Mike Johnson Makes His Next Move on Obamacare—and It’s Grim

It’s official: House Speaker Mike Johnson is letting the Affordable Care Act subsidies expire—and Republicans are pissed. 

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Johnson said that Republican leadership just couldn’t get on the same page about extending Obamacare tax credits. “In the end, there was not an agreement,” he said.

This is an apparent reversal after one Republican aide indicated last week that GOP leadership “would allow” for a floor vote on extending subsidies, at the behest of moderate Republicans who wanted the opportunity to voice their support for an extension. 

Representative Mike Lawler, one of those moderate Republicans, was furious over Johnson’s decision.  

“I think it’s idiotic not to have an up-or-down vote on this issue,” Lawler fumed after Tuesday morning’s House Republican Conference, arguing that Johnson was committing “political malpractice.”

“I am pissed for the American people. This is absolute bullshit,” he said. 

After this week, Congress is out of session until 2026, and the enhanced tax credits expire on December 31. Starting in January, insurance premiums are set to skyrocket, and premiums for some individuals will increase by as much as double. 

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters that Republicans had chosen another path. “I think after everybody talked, they decided they didn’t want to go forward, you know, with the options that were out there,” he said. “So, you know, in the end we have a bill that lowers premiums for 100 percent of Americans. Democrats are only focused on bailing out insurance companies for less than 10 percent of Americans.”

Last week, Republican leadership unveiled their own disastrous plan to lower health care costs, which did not include extending subsidies. 

Instead, they proposed that Americans be given cash directly into health savings accounts paired with high-deductible health plans, meaning higher insurance premiums would theoretically be replaced by higher out-of-pocket costs. 

Donald Trump was apparently tricked into giving Ghislane Maxwell better prison conditions, according to his chief of staff.

Susie Wiles told author Chris Whipple in a Vanity Fair interview that neither she nor the president were consulted about Maxwell’s transfer to a cushier prison earlier this year following her meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“The president was ticked,” Wiles said. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.” Wiles added to Whipple, “If that’s an important point, I can find out.”

Wiles never got back to Whipple on that point, even as the author reached out to her just before Vanity Fair published their interview.

Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell was itself unusual, and Whipple asked Wiles why it was conducted.

“It’s not typical, is it, to send the number two guy in the DOJ and the president’s former defense lawyer to interview a convicted sex trafficker?” Whipple asked. Wiles replied that the interview was Blanche’s suggestion.

If Wiles’s comments are to be believed, it’s easy to trick the president of the United States. In another reading, Wiles’s comments are a revelation by omission. Maxwell was moved to a federal facility that gave her all kinds of special treatment, such as the ability to have visitation rights for long periods of time in the prison’s chapel. She also receives unlimited toilet paper, meal service in her cell, and immediate responses to requests to have other inmates moved away from her.

Maxwell supposedly exonerated Trump from any wrongdoing in her interview with Blanche’s interview, claiming he had never even been to Epstein’s house, but emails released this fall from Epstein’s estate by the House Oversight Committee contradict her testimony. Trump is mentioned as a frequent visitor to Epstein’s home, who “knew about the girls,” which creates the impression that Maxwell was simply telling Blanche and the Trump administration what they wanted to hear.

Do Trump and Wiles really have no idea why Maxwell has an easy prison life right now? It certainly doesn’t seem that way, but based on Wiles’s negative reaction to her published remarks, she’s not going to go out of her way to clear things up.

Maybe the United States should try to be more like Australia.

The day after a mass shooting at a Jewish gathering killed 15 people at Bondi Beach Sunday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wasted no time in moving to tighten gun laws.

“The consideration that will take place includes limiting the number of guns an individual can own, the type of guns that are legal, whether gun ownership should require Australian citizenship, and accelerating work on the national firearms register,” he said during a press conference Monday.

“The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary.”

The United States, on the other hand, seems to have its own way of dealing with mass shootings—and it’s worse than doing nothing.

Here in the land of the free and home of the brave, our lawmakers don’t draft gun control legislation. They draft posts on X spreading baseless conspiracy theories.

Representative Michael Rulli, a MAGA acolyte from Ohio, posted about the weekend shooting at Brown University, claiming that Ella Cook, one of the victims and the vice president of the Brown chapter of College Republicans of America, had been targeted for her conservative beliefs.

“They tried to kill Trump. They killed Charlie Kirk. Now they’ve killed Ella Cook. The left wants all of us dead, and there’s no denying it anymore,” he wrote.

And Rulli wasn’t alone: Multiple right-wing figures pushed the narrative that Cook had been targeted.

Of course, none of them could be bothered to mention Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek neuroscience student who was also killed Saturday, or the eight others who were injured in the shooting. Meanwhile, the gunman has not yet been taken into custody or identified.

At the same time, Yahoo News circulated an unsourced story, cooked up by right-wing media, that the shooter at Brown University had declared “Allahu Akbar” before open firing on a group of students studying for their economics final.

But at least we have our freedom, right?

Fox News is tuning out on Donald Trump.

Practically no one, save the president’s most loyal acolytes, have defended his recent comments about legendary filmmaker Rob Reiner. Trump has said—multiple times—that Reiner would not have been murdered if he had supported the MAGA movement or suffered from what Trump called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

But Fox News cannot be counted among his defenders. The right-wing media behemoth has practically excoriated the president for his tasteless remarks, with hosts and guests across the network showing their love for the longtime Trump critic.

“ROB REINER WAS A LEGEND,” wrote Laura Ingraham, posting a years-old level-headed interview she conducted with the prominent Hollywood liberal.

Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody on homicide charges early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.

On Fox’s Special Report Monday evening, a four-person panel virtually held a roundtable in which each member took their turn condemning Trump’s comments while uplifting Reiner as a “mensch.”

“Rob Reiner was a very liberal Democrat with strong criticism of President Trump,” said former Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz. “And yet, I have to say, that for the president of the United States to take this family tragedy in which both Reiner and his wife were killed and say it was because of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ I thought it was well beneath him and beneath the office and I think it would have been better if the president had made no comment.”

On Jesse Watters’s evening show, Emmy Award–winning actor and conservative activist James Woods underscored that Reiner, in death, had not received a modicum of the sympathy that Reiner himself had extended after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

“When people say horrible things about Rob right now, I find it, quite frankly, infuriating and distasteful,” Woods said, choking up. “Did I agree with his politics? I did not. Did I love him as a friend, as an artist, as an icon of Hollywood and as a patriot? I most certainly did.”

Reiner’s vast and varied trove of work made him a cinematic legend, with each film standing as a template of its respective genre. Reiner enthralled children and adults alike with The Princess Bride, created the blueprint for romantic comedies with When Harry Met Sally…, and practically invented the mockumentary with This Is Spinal Tap.

Republican lawmakers and strategists were equally perturbed by Trump’s inhumanity in the wake of the grisly and tragic murder. Conservative commentator Scott Jennings told CNN he wished Trump “hadn’t made” his statement about Reiner, while Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said Trump should have kept his mouth shut.

“A wise man once said nothing. Why? Because he’s a wise man,” Kennedy told CNN. “I think President Trump should have said nothing.”

The Trump administration is rushing to do damage control after White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s extremely candid interview with Vanity Fair.  

The interview, made up of various meetings between Wiles and Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple over the last year, contained multiple statements from Wiles in which she offered her honest and unfiltered opinions on her fellow Trump administration members, from saying that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality” to confirming Elon Musk’s “avowed” ketamine use, to claiming that Attorney General Pam Bondi “whiffed” on her handling of the Epstein files, to calling Vice President JD Vance a conspiracy theorist. 

The wealth of new information contained in Wiles’s interview has placed the administration on red alert. 

“The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history,” Wiles posted on X Tuesday morning. “Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”

It’s hard to take Wiles seriously here when she met with Whipple multiple times and gave him countless direct quotes about her MAGA peers, but sure. 

“The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade,” she continued. “None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also felt the need to chime in in Wiles’s defense. 

“Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has helped President Trump achieve the most successful first 11 months in office of any President in American history. President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie,” she wrote. “The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.” 

While President Trump has yet to respond, it’s hard to imagine Wiles’s spilling the beans is going over well behind closed doors.