Saturday Morning Covfefe: 5 Things with Olivia

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Thanksgiving plot twist: She’s out. Also: medical debt erased for 128,000 families.

Big news: Marjorie Taylor Greene is stepping down from Congress come January. Her resignation follows a bitter public break with Trump, threats against her life, and a party spiraling under its own extremism. It’s a stunning end to one of the most volatile political careers in modern memory. The question now is: what will she do next?

Welcome back to Saturday Covfefe, the only place where your disbelief is valid and your coffee is never strong enough.

1. “Find the Facts That Fit the Narrative”: Life at the Department of Justice

Sixty Justice Department lawyers just broke the silence to describe what it’s really like inside Trump’s second-term DOJ, and it’s worse than the headlines. On Day One, Trump pardoned nearly all Jan. 6 rioters and installed his former defense lawyers atop the department. From there, the guardrails came off: career prosecutors were ordered to drop corruption and civil-rights cases for political reasons, told to “find facts that fit the narrative,” and threatened or fired if they wouldn’t comply.

The Public Integrity Section was gutted. Foreign-bribery and Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) cases, the investigations that expose hidden foreign influence in U.S. politics, were sidelined. A massive national-security red flag in an administration already vulnerable to foreign pressure. Voting-rights lawsuits withdrawn. Wrongful deportations and pardon recommendations were twisted to reward allies and punish enemies.

The people who spent their careers enforcing the law say it bluntly: this isn’t a Justice Department anymore, it’s the president’s personal law firm.

⚖️ Rule of Law Meltdown: NY Times

2. The Department of Deportation

Yes, that should be its new name, because they’re certainly no longer focused on your safety.

The New York Times uncovered what I and other national security experts have been saying for months: DHS isn’t functioning as a homeland security agency anymore, it’s a mass-deportation apparatus, and the tradeoffs are staggering. Thousands of federal agents who typically hunt child predators, human traffickers, arms smugglers, money launderers, and even Iranian oil networks that fund terrorism have been yanked off those missions and forced into low-level immigration sweeps.

Child-exploitation teams report working one-third fewer hours rescuing abused kids. National-security probes into Iran’s ghost fleet of oil tankers have stalled, with ships and money “just disappearing.” Human-trafficking and sex-smuggling investigations are languishing. Even the Coast Guard is diverting surveillance aircraft and search-and-rescue crews to move detainees between lockups.

And this week, the Coast Guard briefly tried to reclassify swastikas and nooses as merely “potentially divisive,” until public outrage forced a late-night reversal.

A reminder of two things:
(1) Extremism enters institutions through policy, not slogans.
(2) Public pressure still matters, but it shouldn’t take national outrage to call a swastika or noose what it is: hate.

All of this is being driven by Stephen Miller’s daily pressure calls and Kristi Noem’s warnings that “no job is safe” if deportation numbers don’t climb. And they are climbing, at the direct expense of the very missions DHS was created after 9/11 to safeguard.

🚨 When DHS Stops Protecting You: NY Times; Coast Guard’s Whiplash on Hate Symbols: AP

3. The Slow Death of the Education Department

Trump’s “Final Mission”: dismantling federal education from the inside out.

Six new interagency agreements move core K–12 and higher-ed functions to Labor, State, HHS, and Interior, a restructuring that experts warn could destabilize civil rights enforcement and disrupt services for students with disabilities, low-income families, and first-gen students like myself.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon calls it a “proof of concept” for shutting the department down entirely. Half the workforce is already gone. Even Republicans are alarmed. Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick warns the breakup “poses real risks to the very students these offices were created to protect.” Former officials call the plan a “bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine,” an overcomplicated setup that makes everything harder instead of better.

🎓💀 The Great Unraveling: The Guardian

4. Silencing the Watchdogs

The administration is preparing a rule that would gut federal whistleblower safeguards. Internal documents show the rule would exclude tens of thousands of senior federal employees from protections against retaliation for reporting fraud, abuse, or illegal activity.

These aren’t fringe roles; these are the people most likely to spot misconduct. And they’d be easier to fire.

Whistleblower Aid warns the administration is “creating a culture of fear, silence and intimidation.” Federal employment attorneys say this strips protections from officials most likely to witness wrongdoing.

This follows a familiar pattern: firing inspectors general, ousting the head of the Office of Special Counsel, installing loyalists, and rewriting civil-service rules to make dissent a fireable offense. Removing protections doesn’t “streamline government.” It removes the last internal brake on corruption.

And that’s the point.

🛑 Whistleblowers No More: Reuters

5. The Secret “Peace Plan” Trump Just Approved

Trump has approved a 28-point U.S.–Russia “peace plan” drafted behind closed doors by Steve Witkoff, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Jared Kushner, and negotiated with Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev.

Ukraine wasn’t invited.

As I warned back in August, this is precisely where I worried Trump’s foreign-policy posture toward Ukraine was headed, a backroom deal shaped by Moscow’s terms, not Kyiv’s needs. The proposal mirrors Russia’s demands: significant territorial concessions, recognition of Russian control of Crimea and occupied regions, shrinking Ukraine’s army, and banning foreign troops, killing any future NATO guarantees.

The timing is not subtle. It comes as Ukraine faces battlefield exhaustion, a corruption scandal, and devastating missile strikes that killed at least 25 civilians.

Even Senate Republicans were blindsided. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham said he’d “never heard of it. The White House is calling it a “chance for lasting peace.” Diplomats warn it’s something else entirely: A forced settlement, drafted in secret, that would rewrite Europe’s borders, reward invasion, fracture NATO, and leave Ukraine defenseless in the long run.

And once again, the country whose territory is on the table wasn’t in the room.

🕊️ “Trump’s 28-Point “Peace” Plan

​​🔥 BONUS: Meanwhile, at the U.S.–Saudi Investment Forum…

While speaking at the U.S.–Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center this week, Donald Trump claimed he was so wildly popular in 2020 that he could’ve beaten George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, even if they rose from the dead and ran on the same ticket.

Yes. The Founding Fathers. Reanimated. On a unity ticket. Defeated by Trump “by 25 points.” According to…his pollsters, who apparently moonlight as necromancers.

And remember: this wasn’t at a rally or a Truth Social meltdown. He said this on the world stage, at a Saudi forum, in front of global investors, diplomats, and foreign dignitaries. A spectacle of delusion broadcast internationally. The kind of rambling that would spark a leadership crisis in any other democracy, but here, it’s just another Thursday.

🧟‍♂️ This Actually Happened: Medialite

🌱 One Thing for Your Soul

This week, more than 128,000 Nevadans will open a simple envelope and learn that the medical debt weighing on them—the bill they’ve been carrying, dreading, sacrificing for—is gone. Not reduced. Not renegotiated. Erased. Completely. Quietly. Without them even having to ask. And when I heard about this, as a Reno, Nevada native, I genuinely got teary-eyed.

Somos Votantes Education Fund, partnering with Undue Medical Debt, just wiped out over $133 million in medical debt for working families across Nevada. One dollar donated became one hundred dollars forgiven. A small act multiplied into life-changing relief. Next week, thousands of families—parents, seniors, caregivers, young workers—will finally go to sleep without that fear pressing on their chest. Without having to choose between medicine and groceries.

In a country where cruelty is often loud and policy failures hit hardest at the kitchen table, this is a reminder that compassion can still win. That community can still rise. That strangers can still change each other’s lives. Even in the chaos, someone is planting seeds of hope.

👉 If you’re moved by this work, take a moment to learn more about this organization: Seeds of Relief Changing Lives.

May your Thanksgiving bring light to your table, warmth to your home, and a moment of peace that stays with you long after the holiday is over.

Until next time,

Olivia