You’ve probably seen a flurry of news about this new variant of the COVID virus spreading in the United Kingdom. Focus on it has increased rapidly over the last 48 hours and Canada as well as a number of countries in Western Europe have instituted temporary bans on plane flights from United Kingdom. (As I write, the US has not followed suit.) Good information has been hard to come by both because it tends to be highly technical and also because the most knowledgable people have very limited information.

Fears about the new variant can be roughly classed into three categories. First, that it spreads more efficiently than earlier COVID variants; second, that it might be making people more sick; third, that it might be more resistant to the new vaccine.

Obviously the science and technical details are entirely beyond my knowledge. So I will try share what I’ve found and point you to trusted sources. As far as I can tell the only substantial concern based on what is currently known is the first I mentioned, that this variant may spread more efficiently than earlier strains. But even that is not clear. The best overview I’ve seen is this one by Kai Kupferschmidt in Science, published yesterday evening. It’s probably the best place to start. Deeper into the technical details here’s the report of an expert advisory group (NERVTAG) advising the UK government which found “moderate confidence that [the new variant] demonstrates a substantial increase in transmissibility compared to other variants.”

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You’ve likely seen the reports (in the Times, Politico and Axios) of this White House meeting yesterday involving Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and various administration officials in which President Trump seemed to back increasingly outlandish and illegal ploys to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, the results of which are now certified, final and over. What is buried a bit in most of these stories is that Mike Flynn was at the meeting too.

Given her wild conspiracy theories and the litigation she’s pursued around the country, the focus on Powell is understandable. Trump is reportedly considering making her a “special counsel” to investigate the election, whatever that might mean. But I think we need to see Powell as essentially a creature of Mike Flynn, at least inasmuch as she holds Trump’s attention. It’s Flynn who has had a unique connection to and hold over Trump going all the way back to 2015.

There’s so much news that we haven’t wanted to give all the front page real estate over to our 20th Anniversary (“twenty years, twenty tales”) package. But I do hope you’ll find time this weekend to read the two latest additions to the package and those which we published earlier in the week. Nicole Lafond tells the story of TPM alum Hunter Walker’s trip to Toronto to bestow the Golden Duke Award – the actual physical figurine award – on the late Rob Ford, then Mayor of Toronto. Summer Concepcion tells the story of how the TPM union came to be.

Today is the one year anniversary of Donald Trump’s impeachment. One year is not that long ago. Yet it seems almost like a lifetime. I’ve been watching discussions about whether it was worth it, what impact it had on the 2020 election and whether the Democratic opposition’s strategy looks good or bad in retrospect.

On this point intra-Democratic bickering is still hung up on whether it was a mistake or not to keep impeachment narrowly focused on President Trump’s extortion scheme in Ukraine. It’s not like there weren’t other things President Trump had done that could merit removal from office. Little more than six months earlier the Mueller Report had included voluminous evidence that the President had obstructed justice at the very least.

So why limit an impeachment inquiry to just his latest crime?

Word on the street (or, rather, Axios) is that President Trump is going to issue a wave of pardons today as a grand gesture of Christmas clemency to some of his closest friends and family.

We have about six hours of voting left in the quarterfinals for our Duke of Dukes competition.

These are some choice match-ups you won’t want to miss:

• Randy “Duke” Cunningham vs. Scooter Libby
• Rod Blagojevich vs. Dick Cheney
• Anthony Weiner vs. Dinesh D’Souza
• Rudy Giuliani vs. Paul Manafort

Cast your vote here by 6 p.m.

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The House Judiciary Committee still wants to hear from former White House counsel Don McGahn.

I’ve been thinking in recent days about taking a pledge. I hope others do too. It’s sprawling enough in its scope that I haven’t known quite how to whittle or distill it down for the sake of pledging it or sharing it with others. But I will take this post as an opportunity to explain it both to myself and to you. Because I think it’s quite important.

Think of it as a rough draft.

Republicans like Marco Rubio are now claiming to be aghast, hurt and more than anything else unwilling to believe in Democratic promises of rebuilding national unity because Joe Biden’s campaign manager and incoming Deputy Chief of Staff called congressional Republicans “fuckers” in an interview. Days ago we heard that Biden’s forceful denunciation of Republican efforts to overturn the result of the election was “burning bridges” to Trump supporters. We’ve seen this pattern before: bad faith taking of umbrage to justify new forms of bad behavior and predation.

It’s not only that. The production of and the stoking of grievances is central to contemporary conservatism and its apotheosis, Trumpism. But it is mostly the weaponization of bad faith.

For several weeks now evidence has been accumulating that the COVID-19 vaccine won’t be widely available until significantly later in 2021 than the Trump administration is publicly claiming. Here’s some of the best evidence yet, picked up today by our Josh Kovensky in little-noticed remarks from some of the lead officials on the Pentagon’s Operation Warp Speed.

Not a huge thing perhaps. But this is worth noting. Donald Trump has been lashing out at any and every Republican willing to question his claim to have won the 2020 election. But his swipe at Mitch McConnell today was really barely a swipe at all. Perhaps somewhere between a nudge and a plea. Trump has been go wild on Governors like Brian Kemp of Georgia and Doug Doucey of Arizona. He’s called for them to be primaried or even jailed. But Trump seems to know that he needs to tread gently with McConnell. That’s his limit. With Mitch he goes beta.