The Return of Trump

Friday, Nov. 22

With New AG Pick, Trump Throws a Bone to the Establishment

On Thursday evening, a few hours after Matt Gaetz withdrew his name for consideration as attorney general, Donald Trump named Pam Bondi, the attorney general of Florida from 2011 to 2019, and one of Trump’s lawyers during his first impeachment, as a replacement.

The initial buzz on Bondi is that parts of the MAGA world are quite disappointed, whereas mainstream Washington, D.C., is mostly happy. Bondi has already passed what Matthew Continetti of Commentary calls “the Jeb Bush test.” The idea of the test is that if Jeb tweets out his praise of a pick, it’s overwhelmingly likely that it will pass through the Senate. Gaetz, of course, did not pass the Jeb test. 

Bondi’s most obvious advantage over Gaetz is that she can get the job. As Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, an on-again, off-again ally of Trump, put it in a tweet:

“Well done, Mr. President. Picking Pam Bondi for Attorney General is a grand slam, touchdown, hole in one, ace, hat trick, slam dunk, Olympic gold medal pick. She will be confirmed quickly because she deserves to be confirmed quickly.”

One man’s endorsement is another’s red flag. The shift from Gaetz to Bondi is a reminder that, while the Republican Party is outwardly wholly united under Trump, there is a subterranean civil war between GOP institutionalists and MAGA forces eager to bring the federal bureaucracy to heel. Gaetz was a bomb thrower popular with Trump’s base but hated by the institutionalists (and not just by them). Bondi appears far more popular with the latter crowd.

One person familiar with the thinking of Trumpworld told The Scroll that a few of the more enthusiastic MAGA movement figures were disappointed in the choice of Bondi—not because there is anything wrong with her in particular, but because the AG job is extraordinary, in terms of both importance and difficulty. Bondi, a former lobbyist for Qatar, might not be the steel-spined fighter fit to clean out an entrenched bureaucracy of massive scale. That’s a potential issue for the Trump administration because the Department of Justice served as the center of institutional progressive resistance during his first term. It’s the central staging ground for important legal battles and, last go-round, was a wellspring of leaks to the media. If Bondi can’t clean house, the house might run roughshod over Trump.

If there’s such acute disappointment over Bondi within pro-MAGA factions of media and elsewhere, then why isn’t it public? The answer is simple: She’s Trump’s pick. Now that Trump is appointing officials, as opposed to staging a presidential campaign out of the wilderness, criticism of his named allies is muted. Those interested in saving Trump from “the swamp” must also be wary of offending Trump, even when they disagree with his decisions.

As for the Democratic side, Bondi is disfavored, but almost any Trump appointee would be. The New York Times refers to her as a “Trump loyalist,” citing Bondi’s refusal to prosecute Trump University in 2013, and Trump’s subsequent $25,000 campaign contribution to her reelection. Bondi also supported Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020, suggesting she is not as much of a squish as some on the right are making her out to be. Her biggest asset, however, is that she’s not Gaetz, which makes us think the Republican-controlled Senate will be happy to confirm her in January.

Monday, Nov. 18

Pete Hegseth and the ‘Extremist’ Smear Machine

We mentioned last week, in our rundown of Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz for attorney general, that the president-elect’s philosophy for appointments appears to be a version of Robert Conquest’s Third Law: “the behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” The Trumpian innovation is to take the cabal out into the open by publicly appointing the bureaucracy’s enemies to lead it.

One of those enemies is Maj. Pete Hegseth, the 44-year-old Bronze Star veteran, Princeton and Harvard alumnus, and Fox host nominated by Trump to serve as his secretary of defense. A vocal critic of military DEI programs, women in combat, and other social-engineering projects that he sees as peripheral or damaging to the core military function of killing the enemy, Hegseth is a walking repudiation of everything the U.S. military has become in its post-Global War on Terror senescence, in which winning wars has come to be seen as a barbaric relic of an unenlightened past. Unsurprisingly, many are less than thrilled at the prospect of him running the Pentagon. And so, following the playbook of the past decade, the next step is to paint him as a dangerous extremist.

In a Thursday appearance on All in With Chris Hayes, the former NAACP lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill fired the first shot, declaring that Hegseth was a “known white supremacist.” While her remark might be dismissed as hysteria, it was followed up by a Friday report in the Associated Press and a Saturday report in The Washington Post confirming that Hegseth, while serving in the D.C. National Guard, had been flagged by his fellow troops and superior officers as an “insider threat” due to a “white supremacist” tattoo. So what was the tattoo—a swastika? A Sonnenrad? Neither: It was the phrase Deus Vult, Latin for “God wills it,” inked on Hegseth’s bicep. According to the Post, a naval intelligence officer discovered social media evidence of the tattoo in January 2021, and then distributed it to a chat of officers with the warning, apparently based on a brief Google search, that the phrase was affiliated with “the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and other extremist groups that participated in the siege at the Capitol.” Separately, according to the AP, the security manager of Hegseth’s unit flagged the tattoo to his superior officers, writing in a (subliterate) email:

I received the attached information today from a former DC Guard Member regarding MAJ Hegseth … and the information is quiet [sic] disturbing. Sir, MAJ Hegseth has a tattoo of “Deus Vult” on his inner arm (bicep area). The phrase “Deus Vult” is associated with Supremacist groups in which White-Supremacist use of #DeusVult and a return to medieval Catholicism, is to invoke the myth of a white Christian (i.e. Catholic) medieval past that wishes to ignore the actual demographics and theological state of Catholicism today …

Hegseth is an evangelical, not a Catholic, and the phrase, while it has been adopted by sections of the online far right, is also a generic Christian slogan popular among certain evangelical subcultures as well as among internet shitposters inspired by the Crusader Kings II video game. Mind you, the defense establishment labeling Hegseth a potential terrorist for Deus Vult is the same one that, as we reported in March, wrote in an Office of the Director of National Intelligence newsletter that the phrase jihadist was “offensive and problematic” and that analysts should instead use Khawarij, the term koshered by “Islamic sources” to “accurately identify extremists.” Nonetheless, Hegseth’s officers took the “insider threat” talk seriously and ordered him to stand down from protecting Biden’s inauguration. Hegseth later cited this order as his primary motivation for leaving the military.

Hegseth appears to have been a victim of the Pentagon’s witch hunt for right-wing “domestic extremists” in the military, which, as we reported in January, was one among several bogus pretexts (the others being DEI and the vaccine mandate) that the Biden administration used to purge conservatives and others suspected of disloyalty to the Democratic Party from the officer corps. A December 2023 Pentagon study—the capstone to a nearly three-year panic about extremism in the military, much of it sourced to “anonymous defense officials” and spoonfed to outlets like the Post—concluded, based on a review of a decade’s worth of court-martialed records, that there was about one case of prohibited extremism in the military per year, with “no clear increase or decrease in the number of cases over time.” And as we reported on Sept. 27, bogus “insider threat” accusations were weaponized to silence whistleblowers within the FBI who raised questions about the bureau’s role in the Jan. 6 riot. Whistleblower Marcus Allen, for instance, had his security clearance revoked and was then suspended without pay for 27 months after being flagged as an insider threat for citing “extremist propaganda” in a letter to superiors that raised questions about the truthfulness of FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony to Congress. The “extremist propaganda” turned out to be the website RealClearPolitics.

In addition to being an alleged racist, Hegseth is also an alleged rapist. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that Trump was standing by Hegseth after being “jolted” by the revelation that Hegseth had been accused of sexual assault over an encounter with a woman in 2017, which Hegseth insists was consensual. We won’t pretend to know what happened there. What we can say is that the Monterey, California, police department looked into the allegation and declined to file charges; that the woman in question said she “did not remember anything” except being in Hegseth’s room, and had only a “hazy memory” of that, but that Hegseth’s lawyer has pointed to contemporaneous witnesses and security footage showing a “visibly intoxicated” Hegseth leaving the bar arm in arm with the smiling and apparently sober complainant; and that the alleged assault took place on Oct. 7, 2017. Why is that date significant? Because, as Compact’s Matthew Schmitz noted to The Scroll in a message, on Oct. 10, Ronan Farrow published his blockbuster New Yorker article on the sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, setting off the #MeToo movement. Two days later, on Oct. 12, the complainant made her allegations about Hegseth to the police. 

If these knocks are not enough to prevent Hegseth from being confirmed, we expect him to be gung ho about Trump’s reported plans to prune the upper reaches of the U.S. military. On Friday, Reuters reported that the president-elect’s transition team was considering firing much of the senior leadership of the Pentagon, potentially including the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and any officers “elevated and appointed” by former JCS Chairman Mark Milley, the man who appeared before the House Armed Services Committee in June 2021 to defend the introduction of critical race theory into the military, explaining that “I want to understand white rage.” Separately, The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that Trump’s team was considering a “draft executive order” that would “bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system” by creating a panel to evaluate three- and four-star generals for removal, allowing Trump to fire what he has called “woke generals.” In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth endorsed this program totally, writing that the incoming president would need to “radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership” and that “lots of people need to be fired.” 

But wouldn’t firing a bunch of three- and four-stars and elevating a man in his mid-40s harm U.S. national security? In a comment to Reuters, a source close to Trump’s transition team offered some historical perspective. “In World War Two, we were very rapidly appointing people in their 30s or people competent to be generals,” he said. “And you know what? We won that war.”

Friday, Nov. 15

The Dems Need to Change Course. Can They?

“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” — Ronald Reagan

The Financial Times has had a good run of data-based analyses of political trends, and on Thursday, the paper published another one. In an article titled, “Trump broke the Democrats’ thermostat,” author John Burn-Murdoch depicts a Democratic Party that has spent the past decade actively running away from the median voter on social issues: 

“Notably, the shift began in 2016,” Burn-Murdoch writes. “This suggests that Trump’s election radicalised the left, not the right.”

That statement appears to be contradicted by the article’s very own depiction of U.S. General Social Survey data. In the chart on affirmative action, for instance, we can see that, in the early 2000s, “strong Democrats” were roughly in total alignment with the median voter in being fairly unsupportive of such hiring practices. Around 2012, when social media started to hit critical mass and the “Great Awokening” was underway, “strong Democrats” started to massively shift in favor of the practice. FT depicts a similar trend for “increasing immigration,” only the strong Democrat leftward lurch begins even earlier, during Barack Obama’s first term. Burn-Murdoch notes that the shift appears have originated with, and been more extreme among, the party’s “activists and non-profit staffers,” citing Data for Progress research showing that Democratic “political elites and influencers” have shifted much further left than Democratic voters as a whole. This research gives a hint as to how the party found itself regularly taking positions on cultural issues opposed by the vast majority of American voters.

So: What lessons will be learned? What concessions, if any, will be made to voters who feel culturally alienated?

It’s early days, but so far it seems that the party’s mandarins are in denial. One common form of “cope” advanced by legacy journalists is that the Democrats’ only real problem was inflation, which has unseated many incumbent governments around the world. In this reading, the Democrats were doomed by macro events and might have even overperformed in the recent election. Others have attempted to deny that the party really did shift left. Shortly after Trump’s victory, Jon Stewart played a reel of Democratic candidates signaling moderation on immigration and trans issues. Unmentioned was the fact that the candidates who openly bucked their party on these issues performed better than Kamala Harris. 

Of course, the people making the “it’s just the economy” argument were, almost to a person, quick to cite the Dobbs decision as important in helping Democrats overperform in the 2022 midterms cycle. Obviously, “cultural issues” matter in elections. There’s a reason why the ad of the cycle happened to be “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Rather than focus on the substance of Democratic overreach regarding trans policy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interpreted the success of the ad as downstream of Republicans focusing on “you,” versus a Democratic party that has forgotten how to message. 

Leading pro-Democratic voices currently do not want the party to moderate socially, even on a 70/30 issue like, “Should males be disallowed from playing in women’s sports?” John Oliver, for instance, spent some of his Thursday show imploring Democrats to improve their messaging on that issue by emphasizing that “there are vanishingly few trans girls competing in high schools anywhere.”

Fair enough, but then the natural response to that is, “If this is such a minor issue, then why is it worth losing an election over?”

Thursday, Nov. 14

The Gaetz of Hell

On Wednesday afternoon, shortly before The Scroll went out, Donald Trump announced Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as his pick for attorney general.

To say the pick was a shock would be an understatement: Our first reaction was to assume that the announcement was literally fake news, like the photoshopped Truth Social post from Wednesday announcing Tucker Carlson as White House Press Secretary. Gaetz is “polarizing” even among Republicans, which is a polite way of saying widely despised, both for his leading role in the campaign to oust then Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy in 2023—regarded on the Hill as a self-serving stunt that divided and weakened the GOP—and for his unsavory character. The conservative pundit Ben Domenech wrote on Thursday morning that Gaetz is a “sex trafficking drug addicted piece of shit,” which certainly captures the private view of many who may now be wary of stating their views publicly.

The characters issues, in particular, became a liability for Gaetz in 2021, when anonymous sources leaked to The New York Times that he was the target in a Department of Justice probe over whether the congressman had engaged in the “sex trafficking” of an underage prostitute. The case was bizarre and at least partly entangled with what turned out to be an attempt by a former DOJ prosecutor and an Air Force intelligence officer to extort Gaetz’s father for a $25 million loan, ostensibly to rescue former FBI agent Mark Levinson from Iran. Eighteen months later, the DOJ dropped the investigation after prosecutors recommended against bringing charges, reportedly due to problems with the credibility of the witnesses. 

So, Gaetz—at the time a leading pro-Trump voice on the House Judiciary Committee—was, at minimum, the subject of a coordinated leak campaign tied to a suspicious prosecution in which charges were never brought, and which succeeded in sidelining him politically and shredding his reputation. That is, not coincidentally, exactly the sort of abuse of government power that we’ve seen normalized by the Obama faction over the past decade, and the bizarre sequence of events has made Gaetz something of a MAGA martyr. At the same time, Gaetz was not exactly exonerated, and the accusations sounded true even to other Republicans based on what they knew about the man. As Trump ally Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin told CNN in October 2023, amid the McCarthy leadership fight:

You gotta think about this guy. This is a guy that the media didn’t give the time of day to after he was accused of sleeping with an underage girl. There’s a reason why no one in the [Republican] conference came and defended [Gaetz], because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor … of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.

In a subsequent interview, Mullin said that the first time he ever met Gaetz, Gaetz had described Kristi Noem—a friend of Mullin’s and now Trump’s nominee for Homeland Security Secretary—as a “fine bitch.” Neither of those actions are illegal, but nor are they indicative of good judgment. And prior to being nominated as AG, Gaetz was the subject of a bipartisan House Committee on Ethics investigation into the allegations raised by the DOJ, with the committee set to release a “highly damaging” report on Gaetz this Friday. That report is now blocked since Gaetz resigned from his House seat and thus removed the committee’s jurisdiction over him. On Thursday, however, John Clune, the lawyer for the minor Gaetz was accused of having sex with, posted the following on X:

That’s a statement from an interested party, so take it for what you will. We’d note, however, that (a) Gaetz being unjustly blackmailed and smeared by leaks and (b) Gaetz engaging in criminal or discreditable behavior are not mutually exclusive. A man with skeletons in his closet is a natural target.

We have heard a bull case for Gaetz from people we know and trust, which goes something like this: The DOJ has become thoroughly corrupted and politicized over roughly the past decade and can only be fixed by someone who is willing to act as a wrecking ball. A more conventional pick—such as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) or former Acting AG Matthew Whitaker—would be excessively deferential to the institution and thus would be vulnerable to getting rolled by internal DOJ “Resistance,” much in the way that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was in Trump’s first term. According to this theory, Gaetz will be tasked with cleaning house at DOJ, while responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the department will be entrusted to a more conventional, and conventionally qualified, deputy attorney general. Put alongside some of Trump’s other nominations—including Phil Hegseth for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of National Intelligence, Marco Rubio for secretary of state, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services (announced shortly before our publication today)—the Gaetz pick would suggest a general strategy of appointing as leaders of various agencies people who want to burn their agency down. The historian Robert Conquest posited a law that “the behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” As X user @EndingBigly joked, Trump appears to be turning that into his governing philosophy.

In other words, the argument is that, yes, he may be an asshole, but we need an asshole, and he’s our asshole. That’s the theory. It’s a fine theory, and it’s a perfectly good argument for, say, putting Hegseth at the Pentagon. With Gaetz, though, we wouldn’t trust the man as far as we could throw him. Take, as just one small example, the following interview that Gaetz did with Tucker Carlson on Fox back in 2021, immediately after The New York Times published a story on the allegations against him:

Put aside your feelings about Carlson and simply consider the stunt that Gaetz attempted to pull here. After describing—accurately, it turned out—the extortion scheme targeting him and his father, Gaetz immediately pivots to attempting to dirty up Carlson with innuendos about unnamed sex crimes, in what can only be described as an attempt at blackmail on live television. “I’m not the only person on screen right now who’s been falsely accused of a terrible sex act,” Gaetz said. “You were accused of something you did not do and so you know what this feels like.” Asked by Carlson what the underlying allegations were, Gaetz then brought up a private dinner he’d had with Carlson, Carlson’s wife, and a female “friend” who he said was being pressured to serve as a government witness in the case. “You’ll remember her,” Gaetz says, in a particularly bizarre exchange. Carlson responds, “I don’t remember the woman you’re speaking of or the context at all, honestly.” Carlson ends the interview by stating the obvious: “That was one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted.” He never had Gaetz on again.

In other words, that’s how this supposed “loyalist” treats his friends when his back is against the wall: by threatening to dirty them up and bring them down with him.

Tuesday, Nov. 12

Flustered Dems Scramble, Seek Cover

It’s been a week since Kamala Harris’ Election Day wipeout, in which Donald Trump won the popular vote—overturning the myth that Republicans only win national elections owing to fusty inbuilt white supremacy inherent to the Electoral College—and the Republicans gained control of the Senate and retained their House majority. The Democrats have been swimming in a toxic pool of fear, anxiety, and recrimination, evidently shocked that their last-minute candidate switcheroo and its attendant fanfare failed to compel the electorate to follow direction. A decade’s worth of intense admonitions about fascism, Nazis, insurrections, and democracy were shrugged off by the American people in one evening.

The party of Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer is reeling, and fingers are pointing in every direction. Some blame Harris for her uninspired, reclusive campaigning; others blame President Biden for not getting out of the way sooner and then for sabotaging the process by prematurely throwing his support behind Harris. The choice of Tim Walz as running mate was a weird gamble that badly misjudged his appeal as a “normal” Midwestern man’s man, and exit polls from Pennsylvania indicate that Gov. Josh Shapiro might have been a better choice, despite opposition from the teachers’ union juggernaut. Staff from losing campaigns always have plenty of blame to pass around, scapegoating everything from mismanaged resources to flawed messaging and more.

The fumbling of pundits has provided a rich source of humor and gloating for the right. Historian Allan Lichtman, whose “13 Keys to the White House” model gained unaccountable attention this cycle, insisted that Harris had victory locked down because her party had turned such dubiously assigned keys as “being untainted by scandal,” “a strong economy,” and “opponent is uncharismatic.” When his supposedly foolproof model failed, Lichtman explained that the problem lay not with him, but in the ignorance of the electorate, which had been duped by Elon Musk and Fox News into believing falsehoods. Others blamed racism and misogyny, the standard-bearers of the grievance parade, for Harris’ loss. Elie Mystal, the “justice correspondent” of The Nation, posted, “White people did this, and white people have to answer their own evil. Black folks are just innocent bystanders to their violence and bullshit.” MSNBC crackpot Joy Reid blamed anti-Blackness, especially on the part of nonwhites who are “down with white supremacy.”

Pragmatic, victory-focused Democrats encouraged the party to move away from its incessant emphasis on identity politics and return to the gas-and-groceries, kitchen-table focus on economic and family issues that helped Trump capture working-class votes and create a multiracial coalition that Republicans of decades past could only dream of achieving. Clinton-era political guru James Carville expressed his disgust with contemporary Democrat ivory tower bubble speak and hammered “Washington-based Democrats farting around, going to wine and cheese parties and talking about how misogynistic … This identity shit was a disaster. We told you to get out in front of public safety issues. You didn’t.”

Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton told The New York Times that Trump won partly because the left refuses to acknowledge that matters such as letting boys play in girls’ sports are controversial to most people, and that refusal to allow debate on the issue turns the average voter off. Local Democrats criticized Moulton for his remarks, though it bears pointing out that his commonsense, pragmatic approach to transgender athletics dates no earlier than Nov. 6; he is on the record in 2023 opposing a bill “forcing” transgender athletes “to participate in programs that don’t align with their gender.” Moulton, who ran a brief presidential campaign in 2020, is clearly positioning himself for 2028 as a no-nonsense centrist.

Meanwhile, leftist Democrats demand a return to the working-class bread-and-butter issues that they feel are theirs by right. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders released a statement after the election saying, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.” Sanders demanded a renewed focus on wealth inequality, socialized health care, and an end to support for Israel, along with other priorities that the American people supposedly want, though somehow never vote for.

The problem for the Democrats is that it’s not clear that they can credibly turn their clumsy ship around and set it steaming toward the isles of lunch-bucket politics. The principles of critical race theory and intersectionality are the fabric of their party, and other issues are subsidiary. The Democratic coalition is now a hierarchy of special interests in which the most marginal groups are elevated to prominence. Before the election in 2028, Democrats can try their best to shake off the obsessive fixation on identity that they embraced as their brand. But they risk jettisoning their most loyal constituencies if they do.

Monday, Nov. 11

On Foreign Policy, Trump Should Stick With Success

With the election over and done with, the struggle for influence—and appointments—in Donald Trump’s second term has begun.

Last week, we noted a few early personnel moves. Trump designated Susie Wiles, the co-manager of his campaign, as his White House chief of staff. Wiles is generally considered to be highly organized and competent, and to the extent that Trump’s 2024 campaign was more disciplined than his previous two, much of the credit for that goes to her. Trump also selected Brian Hook, who worked closely with Jared Kushner on the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term, as the chief of the transition team for Trump’s State Department. Hook is no Metternich, but still, his role signals at least some continuity with Trump’s first-term foreign policy. Trump has named former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief and border hawk Tom Homan as “border czar” and is “expected” to appoint immigration adviser Stephen Miller as White House deputy chief of staff for policy, indicating that he fully intends to follow through on his campaign promises about securing the border and deporting criminal migrants.

Elsewhere, the appointments remain a bit of a mystery, and there is a very public (and no doubt private) arm-wrestling match among the various factions of the Trump coalition and Trump’s inner circle. Trump announced over the weekend that neither Mike Pompeo nor Nikki Haley would have a role in his administration, allegedly due to lobbying from Tucker Carlson and Don Trump Jr., according to Politico. We have no special affection for either of them, and Pompeo had endorsed Special Counsel Jack Smith’s classified-documents case against Trump, which may have led the president-elect to decide he was untrustworthy. Whatever the case, the Carlson faction has been taking a victory lap:

The above tweet, in particular, raised some eyebrows since it suggested that Don Jr. is taking cues from Dave Smith, a room-temperature-IQ “libertarian” comedian who reliably regurgitates Obama-faction talking points on Gaza and Yemen and believes that Trump’s big problem in his first term was being “awful” on Israel, by which he means that Trump squeezed Iran and its terror proxies rather than embracing the “pro-peace” Obama position of funding Iran. That “pro-peace” position, of course, led to near-constant war and instability during the three Obama-Biden terms in which it was tried, unlike the first-term Trump policy, which produced peace in the Middle East and Europe without entangling the United States in any new wars. Why the self-proclaimed MAGA types want the failed policy instead of the successful one is beyond us, but our humble suggestion would be for the president-elect to throw Smith, Carlson, and their ilk a bone by, we don’t know (and this is just a hypothetical), deputizing Rudy Giuliani to cook up a RICO investigation of Bill Kristol, following the precedent set by Fani Willis. Kristol deserves it, it would be funny, and it’ll keep the boobs entertained. Hypothetically, of course.

But we’d also encourage our readers not to overreact either to the Don Jr. tweet or the sidelining of Pompeo. The other names floating around for top cabinet positions are all, for the most part, quite good. Former Ambassador to Germany and Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, who has been mentioned as a candidate for either secretary of state or national security advisor, would be an excellent choice for either post. Other top names include Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Ambassador to Japan and current Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty, and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, all of whom would be either good or perfectly serviceable. The only real wild card we’ve seen comes from a report in The American Conservative—which we’re not sure we should even take seriously—that Trump is mulling over Vivek Ramaswamy for secretary of state. We like Vivek, but he’s a foreign policy neophyte whose views change every six weeks, and he would likely get rolled by the bureaucracy. The Carlson faction’s preferred candidate, for what it’s worth, is Elbridge Colby, who has also appeared on a few lists for top administration jobs. But even if Trump gives Colby the nod, we’d caution everyone not to conclude that the sky is falling.

That’s because the concrete news so far has all been encouraging. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Congresswoman Elise Stefanik—a militant critic of the United Nations who has also claimed the scalps of several Ivy League presidents—has accepted Trump’s offer to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In a Sunday article, the paper quoted several named and unnamed Trump aides who suggested that Trump’s second term is likely to continue the “Peace through strength” policy of his first term, including by reviving “maximum pressure” against Iran. As the Journal wrote, referencing the multiple foiled Iranian assassination attempts against the president-elect during the campaign:

Trump remains willing to talk with Iran, one of the former Trump administration officials said, but Tehran is going to pay a very heavy price at the negotiating table. “Maybe you shouldn’t have tried to kill him,” the former official said.

Trump, the Journal notes, has also repeatedly told the Israelis to “do what you have to do” against Iran. Which is a good reminder that Trump’s successful first-term policy was mostly the product of Trump’s instincts—back your allies and kick your enemies in the nuts—and not, as a loud faction of MAGA social media has it, a result of sinister “neocons” and “warmongers” whispering in his ear.

Thursday, Nov. 7

Did Obama Have a Plan?

The more votes trickle in, the more impressive Donald Trump’s achievement on Tuesday looks. As of our writing on Thursday morning, he was winning an absolute majority of the national electorate (50.9% to 47.6%) and leading Harris by 4.7 million in the raw vote total. He has won every swing state that has been called and is leading in the two, Arizona and Nevada, where ballots are still being counted. In Nevada, for instance, more than 90% of ballots are in, but an “overnight mail dump” in Clark County gave Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen a narrow lead over Republican challenger Sam Brown in the state’s Senate race. In Arizona, population 7.4 million, 69% of the vote had been counted as of 10:00 a.m. on Thursday. Florida, three times larger, had posted full results by about 9 p.m. on Tuesday. Still, Kamala Harris has already conceded, and Democratic hopes now rest on the House of Representatives and a small handful of Senate races.

But the result does raise a question: What if the election had been close? Let’s step back to where we were a few days ago. In the run-up to the election, Barack Obama, representatives of the Harris campaign, and top Democratic surrogates such as Bernie Sanders had all issued warnings to their supporters and the media that the winner would most likely not be clear for days:

Indeed, on the Sunday before the election, Bloomberg ran an article on the Democrats’ fear of Trump “prematurely” declaring victory on election night—something that would only be possible, Bloomberg noted, “if there was a substantial error in polling.” Harris campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon issued a video statement warning that Trump could declare victory but telling Harris supporters not to be “fooled” or “worried.” In a Monday briefing with reporters, Dillon reiterated that Trump would attempt to declare an illegitimate victory and said that results for Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—at least one of which Trump needed to win the electoral college—would not be available until Wednesday.

That was paired with a suite of what we might call information operations run through the media in the immediate run-up to Election Day. On Saturday, the “gold standard” pollster Ann Selzer released a poll showing Harris leading deep-red Iowa by 3 percentage points, and in a manner that appeared to validate the Harris campaign’s thesis of the race: that Trump would suffer mass defections among older and college-educated white women, including registered Republicans (in the event, Trump won Iowa by 13.2 percentage points, for a 16-point polling miss). Harris operative and Obama veteran David Plouffe began pumping the media full of bogus stories about a massive last-minute swing to the vice president, on Friday writing on X that late-deciding voters were breaking “by double digits” for Harris and on Monday telling reporters that based on early vote data—which, as we explained here, looked uniformly positive for Trump—Harris could win all seven battlegrounds. On Election Day, handpicked hacks like Politico’s Jonathan Martin were fed vague, unsourced stories about gobsmacking turnout in heavily Democratic Philadelphia, which was sure to net Harris the margin she needed. And after early Election Day reports suggested low Democratic turnout in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee election officials announced Tuesday afternoon that a machine for processing absentee ballots had been left in “insecure conditions” and that the count would have to be restarted from scratch. Absentee ballot results were not delivered until 3:24 a.m. on Wednesday.

None of this mattered for the presidential race. Trump dominated so thoroughly in Pennsylvania that independent analysts were calling it by about 10 p.m. on Tuesday, and the networks followed at about 2:00 a.m. Wednesday, allowing Trump to declare his Election Night victory. But the Milwaukee numbers, which couldn’t save the state for Harris but did flip the Senate race back to Democrats, still proved suspicious, at least according to the anonymous analyst @TonerousHyus (aka “Latinx Adjacent Doctor PhD”).

As Dr. Latinx and his online interlocutors point out, turnout as a percentage of the electorate in Milwaukee has declined in every election cycle since 2008, and the city’s population has declined as well. Moreover, urban turnout was down virtually across the board in 2024 relative to 2020; in Philadelphia, for instance, raw votes dropped by 46,000 from 2020 to 2024. In Milwaukee this year, however, the county reported 89% turnout—up 11% from 2020—and an increase in raw votes relative to 2020, despite the number of registered voters declining by about 25,000. Out of Milwaukee’s 324 wards, 160 reported more than 100% turnout relative to 2020, with more than two dozen reporting 200% turnout and four reporting at least 400% turnout (again relative to 2020). Milwaukee Ward 254 reported 600% of its 2020 turnout, despite Harris underperforming with Black voters across the country. And here’s how turnout looked in parts of the Oak Creek neighborhood:

Wisconsin allows same-day voter registration, which means that turnout over 100% is theoretically possible if officials accept ballots without immediately updating the registration figures as well. That said, these figures are, on their face, very difficult to believe. Dr. Latinx, who was an excellent guide to interpreting the early vote and modeling the electorate, now estimates that the city might have produced about 30,000 fraudulent ballots, though he claims he is still collecting his findings into a white paper that he will submit to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The current margin in the Senate race, which has been called for Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin, is 29,229.

Obligatory note of caution here, which is that there could be innocent explanations for these numbers: data reporting errors or, as some X users have suggested, a massive increase in turnout among Trump voters in Milwaukee. But considering the rhetoric that emerged from the Democratic camp in the run-up to the election—the expectation-setting about days of vote-counting, the “prebunking” of Trump’s claims to victory, and the seeding of bullshit stories of historic urban turnout—we should at least consider the possibility that there was a plan in place to “fortify” a second consecutive election—and that what prevented that outcome was a Trump victory so early and so decisive that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. 

Wednesday, Nov. 6

The Trump Landslide

On Tuesday night, Donald John Trump recaptured the presidency in what may be the greatest second act in American political history. While some states are still counting votes, it seems likely, as of our writing, that he will sweep all seven battleground states and become the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote. The Republicans have already recaptured the Senate and are favored (92.4% chance, according to Decision Desk HQ) to retain their majority in the House of Representatives, though many of the competitive races won’t be called until later this week. But we know enough now to say that last night’s election delivered a decisive popular mandate for Trump and a decisive repudiation of the Democratic Party machine built by Barack Obama.

The election played out essentially how we suggested it might in our Oct. 30 Big Story. Our only regret is telling you not to bet the house on it, because if you’d done that, you would have made a fortune. We cannot, unfortunately, claim any special insight into the numbers; we merely had the luck or good sense to follow the right people, among them anonymous early-vote analysts such as @DataRepublican, @TonerousHyus, and @earlyvotedata on X, as well as allegedly “low-quality” or “right-wing” pollsters such as Rich Baris, Mark Mitchell, and the team at Atlas Intel. For months now, they have been saying that mainstream pollsters and pundits predicting a Harris victory were full of it. They were right. The late Harris surge in the polls was a mirage. The stories that recently appeared in outlets such as Politico about massive last-minute swings to Harris among independents, Hispanics offended by a comic’s Puerto Rico joke, and educated women—all of it was bullshit, invented out of whole cloth by Harris campaign operatives and repeated by some journalists, including Jonathan Martin, as if it were fact. In the end, none of it was real. The election wasn’t even close.

How did Trump do it? We’ve seen some suggestive exit polls showing, for instance, Trump winning more than 40% of the Jewish vote in New York City; that sounds right, but we’d caution that exit polls are notoriously unreliable. County data, on the other hand, is rock solid. So consider the following map from The New York Times, which shows virtually the entire country shifting massively toward Trump and the Republican Party since 2020:

And consider this chart, also from the Times, which breaks down vote shifts by county type:

To put that in simple terms: Pretty much the entire country shifted toward Trump. That includes deep-blue strongholds. The New York Post reported Wednesday morning that Harris was leading New York by a little more than 11% with 95% of votes counted—the worst performance by a Democrat in the Empire State since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Trump cracked 30% in New York City—also the best performance by a Republican since 1988, driven by a 35% improvement in the Bronx relative to 2020 and improvements of 20% and 16.5% in Manhattan and Queens, respectively. Finally, Trump blew the doors off of several heavily minority counties across the country, flipping Florida’s Osceola County (home to a large Puerto Rican population) and Texas’ 97% Hispanic Starr County. He won the latter by nearly 16% after losing it by 5% to Biden—a 21-point swing in four years. It was, as Ryan Girdusky observed on X, the first time Starr County had voted for a Republican since 1892.

We’ve seen some talk of a “realignment election,” with the Republicans broadening their appeal among the multiracial working class while the Democrats become more entrenched in affluent white suburbs. We’ll have to wait for more detailed demographic breakdowns to say for sure, but what the above table suggests to us is something different: a “whole of society” (to borrow a term) rejection of Kamala Harris and her party. Punchbowl’s congressional reporter, Max Cohen, cited a Democratic House source this morning who summed up the result nicely: “This was a total and complete repudiation of the Democratic Party. People are not buying what we’re selling. Period.”

Indeed. In the wake of this election, there will no doubt be calls for unity and restraint from the people who spent the past half-decade attempting to undo the results of the 2016 election, censoring speech, weaponizing the federal government and intelligence agencies against their political opponents, prosecuting Trump and his allies and supporters, and more recently running a full-spectrum propaganda campaign to demonize him and his supporters as fascists and Nazis. They gambled their credibility and any right to a presumption of good faith, pushing America’s institutions to their breaking point in their effort to win. And they lost—“bigly,” as the president-elect might say.

We, too, would like to see national unity, and a healing of the scars of the past decade. But first, there needs to be justice.