President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has tested positive for COVID-19, Bloomberg first reported Friday evening.
Nicole Lafond
At least three members of the Trump family inner orbit are looking to a future that might not necessarily involve the chief patriarch being president of the United States.
While the family publicly continues to hype Trump’s dangerous and ridiculous election delegitimization crusade, privately a few have their sights set on their own political futures.
Two weeks ago, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow announced that she had been exposed to COVID-19 and would be stepping away from the network’s post-election coverage to quarantine. Last night, Maddow revealed that her partner of more than two decades, Susan Mikula, has been battling a severe case of the coronavirus.
“At one point, we really thought there was a possibility that it might kill her,” Maddow said, adding that Mikula is thankfully now on the road to recovery.
It was a powerful and authentic moment, and a reminder of the human toll of the virus. Give it a watch after the jump.
To soften the blow of defeat Fox's Geraldo proposes naming the vaccine after Trump. "It would be a nice gesture to him and years from now it would become kind of a generic name. Have you got your trump yet, I got my trump, I'm fine. I wished we could honor him in that way." pic.twitter.com/fM8qwFhxF6
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 20, 2020
Josh Marshall
Through this corrupt era one of the common refrains has been, “that’s why or how we got Trump.” Usually it is whatever it is the person didn’t like before Trump rebranded as the bad thing that got us Trump. But on display today is one of the real reasons ‘we got Trump.’ It’s not the deepest reason but it is a critical, critical part of the equation. It’s also why Donald Trump was able to careen through the leading candidates of the Republican party so easily in 2016.
Josh MarshallWe’re watching the press conference of the President’s legal team. It’s an all star team of rejects and degenerates from the Fox Cinematic Universe: Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Joe DiGenova. It’s both comical in its slapdash level of nonsense but also deeply corrupt and an attack on the very foundations of the American republic. In the course of this event Giuliani has claimed that most of the votes in Wayne County (Detroit) are invalid and should be discarded. Needless to say, this disenfranchises most of the African-American population in Michigan. As Giuliani succinctly put it, “It changes the results of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County.”
John Light
We have a new, exclusive story up right now.
TPM’s Tierney Sneed has learned that the Census Bureau identified routine issues in data from the 2020 decennial census, and will need time to fix them. This seemingly small wrinkle could have significant implications for how political power is distributed through apportionment.
Nicole Lafond
In a narrow sense, this is a very New York City-centric issue. But if it comes to fruition, life as we know it in this city will not only collapse further into the unlivable realm than it already has in the wake of COVID-19, but we might see another outbreak spike in the city.
Now’s your chance to sit back and absorb Josh Kovensky’s deeply reported piece on the Falwells and Giancarlo Granda. Caught with only a short break between Zoom calls? Here’s a condensed version of the main takeaways.
Josh MarshallWe should take a moment this morning to give a big thanks to the Biden campaign team and all the tens of millions of Biden voters. Because under extremely difficult circumstances they made sure it wasn’t close. Biden will win by at least 4 percentage points and likely more like 5. He will win by a 74 vote margin in the electoral college. Under normal, legitimate circumstances a win is a win is a win. Margins are just about bragging and feeling good. But this year it was critical and you can see that from the events of the last 24 hours.
I seldom or maybe never just reprint a tweet in a post. But this one is worth your reading all the way through.
Forget Russia’s interference in '16. Or Trump’s impeachment for asking Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden.
Arguably the biggest political scandal we’ve ever seen in this country is unfolding right before our eyes — even if it's failed to gain traction https://t.co/dRP80pnb0o pic.twitter.com/YdriQN6hJd
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) November 18, 2020
Stop The (Trump) Steal!
- President Trump has ratcheted up his efforts to steal victory from an election he decisively lost. After losing in court over and over again, he has set his sights on strong-arming state Republican lawmakers to appoint electors who would overrule the will of voters in states Trump lost.
- On Thursday, news broke that Trump had reached out to GOP members of Michigan’s Wayne County Board of Canvassers before they attempted to backtrack on their votes to certify the county’s election results.
- The Michigan secretary of state’s office told TPM there is “no legal mechanism” for the GOP members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers to rescind their votes.
- But Trump is not giving up on his clown show coup. He invited Michigan’s top Republican lawmakers to visit the White House on Friday.
- White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters Friday that the confab “is not an advocacy meeting” and that no one from the campaign will be present.
- It should come as no surprise that a dripping Rudy Giuliani delivered the most baffling and bizarre political moment of the week. At a press conference Thursday at RNC headquarters in Washington, Giuliani floated some truly wild conspiracy theories.
- Chris Krebs, the DHS election security official Trump unceremoniously fired on Twitter, summed up the Giuliani spectacle pretty well: “That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest.”
Sex, Lies, And Regret
- TPM’s Josh Kovensky published an exclusive story this week detailing Giancarlo Granda’s long and complicated history with the Falwells: “Across days of in-person interviews outside Washington D.C., over weeks of phone calls, and through dozens of supporting documents, Granda provided TPM with the most detailed account yet of his entanglement with the Falwells, which would contribute to Jerry losing his position as president of Liberty University and leave Granda feeling besieged by embarrassing articles, wanting to change his name.”
- Because we know you’re busy, you can dig into the key takeaways from the story here. But make time for the full story if you can. A lot of work and collective effort went into the piece.
Why Trump May Not Be Able To Rig Census
- Issues in the data of the 2020 census will delay the release of apportionment data until after President Trump leaves office, TPM’s Tierney Sneed first reported on Thursday.
- The issues in the data are standard and this sort of thing is routine, according to a source, but it means Joe Biden will be President when the Census Bureau hands him the data that will be transmitted to Congress to determine House seats for the next decade.
- Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, which has oversight over the census, wrote in a letter Thursday that the Census Bureau is refusing to brief her committee on the data issues that have arisen.
- “Unfortunately, the Committee was not informed about these anomalies before theybecame public,” Maloney wrote. “To the contrary, the Census Bureau cancelled several weekly staff briefings on the status of the 2020 Census over the past month. In addition, when Committee staff requested a briefing earlier today about these new developments, they were refused.”
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Today, TPM is 20 years old. This December, as we close out one of the most exhausting, stressful, and bizarre years of our lives, we’ll be revisiting and celebrating some of the most interesting and noteworthy events from TPM’s history.
The Affordable Care Act appears poised to survive its third confrontation with the Supreme Court largely intact.
At oral arguments Tuesday in a lawsuit brought by red states and supported by the Trump administration, Obamacare’s defenders got signals that there are likely at least five votes on the conservative Court in favor of preserving the bulk of the law.
President Donald Trump will go down in history as a one-term president.
Ep. 146: Post-Election Limbo