Trump Tightens Grip on Power

Good morning,

Last week, Vice President JD Vance explained why Republicans lost Congress: “The reason we lost is the war.” Yesterday, President Trump told him his help with the war was no longer needed.

[BRIEF]

• “We don’t need a deal with Iran,” the president posted on Truth Social. He ordered Vance to turn his “complete and total attention” to corruption in Democratic-run cities.

Vance has been Trump’s diplomat on Iran. He led the American team at talks in Pakistan in April and helped secure the June memorandum meant to end the war (an agreement that collapsed within weeks). On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that he was considering face-to-face talks with a senior Iranian security official.

• So his removal from the case just one day later is jarring. The White House says it is now focusing on the blockade and sanctions rather than talks.

This is just one clash among considerable Republican squabbling after the midterm losses.

• Vance says the war cost Republicans Congress. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defends it. Former Vice President Mike Pence says the war hurt only because the president “stopped short and didn’t finish it.”
• Sen. Ted Cruz blames the tariffs and the war together, calling the result a “Watergate-level repudiation.” Outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis calls it a rebuke of both the president and a Republican Congress that failed to act.
• Behold the early jockeying for 2028. Each of these men wants to lead Trump’s movement after Trump. Each wants to inherit the voters but not the blame. It looks like a splintering party.

President Trump’s response to the elections has been to tighten his grip on power.

• He replaced Chief of Staff Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller, his most combative adviser. He has stood by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth despite calls to fire him.
• He warned that he holds “tremendous executive powers” and will veto what Congress sends him. When Democrats began talking of impeaching his cabinet officials, he called it “extortion at the highest level” and ordered the Justice Department to investigate.
• Sidelining his vice president on Iran could presage a presidency in which no one shares the spotlight and no heir becomes apparent.

President Trump has signed 292 executive orders during his second term so far—more than George W. Bush or Barack Obama each signed in eight years. He set that pace with a friendly Congress. Now that he is about to lose Congress, his main tool will be executive decree. It already looks like he plans to govern harder, not softer.

Gerald Flurry has shown that Trump is a modern antitype of King Jeroboam ii of ancient Israel. He governs with king-like powers and has backing from religious leaders and from the land’s highest court. Early indications show how this prophecy may play out over the next two years.

Trump Considers Regime Change in Cuba

Yesterday, President Donald Trump said he wants to “get Cuba done” before leaving office. In a Hugh Hewitt interview, he said many people from Florida with Cuban heritage support changing the island nation’s Communist dictatorial regime, and one of them is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who would “love to do it.”

• Asked about whether Cubans could be freed using United States military force, Trump replied he would “certainly consider that.”

Earlier this year, the Trump administration authorized resale of Venezuelan oil to Cuban businesses—excluding the government and military—to ease fuel shortages, strengthen pragmatic Cubans, and continue weakening the regime and its Communist supporters.

• Cuba’s regime responded by expanding limited private-state partnerships, which facilitated fuel distribution but also preserved elements of regime control.

Meanwhile, U.S. midterm elections have empowered the president’s opponents and provided legislative avenues to challenge his Cuba policy.

• A resolution introduced in May by Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine from Virginia would have forced the removal of U.S. forces near Cuba and required Congress to approve any blockade. A few Republicans joined Kaine and the Democrats, but Republicans stopped the bill from going to a vote.
• When Democrats gain control of both chambers on January 3, similar measures could be introduced and receive significantly more votes.

The late Herbert W. Armstrong forecast for decades the collapse of the Berlin Wall and German reunification based on Bible prophecies of a revived Holy Roman Empire of five Western and five Eastern European nations. Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has made related forecasts about Cuba based on its political and religious relationships with Europe and Catholicism.

• After the Vatican helped restore diplomatic relations between Cuba and the U.S. under Barack Obama in 2015, Mr. Flurry highlighted Bible prophecies of an economic siege of the U.S. by a revived Holy Roman Empire, asserting that the Catholic Church will prove to be a greater determining factor in Cuba’s relationship with the U.S. than the Communist Party of Cuba.

President Trump’s efforts to bring about regime change in Cuba could still produce a realignment away from communism and toward Catholicism. But America’s broken resolve will prevent him from neutralizing Cuba as a threat. Events now unfolding align with those long-standing biblical forecasts.

Britain Forces Trinidad and Tobago to Legalize Homosexuality

On Tuesday, Britain’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council invalidated Trinidad and Tobago’s 1986 prohibitions on homosexuality, claiming they violate its constitution.

• Trinidad and Tobago is a former British colony. The Judicial Committee acts as a court of final appeal for some former colonies, as well as for current British Overseas Territories.
• Trinidad and Tobago’s High Court ruled against the law in 2018, and its Court of Appeal reversed that decision in 2025.

Trinidad and Tobago is a majority Christian nation where many citizens deeply oppose homosexuality. Representatives of Trinidad and Tobago’s government expressed disapproval of the British court’s ruling.

• Trinidadian Attorney General John Jeremie argued that the law, enacted well after Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962, protected traditional family values.
• Ellis Burris, president of the Trinidadian government’s Inter-Religious Organization, responded this week by reasserting that homosexuality is “against the divine law.”

Burris is right. In Leviticus 20, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6 and elsewhere, the Creator of human beings, sex, marriage and family forbids homosexuality and other sex sins.

Britain should know this. As Herbert W. Armstrong proved in his book The United States and Britain in Prophecy, the British Empire descended from the Israelite tribe of Ephraim and became the largest and most just empire in world history specifically because it was God’s fulfillment of His promise to make Abraham’s descendants into great nations (Genesis 12:1-3; 17:1-8).

• The national blessings possessed by Britain and its “company of nations” (Genesis 35:11), as well as by its brother nation the United States, point the world to Abraham and to the God of Abraham (e.g. Deuteronomy 4:5-8). Yet Britain’s leaders and its people are actively pointing the world away from God and His law.

The Judicial Committee’s authority over constitutionality in possessions and former colonies is one of the last functioning remnants of that empire. Remarkably, its authority is being used to turn people away from God’s law, even in states now independent of the empire.

Tuesday’s ruling marks a grave injustice, not merely against the people of Trinidad and Tobago but against the God who created the British and all peoples.

IN OTHER NEWS

Bundestag approves bill further empowering spy agencies: Today, the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, passed a bill that lets the bnd, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, use artificial intelligence for surveillance to target networks of foreign hacking groups and foreign weapons production. The bill, which would also allow the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, to secretly enter private residences, is likely to become law by the end of the year.

Xi: Taiwan’s ‘complete reunification’ with China ‘cannot be stopped’: Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping said during a speech yesterday at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People that Taiwan’s “complete reunification” with China “must be realized, and it will certainly be realized.” The term reunification, however, is historically misleading: Taiwan has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. Nevertheless, the Communist regime treats the democratically governed island like a rebel province, and Xi has described resolving the issue as the party’s “unwavering historical mission.” He added: “The tide of history ⁠⁠cannot be stopped.” The Trumpet has warned for more than 25 years that China will conquer Taiwan due to America’s broken will to use its power.

NVIDIA CEO quits over spy affair scandal: Yesterday, Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive officer of nvidia, the second-most valuable company in the world, after admitting to committing adultery, including with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy. The chipmaker, valued at about $5.8 trillion five weeks ago, has fallen to $4 trillion, largely because of the scandal. Members of Congress will question Huang about whether U.S. national security was compromised. Huang helped found nvidia with $40,000 in 1993, and he built it into the powerhouse behind the AI boom before the current disaster. For more information on how sexual immorality compromises national security, read “The Governor Spitzer Disease,” by Gerald Flurry.