November 21 was just another day for Jeremiah Johnson, hearing three cases from immigrants seeking to stay in the United States in his courtroom in San Francisco. That was until he heard two of his fellow immigration judges had been fired.

Heading back to his chambers, Johnson logged onto his computer and found an email with the subject line including the word “termination”. Before he could even print the letter from the Department of Justice, he had been locked out of the system.

Appointed under the first Trump administration, Johnson served eight years on the bench, but in one moment on a Friday afternoon, he had lost his job, and the hundreds of immigrants on his docket saw their cases paused.

“Immigration is much more than judges, it's much more than just my job,” Johnson told Newsweek Thursday. “This is an issue that's extremely important. It's even now, I think, more important regarding even just the rule of law. You see the administration avoiding courts, not following the law, or apparently not following the law.”

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said there will not be an amendment vote on extending expiring ObamaCare enhanced subsidies as part of a House Republican health care bill this week, in a move that is infuriating moderate Republicans who had been pushing to go on the record about the subsidies.

Johnson said at a press conference Tuesday that about a dozen Republican members in competitive districts are “fighting hard to make sure that they reduce costs for all of their constituents.”

“Many of them did want to vote on this ObamaCare COVID-era subsidy the Democrats created,” Johnson said. “We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve, and it just was not to be.”

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), one of the members who had been pushing for a vote to extend the subsidies that expire Dec. 31, fumed at the decision as he emerged from a House Republican Conference meeting Tuesday morning.

President Trump’s chief of staff said she tried to get him to end his “score settling” against political enemies after 90 days in office, but acknowledged that the administration’s still ongoing push for prosecutions has been fueled in part by the president’s desire for retribution.

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

Ms. Wiles made the comments in a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews over the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term with the author Chris Whipple that are being published Tuesday by Vanity Fair. Not only did she confirm that Mr. Trump is using criminal prosecution to retaliate against adversaries, she also acknowledged that he was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of the president and his team: Mr. Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was “sort of political” because he was running for Senate. Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck,” whose actions were not always “rational” and left her “aghast.” Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files.

After a disastrous showing in the November 2025 elections and under pressure from President Donald Trump, many Republican-controlled legislatures are looking to (further) gerrymander their states prior to the 2026 midterms. The Court’s recent shadow docket decision permitting Texas Republicans to use their new map in 2026 is just the latest signal that whatever Republicans try, the U.S. Supreme Court will back them up.

Even more alarming is that other Republican-controlled states have been expanding on the same playbook that Texas just used to sneak in its illegal map. And under the Roberts Court’s application of what’s become known as the Purcell principle, Republican states can deliberately time redistricting to dodge meaningful judicial review, knowing that the Court’s commitment to GOP-friendly elections will beat out the Court’s concern for consistency with its own precedent and logic.

In the spring, facing declining poll numbers and broad backlash to his signature policies, President Donald Trump started pushing lawmakers in red states to redraw their maps, hoping to increase Republicans’ odds of holding the House in the 2026 midterm elections. In Texas, this effort resulted in a proposal to flip up to five Democratic seats in a congressional delegation that Republicans already control 25-13, which would give the GOP 79 percent of the state’s representatives despite winning only 58 percent of votes statewide in 2024.

Minority voters and advocacy groups filed suit, and a three-judge panel of federal judges determined in November that the map constituted an illegal racial gerrymander and blocked its use for the 2026 midterms. Weeks later, though, the Supreme Court stayed the decision in Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens. Although the majority did not explain its reasoning, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurrence claiming that the lower court had “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith,” and “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he is ready to give up on demands for Nato membership in exchange for security guarantees from the US and Europe, in a move aimed at advancing peace talks in Berlin on Sunday. 

US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner have pushed Ukraine to accept painful concessions, including ceding frontline territory to Russia, ahead of talks with Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s European allies on the White House plan to end Russia’s invasion.

Ukraine has admitted that it was unlikely to join Nato in the foreseeable future due to strong opposition from Russia, which has long demanded that the transatlantic alliance pledge to halt its eastward expansion as a condition for ending the war.

But Zelenskyy told reporters on Sunday that Ukraine still requires security guarantees from the US and Europe, similar to Nato’s Article 5 clause of mutual protection for any member under attack.

Ukraine would join the EU next year under a proposal backed by Brussels in negotiations to end Russia’s war, a move that would transform the bloc’s approach to admitting new members.

EU accession by January 1 2027 is specified in the latest draft of a peace proposal that Ukrainian and European officials have presented to Washington, people briefed on the document’s contents told the Financial Times.

The plan is a revised version of proposals the Trump administration has made to end the war, a plan that Kyiv and its European allies had seen as tilted towards Russia.

The latest version comes as Donald Trump steps up pressure on Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree a peace deal by Christmas.

Officials supportive of Ukraine’s EU ambitions said the European Commission now understands it should not derail the peace process by opposing the rapid timeline for Kyiv’s membership.

For most people, the tax cuts that President Trump signed into law this summer have yet to materialize. Only after Americans file their taxes next year will the savings become apparent, launching what Republicans hope will be a “refund boom” that lifts the public’s view of the economy.

Many of America’s largest companies have not had to wait. In the months since the law’s passage in July, corporations like Walmart, Amazon, Verizon and Eli Lilly have all disclosed in securities filings that the law would reduce their cash tax payments in the near term. AT&T Inc. projected that it would save as much as $2 billion in taxes just this year.

Those corporate tax savings have already started to have an effect on the federal budget. Between July and November, the last full month of data, revenue from the corporate income tax has dropped by roughly a third, or $52 billion, compared to the same period the year before, according to Treasury data.

Driving the cash savings is not a change in the corporate tax rate, which Republicans kept at 21 percent. Instead, a constellation of tax breaks has given companies a better ability to reduce the amount of income subject to tax. Rather than writing off the costs of new investments and research projects bit by bit over several years, companies are now able to deduct the full cost of these expenses in one year.