Weekend Report: What’s going on?

Trump’s insane, guilt-ridden tirade over Epstein files. At 2025’s end, bankruptcies are soaring. The impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling against National Guard troops in Chicago

Short of outright screaming, “Help!”, you couldn’t ask for a more explicit example of Donald Trump’s panic over the Epstein files that came in posts on Truth Social in the past few days. One was equivalent to an outright admission, a projection, in which Trump talked about the “sleaze bag” friends of Epstein. The other was sheer terror on Trump’s part, railing against the Department of Justice announcing it “found” one million more Epstein documents, and would be releasing them—following a bill he signed into law, by the way—which raises the question of how it’s “hoax” if there are millions of files?

We’ve seen many signs of an economy that had been coming back from the pandemic shockwave in 2024, to one that is teetering under the weight of tariffs. Now comes perhaps one of the biggest alarm bells: Bankruptcies by corporations and smaller businesses exploded in 2025. The levels haven’t been like this since the Great Recession, but this time it was because businesses importing good were forced to pay tariffs, and many of them were crushed.

The news came down so close to the holidays, and it was a rebuke of Trump coming from the Supreme Court—which has been rare. The Court ruled Trump couldn’t put the National Guard in the streets of Chicago amid immigration raids. But legal scholars say the decision and what it is based on means Trump cannot call up the National Guard anywhere. His only choice is to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would require complete civil unrest and pandemonium for it to be constitutional. It’s a big win for democracy.