Biden administration finalizes rule to strike medical debt from credit reports
Rob Wile – January 7, 2025
The Biden administration says people who previously had medical debt on their credit reports could see their credit scores rise by an average of 20 points.
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U.S. consumers will no longer have medical debt appear on their credit reports under a new rule the Biden administration finalized Tuesday.
The change, which administration officials had proposed over the summer and is set to take effect in March, means some $49 billion in medical bills will be struck from the credit reports of about 15 million Americans. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said lenders would also be prohibited from using medical information in their lending decisions.
“People who get sick shouldn’t have their financial future upended,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement. “The CFPB’s final rule will close a special carveout that has allowed debt collectors to abuse the credit reporting system to coerce people into paying medical bills they may not even owe.”
About 1 in 12 adults in the U.S. had medical debt as of 2021, according to an analysis by KFF, a nonprofit group that researches health policy issues. The CFPB determined that a medical bill on a person’s credit report was a poor predictor of whether they would repay a loan yet contributed to thousands of denied mortgage applications.
The agency expects the rule will lead to the approval of some 22,000 additional mortgages every year, and that Americans with medical debt on their credit reports could see their credit scores rise by an average of 20 points.
The three major U.S. credit bureaus already announced in 2023 that previously paid medical debts, or any medical debts under $500, would no longer appear on credit reports.
The move comes as Biden administration officials race to safeguard aspects of their work weeks before President-elect Donald Trump retakes office. The White House on Monday, for example, announced a ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the U.S. coastline. When it comes to consumer finance, advocates are preparing for an expected rollback of certain safeguards imposed in the last four years by the CFPB, a high-profile target of some GOP lawmakers and Trump allies including Elon Musk.
How removing unpaid medical bills from credit reports could help consumers
Cora Lewis – January 7, 2025
FILE – Medical bills are seen in Temple Hills, Md., on June 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Lenders will no longer be able to consider unpaid medical bills as a credit history factor when they evaluate potential borrowers in the U.S. for mortgages, car loans or business loans, according to a rule the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized Tuesday.
The three national credit reporting agencies — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion — said last year that they were removing medical collections under $500 from U.S. consumer credit reports. The government agency’s new rule goes further by banning all outstanding medical bills from appearing on credit reports and prohibiting lenders from using the information.
The rule is set to take effect 60 days after publication in the Federal Register, although President-elect Donald Trump has proposed sweeping changes and limits to the CFPB’s regulatory reach.
Here’s what to know:
How many people will this affect?
The CFPB estimates the rule will remove $49 million in medical debt from the credit reports of 15 million Americans. According to the agency, one in five Americans have at least one medical debt collection account on their credit reports, and over half of collection entries on credit reports are for medical debts.
The problem disproportionately affects people of color, the CFPB has found: 28% of Black people and 22% of Latino people in the U.S. carry medical debt versus 17% of white people. While the national credit reporting agencies voluntarily agreed to disregard medical debt below $500, many consumers have amounts much higher than this threshold on their reports.
What will the impact be for consumers?
The CFPB says its action will give millions of consumers increased access to loans and lead to the approval of approximately 22,000 additional mortgages a year. Americans with outstanding medical bills may see their credit scores rise by an average of 20 points, according to the bureau.
The rule was also drafted to increase privacy protections and to help keep debt collectors from using the credit reporting system to coerce people into paying bills they don’t owe. The CFPB has found that consumers frequently receive inaccurate bills or are asked to pay bills that should have been covered by insurance or financial assistance programs.
What’s more, lenders will be barred from using information about medical devices, such as prosthetic limbs, to make them serve as collateral for a loan and subject to repossession, according to the CFPB’s announcement.
How are advocates responding?
Nonprofits in the healthcare space are pleased.
“This decision is great news for everyday Americans,” said Carrie Joy Grimes, founder of personal finance organization WorkMoney. “Medical debt is not a reflection of being bad with money — any one of us can experience illness or injury. With this new rule, Americans will now be able to focus less on the strain of medical debt and more on getting back on their feet.”
Patricia Kelmar, health care campaigns director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, said the rule would help “many financially responsible families who have accumulated medical debt from unpredictable health issues, high out-of-pocket costs, insurance claim denials and billing errors.”
What should you do after receiving an unexpectedly high medical bill?
First, determine whether you qualify for charity care. Federal law requires nonprofit hospitals to lower or write off bills for individuals depending on household income. To determine if you qualify, do an internet search for the hospital or health care provider along with the phrase “charity care” or “financial assistance policy.” The nonprofit organization Dollar For also provides a simplified online tool for patients.
Next, appeal under the provisions of the No Surprises Act, a federal law that says insurance companies must reasonably cover any out-of-network services related to emergency and some non-emergency medical care. If you’re being charged more than you’re used to or expect when you receive in-network services, that bill may be illegal.
Also: Always ask for an itemized bill. Medical billing is notoriously complicated and rife with errors. An itemized bill includes the billing codes of all care received. If something is off between these codes and the care provided, contesting your bill can yield changes.
Another approach — comparing the bill with insurance companies’ estimates of fair charges for services can also help. If the price you were charged is more than average, you may have your costs lowered. You could even take the provider to small claims court over the discrepancy – or let them know you have a case.
Finally, always compare your insurance company’s “explanation of benefits” to the bill. The hospital’s bill must match the explanation of costs that are covered and not covered. If it does not, you have another reason not to pay and to ask the provider to work with your insurance company further first.
Even after taking these steps, you can always appeal health claims with your insurance company if you believe there is any reason the bills should be covered entirely or more than the company initially decided. You may also contact your state insurance commissioner for support.
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This version has been corrected to show a consumer organization mentioned in the 13th paragraph is the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, not the U.S. Public Interest Resource Group.
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The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.
New federal rule will remove medical debt from credit reports
Elizabeth Schultz – January 7, 2025
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In a major change that could affect millions of Americans’ credit scores, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday finalized a rule to remove medical debt from consumer credit reports.
The rule would erase an estimated $49 billion in unpaid medical bills from the credit reports of roughly 15 million Americans, the CFPB said.
That could help boost those borrowers’ credit scores by an average of 20 points, helping them qualify for mortgages and other loans.
PHOTO: Vice President Kamala Harris waits in the Old Senate Chamber before swearing in new senators at the U.S. Capitol, Dec. 9, 2024, in Washington. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“No one should be denied economic opportunity because they got sick or experienced a medical emergency,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement touting the new rule.
“This will be life-changing for millions of families, making it easier for them to be approved for a car loan, a home loan or a small-business loan,” Harris added.U.S. & World NewsLatest national and global stories
Major credit reporting agencies have already announced voluntary steps to remove medical debt from their reports.
The final rule is set to take effect in March – but that timeline could be delayed by legal challenges.
Debt collection industry groups like the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals have opposed the change, saying it would result in “reduced consequences for not paying your bills, which in turn will reduce access to credit and health care for those that need it most.”
A Charlotte bankruptcy attorney says although that debt won’t show up on those reports anymore, he believes creditors will find a new way to make sure those debts are paid.
“So it is a really important thing,” explained Ruth Lande, vice president of Provider Relations at Undue Medical Debt. “Most people know that medical debt is not like other debts. It’s not the same kind of a debt of choice. And so to have those kinds of repercussions on a credit report affecting your ability to get housing or get a car or different things, that is really not what the credit system should be about.”
It’s a national nonprofit using donations to buy large bundles of unpaid medical bills to help Americans out of debt. Lande says clients say those debts stress customers — and deter them from seeking medical care.
Charlotte bankruptcy attorney Rashad Blossom.
“Patients want to pay their bills, and studies from Kaiser Family Foundation show that four-in-10 adults have these kinds of debts and that it’s affected their willingness to go and seek care or family members seeking care because they’re afraid of the cost. So, fear and anxiety and depression are really a big issue around medical debt.”
Charlotte bankruptcy attorney Rashad Blossom says more than 50 percent of his clients have unpaid medical debt. But, he says it may be too early to tell how much the new rule will really help.
“On one hand, the concern is, are creditors going to get aggressive in other areas, or will they start suing people?” Blossom said. “Will they start harassing them because that credit reporting debt collected tool has been taken away? So, it could be the case that drives more bankruptcies as creditors get more aggressive in other areas. On the other hand, it’s good for the consumer that this is not being reported because now, that’s one less concern about them being able to buy a home.”
The final rule is set to take effect in March – but that timeline could be delayed by legal challenges.
“So, the bottom line is it is just too early,” Blossom said. “We don’t know yet, but the concerns are there that it could be counterproductive.”
Jamie Dimon says the ‘Buffett Rule’ approach to taxing the wealthy could solve America’s debt problem
Filip De Mott – January 7, 2025
On PBS, Jamie Dimon described the Buffett Rule as a good idea for clamping down on US debt.
It says richer households shouldn’t pay taxes on a smaller share of income than middle-class ones.
He argued that if the US followed this, it could continue spending while still reducing debt.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has put forth a solution to unrestrained US debt: Tax the rich at the same rate as middle-class people, or at a higher rate.
The bank executive told “PBS News Hour” in August that the country could clamp down on runaway borrowing without eliminating spending. Dimon said he expects that reducing the debt while still investing in the right initiatives is “doable.”
“I would spend the money that helps make it a better country, so some of this is infrastructure, earned-income tax credits, military,” he said. “I would have a competitive national tax system, and then I would maximize growth.”
Dimon added, “And then you’ll have a little bit of a deficit, and you would maybe just raise taxes a little bit — like the Warren Buffett type of rule, I would do that.”
This rule posits that no household making above $1 million a year should pay taxes on a lower share of their income than middle-class earners. It earned its name from the billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who famously criticized the fact that his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he did.
Calls for wealthier Americans to pay higher taxes have grown louder in the past year as economists have searched for answers to the federal government’s skyrocketing debt.
Anxiety has grown as the government’s debt pile has ballooned to a record $35 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that it could make up 6% of US GDP by the end of this year, which would far outpace the 50-year average of 3.7%.
Otherwise, higher borrowing costs mean Washington will have less to spend on social initiatives. A recent report from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation pointed out that the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that by 2054, interest payments on the debt will triple Washington’s historical spending on research and development, infrastructure, and education.
Dimon has been among Wall Street’s most consistent voices to raise the alarm, frequently saying runaway borrowing will amplify inflation and interest-rate pressures through the coming decade.
Not everyone shares Dimon’s optimism that tax hikes alone can solve this problem. Though some commentators have pushed for tax-hike proposals that embrace all income levels, others have urged both Democrats and Republicans to consider spending cuts as well.
However, speaking with PBS, Dimon argued that the US should continue to spend money that helps maintain its economic strength and creates a more equitable income environment.
This article was originally published in August 2024.
Among the senators Kinzinger roasted was Trump ally and staunch defender Lindsey Graham. “Those who made this attack on our government need to be identified and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Graham said four years ago on X (formerly Twitter). “Their actions are repugnant to democracy.”
“I unambiguously condemn in the strongest possible terms any and all forms of violent protest,” Johnson said at the time. “Any individual who committed violence today should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
“Thanks @SpeakerJohnson,” Kinzinger said as he shared the four-year-old post.
Three police officers stand in front of the U.S. Capitol Building on Monday in Washington, D.C. ,Monday marks the fourth anniversary since rioters stormed the Capitol (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
“These actions at the US Capitol by protestors are truly despicable and unacceptable. While I am safe and sheltering in place, these protests are prohibiting us from doing our constitutional duty.” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee wrote four years ago on X.
“I condemn them in the strongest possible terms. We are a nation of laws,” Blackburn added, to which Kinzinger reposted and said: “Thanks @MarshaBlackburn.”
He also shared a 2021 post from conservative radio host Erik Erikson that called for the protestors to be “shot” and to “deny [Trump] the ability to run for election again.”
Kinzinger lashed out at his former political allies and accused them of “cowardice.”
“Jan 6th is a reminder to me: cowardice spreads like wildfire,” he said in a follow up post on X. “This country needs leaders who are willing to tell the people the truth, not pander to lies.”
As Trump’s election is certified, Americans should declare war on stupidity
Rex Huppke – January 6, 2025
On the eve of Donald Trump’s election certification, the best thing sensible Americans who oppose him and the MAGA leadership can do is remember that stupidity should be embarrassing.
Trump exists in our political sphere because he persuaded people to forget that simple fact. He somehow turned dunderheads like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and, of course, himself – public figures who routinely utter abject nonsense – into people who get taken seriously.
Following the New Orleans terrorist attack on New Year’s Day, Trump ranted about immigration when the suspect killed in the attack was a U.S. citizen. That was stupid and unhelpful. For a president-elect and elected leaders who protect him, it should be deeply embarrassing.
Trump has made stupidity acceptable. It shouldn’t be.
President-elect Donald Trump arrives on New Year’s Eve at his Mar-A-Lago Club on December 31, 2024 in Palm Beach, Florida.
When Greene hypothesized that Jewish space lasers started California wildfires, that was not a mistake or an “oops” moment. It was stupid, and it should have been the embarrassing end of her political career.
When Kennedy encourages people to drink bacteria-laden raw milk, he should be laughed out of the country. Instead, Trump has picked him to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is utterly stupid and should be profoundly embarrassing for Trump.
Yet here we are, waiting for Trump to return to the White House and install harebrained MAGA acolytes in all positions of power, confidently and without shame.
Bringing back shame may be powerful tool to deal with Trump
It’s that last bit that’s the problem: “without shame.”
We all do dumb things. There have been plenty of times I’ve said or written something stupid, made a dumb factual error or mouthed off about something I didn’t fully understand. And it’ll happen again, to be sure. No matter the room, I’d never claim to be the smartest guy in it.
Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) yells as President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on March 7, 2024.
The difference, though, is that in those dumb moments, when I’ve realized my own blunder, I’ve felt embarrassed. When I’ve had to correct a column or admit I got out over my skis on something, I’ve been ashamed of the mistake.
Shame is what keeps us in check, or at least it should. It certainly used to.
If we tolerate stupidity in the public sphere, it will flourish
How else do you explain politicians supporting him – a convicted felon, an inveterate liar, a man found liable of sexual abuse – for a third time? The decision to put someone like Trump back in the most powerful position in America should be embarrassing. It wasn’t.
That’s enough to make people who dislike Trump, whether because of his politics or his personality, feel powerless. I get that.
However, I’d argue the best way to reclaim power in the age of Trumpism is to stop tolerating stupidity.
Stupidity isn’t about book smarts, it’s about choosing ignorance
Before I go further on that, let’s be clear what I mean by “stupidity.” I’m not talking about any level of education.
Heck, most of the people Trump surrounds himself with are highly educated but dumb as fence posts.
Stupidity is speaking authoritatively about things you don’t understand at all. It’s the willingness to say something objectively false and refuse to admit you’re wrong. It’s the lack of curiosity that allows our leaders to accept bologna conspiracy theories over provable facts.
Those, to me, are traits that should be embarrassing.
Stop giving elected officials embracing stupidity a pass
But since Trump’s first presidential win, some people have been afraid to call out such traits.
The argument is, essentially: “Well, he won people over, so we shouldn’t call him dumb lest we insult his voters, who we must do our best to understand.”
Then-Rep. Matt Gaetz, left, supports former President Donald Trump at his hush money trial in New York City on May 16, 2024.
So now, as we await whatever fresh hell a new Trump administration will bring, it’s time to stop pandering to politicians who have embraced a reality disconnected from actual reality.
It’s, “If you can’t accept basic facts, you’re a chucklehead who should be shunned.”
President-elect Donald Trump greets SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at a test flight of the Starship rocket on Nov. 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas.
Making people feel embarrassed for believing claptrap or speaking a bald-faced lie isn’t cruel. It’s corrective.
We don’t coddle our kids when they spew nonsense or think the truth is irrelevant. We correct them. And we do that to avoid the kind of chaos Trump has brought and continues to bring.
Do it for America: Make Stupidity Embarrassing Again
So I encourage you, as this year goes along, to make politicians who say stupid things feel uncomfortable. You may not think your voice matters, but the collective force of all our voices reminding people our society looks down on willful ignorance might matter.
Besides, we tried the other way, and things only got worse.
Comforting fools paves a path for more fools to follow. Do America a favor – mock stupidity at every turn.
Trump says he’s going to imprison and then deport millions of brown-skinned immigrants. He’s going after the wrong people.
It seems that ever time a Republican goes on one of the national political TV shows, they make sure to get in the lie that “Joe Biden opened the southern border wide open,” or toss in a reference to “Biden’s open borders.”
It is, of course, a viscious lie — but one that’s almost never called out by the hosts because it’s peripheral or tangential to the topic being discussed. And, as is so often the case, this all started with Reagan (more on that in a moment).
While it’s true that two factors have driven a lot of migration over the past few decades (climate change wiping out farmland, and political dysfunction and gangs caused by the Reagan administration devastating the governments of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) the latest main driver of would-be immigrants and refugees is the Republican Party itself.
Lacking any actual, substantive economic issues to run on, the GOP decided after Biden’s election in 2021 to fall back on a familiar ploy: scare white people that brown people are coming for them and/or their jobs. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, I remember well how the GOP pitch to white people was that Black people wanted “our” jobs; now it’s brown people from south of the border.
Trump did this in the most crude, vulgar and racist way possible from his first entrance into the Republican primary through the end of his presidency. It frightened enough white voters that it got him into office once, and the GOP repeated that trick last November.
In doing so, they’re playing with fire. Their daily lies about American policies for the past four years are causing people to put their lives in danger.
The truth is that Joe Biden never “opened” our southern border.
“Open borders” have never been his policy or the Democratic Party’s policy or, indeed, the policy of any elected Democrat or Democratic strategist in modern American history.
Everybody understands and agrees that for a country to function it must regulate immigration, and it’s borders must have a reasonable level of integrity.
Republicans are playing a very dangerous game here. By loudly proclaiming their lie that Biden had “opened” the southern border and was “welcoming” immigrants and refugees “with open arms,” they created the very problem they’re pointing to.
Republican lies like this don’t stay in the United States.
As they get repeated through our media, even when most Americans realize they’re simply wild exaggerations (at the most charitable), the media of other countries are happy to pick up the story and spread it across Mexico and Central America.
This, in turn, encourages the desperate, the poor, and the ambitious to head north or send their teenage children northward in hopes for a better life. Meanwhile, criminal cartels have jumped into the human trafficking business in a big way, exploiting and aggressively repeating the GOP rhetoric to recruit new “customers.”
I lived and worked in Germany for a year, and it took me months to get a work-permit from that government to do so. I worked in Australia, and the process of getting that work-permit took a couple of months.
In both cases, it was my employers who were most worried about my successfully getting the work permits and did most of the work to make it happen. There’s an important reason for that.
The way that most countries prevent undocumented immigrants from disrupting their economies and causing cheap labor competition with their citizens is by putting employers in jail when they hire people who don’t have the right to work in that country.
We used to do this in the United States.
In the 1920s, the US began regulating immigration and similarly put into place laws regulating who could legally work in this country and who couldn’t.
Because there was so much demand for low-wage immigrant labor in the food belt of California during harvest season, President Dwight Eisenhower experimented with a program in the 1950s that granted season-long passes to workers from Mexico. Millions took him up on it, but his Bracero program failed because employers controlled the permits, and far too many used that control to threaten people who objected to having their wages stolen or refused to tolerate physical or sexual abuse.
A similar dynamic is at work today. Employers and even neighbors extract free labor or other favors of all sorts from undocumented immigrants in the United States, using the threat of deportation and the violence of ICE as a cudgel. Undocumented immigrants working here end up afraid to call the police when they’re the victims of, or witnesses to crimes.
Everybody loses except the employers, who have a cheap, pliable, easily-threatened source of labor that is afraid to talk back or report abuses.
It got this way in 1986, when Ronald Reagan decided to stop enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring undocumented people, and directed the government’s enforcement activities instead toward the least powerful and able to defend themselves: brown-skinned immigrants.
The result has been a labor market in the US that’s been distorted by undocumented workers creating a black-market for low-wage labor that many of America’s largest corporations enthusiastically support.
For example, prior to the Reagan administration two of the most heavily unionized industries in America were construction and meatpacking. These were tough jobs, but in both cases provided people who just had a high school education with a solid entry card into the American Dream. They were well-paid jobs that allowed construction and meatpacking workers to buy a home, take vacations, raise their kids and live a good, middle-class life with a pension for retirement.
Reagan and his Republican allies, with healthy campaign donations from both industries, wrote the 1986 Immigration Reform Act to make it harder to prosecute employers who invited undocumented workers into their workplaces.
“[T]he bill’s sponsors ended up watering down the sanctions on employers to attract support from the business community, explains Wayne Cornelius of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at U.C. San Diego. ‘The end result was that they essentially gutted the employer sanctions,’ he says.”
So Reagan stopped enforcing our labor and immigration laws with respect to wealthy white employers, and the next 20 years saw a collapse of American citizens working in both the meatpacking and construction industries, among others.
Forty-dollar-an-hour American-citizen unionized workers were replaced with seven-dollar-an-hour undocumented workers desperate for a chance at a life in America for themselves and their children.
From the Republican point of view, an added bonus was that levels of unionization in both industries utterly collapsed. Reagan succeeded in transforming the American workplace, and set up decades of potential anti-Latino hysteria that Republicans could use as a political wedge.
Without acknowledging that it was Reagan himself who set up the “crisis,” Republicans today hold serious-sounding conferences and press availabilities about how “illegals” are “trying to steal Americans jobs!” They’re all over rightwing hate radio and in the conservative media on a near-daily basis.
But it’s not poor people coming here in search of safety or a better life who are impacting our labor markets (and, frankly, it’s a small impact): it’s the companies that hire them.
And those same companies then funded Republican politicians who pushed under-the-radar social media ads at African Americans in 2016 and the last election saying that Democrats wanted Hispanic “illegals” to come in to take their jobs.
America, it turns out, doesn’t have an “illegal immigrant” problem: we have an “illegal employer” problem.
“Black lawmakers accused Republicans on Tuesday of trying to ‘manufacture tension’ between African-Americans and immigrants as GOP House members argued in a hearing that more minorities would be working were it not for illegal immigration.”
Tossing even more gasoline on the flame they, themselves, lit, Republicans are now amplifying the warnings and “danger” of undocumented immigrants by pulling out the Bush/Cheney “terrorist” card along with Trump’s “diseased rapist criminals” and “they want to take your job” tropes.
Because the GOP has been playing these kinds of racist, xenophobic games with immigration since the Reagan era, our immigration and refugee systems are a total mess. Trump additionally did everything he could to take an axe to anything that wasn’t a jail or a cage…and turned those jail cells into sweet little profit centers for his private-prison donor corporations.
America needs comprehensive immigration reform and a rational immigration policy that’s grounded in both compassion and enlightened economic self-interest. We need an honest debate around it, stripped of the GOP’s racial dog-whistles. And our media needs to stop taking GOP lies about immigration and the southern border at face value.
Americans — and people who want to become Americans out of hope or desperation — deserve better. And throwing some of these rich white employers in jail instead of terrified immigrants would be a good start.
Do you value a free press?
We’ve just observed a historic first: the election of a president who called the media the “enemy of the people.” We don’t agree — and we hope you don’t either.
With Trump’s return, Raw Story is doubling down on investigative journalism, exposing authoritarianism, extremism, and threats to our democracy. We’re committed to the truth. No billionaires call the shots here.
The next four years promise dramatic implications for justice, reproductive rights, immigration and the climate— and it’s time for us to step up and hold those in power to account. It’ s going to be an enormous challenge. And we need your help.
Adam Kinzinger Brutally Sums Up The ‘Entire’ Republican Party With Just 1 Acronym
Ben Blanchet January 5, 2025
Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) — a frequent Donald Trump critic after his 2020 election loss — revealed why it’s “interesting” that critics tag him with the “RINO” acronym, which stands for “Republican in name only.”
“The reality is the entire Republican Party today is the RINO. They’re Republicans in name only,” said Kinzinger in an interview with Salon shared Saturday.
“They hold the title to the Republican Party, a lot of them still think they’re holding a legacy, but that’s exactly right, it’s gone,” he continued.
Kinzinger, the focus of a new documentary, “The Last Republican,” from “Hot Tub Time Machine” director Steve Pink, added that “what it means now to be a Republican” is that you’re “driven by anger” and division.
“I think what they stand for is supporting culture war, rage, and one person, one personality, and that’s Donald Trump. Now, they’ll never admit it, but that’s the reality of it,” he said.
Kinzinger, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over his role in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, served on the House committee that investigated the insurrection.
He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in last year’s election and, in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, declared that he was “putting our country first.”
In a separate interview with Forbes published Friday, Kinzinger said he’s built “new alliances” in recent years and has realized he’s “probably closer to a Democrat now because of how the Republican Party has changed.”
“The Democrats are now the party that’s defending America’s role in the world, defending Ukraine, which I’m really passionate about,” said Kinzinger, who predicted that the GOP is “toast for a while” as “Trumpism” won’t “survive past these four years.”
The former congressman, in his interview with Salon, said he thinks Trump is “already a lame duck,” before noting that his control over his base could pose a “concern” for Republicans when the president-elect’s second term ends.
“If you think about George W. Bush toward the end of his second term, Republicans were falling away. That won’t happen with Trump,” Kinzinger said.
“All those Republicans who should be falling away will still have to face reelection even though Donald Trump doesn’t,” he continued.
Kinzinger added that he doesn’t think the GOP can be “saved in the near term,” but he hopes people don’t “give up on it.”
“Because the reality is that there’s probably forever only going to be two major parties in this country, and the Republican Party will be one of them,” he said. “We can either write it off and lose elections, with such consequences as we’ve just had, or we can continue to fight inside.”
Washington Post Cartoonist Ann Telnaes Quits After Bezos-Owned Paper Kills Trump Satire Piece
Tess Patton – January 3, 2025
Washington Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after a satirical cartoon, which poked fun at the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos and other media and tech giants bending the knee to President-elect Donald Trump, was killed.
The Pulitzer Prize winner shared her decision in a Substack post Friday.
“I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now,” she said.
Telnaes had worked at the Washington Post since 2008. She described the political cartoon that did not get published, saying it “criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.”
The Washington Post did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
The cartoon included Facebook and Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong, the “Walt Disney Company/ABC News” depicted as Mickey Mouse and Washington Post owner Bezos. A rough draft of the scrapped cartoon can be seen below.
A rough draft of Ann Telnaes’ scrapped cartoon (Credit: Ann Telnaes/Substack)
Telnaes criticized Bezos for his handling of the Washington Post in the months leading up to Trump’s election and those to follow. The paper did not endorse a presidential candidate in 2024 for the first time in decades, leading to three editorial board member resignations and widespread canceled subscriptions.
“Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press— and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” the cartoonist said of her former boss.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post,” she said. “I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”
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