As he was yukking it up with Daily Wire commentator and vehement anti-LGBTQ provocateur Michael Knowles on his podcast, “Triggered With Donald Trump Jr.,” this week, the president-elect’s eldest son made something of an announcement about his and his father’s latest scheme to go after mainstream news sources during Trump II.
Continue reading “The New White House Bro Briefing”Rudy Giuliani Melts Down In Court: ‘I Have No Cash’
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Only Real Accountability We Got
I hope it goes down as more than a footnote to history that the most substantive accountability any higher-up in Trump World received for their roles in trying to subvert the 2020 election was imposed by two Black women, the election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, whose $148 million defamation judgment against Rudy Giuliani offers the only genuine taste of schadenfreude from the coup attempt.
Giuliani was back in federal court yesterday, where, as the NYT put it, he lost his lawyers and his temper. In addition to getting smacked around by a federal judge for his courtroom outburst, Giuliani was taken to task once again for his dilatory efforts to surrender assets to Freeman and Moss to satisfy their enormous judgment against him for lying about them trying to commit election fraud during the 2020 vote count.
With his original lawyers allowed to withdraw from the case, having cited an unspecified dispute over “professional ethics,” it was left to Giuliani’s new lawyer to shut his client up in front of the judge, to no avail. The judge warned that Giuliani, himself now disbarred in New York and D.C., would face sanction for any further outbursts.
The judge refused to delay a trial set for January over the disposition of some of Giuliani’s assets, a delay Giuliani has sought so he could attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The irony of course is that Giuliani got himself in this mess while representing Trump, who failed to pay him. Giuliani’s claims against the Trump campaign for unpaid bills is one of the assets he’s having to surrender.
Giuliani’s outburst in court was mostly about how cash-strapped he now is, thanks to Freeman and Moss, a pity party he replayed outside of court:
Rudy Giuliani: The reality is I have no cash…
— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 4:52 PM
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Painful
While Special Counsel Jack Smith has dismissed his cases against Trump and is expected to leave his position before Inauguration Day, Special Counsel David Weiss – a Trump administration holdover who is still the U.S. attorney for Delaware – looks set to continue his work into Trump II, having filed new tax charges against a former FBI informant separately charged with lying about bribery allegations against Joe and Hunter Biden.
IMPORTANT
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) has put a hold on the promotion of the Lt. Gen. Chris Donahue, who was the last American soldier on the ground in Afghanistan, a move that has “reinforced fears among officers that they could face retaliation for carrying out orders by the Biden administration,” the WSJ reports.
Trump Is Already Breaking The Presidential Transition
A few new developments on Trump acting out his transgressive impulses via the presidential transition:
- Trump Team Signs Long-Delayed Agreement: “The Trump transition has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Biden White House. … The Trump team’s unprecedented delay in signing these agreements, weeks after being declared the winner of the election, had alarmed former officials and ethics experts who warned it could lead to conflicts of interest and leave the new government unprepared to govern on Day One.”–Politico
- Still Dragging Feet: “But the Trump team is still refusing to accept several typical trappings of the presidential transition process, including federal funding, equipment and office space — as well as official government background and security checks for his transition staff. The agreement does not include an ethics pledge for the president-elect, required by the Presidential Transition Act, stating that Trump will avoid conflicts of interest while in office.”–WaPo
- Security Clearance Free-For-All: “Donald Trump’s transition team is planning for all political appointees to receive sweeping security clearances on the first day and only face FBI background checks after the incoming administration takes over the bureau and its own officials are installed in key positions, according to people familiar with the matter.”–The Guardian
Don’t Sleep On Russ Vought
We’ve been telling you for months about Russ Vought, the presumptive nominee for another run as Trump’s OMB director. If you’re late to the party, TPM’s Josh Kovensky has a refresher: “Across public speeches, little-noticed interviews, and secretly made recordings, the Trump functionary-turned-MAGA policy influencer has spent several years enunciating his belief: America was founded as a Christian nation, and is intended to be governed that way.”
Trump II Clown Show
- Anti-lockdown Stanford Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: director of the National Institutes of Health
- Robert Lighthizer protegé Jamieson Greer: U.S. trade representative
- Former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Kevin Hassett: director of the White House’s National Economic Council
- Peter Thiel associate Jim O’Neill: deputy secretary of Health and Human Services
Trump Transition Miscellany
- Loyalty Over All Else: “Trump’s Cabinet is almost complete just three weeks after his reelection, offering an unusually quick window into his plans and priorities for a second administration. After years of complaining about first-term staff members who resisted his ideas and ultimately denounced him, Trump has prioritized loyalty over traditional expertise in some positions and has elevated some supporters with little direct or managerial experience in the areas they are set to lead.”–WaPo
- So Long, Student Loan Debt Forgiveness: “President-elect Donald Trump is poised to pull the plug on President Joe Biden’s yearslong push to cancel student debt for tens of millions of people as Republicans sweep into power in the coming months.”–Politico
House GOP Will Have A 1-Vote Margin Deep Into 2025
It’s looking like once all the counting is complete, the House GOP will hold a 220-215 majority – but with resignations and appointments to the new Trump administration, that margin will shrink to 217-215 for the early months of 2025, as narrow a margin as it gets.
Cooper Vetoes GOP Power Grab In North Carolina
The GOP supermajority in the North Carolina legislature is expected to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of their effort to take power away from statewide offices won by Democrats in the recent election.
What Capitulation Looks Like
“Walmart’s sweeping rollback of its diversity policies is the strongest indication yet of a profound shift taking hold at U.S. companies that are re-evaluating the legal and political risks associated with bold programs to bolster historically underrepresented groups.”–AP
A Tough Read
Sarah Wildman, who lost a daughter to pediatric cancer, summons the strength to try to nudge us away from our deep cultural aversion to the reality of death and dying so that we might be more humane with each other and with ourselves: “Medical teams may fear death, but so does society, in a cycle of suppression and evasion that ultimately fails us all. It is why so many of us feel so alone when death and grief come.”
Thank You
As we head into the holiday weekend, I want to offer my thanks to Morning Memo readers for your support, consistency, and feedback this year. I know for many of you it’s been difficult to stay engaged with politics, whether you do so as an active participant or as on outside observer. Some editions of Morning Memo, like yesterday’s, have been hard to write. But I’ve been able to trust that you expect me to give you the news you need to know rather than pander to what you might like to hear.
The number of Morning Memo subscribers – it’s free, but many of you opt to receive Morning Memo via email – has grown by 70 percent since this time last year. Welcome, to the newer folks! It’s good to have you here.
My main regret this year has been letting the tone of Morning Memo become too grim at times. TPM has always brought a sense of the absurd to our coverage of American politics, but it’s been a challenge lately to frame the absurdity in the breezy, ironic, and occasionally humorous way that you’ve become accustomed to.
I did make a conscious decision in the late summer to steer Morning Memo in a more earnest direction. I wanted to be able to look back in 10 or 20 years on the Morning Memos written during the stretch run of the 2024 election and not regret having missed the mark by failing to warn adequately of the stakes, by getting tangled up in trivialities, or by losing perspective on the big picture.
The result at times was a tone that veered toward dour. In the aftermath of the election, I’m still working on shifting that tone back to one that takes the work seriously but not myself. Thanks for your patience as Morning Memo reboots for Trump II.
Morning Memo will be back on Monday.
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Clarity
I mentioned earlier this week that a big part of Trump’s MO is firing off ten flares, letting everyone react to everything and then hanging back to decide on his own timetable which of those flares he’s actually going to follow through on. It’s critical to take back that initiative. When Trump and Republicans have a trifecta there’s little direct impact Democrats can have on any legislative decision. Lots of things are important, damaging. Go after things that are clearly unpopular. Political power is unitary. Landing a punch on one policy front reduces the White House’s ability to act everywhere else.
One thing that we are absolutely sure is going to happen is an extension of the 2017 tax cuts. This is a dead certainty. There are already rumblings that the Trump White House will cut the Affordable Care Act proper to get the money. But they are openly saying they will cut Medicaid to do it. (In the Trumpite taxonomy, defense, Medicare and Social Security are supposedly off limits.) But here’s the thing. With Medicaid expansion, Medicaid is functionally part of the ACA. Maybe some policy wonk will tell you they’re separate things. That’s silly. They’re not. Don’t listen to that silly person. Cutting Medicaid — through whatever means you choose to do that — is cutting the ACA. That’s a big reason why there are currently a historically low number of people uninsured. Donald Trump is going to hand out tax cuts and pay for it by cutting the ACA. Simple.
Army Veteran Senator Details The Many Ways In Which Hegseth Is ‘Unqualified’ For Defense Gig
For many reasons, including a previously undisclosed allegation of sexual assault against him, Democrats have been sounding the alarm on veteran and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s extreme lack of fitness to be the secretary of the Department of Defense.
Continue reading “Army Veteran Senator Details The Many Ways In Which Hegseth Is ‘Unqualified’ For Defense Gig”A Funny Thing Happened on The Way To Your Phone: Thinking About Bluesky
Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter two years ago, those who despise his evolving mix of predatory trolling, stunted emotional development and right-wing extremism have been hoping for an alternative. There was “Post”; Meta got into the act with “Threads”; another entity of at first uncertain origins actually got its start with one of Twitter’s former CEOs, Jack Dorsey. That was Bluesky. There was also Mastodon, a sort of Linux of social media networks. Part of the problem there was that you may not be familiar enough with Linux to understand the analogy. And if you do, you’re part of a potential community not nearly big enough to sustain a mass adoption social media platform. Each in succession thoroughly failed to dislodge or even make much of a dent in Twitter’s disordered and Frankensteinian dominance. It’s the power of network effects. Everyone can want to leave (or at least a big chunk of users can want that) and yet everyone is simultaneously trapped. It’s a collective action problem.
Continue reading “A Funny Thing Happened on The Way To Your Phone: Thinking About Bluesky”The ‘Christian Nation-ist’ Set To Take Control Of The Federal Government
Russ Vought wants to make America Christian again. And he has put quite a bit of thought into what that might look like.
Continue reading “The ‘Christian Nation-ist’ Set To Take Control Of The Federal Government”North Carolina Dem Gov Vetos Republicans’ ‘Sham’ Power Grab. But This Isn’t A Victory.
Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has just vetoed a sweeping Republican-backed bill — a power grab disguised as a hurricane relief bill — that Republican state lawmakers have tried to fast-track in the waning days of their veto-proof supermajority.
Continue reading “North Carolina Dem Gov Vetos Republicans’ ‘Sham’ Power Grab. But This Isn’t A Victory.”Inside The Last-Ditch Legislative Effort To Protect Journalists Before Trump Comes To Town
In the lame duck session, the energy on Capitol Hill is busy and frazzled, as Democrats try to squeeze in any lingering priorities before they’re shut out of power for at least two years. Republicans are largely intent on blocking or slowing down those priorities, while members jockey for position in the new trifecta.
Continue reading “Inside The Last-Ditch Legislative Effort To Protect Journalists Before Trump Comes To Town”What Would It Mean If President-elect Trump Dismantled The US Department of Education?
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
In her role as former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, Linda McMahon oversaw an enterprise that popularized the “takedown” for millions of wrestling fans. But as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, the Trump loyalist may be tasked with taking down the very department Trump has asked her to lead.
If Trump does dismantle the Department of Education as he has promised to do, he will have succeeded at something that President Ronald Reagan vowed to do in 1980. Just like Trump, Reagan campaigned on abolishing the department, which at the time was only a year old. Since then, the Republican Party platform has repeatedly called for eliminating the Education Department, which oversees a range of programs and initiatives. These include special funding for schools in low-income communities – known as Title I – and safeguarding the rights of students with disabilities.
As an education policy researcher who has studied the federal role in addressing student-equity issues, I see the path to shuttering the department as filled with political and practical obstacles. Republicans may therefore opt to instead pursue a series of proposals they see as more feasible and impactful, while still furthering their bigger-picture education agenda.
To better understand how the proposal to eliminate the Education Department would fit within the larger educational agenda of the incoming administration, I believe it’s helpful to revisit the history of the Education Department and the role it has played over the past five decades.
Department of Education history and roles
By the time Congress established the department in 1979, the federal government was already an established player in educational policy and funding.
For instance, the Higher Education Act of 1965 began the federal student loan program. In 1972, Congress created the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant, the predecessor program to today’s Pell Grants. The G.I. Bill of 1944, which, among other things, funded higher education for World War II veterans, preceded them both.
At the K-12 level, federal involvement in vocational education began with the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Federal attention to math, science and foreign language education began in 1958 with the National Defense Education Act.
Two laws passed during the Lyndon Johnson administration then gave the federal government its modern foothold in education: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The 1964 law provided antidiscrimination protections enforced by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The 1965 law, which is currently reauthorized as the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, includes Title I, which sends extra funding to schools with high populations of low-income students.
In 1975, Congress added the law currently known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, or IDEA. The law helps schools provide special education services for students with disabilities. IDEA also sets forth rules designed to ensure that all students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate public education.
Department had early Republican support
When Congress created the Education Department, it divided the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two agencies. One was the Education Department. The other was Health and Human Services, also known as HHS. Although President Jimmy Carter championed the move, it was bipartisan. The Senate bill to create the new department had 14 Republican co-sponsors.
Within a year, however, support for and opposition to the Education Department had become strongly partisan. Reagan campaigned on eliminating what he referred to as “President Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle.”
Those bureaucracies, however, existed before Carter and the new department. The only major addition was the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, which served primarily as the research arm of the Education Department. That office has since been replaced by the Institute of Education Sciences.
Congressional support needed
To dissolve the Education Department, both houses of Congress would have to agree, which is unlikely. In 2023, an amendment was proposed in the House to shut down the department. It failed by a vote of 161-265, with 60 Republicans joining all Democrats in opposing the measure.
Even assuming that sufficient pressure were exerted on Republicans in 2025 to garner almost complete Republican House support, the bill would likely need 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster – meaning that at least seven Democrats would have to support termination.
But what would such termination entail? The department’s functions and programs would need to be assigned to new institutional homes, since terminating a program’s department doesn’t terminate the program. That said, this shuffling process would likely be complicated and chaotic, harming important programs for K-12 and university students.
While details about what reorganization would look like remain to be seen, one option was proposed by Trump during his first term: merging the Education Department with the Labor Department.
Another approach is set forth in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a detailed policy blueprint that, among other things, specifies landing places for the Education Department’s major functions and programs. A CNN review found that over 100 people involved with Project 2025 worked in the first Trump administration.
The Project 2025 blueprint calls for the lion’s share of programs, including Title I and IDEA, to be moved to HHS – which already administers Head Start. Most vocational education programs would be moved to the Labor Department. The Office for Civil Rights would be moved to the Justice Department. And the Pell Grant program and the student loan program would be moved to the Treasury Department.
Part of a larger education agenda
In the scenario where existing Education Department programs are transferred to other agencies, those programs could continue without being closed or drastically cut. But Trump and Project 2025 have articulated a set of plans that do make radical changes. Trump has said he supports a federal voucher – or a “universal school choice” – plan, likely funded through federal tax credits. This idea is set forth in the proposed Educational Choice for Children Act, which is backed by Project 2025. Perhaps tellingly, Trump’s announcement of the McMahon nomination highlighted school-choice goals; it did not mention abolishing the department.
Project 2025 also lays out other changes and program cuts, including ending the Head Start early childhood education program and phasing out Title I over 10 years, and converting most IDEA funds into a voucher or “savings account” for eligible parents.
Beyond these initiatives, Trump’s campaign shared his plan to target a variety of culture-war issues. This includes cutting federal funding for any school or program that involves “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children.”
What we can expect
My expectation is that the Trump administration’s most likely and immediate changes will be in the form of executive orders that alter how laws will be implemented. For example, Trump may use an executive order to remove protections for transgender students.
Subsequently, I also expect some congressional budgetary changes to education programs. Based on past votes, I expect overwhelming but not universal Republican congressional support for Trump’s educational agenda. Using the budget reconciliation process, which circumvents the filibuster, a majority vote can make changes to revenue or spending. Accordingly, Congress may agree to program cuts and perhaps even to move some programmatic funding into education vouchers for individual parents.
As for closing the Education Department, which probably would not qualify for the reconciliation process, Secretary-designate McMahon may find that takedown to be a politically difficult one to achieve.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The Hard Truth Is That Donald Trump Got Away With A Violent Insurrection
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
A Structural And Institutional Failure
I know you have little appetite for reading about the inglorious end of the federal prosecutions of Donald Trump. I don’t have much appetite for writing about it at this point. But it needs to be acknowledged for the travesty it is, while trying not to sound melodramatic.
The historic conclusion of Trump’s prosecution for Jan. 6 – and for all practical purposes it is over – is a withering indictment of structural and institutional failures that will haunt us for decades to come. The ignoble end of the Mar-a-Lago prosecution, while similarly confounding, strikes somewhat less directly at the constitutional order.
At this late stage, finger-pointing at the many culprits who share responsibility for this absurd outcome seems inadequate to the long-term challenge of fixing the structural deficiencies and institutional inadequacies that have left the rule of law exposed, vulnerable, and unprotected.
What is required now is the difficult, long-term, low-odds challenge of reimagining a constitutional order that functions as the founders intended, elevating one person from among the people to administer the national government without making them a monarch, potentate, or tyrant.
The problem, of course, is that we must undertake this generational challenge while now confronted with a newly rearranged constitutional order that has brought us closer than ever before to having precisely the kind of ruler the founders most feared and warned of.
It’s not an undertaking for the faint of heart.
For The Record
The relevant documents are short and to the point:
- Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Motion to Dismiss the Jan. 6 Case against Donald Trump
- U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s Opinion granting Smith’s Motion to Dismiss
- Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Motion to Dismiss the Mar-a-Lago appeal as to Donald Trump
Reactions To The Dismissal Of Trump’s Federal Cases
- “The end of the two federal criminal cases against President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday left momentous, unsettled questions about constraints on criminal wrongdoing by presidents, from the scope of presidential immunity to whether the Justice Department may continue to appoint outside special counsels to investigate high-level wrongdoing.” –Charlie Savage
- “But let’s be real: It’s over. If you have to say the words “equitable tolling” in describing a vision of presidential accountability, you’re not really talking about presidential accountability. You’re talking about a fantasy. You’re lighting votive candles with pictures of prosecutors.”–Benjamin Wittes
- “It is hard to escape the grim conclusion: No president out of office has done more to grow the power of the presidency than Donald Trump. And the fact that this strengthening of the office is the result of his misdeeds, and empowers the president to undertake further misdeeds with impunity, is profoundly disturbing.”–Kim Wehle
Kicker Of The Day
NBC News concludes its story on the dismissal of the Jan. 6 case against Trump with this gut punch: “He is expected to walk through the lower west tunnel, where some of the worst violence of Jan. 6 took place, to be sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2025.”
Look Who Passed Trump’s Litmus Test
Trump has picked more than a dozen people for key roles in his new administration who showed up to support him in court during his hush money trial, the NYT reports.
What Was Boris Epshteyn Up To?
Morning Memo is likely to return to this story, but in the meantime, be careful about which bucket you put it in. A close adviser to President-elect Trump allegedly seeking pay-to-play arrangements epitomizes the kind of corruption that has always swirled around Trump and is likely to continue on steroids in his second term. Self-dealing by Boris Epshteyn seems to be what’s alleged, but I’m not sure that context alone is sufficient to capture the full mix of internal power struggles, back-stabbing, and perhaps even worse levels of corruption. It’s telling that the news of the internal Trump investigation first emerged at John Solomon’s right-wing Just the News and included a Trump interview. Don’t get me wrong, whatever bucket or buckets it belongs in is BAD. But the precise contours of this alleged episode, and its full dimensions, are still unclear.
RFK Jr. Accuser Comes Forward
A woman who worked in the late 1990s as an intern in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s office and as a babysitter for his family has spoken to the WSJ and is willing to testify to the Senate about her sexual misconduct allegations against him.
Headline Of The Day
Public Notice: “A government by toxic men, for toxic men”
Trump Transition Miscellany
- Tariffs: “The major question is whether the threats are a negotiating ploy to wring concessions on trade and other policy priorities from U.S. trading partners, or the start of a sustained campaign to reshape global trade and the American economy.”–WSJ
- Deportations: “Tom Homan, President-elect Donald Trump’s new ‘border czar,’ has warned states that refuse to ‘cooperate’ with mass deportation plans may face having their federal funding slashed.”–HuffPost
- Taxes: “Republicans are trying to fit as many priorities as possible into one bill early next year, combining tax cuts, spending cuts, energy policy, border security and President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises.”–WSJ
It’s Come To This …
You might find yourself reluctantly rooting for no-longer-leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to curb the worst excesses of Trump on Ukraine and executive power:
Mr. McConnell, whose current term ends in 2027 and who has not said whether he will seek another, has said he plans to focus intently during the next two years on advancing his interventionist strain of foreign policy, which flies in the face of the president-elect’s “America First” approach. He also wants to concentrate on preserving the Senate’s institutional independence at a time when Mr. Trump, who will have a governing trifecta in January, has made clear that he means to bend the chamber to his will.
Good Read
WSJ: Christopher Rufo Has Trump’s Ear and Wants to End DEI for Good
Boebert On Cameo
House ethics rules prohibit profiting off your office, but you do you, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO).
State Judge Upholds Missouri Ban On Gender-Affirming Care
“A Missouri circuit court judge on Monday declined to restore access to gender-affirming care for minors in the state, ruling in a 74-page judgment that a law banning children from accessing medical care is constitutional.”–HuffPost
A Civilized Way To Travel
After I mentioned in yesterday’s Morning Memo the imminent demise of the SS United States, I heard from a couple of readers about their youthful experiences as passengers aboard the ship, back when she made regular transatlantic crossings:
MM Reader MA:
I took the USSS from France to NYC in 1961. I have a cup with its photo. It was very fast and so very bumpy, but a kind steward got me outside in the wind and cajoled me into thinking I could do it.
TPM Reader SB:
My family sailed back from Southampton on the SS United States in September of 1966. I was 11. We went through a hurricane along the way and they put ropes up along the gangways to give folks something to hold onto as they walked around. The ship rolled a crazy amount (to my eyes) but everyone just dealt with it. There were no roll stabilizers on those liners. They would dampen the table cloths in the dining areas so the plates and cups wouldn’t slide. One special evening we ordered Baked Alaska as the desert. What a treat that was! After we were through the brunt of the storm the captain speeded up and the belief was we were doing closer to 40 knots to make up time. The indoor pool had been emptied during the storm but refilled (partially) and the water would slosh back and forth like a modern wave pool. The VW bus we had purchased in Europe came home with us and we drove it off the dock in NYC with all our luggage. Very civilized.
Thanks for sharing!
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