Security surge / Christmas at Broadview / Qs for yous

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Security surge. After a rash of violent incidents on Chicago Transit Authority property—and under fire from President Trump—the CTA and Chicago police say they’re deploying “dozens” of extra officers and canine security teams across the public transit system.
■ A man set himself on fire at the CTA’s Damen Blue Line station early today.

‘Terrifying and infuriating.’ That’s Evanston Mayor and congressional candidate Daniel Biss’ reaction to Trump administration moves to ban gender transition treatment for minors—like that now being undergone by two of his children.
■ Illinois kids returning to school in January may find that support services including mental health programs and food pantries have disappeared—because the Trump administration’s cut off federal aid.
■ On the other hand, some of the government’s still working: The FDA’s on Target, Walmart and Jewel-Osco’s case for failing to remove botulism-contaminated baby formula from their shelves.

Christmas at Broadview. A coalition of clergy is asking Homeland Security to allow ministers access to detainees at the Chicago-area ICE detention facility on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.
■ A Tribune editorial (gift link): Border Patrol chief Bovino is trying “to render the 2025 Christmas season one to remember for all the wrong reasons.”
■ A Berwyn woman shot by agents during a Broadview protest is demanding $1.5 million in damages.
■ Axios: Despite assurances that Homeland Security would end random immigration sweeps on sidewalks and businesses like Home Depot, it’s still happening here.
■ In its first public meeting, the Illinois Accountability Commission heard testimony that ICE agents’ excessive force felt like a “war zone.”
■ Illinois’ senators want a criminal probe of the Chicago-area immigration blitz.
■ Block Club: Members of Chicago’s police district councils want a public hearing into reports cops have been helping the Border Patrol.
■ Protesters gathered outside a Thorntons gas station in Forest Park to protest its sales to ICE agents.
■ In a case that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says “could be legally monumental,” a county judge has been found guilty of obstructing federal agents seeking to make an immigration arrest outside her courtroom.

‘Bullshit doesn’t quite capture Trump’s danger.’ Reviewing the president’s “18-minute prime-time rant,” fact-checker Glenn Kessler is ratcheting up to bullcrap.
■ Columnist Steven Beschloss saw “a desperate and delusional man … digging a hole from which he has no idea how to escape.”
■ Neil Steinberg’s take: “600 percent more bullshit.”
■ Jeff Tiedrich: “Old man yells at country.”
■ Updating coverage: Trump’s Justice Department faced a deadline today for release of its files on convicted—and dead—Trump pal and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
■ The Intercept: The New York Times’ David Brooks “said there’s too much focus on Jeffrey Epstein. Here he is hanging with Epstein.”

Score one for Sen. Duckworth. Her threat to withhold support for a promotion of the Coast Guard’s top officer has apparently prompted the Guard to abandon a plan to downgrade the definition of swastikas and nooses from overt hate symbols to “potentially divisive.”
■ Illinois is resisting Justice Department demands it turn over complete, unredacted voter records—including dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers.

Sign of the times. Despite objections that only Congress can make such a change, the Kennedy Center has begun the work of adding Trump’s name to the building.
■ Former ABC News reporter Terry Moran: “Congress has increasingly behaved like a bystander—reacting after the fact, declining confrontation and treating the assertion of its own authority as optional.”

‘He owes the city quite a bit.’ A Chicago City Council member’s sounding an alarm about Barack Obama’s old boss—who the Sun-Times says “owes City Hall more than $40,000 in unpaid water bills … and more than $360,000 in fees and fines” and yet still has business with the city.

Brown shooter dead. Law enforcers say the man responsible for a mass shooting at Brown University and the later slaying of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor killed himself.
■ An anonymous tipster’s getting credit for identifying the killer …
■ … whose entry into the U.S. was allowed by a green card lottery program that Trump’s now suspending.

Qs for yous. Coming next week: A super-sized, two-part year-end news quiz. But here’s 2025’s final regular challenge from past Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Fritz Holznagel.
■ Your Chicago Public Square columnist scored a sad 4/8 score this time out.
■ Axios’ Justin Kaufmann has concocted a 2025-in-review Chicago-centric challenge—with a 7/10 score here.

Environmental defection. A new report from the Environmental Integrity Project finds that, adjusted for inflation over the last 15 years, Illinois government has cut its EPA budget by 21%—even more than Republican-controlled Indiana and West Virginia.
■ Lyz Lenz’s Dingus of the Week: A Fox Business host who suggested a Christmas tree farm would be better used as an AI data center.

‘It’s been a hard year. … You literally pulled us out of a hole.’ Jimmy Kimmel teared up as he opened his final show of 2025.
■ Emotions ran high as CBS Evening News anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois closed the show for their last time last night.
■ Poynter columnist Tom Jones’ media person of the year is the person forcing Dickerson and DuBois out, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.

Y’know those newsletters taking all of Christmas week off? Not Square. Because you—especially those whose financial support (even just $1, just once!) keeps this service coming—deserve it. See ya here Monday.
■ Also it gives us a few more days to nag you to vote before the end of the year for Square in the Reader’s Best of Chicago poll. It’ll take you less than 30 seconds.

Thanks. Chris Koenig and Mike Braden made this edition better.

‘He lied and lied and lied’ / Bissed off / ‘Hitler did it, too’

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‘He lied and lied and lied.’ Columnist and former Tribune editor Charlie Madigan on President Trump’s primetime address last night: “I knew it would be bad, but not this bad!”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “What stood out was his frenetic, angry delivery. It was like he had somewhere to be and was hacked off that he had to deal with some speech thing.”
■ Pod Save America cohost Dan Pfeiffer says the address backfired bigtime: “A tone-deaf victory lap at the absolute wrong time.”
■ CNN’s fact-check finds a series of lies—“false claims … most of which have been debunked before.”
■ Same from The New York Times (gift link).
■ What Did Donald Trump Do Today? calls it “the sound of a presidency trying to talk over its own polling, insisting that everything is perfect precisely because voters increasingly believe it is not.”
■ Maybe the most substantial thing he announced: The feds will send U.S. troops a $1,776 bonus check for Christmas.
■ California Gov. Gavin Newsom paraphrased it with one word repeated 731 times.

‘Shame on the TV networks.’ Picayune Sentinel proprietor Eric Zorn says they shouldn’t have aired “a mendacious infomercial.”
■ Columnist Mary Geddry says the networks whiffed: “There was no advance transcript requirement, no conditional airing, no editorial threshold beyond ‘Well, he is the president.’”
■ Popular Information notes that the networks have declined to air primetime speeches from the last two Democratic presidents, claiming they were too political.
■ Stephen Colbert: “We talked about doing the show live tonight to cover the speech, but we decided not to, because—and just to give you a little peek behind the showbiz curtain—we would had to have watched it, and I don’t want to do that no more.”

‘Proof beyond a reasonable doubt.’ That’s what the AP says former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers his team had on charges that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the 2020 election.
■ Wonkette’s Marcie Jones on four Republicans’ alliance with Democrats to force a vote on Obamacare subsidies: “In one of the greatest loosenings of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s grip since his family installed Covenant Eyes, Republicans are revolting.”

‘I’m really disturbed.’ Count at least one Republican senator among those troubled by the insulting and partisan plaques Trump’s added to the White House portraits of his predecessors.
■ Author and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich: “If Trump was once rational, he no longer is.”

‘The FCC just admitted it’s not independent anymore.’ Minutes after chair Brendan Carr suggested that in a contentious Senate hearing about his threats to ABC before it suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show—the commission’s website was edited to remove that word.
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones sees that as cause for rising concern about political pressure on the media.
■ Kimmel was disappointed more senators didn’t press Carr: “No one admitted to anything, nothing was done to prevent it from happening again, no one was held accountable … and your freedom of speech is only guaranteed depending on what you have to say.”
■ Contrarian Jennifer Rubin’s list of “The ‘powerful’ who cowered in 2025” leads off with CBS as the worst of news outlets.
■ Ahead of his cancellation by CBS, Stephen Colbert’s auctioning off his show’s stuff for charity …
■ … including VIP tickets to his final show in June, going as of this morning for more than $30,000.

Bissed off. As Border Patrol Greg Bovino’s minions swept through Chicago and the suburbs yesterday, he got into it with the mayor of Evanston …
■ Bovino told a Trib photographer, “We’re, for the first time, receiving some assistance from both Chicago PD and Evanston Police Department.”

‘Happy Public Domain Day.’ It doesn’t roll around until Jan. 1, but Cory Doctorow says the 2026 edition will bring much to celebrate—including release into the wild of “some spectacular works.”
■ Here’s a detailed list of books, movies, cartoons, characters, sound recordings and musical and artistic compositions that will legally become sharable, performable and screenable without permission or fee.

Oscars online. For the first time since the rise of television, the Academy Awards won’t be broadcast over the airwaves in 2029—because they’re moving to YouTube.
■ M.G. Siegler at Spyglass: “I think Netflix is going to be allowed to buy Warner Bros. In fact, it feels like they might need to … to have any shot against YouTube.”
■ Penn State media entrepreneurship professor Tom Davidson: “PBS may be nearing a systemic collapse.”

‘Hitler did it, too.’ Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis didn’t have to look hard to find a historic parallel for the State Department’s return to its old typeface.
■ Trump’s deputy chief of staff is firing back after critics compared his haircut in that Vanity Fair photoshoot to Hitler’s.

Like sharing links on Facebook? The company’s testing new limits on how much you can do that …
■ … another reason Chicago Public Square’s shifted to sharing news on Bluesky.


Thanks. John Herrbach and Mike Braden made this edition better.

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