People are scared and upset about Kash Patel becoming FBI director. There’s good reason to be. But the language illustrates problems we should have learned about during the election. I hear that he’s an “extremist,” that’s he’s a “norm-busting” pick, that he’s inexperienced, that he’s a “hardcore MAGA loyalist.” This all sounds like yada, yada, yada to me. In one ear and out the other.
What I want to hear Democrats saying is that Patel has literally promised to abuse his power as soon as he’s sworn into office. He’s said that repeatedly over the last year. I want to hear Democrats saying they don’t want an FBI director who has promised to abuse the powers of his office as soon as he’s sworn in. To me, that’s not complicated. That’s pretty straightforward. Everyone can understand it.
But the South Korean presidential coup appears to be over. Facing what appears to have been unified political opposition across the political spectrum, including in his own party, and lukewarm support from the military, South Korean President Yoon went before the cameras a few moments ago and announced he was lifting his decree of martial law.
The situation remains fluid in the South Korean capital of Seoul. But I wanted to update you on some breaking events.
A successful coup generally involves three things. One is securing the support of major national stakeholders — the military, security services, the business community, a major political party, etc. Coups aren’t democracies of course. But they seldom succeed without significant bases of support. Another is controlling access to major power centers and communications centers. Yet another is being able and willing to use force to back up that control.
President Yoon’s coup attempt seems not to be succeeding at any of these.
A short time ago, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, claiming it was necessary to root out North Korean sympathizers in the the South. So far it hasn’t gone like your standard presidential coup. Unsurprisingly, the leader of the opposition denounced the move. But then so too did the head of Yoon’s own political party. Yoon is a Trump-like figure and he’s been mired in declining popularity, a series of scandals and budget stand-offs with the opposition. In other words, the “threat” seems more Yoon’s plummeting public support than any communist infiltration in the South. Militaries of course operate by their own logic. But absent a threat that military leaders find compelling — communism during the Cold War — they generally won’t join up with a President who is already flailing.
As the Senate returned Monday evening from the holiday recess, Republican senators voiced little to no concern over Donald Trump’s corrupt plan to fire FBI Director Chris Wray and showed no signs of being ready to torpedo Kash Patel’s presumptive nomination as Wray’s replacement.
Even GOP senators who might be expected to sound some feeble caution – Thom Tillis (R-NC), Joni Ernst (R-IA), and Susan Collins (R-ME) – offered no reservations and expressed confidence in Patel’s prospects for confirmation.
Patel’s Particulars
“The Patel Paradox can be stated as follows: the only reason to nominate someone like Patel to run the FBI is to commit impeachable abuses of power. Trump makes no secret that this is, in fact, his purpose. Patel is similarly explicit on the point.”–Benjamin Wittes
Roger Parloff offers a glimpse of Kash Patel from a witness in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
“To understand the full scope of the damage Mr. Patel could inflict, you have to understand how unique, powerful and dangerous the F.B.I. can be — and why a Patel directorship would likely corrupt and bend the institution for decades, even if he only served a few years.”–Garrett Graff
Making A List And Checking It Twice
Who’s been naughty or nice to Kash Patel:
Here’s Kash Patel’s full Deep State enemies list, which by my count includes 17 Trump administration political appointees from his first term
“He’s absolutely unqualified for this job. He’s untrustworthy. It’s an absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature.”–Charles Kupperman, Trump’s first-term deputy national security adviser, on Kash Patel’s presumptive nomination as FBI director
Hegseth Nomination Watch: ‘Wild Childs’ Edition
Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s embattled nominee for secretary of defense, was on the Hill meeting with senators Monday amid allegations of sexual misconduct, public drunkenness on the job, and financial mismanagement.
The excuse of the day belonged to Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY): “Are soldiers sometimes wild childs? Yeah, that can happen.”
NBC News: Republican senators brush aside Pete Hegseth misconduct allegations after meeting with him
The Daily Beast: Pete Hegseth Faces Reporters on Capitol Hill Asking if He Has A Drinking Problem
CNN: Fox News ignores misconduct allegations against former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as concerns over Trump pick mount
Trump II Clown Show
Mother Jones: Trump’s New Press Secretary Was Paid for Articles Praising a Con Man
NYT: Project 2025, Mar-a-Lago and Fox News: What Connects Trump’s New Staff Picks
WSJ: How RFK Jr. Transformed From Green Hero to Vaccine Skeptic
NYT: How Kennedy Has Worked Abroad to Weaken Global Public Health Policy
Trump’s Future Transgressions Will Be Biden’s Fault
The Hunter Biden pardon has uncorked another round of excusing Donald Trump for his own transgressions – including yet-to-be-committed future transgressions:
WaPo: Biden pardon will “provide ammunition” to Trump.
Politico: The Hunter Biden pardon gives Donald Trump powerful new political cover
The Guardian: Trump uses Hunter Biden pardon to hint potential clemency for January 6 insurrectionists
The Hunter Biden pardon can be reasonably criticized, but the idea that Trump needs political cover, fresh ideas for transgressions, or new precedents from Biden fails to grasp Trump. It’s fear-based analysis that anticipates what the bully will do and blames the victim for bringing it on himself.
Trump has already abused the pardon power in unprecedented ways to protect himself, plans to abuse it again in the future, and promised throughout his campaign to undermine the rule of law by wrecking the Justice Department and federal law enforcement.
Detect A Pattern?
The notion of “legacy” is one of the conventional tropes of political journalism that lets reporters judge some presidents against an imaginary and illusory standard:
WSJ: Biden Pardon Threatens His Legacy—and Democrats’ Fight Against Trump
NYT: Pardoning Hunter Complicates the Legacy That Biden Envisioned
Politico: Biden risks sullying his legacy to protect Hunter
“Legacy” is a classic second-day analysis piece, the subtext of which is the president’s hypocrisy for failing to meet their own standards. By not having any standards, Trump often escapes this trope.
Inside SCOTUS’ Failed Effort To Hold Itself Accountable
The NYT draws on internal Supreme Court memos and interviews to piece together the desultory effort to adopt an unenforceable ethics code for the justices:
Justice Gorsuch was especially vocal in opposing any enforcement mechanism beyond voluntary compliance, arguing that additional measures could undermine the court. The justices’ strength was their independence, he said, and he vowed to have no part in diminishing it.
In the private exchanges, Justice Clarence Thomas, whose decision not to disclose decades of gifts and luxury vacations from wealthy benefactors had sparked the ethics controversy, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote off the court’s critics as politically motivated and unappeasable.
The three liberal justices insisted that the rules needed to be more than lofty promises. But their argument never had a chance.
Trump’s Looming Deregulation Fiesta
TPM’s Kate Riga: “Monday’s oral arguments on the Food and Drug Administration’s rejection of a new flavored vape was, and felt like, a lame-duck exercise — a challenge against an agency regulation that may well evaporate as soon as President-elect Donald Trump takes power.”
In The States …
North Carolina: The GOP-controlled state Senate voted to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of their big lame duck power grab. The GOP-controlled House will vote on the veto override later this month.
Wisconsin: “Wisconsin public worker and teachers unions scored a major legal victory Monday with a ruling that restores collective bargaining rights they lost under a 2011 state law that sparked weeks of protests and made the state the center of the national battle over union rights.”–AP
WSJ: Blue States Are Bracing for Legal Clashes With Trump
For The Record
The Army general who was last American soldier to leave Afghanistan was given a fourth star after Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) lifted a hold on his promotion.
Trump ally and MAGA influencer Dinesh D’Souza posted a statement on his website over the weekend at long last admitting that his conspiracy theory film “2,000 Mules” was produced “on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team” — joining a growing group of election deniers who have been quietly dropping the act in the wake of Trump’s victory last month.
North Carolina Senate Republicans on Monday voted to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s recent veto of a Republican-passed bill designed to strip away power from the newly-elected Democratic governor and attorney general. The override vote passed 30-19.
Monday’s oral arguments on the Food and Drug Administration’s rejection of a new flavored vape was, and felt like, a lame-duck exercise — a challenge against an agency regulation that may well evaporate as soon as President-elect Donald Trump takes power.
Trump Wants This Guy At The Top Of The Chain Of Command
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer published a new piece last evening about Pete Hegseth’s troubled tenure at two nonprofits before he became a Fox News host in 2017. The article, based on whistleblower accounts, paints a picture of Donald Trump’s presumptive nominee for defense secretary as frequently drunk in public at work events, overseeing workplace environments that were saturated in sexism, and engaging in mismanagement.
The new revelations come on top of Hegseth’s settlement of a 2017 sex assault claim against him that he did not initially disclose to the Trump transition team. Hegseth denies committing sexual assault in the previously reported case; and in a statement released on his behalf in response to The New Yorker article said he would not comment on its “outlandish claims.”
The Mayer piece is devastating:
A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.
Among the specific allegations:
repeated public intoxication while “acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events”;
trying to dance on stage with strippers at a strip club in Louisiana where he’d brought his team;
sexually pursuing his organization’s female staffers, who were classified as either “party girls” or “not party girls”; and
drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” at a bar in Ohio while on business there.
The New Yorker story is based in part on a previously undisclosed whistleblower report from his 2013-2016 tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America. Mayer spoke with some of the people involved in compiling the report and relied on other documents and accounts from those who were involved with the organizations during the times in question.
Can We Stay Focused On Trump Firing The FBI Director?
Donald Trump’s holiday weekend announcement glossed over the fact that he will fire FBI Director Christopher Wray before the end of his 10-year term. The rest of us don’t have to accept that gloss. The politically motivated firing of Wray as retribution is the scandal. It will be the second FBI director fired by Trump: Wray was appointed by Trump to replace James Comey, whom he fired in 2017.
Ever since Trump won the election, the coverage of his firing of the FBI director has been muted, framed more around the parlor game of who Trump will name as Wray’s replacement, with some concern about what this or that potential nominee could do to undermine the rule of law. But the firing of the FBI director on specious grounds as political payback for leading validly predicated investigations into Trump himself is itself undermining of the rule of law.
Kash Patel is an appalling figure who is as unqualified and dangerous as the failed Matt Gaetz was for attorney general. That, too, is a scandal. But before GOP senators are forced to defend the Patel nomination, they need to be made to answer for why they’re sanctioning Trump’s corrupt firing of the FBI director.
Joe Biden Pardons Hunter Biden
President Biden issued a sweeping pardon of his son Hunter Sunday night, bringing full circle a dominant story line of at least the last five years. The news of the pardon, first reported by NBC News and quickly followed by a written statement from the President, came after the Biden family huddled on Nantucket over the Thanksgiving weekend. Biden – who had repeatedly promised not to pardon Hunter – made the decision Sunday and didn’t waste any time in announcing it, Playbook reported.
It may sound like a copout, but I’m not convinced that the question of whether Biden should or should not have pardoned his son is the most illuminating way of assessing the entire debacle that led to Trump’s first impeachment, proceeded through a misguided special counsel investigation, and culminated with pardons on the eve of Hunter’s dual sentencings in federal courts on opposite coasts later this month.
Those who work on criminal justice issues and are focused on the fair, even, consistent awarding of pardons are understandably concerned in that context with the implications of the Hunter Biden pardon. It’s important to note, however, that hat is not the only context for this pardon. A separate category of reactions strike me as too credulous to take seriously: It clears the way for Trump to do bad things. As if Trump needed an excuse. A third category of responses defended the pardon unequivocally.
This is not going to be the first time in the Trump II era that we’re forced wrestle with the question of what extraordinary means are necessary and appropriate to confront the extraordinary threat to the rule of law and democracy that Donald Trump presents. While it is important to mark deviations from the norm and remember what norms we seek to restore, it does seem increasingly feckless to cling to those norms while they are decimated. But what standards take their place? Where do you draw the new line? What accountability is there under the new standards? Killing democracy to save it is obviously not the answer either.
I land at a tenuous and perhaps too easy conclusion that Trump’s erosion of the rule of law is what got us here in the first place, and the Hunter Biden pardon is another marker of how far down this slippery slope we’ve already fallen.
Hillsborough County (Florida) Sheriff Chad Chronister: DEA administrator
retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg: US envoy to Ukraine and Russia
The Trump Fathers-in-Law
Donald Trump plans to name two of his children’s fathers-in-law to positions in his new administration:
Convicted-but-pardoned-by Trump Charles Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, as ambassador to France; and
Lebanese-born billionaire Massad Boulos, father-in-law of Tiffany Trump, as senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.
Why We Keep Focusing On Russ Vought
(Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“Trump insists on nominating clowns and buffoons and is himself inevitably a chaotic presence. But he also brings people like Vought with him into power. Many people tend to think that the extremists, the nutty MAGA people, are inherently incompetent; and that conversely, when you go up on the competence scale, you are likely to encounter fewer ideological extremists. Vought, however, is a fully competent, utterly committed radical ideologue.”–Thomas Zimmer
IMPORTANT
All the signs are there that Trump II will include a deeper slide into crony capitalism, putting pressure on corporate America, that it mostly resisted in Trump’s first term, to kowtow to the powers-that-be to protect its economic interests.
GOOD READ
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: How Trump’s Failed 2020 COVID Policy Birthed His 2024 Public Health Nominees
Crazy Story
WSJ: Chinese Ship’s Crew Suspected of Deliberately Dragging Anchor for 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables
Mass Deportation Watch
WSJ: The Local Sheriffs Gearing Up to Help Trump Carry Out Mass Deportations
Politico: California will not help Trump’s deportation plans, Sen. Alex Padilla says
NBC News: Democratic-controlled cities are finalizing plans to oppose mass deportation
‘Recipe For Disaster’
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman: North Carolina GOP’s New Power Grab Is A ‘Recipe For Disaster’ For Elections
Thank You For Your Recollections
PHILADELPHIA, PA- JULY 10, 2014: The covered First Class Promenade Deck of the SS United States. The ship has been docked at a pier on the Philadelphia waterfront and has been the target of numerous “save our ship” schemes, all of which have failed. (Photo by Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Since I first mentioned the imminent demise of the SS United States, I’ve received some wonderful recollections from readers of their experiences crossing the Atlantic aboard her. A couple more goodies:
TPM Reader BK:
I’m late adding my two cents, but my family took the SS United States from New York to Southampton in February of 1964. (Within a day or two after the Beatles went on the Ed Sullivan Show.) We were moving to London. I was 6, and my brother and sister were 4 and 3.
My parents chose to go by boat rather than air because they thought the time zone change would be easier on us kids. I suspect they came to regret it. First, my brother got chicken pox. Then, around day 3 or 4, we ran into a tremendous storm that made the boat rock so much that the ladders to the top bunks kept falling over. Already prone to motion sickness — I had previously thrown up when watching a movie in the theater, which was on the top deck so it swayed more — we couldn’t have been more miserable.
Other than that (Mrs. Lincoln) it was an awesome trip! The boat was gleaming and there was plenty to do if you weren’t feeling sick; it’s hard to see it so rusted now.
TPM Reader PW:
I too was a passenger on the S.S. United States back in 1962! I crossed from New York to Southhampton with my parents and brother to spend a year in England. My father finished what is still considered a definitive biography on the poet John Milton while my brother and I attended a Quaker boarding school which we loved and did not want to leave! My memories of the crossing were mostly that there was a constant flow of far too much food, the waves were gigantic compared to the little lake where we spent our summers, and some boy with romantic fantasies followed me around whenever I went exploring on my own!
I always enjoy discovering when the news of the day bumps into the personal experiences of TPM readers.
Over the past couple weeks, the thought of President Biden pardoning his son entered my head a few times. I tossed it around: good or bad idea? I could see it both ways. I still can. But I am fine with his decision. I’m glad he did it. Biden learned the right lesson: no one gives a fuck about norms. It’s unquestionably true that Hunter Biden wouldn’t be in this position if not for his dad. That’s basically the justification Biden gave. And he’s right. It may sound angry or cynical to say “no one gives a fuck.” But I mean it both in a general way and in this particular way: the reason for Biden not to do this was to allow his son to remain collateral damage of the GOP war against his presidency and to leave him in the hands of the Trump DOJ for at least the next four years all to make a point of principle about being better, different, more righteous, more norm-honoring than Donald Trump.
Truly. No one gives a fuck. If anything, that logic I just laid out sounds like one of those fastidious, hyper-process-oriented and baroque bits of reasoning that have of late left Democrats mesmerized while the real world is passing them by.
Either you know the difference or you don’t. This doesn’t shift the balance in anyone’s head.
