White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is expecting a baby girl, Fox News Digital has learned.
Leavitt and her husband Nick are expecting their second bundle of joy to be born in May 2026. Their first son, Niko, was born in July 2024.
‘My husband and I are thrilled to grow our family and can’t wait to watch our son become a big brother,’ Leavitt told Fox News Digital. ‘My heart is overflowing with gratitude to God for the blessing of motherhood, which I truly believe is the closest thing to Heaven on Earth.’
Leavitt told Fox News Digital that she is ‘extremely grateful to President Trump and our amazing Chief of Staff Susie Wiles for their support, and for fostering a pro-family environment in the White House.’
‘Nearly all of my West Wing colleagues have babies and young children, so we all really support one another as we tackle raising our families while working for the greatest president ever,’ Leavitt said.
Leavitt added: ‘2026 is going to be an amazing year for the President and our country, and personally, I am beyond excited to become a girl mom.’
A senior White House official told Fox News Digital that Leavitt will remain in her post as press secretary.
Leavitt will be the first pregnant press secretary in U.S. history.
President Donald Trump is taking his pressure campaign to the next level against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and making it clear he doesn’t believe the strongman should be leading the country — all while China and Russia are speaking out on the escalating conflict involving their ally.
The Trump administration has launched a series of strikes targeting alleged drug boats off the coast of Latin America in recent months and announced this month a ‘complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela’ as his administration has significantly beefed up its naval assets in the region.
While the Trump administration has said that these efforts align with the administration’s effort to curb the influx of drugs into the U.S., the campaign also appears geared toward removing Maduro from power. This isn’t the first attempt by Trump to squeeze out Maduro. He previously imposed sanctions on Venezuela and backed opposition leader Juan Guaidó during his first term.
As a result, Trump said Monday that Washington’s pressure campaign against Venezuela would ‘probably’ be sufficient to coerce Maduro to step down and made it clear he believes that’s something Maduro should be doing.
‘That’s up to him, what he wants to do,’ Trump said Monday. ‘I think it would be smart for him to do that. But, again, we’re going to find out.’
The White House has historically refused to comment on whether it is pursuing regime change in Venezuela even though it does not recognize Maduro as a legitimate head of state and insists he is the leader of a drug cartel.
China and Russia are speaking out about U.S. actions in the region, accusing the U.S. of breaking international law after the U.S. seized multiple oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela. The first seizure occurred Dec. 10, and Trump confirmed Monday that the U.S. is still pursuing another oil tanker that a U.S. official told Fox News Digital is a ‘sanctioned dark fleet vessel that is part of Venezuela’s illegal sanctions evasion.’
‘The U.S. practice of arbitrarily seizing other countries’ vessels grossly violates international law,’ Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian told reporters Monday. Jian said Beijing opposes anything that ‘infringes upon other countries’ sovereignty and security, and all acts of unilateralism or bullying.’
Meanwhile, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Venezuela’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Yván Gil spoke over the phone Monday, and the ‘Russian side reaffirmed its all-out support and solidarity with the leaders and people of Venezuela in the current context.’
‘The ministers expressed grave concern in connection with Washington stepping up its escalation actions in the Caribbean, actions fraught with far-reaching consequences for the region and creating a threat for international shipping,’ the statement said.
Katherine Thompson, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, previously told Fox News Digital that adversaries like Russia and China are likely perplexed as to why the Trump administration has zeroed in on the Maduro regime. That’s because Caracas doesn’t jeopardize U.S. interests as much as other actors, in addition to the Trump administration’s ‘American First’ mantra, Thompson said.
‘I imagine, for them, it’s probably a bit puzzling if they’re looking at it through a real, brass tacks, realist lens why this administration would be prioritizing ousting the Maduro regime as opposed to conflicts in other theaters,’ Thompson said earlier in December.
The Trump administration has conducted nearly 30 strikes in Latin American waters since September as part of its hard-line approach to crack down on the influx of drugs into the U.S.
For example, the Trump administration designated drug cartel groups like Tren de Aragua, Sinaloa and others as foreign terrorist organizations and bolstered its naval assets in the region in recent months, including signing off on the unprecedented step of sending the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford to the region.
In addition to the strikes against alleged drug vessels, Trump has suggested for months that strikes on land could be the next step.
‘We’re knocking out drug boats right now at a level that we haven’t seen,’ Trump said Dec. 3. ‘Very soon we’re going to start doing it on land too.’
Although the Trump administration has said it has the authority to conduct these attacks against alleged drug boats, Democrats and some Republicans have questioned the legality of the strikes.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and senators Tim Kaine, D-Va., Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced a war powers resolution this month to bar Trump from using U.S. armed forces to engage in hostilities within or against Venezuela.
Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson contributed to this report.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar blasted the Palestinian Authority (PA) for emboldening terrorism with its infamous ‘Pay-for-Slay’ program after a Palestinian on Friday murdered two Israelis.
Palestinian terrorists murdered 19-year-old Aviv Maor from Kibbutz Ein Harod and Mordechai Shimshon, 68, from Beit She’an on Friday in northern Israel.
The Palestinian Authority ‘Pay-for-Slay’ policy gained wide public attention when Taylor Force, a West Point graduate who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, was savagely knifed to death by a Palestinian terrorist on March 8, 2016, while on a tour of Israel. President Donald Trump signed the Taylor Force Act into law in October 2018, after a vigorous campaign by Force’s parents, Robbi and Stuart Force.
Prior to Friday’s terrorist attacks, Sa’ar issued warnings to the international community about alleged Palestinian leadership deception. He wrote on X: ‘Don’t believe Mahmoud Abbas’ lies. The Palestinian Authority’s payments to terrorists and their families haven’t stopped. The PA decided to continue its ‘Pay-for-Slay’ policy. This includes payments to the families of ‘martyrs’ and injured terrorists, jailed terrorists and released terrorists. The PA is also disguising the payments to the released murderers as payments to pensioners of the Palestinian Security Services! This is distorted. End ‘Pay-for-Slay’ now!’
Abbas is the 90-year-old chain-smoking president of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank (the region is known in Israel by its biblical names of Judea and Samaria.)
Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, told Fox News Digital that contrary to Palestinian Authority claims about stopping the ‘Pay-for-Slay’ program, there has been ‘no substantial change in Palestinian Authority policy with regard to the payments to terrorists.’
He continued that ‘They are making noises as if they are changing their policies.’ But he termed it a ‘façade’ with no change in policy.
Michael said that ‘Pay-for-Slay will continue in a different manner. Donors and the international community [who finance the PA] will find it more difficult to monitor it.’
The counter-terrorism expert, Michael, who is also a fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy, said the PA ‘defines terrorists as social welfare. They continue to support incitement against Israel. They continue remaining dysfunctional.’
According to a Dec. 19 report in the Times of Israel, a PA-linked organization –The Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution (also known as Tamkeen) — disputed the Israeli government claim that ‘Pay-for Slay’ is still intact.
Tamkeen noted in its statement that it ‘confirms that the payment system linked to the number of years of imprisonment has been completely and permanently abolished and is no longer in effect in any way.’ It added that ‘Claims regarding its continuation fall under the category of deliberate misinformation and falsification of facts.’
Fox News Digital reached out numerous times to the Palestinian Authority for a comment and sent press queries to the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution (Tamkeen.)
When asked by Fox News Digital what donor nations can do to stop ‘Pay-for-Slay,’ Michael said, ‘Be strict when it comes to financial donations,’ adding there are ‘many ways to pressure the Palestinian Authority.’
He sharply criticized Western European leaders who recognized an independent Palestinian state in 2025 without ensuring that the state would be a non-sponsor of terrorism. ‘Western leaders, the British prime minister, the French president and the Spanish prime minister are rushing and running to recognize a Palestinian state, and they don’t care what takes place under the Palestinian Authority in the territories.’ He said their recognition is ‘an incentive to continue to ‘Pay for Slay.’’
Michael said the Trump administration is the only one ‘applying pressure on the Palestinian Authority.’
He stressed that if the U.S.-designated terrorist movement Hamas is not dismantled and disarmed in Gaza, ‘it will be another achievement of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.’
The U.S. State Department and American Embassy in Jerusalem did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital press queries.
Capitol Hill is a ghost town with both the House and Senate out of session until a few days into the new year.
Lawmakers left town the week before Christmas, and with their departure have left several key fights unresolved — with deadlines looming large for both Republicans and Democrats.
Government funding
Congress voted to end the longest-ever government shutdown in history last month after 43 days of gridlock.
But lawmakers did not strike a deal on federal funding for the rest of fiscal year (FY) 2026, which they’re expected to do annually. Instead, they passed a portion of FY 2026 funding while punting the deadline for the majority of areas to Jan. 30.
Senate Republicans had hoped to strike a deal on the vast majority of the remaining funds before leaving town, but various objections from senators on both sides of the aisle delayed an actual vote.
Now, that legislation will have to be reckoned with in early January. During that month, the House and Senate will only have a total of eight days in session together before the Jan. 30 deadline.
The Senate will have 15 total days in session, while the House will have 12.
Healthcare
Millions of people across the country are expected to see an increase in how much they pay for healthcare premiums every month starting in January.
Congress, meanwhile, has failed to pass a compromise between the House and Senate to help Americans deal with the rising cost.
For some Americans on Obamacare, part of that is due to COVID-19 pandemic-era enhanced subsidies expiring at the end of 2025.
Republicans have largely rejected the notion of extending those subsidies, at least without significant reforms. But a small group of moderate GOP lawmakers are pushing for a short-term extension to give Congress time to create a more permanent system for lowering costs.
The House passed a healthcare reform bill aimed at expanding options in the commercial insurance marketplace the week before leaving town. In the Senate, however, dueling plans by Republicans and Democrats failed to advance.
It will now be an issue for GOP congressional leaders to tackle in 2026 — while Democrats are likely to seize on it as an election-year issue.
Redistricting
Mid-decade redistricting has upended state and federal politics across the U.S. this year, with President Donald Trump pushing multiple GOP-controlled states to change their congressional lines in order to give Republicans an advantage in the 2026 midterms.
Democrat-led states like California have responded by moving to redraw their own maps to give the left an advantage. It’s resulted in prolonged court battles on both sides.
In Texas, where new maps could give Republicans as many as five new House seats, the Supreme Court granted an emergency stay on a lower court’s order allowing the GOP-led initiative to move forward.
The federal court battle over the Golden State’s new map is likely to draw into the new year. Meanwhile, states like Virginia, Illinois, Alabama, and Louisiana could still move to make new lines before next November.
Multiple House lawmakers have introduced legislation to ban mid-decade redistricting, but to no avail so far.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., warned at a press conference earlier this month, ‘Republicans may have started this redistricting battle. We as Democrats plan to finish it.’
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., by contrast, has taken a largely hands-off approach, preferring to leave the matter to state legislatures and the courts.
In 1980, at Dartmouth College, psychologists Richard E. Kleck and Angelo G. Strenta set out to study how people perceive subtle social cues. In their own mischievous words, “Individuals were led to believe that they were perceived as physically deviant in the eyes of an interactant.”
Over a series of studies, dozens of volunteers (mostly females) pretended to have a physical ailment or disfigurement — often a facial scar — during an interview. The rub was this: the person pretending to have the disfigurement was the true test subject.
To make volunteers believe they bore a scar, each subject sat down with a professional makeup artist, who carefully applied a facial “injury.” The participants were shown their fake scar in a hand mirror and given a moment to absorb their appearance. But before meeting the stranger, the makeup artist returned under the pretense of “touching up” the scar — and quietly removed it. Participants were unaware of the subterfuge and entered their interview convinced their face still bore the disfigurement.
Even though no scar was present, nearly all subjects reported that the strangers they met seemed uneasy by their appearance — avoiding eye contact, speaking awkwardly, or looking at them with pity.
A Distorted ‘Social Reality’
What Kleck and Strenta had uncovered was how easily human expectations about how we’re perceived can color — and distort — our reading of other people’s behavior.
Though the study was groundbreaking, previous studies had treaded similar ground. This included Beatrice A. Wright’s “Physical Disability: A Psychological Approach,” which had found that once a person acquires a physical disability, their perception of social reality becomes filtered through that disability.
While Kleck and Strenta noted that their research differed from Wright’s in key ways, they also saw a clear connection, noting “that persons who are permanently physically deviant make the same kinds of disability-linked attributes to a natural stream of behavior as did the subjects in the present studies.”
The findings of Kleck and Strenta are highly relevant half a century later. In modern America, it’s not uncommon for people to see their group identity as a kind of social handicap. The idea that certain identity groups face discrimination has taken root in the American mind. For example, a May 2025 Pew Research survey asked Americans how much discrimination they think various groups face. Their responses are instructive:
Illegal Immigrants: 82% say some (57% say “a lot”)
Transgender people: 77%
Muslims: 74%
Jews: 72%
Black people: 74%
Hispanic people: 72%
Asian people: 66%
Legal immigrants: 65%
Gay/Lesbian individuals: 70%
Women: 64%
Older people: 59%
Religious people: 57%
Discrimination certainly exists, at both the individual and collective level. No doubt some individuals in all these groups have faced discrimination, just as some individuals have in groups less commonly associated with it, such as rural Americans (41%), young people (40%), white people (38%), and atheists (33%).
Kleck and Strenta’s experiment shows that people often believe they’re being discriminated against because they expect to be, not because they are. Edgier comedies of the 1990s explored this idea.
In one Seinfeld episode, Jerry is on a date and stops to ask a mailman (whose face is obscured) if he knows where a certain Chinese restaurant is. “Excuse me, you must know where the Chinese restaurant is around here,” the comedian says.
Things get awkward, however, when it turns out the mailman is Asian. “Why must I know? Because I’m Chinese?” the mailman says in a heavy accent. “You think I know where all the Chinese restaurants are?”
The scene is comical and a bit absurd, but it reflects a phenomenon Kleck and Strenta observed in their experiments: Once humans begin to feel they are being treated differently based on their physical appearance or inherent attributes, they will believe people are treating them differently even when that is not the case.
“… if we expect others to react negatively to some aspect of our physical appearance,” the authors wrote, “there is probably little those others can do to prevent us from confirming our expectation.”
The Cost of Victimhood Culture
I learned about the Kleck-Strenta as an undergraduate in an introductory psychology class nearly 30 years ago. But I had rarely thought about it since — until Konstantin Kisin, a British-Russian political commentator, brought it up in recent podcast appearances and connected the study to the rise of victimhood culture.
“If you preach to people constantly that we’re all oppressed, that we’re all being discriminated against, then that primes people to look for that,” says Kisin, “even where it doesn’t exist.”
As a concept, victimhood culture wasn’t articulated until the 1990s. But by 2015, the phenomenon was widely discussed in academic literature and mainstream publications, likely due to the rise of political correctness that preceded it.
“‘Victimhood culture,’ Arthur Brookes wrote in the New York Times a decade ago, “has now been identified as a widening phenomenon by mainstream sociologists.”
Though relatively new in scholarship, the psychological phenomenon itself has been around for ages. In his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky explores the human proclivity to manufacture grievance by taking offense.
“A man who lies to himself is the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea — he knows all that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility.”
These words are uttered by Father Zosima, a wise monk tasked with settling a dispute among the Karamazov family. Fyodor Karamazov, the lecherous patriarch, practical purrs in agreement.
“Precisely, precisely—it feels good to be offended,” he replies. “You put it so well, I’ve never heard it before.”
Dostoevsky was observing a psychological tendency: our ability to see ourselves as victims. (Anyone who has watched The Sopranos has seen this idea explored in brilliant artistic fashion.)
Combine that impulse with postmodern philosophies that have turned oppression into a kind of fascination, and you get a potent—and corrosive—worldview.
None of this is to deny that real oppression exists or that people are sometimes treated differently because of their appearance. But the research of Kleck and Strenta suggests that, oftentimes, the perceived discrimination exists only in the minds of those who believe they’ve been wronged.
“Regime uncertainty” should be our bywords for understanding the economy of 2025. Trump’s push for “state capitalism,” ranging from tariffs to taking federal stakes in companies to industrial policy to jawboning companies to fire executives to targeted regulatory carveouts, has created a chaotic, pay-to-play environment in which firms find they can get favorable treatment by contributing to Trump’s political success, but the basic rules of the economic game are unpredictable and open to constant negotiation. That unpredictability has in turn deterred private investment and brought on stagflation.
Economist Robert Higgs developed the concept of regime uncertainty to explain why American recovery from the Great Depression was so slow. Investors feared for the security of their contracts and their private property rights as FDR turned explicitly anti-business during the 1936 presidential campaign. As a result, private investment stagnated and the economy tipped back into recession, prolonging the Great Depression. Investor confidence didn’t return until after the war, when it launched an economic boom.
Regime uncertainty was on my mind when I watched the fateful “Liberation Day” press conference in the Rose Garden on April 2, when President Trump held up the schedule of so-called “reciprocal tariffs” that would apply to imports from other countries. The tariff rates themselves were extremely high, but more than that, they were absurd and irrational. They had no logical basis in law or economics. I immediately moved my retirement savings out of US equities into global equities and bought physical gold with all my family’s free cash. After most of the tariffs were rolled back, I gradually started shifting back to a 60-40 US-global equities mix, which is still overweighted to international stocks compared to most Americans’ portfolios.
I didn’t shift to gold or global stocks because I thought the tariffs themselves would be so destructive, but because I lost all confidence in this administration’s economic policy team. I figured we were in for a wild ride, and unfortunately, we have been.
Regime uncertainty explains not just why global stocks have outperformed US stocks (Figure 1), but why gold has performed so well, despite reasonably moderate inflation (Figure 2). Gold is hedging not just ongoing inflation, but policy uncertainty more broadly.
Figure 1: S&P 500 Index vs. S&P Global Index, Jan. 2025 to Dec. 2025 (source: WSJ)
Regime uncertainty explains another curious fact about the current US economy: the return of mild stagflation. With private investment lagging, unemployment has risen along with inflation. Macroeconomists would interpret this combination as an “adverse supply shock,” that is, a loss of productivity growth.
As Figure 3 shows, US job growth has slowed markedly since April. Monthly job growth since then has averaged a measly 35,000 workers, compared to over 100,000 every single month going back to October 2024.
Figure 3: US Nonfarm Jobs, Monthly Change, Jan. 2022 to Nov. 2025
The unemployment rate has also now risen a full percentage point since its 2023 low. Note that there is a gap in the series because of the government shutdown: the October figure is missing. The November figure is 4.6%, which means that the unemployment rate has risen a full half a percentage point just since June.
Figure 4: US Unemployment Rate, Jan. 2022 to Nov. 2025
Figure 5 shows monthly personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation rates up through November (excluding October). While this series is highly noisy, an upward trend since March is plainly apparent. Moreover, the disinflationary trend that we saw from the beginning of the series up until March has definitively come to an end. For the months through September, we had six straight months of PCE inflation near or above the Fed’s target. The last time that happened was the six months ending in June 2023.
Figure 5: US PCE Inflation, Monthly, Jan. 2022 to Sept. 2025
So far the data suggest the US economy is slowing, investors are hedging against something, and investors prefer to park their money abroad rather than in the US. But the smoking gun that suggests regime uncertainty is at fault is private investment. Real gross private investment is the series that Higgs himself uses to establish a “capital strike” during the late New Deal period.
What do we see when we look at US real gross domestic private investment in 2025? In Q2 2025, the quarter that includes Liberation Day, we see the largest single-quarter decline in US private investment since Q2 2020, the quarter most affected by the global pandemic (Figure 6). To see another decline as large, we have to go all the way back to 2009, during the throes of the Great Recession. Indeed, to find another quarterly decline as large outside the immediate period during or around an official recession, we have to go all the way back to Q1 1988. The just-released figures for Q3 show another decline in real private investment, of 0.3%.
Figure 6: US Real Gross Domestic Private Investment, Quarterly Growth, Q1 2020 to Q3 2025
All of this has been happening at the same time as an AI-fueled boom in capital investment for electricity generation and data centers has taken hold. Had this technologically driven boom not been ongoing, the effects of regime uncertainty on the US economy presumably would have been much worse.
Indeed, if we look at the components of private investment, “information processing equipment,” “software,” and “research and development” have contributed significantly to growth this year. But their growth has been more than offset in the last two quarters by declines in nonresidential structures and residential construction.
Why has regime uncertainty become such a problem? After all, the Trump Administration has made a verbal commitment to deregulation, and the tax cuts passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill should have incentivized business investment. But all of the deregulation enacted by the Trump Administration has come through executive orders and the rulemaking process, not legislation. A future administration could easily undo it. As a result, businesses lack the confidence that large capital investments will pay off in the long run.
The evidence suggests that to turn the American economy around, the Trump Administration needs to work through Congress to pass statutory deregulation, end its experiments with industrial policy, government ownership, and tariffs, and shift from a “deal-making” posture of transactional politics to a firm, credible commitment to enforcing a level playing field for private business. Without a believable shift in strategy, this administration risks incurring an economic malaise that could last for another three years.
North Korea showed off its apparent progress in the development of a nuclear-powered submarine. State media released photos of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and his daughter, a potential heir, as they inspected what appears to be a largely completed hull.
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea’s official state media, said Kim and his daughter visited the shipyard to examine the construction of what it describes as an 8,700-ton-class nuclear-propelled submarine, The Associated Press reported. Pyongyang has signaled that it plans to arm the submarine with nuclear weapons, the AP noted. Kim has said the development of the submarine is a crucial step toward the modernization and nuclear armament of his country’s navy.
The Christmas Day release of the photos marks the first time North Korean state media has shown an update on the nuclear-powered submarine since March. Earlier images mostly showed the lower sections of the vessel, the AP noted. The KCNA did not say when the photos released on Thursday were taken.
Moon Keun-sik, a submarine expert at Seoul’s Hanyang University, told the AP that the photos of a largely completed hull indicate that many of the core components are already in place, as submarines are typically built from the inside out. However, it was not immediately clear exactly how much progress Pyongyang had made.
‘Showing the entire vessel now seems to indicate that most of the equipment has already been installed and it is just about ready to be launched into the water,’ Moon, who also served as a submarine officer in the South Korean navy, told the AP. Moon added that North Korea’s submarine could be ready for testing at sea within months.
While at the shipyard, Kim condemned South Korea’s efforts to develop its own nuclear-powered submarine as an ‘offensive act,’ despite the fact that President Donald Trump has backed Seoul’s push toward the technology. Kim said South Korea’s efforts violate North Korea’s security and maritime sovereignty, according to the AP.
In October, during his tour of Asia aimed at securing investments, Trump said that the U.S. would share technology with South Korea that would allow it to build a nuclear-powered submarine. The president posted on Truth Social that the vessel would be built in Philadelphia.
‘South Korea will be building its nuclear-powered submarine in the Philadelphia shipyards, right here in the good ol’ U.S.A. Shipbuilding in our country will soon be making a BIG COMEBACK,’ the president wrote.
The White House underscored the point when it released a fact sheet in November which directly referenced Washington and Seoul’s efforts to ‘further our maritime and nuclear partnership.’
The darkest days of the year have always asked something of us.
Long before we strung electric lights and gathered around brick fireplaces, people across cultures marked the winter solstice — the darkest day of the year. We do so still, not with despair, but as a moment of deliberate action, of invitation. We bring greenery indoors. We light candles in the windows and fires in the hearth. We gather, sing, feast, celebrate. We tell stories about the sun’s return, even though the bulk of winter lies heavy ahead.
Why We Bring Life and Light Indoors
The solstice is neither the end of winter nor its harshest nadir. It is the turning point, the time when decline stops and reversal begins. The days will begin, imperceptibly, to lengthen again. There seems to be some universal human impulse to mark the deepest darkness with light of our own making, and to gather in the good things that sustain us through lean times.
By the second century BCE, Roman households decorated their doors with holly, sacred to the god Saturn. Its red berries and vibrant green foliage set the season’s signature color scheme. Around the same time, Druids were decorating holly trees (though cutting one down would bring bad luck) and bringing in red-and-white speckled fly agaric mushrooms to dry by the fire. Further north, the Norse were hanging mistletoe, with its tiny white berries, under which couples would stop to kiss. Celts and Germanic tribes cut boughs from the evergreen plants around them — ivy, fir, laurel — to symbolize enduring life.
As Christianity crept across the continent, these cultural practices were absorbed by new narratives. The decorated tree was eventually brought indoors and adorned with ornaments, migrating from Germany with Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. It was subsumed into the Christmas tradition and subsequently across the Anglosphere, including the southern hemisphere.
But indigenous midwinter celebrations of fire, music, and revelry were already observed there, in June. The Mapuche of southern Chile and adjacent Argentina celebrate We Tripantu around the June solstice as a new year and renewal of the natural cycle. Each recognizes that midwinter is not a time of death, but of quiet hibernation, preparation, and anticipation.
Why We Light the Dark
In Scandinavia, a giant oak log, the Yule log, was burned to symbolize strength and endurance, its light defying the darkness and promising regrowth and rebirth. A fragment was saved each year to start next year’s fire.
And that, perhaps, is the enduring lesson of these solstice ceremonies of renewal.
Evergreens remain visibly living when deciduous plants appear dead, so they become symbols of continuity, rebirth, and eternal life. But neither are really dead. They are storing away energy, waiting for the light and opportunity to grow to return.
The embers of the Yule log, saved for next year; the hard-won sugars stored up in evergreen boughs. Human beings have always marked the darkest economic and seasonal moments not by denial, but by deliberate acts of renewal — bringing light and living things indoors as a vote of confidence in the future.
Discipline in Dormancy
Human capital works the same way. Periods of stagnation and loss can be times of preparation — if we take responsibility for them. Skills can be sharpened. Habits can be examined. Character can be rebuilt. But none of this happens automatically. Winter only becomes preparation if we choose to treat it as such.
The first signs of recovery are often invisible: better decisions, renewed discipline, a willingness to accept responsibility for one’s future. These do not immediately produce abundance, but they change the trajectory. Compounding works quietly at first.
In economic life, downturns, stagnation, and personal failure function as winter solstices. In the moments when progress is slowest, we might not notice that reversal has already begun. Prosperity does not return automatically — it returns because people act as if it will. We conserve capital, tend embers, make plans, and orient ourselves toward the future. We honor the natural cycles by preparing ourselves to grow again.
Prosperity depends not only on policies or institutions, but on the daily choices of individuals who conserve, invest, and prepare. It depends on people willing to tend embers rather than curse the cold.
In a time when economic anxiety is widespread and faith in the future often feels thin, the solstice offers a bracing reminder. Darkness does not mean directionlessness. Dormancy does not mean decay. And renewal does not require grand gestures — only the discipline to preserve what still lives and the courage to believe that patient effort matters.
The people who celebrated the “longest night” were not naïve. They knew months of cold still lay ahead. They knew crops would not sprout for a long time. Yet they marked the moment anyway, because direction mattered more than speed. After the solstice, as in recession and personal loss, progress begins before comfort returns.
President Trump has accused virtually every country, including those inhabited only by penguins of ripping us off when it comes to trade. But there’s one region that the President has neglected to protect us from: the North Pole. By every metric that the Trump administration has used, Good Saint Nick should really be considered an economic terrorist. Consider the following:
North Pole Trade Deficit
Santa operates out of the North Pole which is (as of yet) not part of the United States; everything that he brings into the country is considered an import. Meanwhile we export nothing to the North Pole annually, giving us an entirely one-sided trade deficit with the North Pole. But just how much does Santa actually import into the United States each Christmas?
With just under two-thirds of Americans identifying as “Christian,” that gives us about 200 million people eligible for gifts from Santa, of which about half would be considered children. A recent survey finds that parents are anticipating spending about $521 per child on Christmas presents, which equates to $52.1 billion worth of Christmas spending. Obviously, parents and other family members will contribute the bulk of these presents to the kids. If we assume that only a quarter of the gifts that children receive on Christmas morning are “From: Santa,” that means that Santa must be importing $13 billion worth of Christmas presents on Christmas Eve.
Using the same methodology that the President’s Council of Economic Advisors has used, we can calculate the devastation that this pile of presents would bring upon our nation. At an average wage of $36 per hour, Santa’s imports are the equivalent of 180,555 manufacturing jobs that are destroyed by him deciding to spread his “good cheer.”
Of course, if Santa were to contribute more than a mere quarter of the Christmas presents per year, this number would only rise.
Unfair Trade Practices
Worse still, is Santa’s practice of dumping gifts on the American economy. “Dumping,” according to US law, is when a foreign producer sells goods in America below the cost of production. Previous administrations have solved this in the past through the use of antidumping duties, sometimes exceeding 200 percent of the product’s value.
But Santa does not merely sell below cost. He gives his goods away for free. This is dumping at a price of zero, which is completely indefensible under US law. Even China, often referred to as the worst trade offender in the world, has the decency to charge us something for their harmful production.
Using standard methodology to calculate the appropriate response is simple: take the value of the good, divide it by the price the importer is selling, and multiply it by 100 to arrive at the appropriate percentage penalty to apply. Since Santa charges us nothing, the appropriate response is therefore an infinite tariff rate applied to any and all goods imported from the North Pole.
Unfair Production Processes
We must also consider the means by which the North Pole produces its wares: intellectual property theft. Santa does not produce his own merchandise, but rather creates facsimiles of products readily available on shelves of stores around the country. This is intellectual property theft at its finest, which by some estimates costs the US up to $600 billion annually. Is it possible that all of those “elves on the shelves” are really spies, seeking to steal trade secrets through corporate espionage? After all, they apparently return to the North Pole every evening to “report to Santa.” Just what is in those reports? Has anyone seen them?
And how does Santa build these gifts? Through the use of what can only be considered child and slave labor, no less. Watching 1994’s The Santa Clause with the eyes of a trade representative reveals just how abhorrent Santa’s labor practices are as Santa has been using child elf labor since the beginning of his operation. Worse is 2003’s Elf, which reveals that when an elf does manage to escape, none other than Santa himself will descend from his throne and seek to collect the escapee. And should an elf wish to be anything other than a toymaker, he is berated and faced with serious pressure to conform, as the 1964 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer shows with the plight of Hermey and his desire to become a dentist.
“And what are these elves paid with?” you ask. That’s easy: candy canes, hot cocoa, and “Christmas spirit.” This is currency manipulation at its finest. Meanwhile, these workers live in a region with no significant thermal activity and average temperatures of about -40°F, six months of darkness, and zero compliance with standard OSHA practices. Still, Santa reports that his elves are “merry.”
National Security Threat
Finally, we must consider the national security threat that Santa presents. President Trump has secured the border against illegal crossings. So why has nothing been done against Santa? Has he been vetted by national security advisors? Does he have visa paperwork or asylum status? Does he enter through a designated port of entry, submit to customs inspections, or declare the goods he is importing? It appears that the answers to all of these questions are a resounding “no,” which means that if any border is in need of a wall, it’s our northern border. Good luck building one tall enough to stop reindeer flying at over 650 miles per second.
Either Condemn Santa—or Thank Free Traders
To his credit, the President has tried to convince parents that they should give their children fewer Christmas presents. At his affordability rally in Pennsylvania just a few weeks ago, he pointed out very clearly that “you don’t need 37 [dolls] for your daughter. Two or three is nice.” This isn’t the first time the President has derided excess consumption in the name of national security: he said as much back in May as well.
The reality is that the American people understand full well that Santa is no “economic terrorist.” While we may bemoan having to clean up the mess of wrapping paper, find ourselves unprepared for the sheer number of toys that need (but do not include) batteries, and perhaps find frustration that after a late night, we have to get up absurdly early, we still see Christmas Day not as a sign of us being taken advantage of, but as a day of celebration and good cheer.
But if we really stop and think about it, foreign producers have a degree of “Santa” in them. While they do not sell us their wares at zero price, they still charge lower prices than our domestic counterparts can match. This means more access to goods and services that allow us to live healthily and wealthily, however we choose to define those terms. Unlike Santa, foreign producers sell their “gifts” to everyone regardless of age or religious affiliation and they do so year round.
So what we should really be after here is consistency: either condemn Santa as the job-destroying, IP-stealing, border-flouting menace he is — or thank foreign producers for enriching our lives with their gifts of specialization. You cannot have it both ways.
A Christmas Eve jazz concert at the Kennedy Center was canceled just days after the White House announced that President Donald Trump’s name would be added to the iconic performing arts institution in Washington, D.C.
The show’s host, musician Chuck Redd, who has led the holiday ‘Jazz Jams’ at the Kennedy Center since 2006, said he called off his performance after Trump’s name was added to the facility.
‘When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,’ Redd told the Associated Press.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the Kennedy Center for comment. The Kennedy Center’s website lists the show as canceled.
The Kennedy Center’s board voted unanimously on Dec. 18 to rename the institution the ‘Trump-Kennedy Center,’ prompting swift backlash from members of the Kennedy family who said the decision undermined the legacy of President John F. Kennedy.
Maria Shriver, Kennedy’s niece, criticized the decision, calling it ‘beyond comprehension.’
Last week, workers added Trump’s name to the outside of the center, and the website’s header was changed to ‘The Trump Kennedy Center.’
Another Kennedy niece, Kerry Kennedy, vowed to remove Trump’s name from the building after he leaves office.
President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill in 1964 that designated the center as a living memorial to Kennedy following his assassination in 1963. The law prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else or from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior, the AP reported.
Trump was elected chairman of the Kennedy Center board in February, after removing 18 trustees appointed by former President Joe Biden.
Since Trump returned to office on Jan. 20, several artists have canceled performances at the Kennedy Center, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, who called off a production of ‘Hamilton.’
Redd has toured worldwide and performed with numerous musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, according to his website bio.
Fox News Digital has reached out to Redd for comment.
