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 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
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 In Deep Into 2020
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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