At TPM we have a lot to be grateful for this year. I set forth a few of them here. So hopefully not to be wishing for too much but I did want to let you know about something we’re trying to get done before the end of this calendar year. Our goal this year was to get to 35,000 TPM members this year. And we are pretty close. As I write we are at 34,496 subscribers. Can we get to 35,000 in one month?

Well, it’s a tall order. But not impossible. We signed up 418 new members in October and 478 in June. These are net added subscribers. Every publication has ‘churn’, a certain number of people always in the process of unsubscribing or subscribing. So this is about how many more you have at the end of the month. So it’s doable and boy would we like to do it.

So if you’ve never become a subscriber or lapsed and are considering rejoining, now is a great time. Join us. Maybe encourage your TPM-reading friends to do the same. Or maybe you just want to support our independent journalism. These are all really good reasons to sign up. So join us! And thank you to everyone who already has.

TPM Reader MA looks at what Donald Trump’s post-presidency may be like and whether it will be a ‘post-presidency’ at all. It resonated with me and some as yet inchoate thoughts I’ve had on the topic. I saw someone yesterday on Twitter say that Trump was trying to set himself up as the presidential equivalent of an anti-pope, the term for pretender popes during the various schisms of the middle ages. That seemed oddly on the mark. If Late Stuart and Early Hanoverian Great Britain is your reference, he wants to be the ‘king over the water.’

Here’s TPM Reader MA …

Between the intrinsic absurdity of Trump and understandable relief that Biden won, I think there is a dangerous tendency to underestimate what is actually happening politically.

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.