I’ve written in general against post-election recriminations since November 5th. This post may seem like one such recrimination on the surface. But I think if you bear with me, you’ll see that it’s really not. I should be clear, too, that being anti-recriminations, whatever that might mean, doesn’t or shouldn’t mean people shouldn’t try to figure out what was done right or wrong, criticize whoever needs to be criticized. Of course they should. What it means to me at least is that in the desolation of a really, really hard defeat, a very consequential one, people shouldn’t rush in to take shots at the folks they’ve always had it in for, using the devastation less as a wound to overcome than an opportunity for the old score-settling.
So here’s the issue I want to discuss.
Until his campaign began to come undone this last summer, it was widely understood and accepted among Democrats that Joe Biden, to the surprise of many, was the most progressive Democratic president, with the most consequential progressive legislative agenda, in at least half a century. This was widely believed because it was unquestionably true. Because of a series of decisions by both Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden ended up governing with a trimmed down version of the legislative agenda of the progressive left. What counts here as “trimmed down” is obviously a pretty critical question. There was no Medicare for All. But on lots of policy and regulatory positions, the left’s agenda was Biden’s. This isn’t just me saying this. Ask Bernie Sanders, or at least ask him until a week ago. The point I’m making here really isn’t open to much debate.
More details emerged over the weekend about the sexual assault claim against Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense.
The WaPo was first with extensive new information about the circumstance of the alleged sexual assault, based on (i) a memo it obtained that was provided to the Trump transition team late Wednesday by a friend of the victim; and (ii) a statement from Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore.
The woman later reported the alleged assault to police, but no charges were ever filed:
According to the police statement, the complaint was filed four days after the encounter, and the complainant had bruises to her thigh. The police report itself was not released.
Hegseth settled the woman’s claim for an undisclosed amount, and she signed a nondisclosure agreement.
Trump is standing by Hegseth in the face of the undisclosed settlement of the sexual assault claim.
More On Hegseth’s Tattoos
WSJ: How Hegseth’s Tattoo Got Him Barred From Working at Biden’s Inauguration
WaPo: Pentagon pick left Guard after being reported as possible ‘insider threat’ due to tattoo
The Prospects For Matt Gaetz’ Nomination As AG
Surveying the backlash to the Gaetz nomination:
“Republican U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin called on the House of Representatives on Sunday to share an unreleased ethics report into alleged sexual misconduct involving a 17-year-old girl by Matt Gaetz.”–Reuters
“More than half of Senate Republicans, including some in senior leadership positions, privately say they don’t see a path for former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to be confirmed as attorney general and would not support him to lead the Department of Justice, according to multiple people who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity.”–NBC News
“An attorney representing two women who testified to both federal and House Ethics investigators about Gaetz’s alleged misdeeds is coming forward with new details about what his clients told investigators. Lawyer Joel Leppard is set to do multiple network TV interviews Monday as he pushes for the release of the House Ethics report.”–Politico
As Bad As It Gets
Perhaps the biggest story of the weekend came from NBC News:
The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan.
Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason, the two sources said.
It’s often said that Trump campaigned expressly on a platform of authoritarian rule, but this also applies to corruption: He didn’t disguise his promises to govern in the direct interests of some of the wealthiest executives and investors in the country—and he won anyway. Trump and his allies will likely interpret this as a green light to engage in an extraordinary spree of unrestrained malfeasance.
With only two months left until Donald Trump returns to the White House, the president-elect and convicted felon has been waging lawfare by a flurry of lawsuits against media companies and publishers that have been critical of him.
The lawsuits come amid growing fears of what a second Trump term would mean for press freedom as Trump intensifies his longstanding hostility against the media – which he called “the enemy camp” in his victory speech last week.
Trump Calls For ‘Investigation’ of Iowa Pollster
In a social media post, Trump bizarrely called for an investigation of retiring Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, whose late-in-the-race shock poll showed Kamala Harris in the lead in a state that ultimately went to Trump by a comfortable margin:
“Multiple current and former senior Justice Department and FBI officials have begun reaching out to lawyers in anticipation of being criminally investigated by the Trump administration, according to three people with knowledge of their deliberations.”–NBC News
There are a small number of people who I have told, “Look, you should take a vacation outside of the country around the time of inauguration, just to see what happens. Just go on a routine vacation and see what plays out come Jan. 20, 21st, 22nd.” By that time, we’ll know who’s going to be [in senior administration roles] and whether they will be more fundamentalist about this issue than the general politician who’s appointed into a position that requires Senate confirmation.
NOT NORMAL
It is not normal for an incoming president to replace the FBI director, who has a 10-year term precisely to insulate them from partisan politics, but Donald Trump is widely reported to be considering firing Christopher Wray, whom Trump famously appointed after firing James Comey in 2017.
Among the supposed contenders to replace Wray if Trump goes through with the firing: the destructive and unqualified Kash Patel.
Trump Transition Bypasses FBI For Some Background Checks
“President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is bypassing traditional FBI background checks for at least some of his Cabinet picks while using private companies to conduct vetting of potential candidates for administration jobs, people close to the transition planning say.”–CNN
The Trump II Clown Show
A good reminder from historian Kevin Kruse that Trump’s announcement of his expected cabinet nominees is coming at a breakneck speed that far exceeds the pace of his predecessors and his own first administration. Among Trump’s latest personnel moves:
“In at least four counties — Bucks, Philadelphia, Centre and Montgomery — local election officials are acting in open defiance of a ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that arrived weeks before the election. The court found that mail ballots that are missing the date on the outer envelope, or have the wrong date, cannot be counted for this election.”–NYT
Wave Of Offensive Texts Expands To Hispanics And LGBTQ
The campaign of racists texts sent soon after the election to Black people has expanded to include Hispanics and LGBTQ communities. The texts include false claims that they have been “selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp,” the FBI warned.
Neo-Nazis March In Ohio
A small group carrying the Nazi flag marched Saturday in a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio.
The Stunning Pronatalist Argument Against Abortion
The attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri, seeking to establish the states’ standing to challenge the federal government’s liberalized rules for medication abortion, claim that expanded access to the abortion pills is “causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase,” and that “decreased births” were inflicting “a sovereign injury to the state itself.” This remarkable assertion comes on Page 189 of the states’ 199-page complaint, as astonishing a legal document as I have ever read.
You Can Find Me at Bluesky
If you’re making the transition to Bluesky, you can find me here. Hope to see you there.
With Donald Trump now appearing to fall below the 50% threshold in the popular vote, according to the most up to date count, it will now fall to the Democrats to speak for the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for him.
President-elect Donald Trump said this week he’s nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who was running for president himself not too long ago — to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services under his incoming administration.
Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal attorney, as deputy attorney general, the second in command who runs the Justice Department on a day-to-day basis.
Emil Bove, another of Trump’s personal lawyers, installed as No. 3.
It is a crippling mix of incompetence, disregard for the rule of law, conflicts of interest, and divided loyalties that would send the Justice Department down a flawed and uncertain course seen perhaps only once before, in the darkest days of Watergate.
What Will Become Of The Gaetz Ethics Report?
The House Ethics Committee was supposed to meet privately this morning, but that meeting has reportedly now been cancelled. It leaves in further doubt whether the committee’s completed report on now-former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and his alleged sexual misconduct will be released either publicly or to senators considering his nomination to be attorney general.
Meanwhile, ABC News reports that the underage woman with whom Gaetz allegedly had sex testified to the House Ethics Committee she was 17 years old when their encounter happened.
Hegseth Had Previous Sexual Assault Allegation
The nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense already faced all kinds of problems, but Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman reports that the Trump transition team was caught off guard by an allegation of sexual assault arising from a 2017 incident in Monterey, California:
According to the transition source, the allegation is serious enough that Wiles and Trump’s lawyers spoke to Hegseth about it on Thursday. A source with knowledge of the meeting said that Hegseth said the allegation stemmed from a consensual encounter and characterized the episode as he-said, she-said.
On Thursday evening, Hegseth’s lawyer Timothy Parlatore said: “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it.”
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: Friend of Don Jr.’s Who Hawks Trump Merch To Run White House Personnel Office
Don’t Forget About Tulsi Gabbard
WSJ: “President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead powerful U.S. spy agencies has often seemed to embrace Washington’s adversaries and questioned key American intelligence judgments, raising alarm among veteran intelligence officials and the wider national-security establishment.”
Let’s Not Fool Ourselves About Senate Republicans
Is the Gaetz nomination in real trouble? Perhaps:
WSJ: Gaetz Nomination Seen as Doomed by Some Senate Republicans
WaPo: Republican senators say Matt Gaetz has ‘steep’ climb to nomination
But take this reporting from CBS News’ Roberta Costa:
What I’m hearing privately from a few key GOP senators: yes, they’d prefer to not have a messy fight over Gaetz. Not their favorite. But they also don’t have a lot of energy for pushing back. Trump runs the show, they say. If Gaetz can reassure them, they’re open to backing him.
Low energy! It suggests that spending the next three months on pins and needles over whether the Republican-controlled Senate will block any of Donald Trump’s nominees for his new administration seems like misspent energy on a fool’s errand. That’s true not only because GOP senators are not eager to have a showdown with Trump, but because there’s no indication that Trump’s replacements for any failed nominations will be much better.
Quote Of The Day
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), to fellow senators: “Vote with President Trump, this is the last chance we’re going to have to save this country, and if you want to get in the way, fine, but we’re going to try to get you out of the Senate, too, if you do that.”
More Low Energy Deference To Trump
In a first, two federal judges in DC delayed key deadlines in Jan. 6 cases in anticipation that Trump may pardon the defendants. The decisions amounted to declaring “Why bother?” even as other federal judges have declined to derail cases on the basis of speculation and conjecture about what Trump will do. How long will the two judges who ordered delays wait to see what Trump does?
This come against the back drop of attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz doing as much as anyone to rewrite the history of Jan. 6.
Elon Musk Watch
One of the most important stories to track in the Trump II presidency will be whether corporate America holds the line, which it largely did in his first term, or begins to collapse into crony capitalism. Even before Trump’s win, Elon Musk foreshadowed an erosion into corruption, favoritism, and pay-to-play:
NYT: Elon Musk Met With Iran’s U.N. Ambassador, Iranian Officials Say
Politico: Musk’s sway over Trump could devastate electric vehicles — except his own
NYT: Elon Musk Helped Elect Trump. What Does He Expect in Return?
For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”
No Joke
WaPo: Go bags, passports, foreign assets: Preparing to be a target of Trump’s revenge
Makes You Want To Weep
The lead paragraph in this Politico story just flipped political journalism’s script on the economy, without batting an eye: “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could not sell voters on the strength of the economy. Now, Donald Trump is poised to enter the White House with booming markets and solid growth. Expect him to reap the political rewards.”
2024 Ephemera
PA-Sen: An automatic recount was triggered, with Sen. Bob Casey (D) trailing Dave McCormick (R) by fewer than 25,000 votes statewide.
AZ-Sen: GOP nominee Kari Lake is still not conceding that she lost to Rep. Ruben Gallego (D).
WI-Sen: GOP nominee Eric Hovde still hasn’t conceded to Sen. Tammy Baldwin and is considering seeking a recount.
WaPo: Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters
You Can’t Make This Up
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA – NOVEMBER 14: The satirical news company The Onion has purchased Alex Jones’s InfoWars in a bankruptcy auction as part of a defamation settlement over the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. (Photo Illustration by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The Onion bought Alex Jones’ InfoWars out of bankruptcy and almost immediately shut down the conspiracist website. The proceeds of the auction sale go to the families of the Sandy Hook victims who to satisfy their $1.5 billion judgment against Jones for claiming the school shooting was a hoax.
The House Ethics Committee was going to vote on whether to release a report on its three-year-long investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Friday, Punchbowl News was first to report — just days after Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was nominating Gaetz as his attorney general. The Florida congressman, who was investigated but not charged as part of Justice Department probe into sex trafficking, quickly “accepted” the nomination in a post on Twitter and resigned from Congress.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss how Democrats can ready themselves to take back power and analyze Trump’s early Cabinet picks.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
In the waning days of the 2024 presidential campaign, Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos became the target of widespread and deserved disgust for nixing The Washington Post’s policy of endorsing presidential candidates to avoid antagonizing Trump. As I wrote at the time, it’s not that there’s anything magical or even necessary about newspaper endorsements. The whole concept strikes me as a bit dated. The issue was why they were being dropped. Bezos wasn’t being paranoid. There is abundant and persuasive evidence that Trump used the levers of government to punish Bezos through Amazon and his Blue Origin space delivery company during his first term. The phrase many people used to describe this behavior is “anticipatory obedience.” (I’ve been told the phrase might originate with Timothy Snyder. I don’t know if he coined it or simply brought it to wider use.) But there’s another kind of anticipatory obedience I’ve seen like a torrent in the days since Trump won the election, and it’s more paradoxical because it comes from people who feel they are the most intense of opposers.
During harrowing times some people become overwhelmed and even lose hope. It’s not a one-way progress. Almost everyone has their moments. But there’s a particular kind of militant doomerism afoot at the moment. Any discussions of next steps in the battle against Trumpism or the preservation of civic democracy, any suggestions or strategies, are met with a chorus of, “don’t you get how it worked under Hitler and Stalin!!?!” Or “don’t you know rules don’t matter to Donald Trump!?!?!”
