As the year winds down, we have a fun little project I want to pitch you on. It’s a key, incremental part of keeping TPM strong, vital and moving forward into the new year and beyond. Right now, we are 279 subscriptions short of a net increase of 3,000 subscribers for the year. True, this is not a bumper-sticker ready declaration. But it’s an important one. We want and need to keep growing like that as we move forward and the 3,000 net new members is a big milestone. So if you’ve been thinking about subscribing, please consider doing it before the new year.

And here’s the incentive. We have a supply of high-end TPM t-shirts and baseball caps from TPM’s 25th anniversary. These isn’t your standard made-on-demand online merch stuff. This is high end, plush, well made. I’m not saying it’s quite Louis Vuitton. But if you went to the campus bookstore at your alma mater and thought of getting a sweatshirt or something, it’d be that level of quality. If you are a non-member and you sign up for a TPM AF (ad free) annual membership we will give you a choice of either a T-shirt or a cap. This is while supplies last. We’ll update each day to tell you what we have left. If you are currently a TPM Prime member and you upgrade to ad free, we will make the same offer. Just to be super clear, we cannot do this for a regular TPM Prime membership. This does not mean that we don’t want you to sign up or that we’re not super grateful but these are pricey and we are trying to offer these as an additional incentive. (I’ll note how to claim your merch below.) Mainly, the reason to do this is to join our community and support our team’s work. People are often amazed that this little organization remains when so many other bigger ones, richer ones, hotter ones, have fallen by the wayside. This is why. We have this community who wants to be part of what we do and support what we do for the relatively small cost of a subscription. Click here to join right now.

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INSTRUCTIONS: If you sign up for a new TPM PRIME AF (ad free) annual membership, here’s what you do to claim your merch. Sign up or upgrade to the new membership. You’ll get a receipt by email. Someone at TPM will then follow up later (that day or the next) by email to get the details about your merch preferences and where to send it. That’s it. As I said, we will do this while supplies last and we are making the offer through this week. We will update on the Editor’s Blog if we run out of merch by the end of the week.

Our bespoke piñata of the day is the Susie Wiles piece in Vanity Fair (they must be excited to move on from Olivia …) We’re seeing the standard incantations of “fake news” from none other than Wiles herself. Trump’s Cabinet secretaries have all lined up to post tweets repeating the claim, intoning the Trump-Wiles catechism as though they’d just emerged from a fast-forward struggle session with a pack of feral MAGA toughs. I’ve started making my way through the morselly excerpts, as perhaps you have or are too. What struck me here was perhaps not even so much the quotes as the venue.

Few American publications are more at the heart of the cosmopolitan world of America than Vanity Fair. That is not liberal. Small-c cosmopolitan is different but overlapping. But it is perhaps even more than “liberal” what MAGA is talking about when it denounces the “coastal elite.” Certainly they’re talking more about that than, like, People for the American Way or Americans for Democratic Action or Heather Cox Richardson. Susie Wiles is no fool. And while she may — as in a very low de minimis chance — have gotten a touch injudicious in a few quotes, she certainly knew with perfect clarity what Vanity Fair is.