Mark Burnett may have transformed Donald Trump into a household TV name by employing him as the big boss on his show, The Apprentice, but that doesn’t win him any favors in the White House. The Swamp was told that Burnett called his old meal ticket to ask him if he could change the 9 p.m. timing for the president’s live address to the nation last Thursday because it clashed with the finale of Survivor, another Burnett show. Trump blew him off but might have given him a new game show idea in the process: Celebrity Speeches on Helium. Maybe it’s time for Burnett to release the outtakes from the NBC show as a sequel to the Epstein Files.
Grok Goes To (The Department of) War
The Trump–Musk bromance is back on, and it’s louder, richer, and a whole lot more militarized. Seven months after their epic blow-up, the world’s most powerful politician and its richest man are flirting again—this time over the Pentagon’s server rack. On Monday, the Department of Defense announced it is partnering with Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence ecosystem to deploy Grok, the chatbot controlled by Musk’s X empire, across government systems. Supporters frame it as innovation. But critics say the optics are brutal: the president’s biggest billionaire booster gaining unprecedented access to government systems, powered by a technology he personally controls. Unlike many government-developed tools, Grok is privately owned, opaque, and answers to Musk whose views on everything from geopolitics to censorship are famously mercurial. Nothing says “America First” quite like letting a donor’s AI move into the nation’s military infrastructure. Musk, after all, didn’t just back Trump with vibes and memes. He spent roughly $277 million helping to elect him. “This is beyond corruption, and way beyond dangerous,” observed Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of New York Health. Still, you have to wonder what JD Vance benefactor Peter Thiel thinks. After all, his data-mining behemoth Palantir has long been one of the Pentagon’s favorite AI contractors. Is this the start of a quiet rivalry between two Trump-adjacent tech titans? Whatever the case, loyalty pays in Washington—and these days it comes with Oval Office access and government largesse.
Lips Leavitt Strikes Again
The Trump administration communications team loves to bash the media, yet still cannot help but tout their appearances in the, err, media. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has been the most public mouthpiece against the “fake news,” but she was all too happy to promote being featured in Newsweek’s “Winners and Losers of 2025” sharing a screenshot with her more than 2.5 million followers on Instagram. (Click here to find out which one she is…)
It’s similar to how she had no problem striking a pose for Vanity Fair, before that blistering article and photo lineup came back to haunt her.
The DOGE Failure of 2025
The Department of Government Efficiency came into 2025 with a bang but went out with a whimper. As part of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s wrap-up of the year, he praised Congress for codifying DOGE’s work into law with so-called revisions, even as the government clawed back just $9 billion in spending that the agency targeted in 2025. It amounted to just one package on foreign aid and public media. Meanwhile, despite 317,000 federal workers leaving the government workforce this year, the exodus made almost no dent in spending so far. The national debt ended the year at nearly $38.4 trillion, up more than $2 trillion from a year ago. Still, DOGE notched one small win: Ex-leader Musk somewhat mended his personal relationship with Trump following their explosive breakup halfway through the year.
And Finally, Peace on Earth?
We leave you with some a Christmas question: Is Ryan Lizza’s apparently endless Substack serialization of the end of his relationship with Olivia Nuzzi a joyous visit from the D.C. gossip Santa? Or are you a Lizza Grinch? Either way, some good news and some bad news: Lizza’s gift shop of revelations is about to close up with just one more episode promised. Happy Christmas to one and all!
The post MAGA’s Double Standards Exposed in Spectacular Style appeared first on The Daily Beast.
