A prominent Iraq War veteran tore into President Donald Trump's administration on Friday night after CNN played a supercut of Cabinet members fawning over the president, including one who declared this was the "greatest Cabinet ever for the greatest president ever."

Anchor Erin Burnett played a montage of Trump's public Cabinet meeting from Tuesday, in which his Cabinet members lavished praise on the president.

"Thank you for fighting for our country," Attorney General Pam Bondi said in the clip.

"Thank you for allowing me to be part of this team, for people here who are focused on winning," said Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

"Even you kept the hurricanes away," joked Kristi Noem, Trump's Department of Homeland Security secretary, to laughs. "Thank you for letting us get up every day and have a purpose."

And the praise only escalated from there.

"Thank you, Mr. President, for being willing to take a bullet for this country," said Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency."

"The greatest Cabinet ever for the greatest president ever. And I, as I sit here today, I can't be more proud of how you did it, Sir. You've created the greatest Cabinet. It is a joy to be at this table!" exclaimed Howard Lutnick, Trump's Commerce secretary.

Burnett asked Paul Rieckhoff, founder of the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, for his thoughts, particularly on news that Trump was awarded the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize earlier in the day.

Rieckhoff began by mocking Trump's Cabinet.

"I want to thank you for having me on the greatest panel in the history of the world," he began, to laughs. "It does give me joy and I'm so infinitely grateful and thank you for stopping hurricanes."

Then Rieckhoff got serious.

"I think it's ridiculous. It's shameful. It's beneath the office. It's gross. It's also dangerous because I think it's a very effective manifestation of the growth of his propaganda machine," he said.

Trump is waging a war on the truth, said Rieckhoff, and was awarded a "made-up" peace prize for his efforts.

Rieckhoff noted it was no accident that Trump accepted the award on Fox Sports.

"That's not insignificant. He continues to go back to Fox Sports. He went there for the NFL. He understands that culture and sports are a way to get to more people," said Rieckhoff.

The White House, he added, looks like it's for sale.

"He's making a mockery of the office and our country," said Rieckhoff.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, considered by some to be the frontrunner to be the next Democratic presidential nominee, said during a panel on Wednesday that he wants his party to be a “big tent” that welcomes large numbers of people into the fold. But he’s “adamantly against” one of the most popular proposals Democrats have to offer: a wealth tax.

In October, progressive economists Emmanuel Saez and Robert Reich joined forces with one of California’s most powerful unions, the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers West, to propose that California put the nation’s first-ever wealth tax on the ballot in November 2026.

They described the measure as an “emergency billionaires tax” aimed at recouping the tens of billions of dollars that will be stripped from California’s 15 million Medicaid recipients over the next five years, after Republicans enacted historic cuts to the program in July with President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which dramatically reduced taxes for the wealthiest Americans.

Among those beneficiaries were the approximately 200 billionaires living in California, whose average annual income, Saez pointed out, has risen by 7.5% per year, compared with 1.5% for median-income residents.

Under the proposal, they would pay a one-time 5% tax on their total net worth, which is estimated to raise $100 billion. The vast majority of the funds, about 90%, would be used to restore Medicaid funding, while the rest would go towards funding K-12 education, which the GOP has also slashed.

The proposal in California has strong support from unions and healthcare groups. But Newsom has called it “bad policy” and “another attempt to grab money for special purposes.”

Meanwhile, several of his longtime consultants, including Dan Newman and Brian Brokaw, have launched a campaign alongside “business and tech leaders” to kill the measure, which they’ve dubbed “Stop the Squeeze.” They’ve issued familiar warnings that pinching the wealthy too hard will drive them from the state, along with the critical tax base they provide.

At Wednesday’s New York Times DealBook Summit, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Newsom about his opposition to the wealth tax idea, comparing it to a proposal by recent New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who pledged to increase the income taxes of New Yorkers who earn more than $1 million per year by 2% in order to fund his city-wide free buses, universal childcare, and city-owned grocery store programs.

Mamdani’s proposal was met with a litany of similar warnings from Big Apple bigwigs who threatened to flee the city and others around the country who said they’d never move in.

But as Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein explained in October for the American Prospect: “The evidence for this is thin: mostly memes shared by tech and finance people... Research shows that the truth of the matter is closer to the opposite. Wealthy individuals and their income move at lower rates than other income brackets, even in response to an increase of personal income tax.” Many of those who sulked about Mamdani’s victory have notably begun making amends with the incoming mayor.

Moreover, the comparison between Mamdani’s plan and the one proposed in California is faulty to begin with. As Harold Meyerson explained, also for the Prospect: “It is a one-time-only tax, to be levied exclusively on billionaires’ current (i.e., 2025) net worth. Even if they move to Tasmania, they will still be liable for 5% of this year’s net worth.”

“Crucially, the tax won’t crimp the fortunes of any billionaire who moves into the state next year or any later year, as it only applies to the billionaires living in the state this year,” he added. “Therefore... the horrific specter of billionaire flight can’t be levied against the California proposal.”

Nevertheless, Sorkin framed Newsom as being in an existential battle of ideas with Mamdani, asking how the two could both represent the Democratic Party when they are so “diametrically opposed.”

“Well, I want to be a big-tent party,” Newsom replied. “It’s about addition, not subtraction.”

Pushed on the question of whether there should be a “unifying theory of the case,” Newsom responded that “we all want to be protected, we all want to be respected, we all want to be connected to something bigger than ourselves. We have fundamental values that I think define our party, about social justice, economic justice.”

“We have pre-distribution Democrats, and we have re-distribution Democrats,” he continued. “Therein lies the dialectic and therein lies the debate.”

Polling is scarce so far on the likelihood of such a measure passing in California. But nationally, polls suggest that the vast majority of Democrats fall on the “re-distribution” side of Newsom’s “dialectic.” In fact, the majority of all Americans do, regardless of party affiliation.

Last year, Inequality.org examined 55 national and state polls about a number of different taxation policies and found:

A billionaire income tax garnered the most support across party identification. On average, two out of three (67%) of Americans supported the tax including 84% of Democrats, 64% of Independents, and 51% of Republicans.

In national polls, a wealth tax had similarly high levels of support. More than three out of five Americans supported the tax including 78% of Democrats, 62% of Independents, and 51% of Republicans.

That sentiment only seems to have grown since the return of President Donald Trump. An Economist/YouGov poll released in early November found that 72% of Americans said that taxes on billionaires should be raised—including 95% of Democrats, 75% of independents, and 48% of Republicans. Across the board, just 15% said they should not be raised.

Support remains high when the proposal is more specific as well. On the eve of Mamdani’s election, despitre months of fearmongering, 64% of New Yorkers said they backed his proposal, including a slight plurality of self-identified conservatives, according to a Siena College poll.

Many observers were perplexed by how Newsom proposes to maintain a “big tent” while opposing policies supported by most of the people inside it.

“A wealth tax is a big tent policy unless the only people you care about are billionaires,” wrote Jonathan Cohn, the political director for Progressive Mass, a grassroots organization in Massachusetts, on social media.

“Gavin Newsom—estimated net worth between $20 and $30 million—says he’s opposed to a billionaire wealth tax. Color me shocked,” wrote the Columbia University lecturer Anthony Zenkus. “Democrats holding him up as a potential savior for 2028 is a clear example of not reading the room.”

A prominent Republican U.S. senator ducked into a bathroom this week to try to avoid questions about the GOP's efforts to throw together a health care plan, The New York Times reported on Friday evening.

"Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, was on the way to a health committee hearing this week when he was asked what his party was going to do about insurance subsidies that are set to expire, driving up the cost of care for millions of Americans and leaving millions of others uninsured," reported Sheryl Gay Stolberg. Confronted with this, "he laughed and said: 'Sounds like a question.' His press secretary offered a reporter her card. Then Mr. Scott pulled a common Capitol Hill avoidance tactic: He ducked into the men’s room."

This comes as Republicans are still arguing among themselves what plan to offer, or whether to even offer a plan at all, as an alternative to the proposed Democratic compromise legislation on extending the subsidies, which were passed to help people buy Affordable Care Act plans during the pandemic.

This issue triggered a government shutdown that lasted weeks, until Republicans promised Democrats a vote on the issue this month.

"Roughly three weeks before a set of enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act expire, Republicans are scrambling to come up with a stopgap measure that would help Americans keep their coverage and possibly prevent their party from getting clobbered in next year’s midterm elections," said the report. "President Trump, who had hinted that he might lay out a plan, has remained mum, while top Republicans in Congress are staring down the deadline with little to show for their efforts to coalesce around a proposal."

Trump initially proposed a plan of just sending the subsidy money directly to Americans to save in individual accounts; then, he reportedly started working on an idea that would involve extending the subsidies in return for an income cap and anti-fraud measures, but delayed rolling it out as it became clear a number of Republicans in Congress weren't on board.