A slew of news organizations have now confirmed that this morning President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and asked him to convince the state legislature to overturn the results of the election. Kemp refused. (Trump makes weird heroes.) We need to understand that these are literally crimes. I don’t mean moral lapses or things that are wrong. They’re crimes. If I call up someone at the Board of Elections in New York and try to convince them to change the vote numbers or throw away ballots, that’s a crime. I would certainly be charged with a crime. Their saying no doesn’t absolve me of the crime. It’s no defense. The higher up you are on the totem pole the graver a crime it becomes because your chances of success are far greater. Again, these are crimes.

I wanted to add my voice to David’s note of praise and appreciation for the TPM team over this arduous year. In case you didn’t see it David reprinted one of his emails to staff as we started the process of locking down our operations in New York and DC back in March. We were actually early in the process, beginning a plan for redeploying entirely to remote work before most organizations were even considering it. In the event things moved so rapidly when the crisis hit, especially in New York City, that the difference between being “early” and not only ended up being a few days.

Adding to the oddity, all surreal in retrospect, was that we held a long-planned TPM event in New York City on March 5th, the day before our official decision to close down on March 6th and only a few days before our last day in the office on March 11th.

Something or other caught my eye this morning and reminded me that impeachment was this year. It took me a minute to regain my bearings. Such has been the torrent of news, history and calamity in 2020.

It got me to reflecting a bit, scanning back over my calendar, pinpointing those critical days in February-March when the Before Time came to an end.

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It turns out, President Trump’s top allies got a warning this summer that should have foreshadowed where we find ourselves now in December.

I want to recommend a couple articles to you.

This story from the AP this afternoon, about a Trump political fixer booted from Main Justice, literally banned from the building, is part of a fascinating, much broader and highly significant story. Across the government, the agencies, departments, even in some cases Trump’s own appointees are becoming more resistant to his direction and power. I basically guarantee you that showing this woman the door at the DOJ does not happen before President Trump’s defeat.

We’ve seen this already most clearly at CDC, NIH and FDA. Fauci is back making statements from the White House. Nancy Messonnier, the CDC official who sounded the first real alarm about COVID back in February, suddenly piped up again last week after eight months of silence. The FDA is showing more outward resistance to President Trump’s demands over its vaccine approval process. Scott Atlas suddenly got the boot. But with the health care bureaucracy the process is a bit more complicated because Trump seems largely to have lost interest in COVID after the election. There’s resistance. But aside from his pet issue of emergency approvals for “his” vaccines Trump really doesn’t seem to care about COVID anymore. At the Justice Department and the Census Bureau developments Tierney Sneed has been covering we see the broader story: Donald Trump’s power as President is disintegrating.

The ginger detachment commences.

And it appears the squirm away from Trumpism will involve quite a lot of calculated political maze navigation for the RNC.

It is such an uncanny period in the COVID pandemic. Many of us are now for the first time thinking concretely, realistically about what we’ll do when this is over. We have good reason to think it’s not that far off. Where will we go? Who will we spend time with? And yet amidst that optimism and anticipated relief we are also in the midst of the very worst of the crisis. Judged by death toll yesterday was the worst day in the history of the epidemic. 2760 deaths were recorded, exceeding the 2752 deaths recorded on April 15th. While some part of that number may still be a reporting backlog from the holiday weekend there is every reason to believe that record will be exceeded again and again over the coming weeks and possibly months. All the evidence suggests it will get worse, quite likely much worse, and stay worse at least into February.

The drama over Trump threatening to fire Bill Barr is so surreal, so absurd, so dark inasmuch as it is really just the pitiful acting out of a terrified, impulsive man raging against the dying of his vast and untrammeled power. We can focus on the craziness of Trump’s turning on Barr, who has abused his office so willingly and fulsomely on Trump’s behalf. But the reality is it simply doesn’t matter. Even that is irrelevant at this point. The administration is over. Barr is just there in a caretaker role. The people have already fired all of them.

A bizarre, hilarious and maddening story out of Georgia. A Florida Republican lawyer from Bay County, Florida is caught on tape encouraging Florida Republicans to claim phony residence in Georgia to vote in the run-offs. He says he’s registering at the address of his brother who lives in Georgia. When local reporter Nicole Carr asked the lawyer, Bill Price, about the video he said that it was all a joke and that of course he didn’t make a bogus registration at his brother’s address.

But she checked and he had registered. Now Price is being investigated for vote fraud by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

After the joke excuse didn’t pan out Price apparently changed his story and insisted that he made the fraudulent registrations to prove how susceptible Georgia’s voting system was to fraud.