Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy
Journalists who turn themselves into political activists inadvertently undermine democratic institutions.
Yascha Mounk

But while all of us, including journalists, may have a civic obligation to fight for the preservation of our political system in our role as citizens, it is a category mistake to assume that journalists should place that aspiration at the center of their professional identity. Democracies depend on having a few widely trusted news outlets that can objectively inform the public about current affairs. The trust which citizens have traditionally placed in these outlets was premised on a belief that their journalists are at least striving to present events in an even-handed manner. The moment they recognize that this is no longer the case, that trust is shattered—and any hope of building political life on a basis of shared facts vanishes.

As it happens, the reluctance to level with readers ultimately accomplished the opposite of what was intended. It allowed Biden to stay in the race long enough to make the entire Democratic establishment complicit in covering up the true state of his mental health. And it made it virtually impossible to stage an open primary to choose his successor.

Rubio, Gabbard, and Gaetz. . . Oh My!
Oliver Wiseman, The Free Press

But first, three presidential picks—and what they say about the second Trump term.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced three more headline-grabbing cabinet nominees. Each represents a strand of the unlikely MAGA alliance that triumphed last week and is set to run Washington in the coming years.

The Submission Chain: The Transitive Property and Trump
The Transitive Property and Trump

“Owning the libs” does not get us far in international politics. Usually democratic power is about multiplication: we bring people together, we can pass some laws, people might benefit.  But Trump’s domestic power is division, making America much weaker than it would be in foreign affairs.  The United States is strong as a republic (flawed though that republic might be).  It is weaker when its ruler aspires to be a divider and a dictator.  And thus the very power that Trump voters see in Trump is, seen from any external perspective, weakness.  This is how the next step of the formula is possible:

There is no conceivable argument from US national interests to propose Tulsi Gabbard for that most critical position.  She has zero relevant experience. The only thing for which she is known is her support of Putin (and Assad). Her candidacy is, quite literally, a proposal that can only have emerged in Moscow, where she is known as a “Russian agent” or as “our girlfriend.”

Trump’s Shock, Mock, and Roll ‘Em Strategy
The president-elect isn’t worried about Senate Republicans growing a backbone. They’re unlikely to prove him wrong.
William Kristol

If you’re surprised, you’re a dupe. President Trump is going to do in his second term what he said he’d do on the campaign trail, and what he tried fitfully to do in his first term. He’s going to turn the federal government into an instrument of MAGA policy and grievance. He’s going to pursue retribution against enemies. He’s going to destroy what remains of the older norms that guide the operations of the government, and of the institutional checks that constrain the abuse of power.

He told us this was his plan. The only surprise is how quickly he’s acting on it.

And Trump is their master. As Rep. Troy Nehls (R–Tex.) said yesterday, “His mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word. . . . If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That’s it.”

6 Things About Trump’s Hawkish New Defense Secretary That Should Scare the Hell Out Of You
Mehdi Hassan, Zeteo

President-elect Donald J. Trump sent shockwaves through the Pentagon this week, after announcing his pick for secretary of defense: Fox weekend host Pete Hegseth, who has zero experience in government.

But frankly, it’s not the lack of experience or his association with right-wing media that should worry people the most – it’s his clear love for war, war crimes, and war criminals.

With apologies to Donald Rumsfeld, he may be about to become the most extreme defense secretary in American history.

Washington insiders are less certain than ever that the second Trump administration will be more professionalized than the first.

And then, in the span of less than 24 hours, Trump added, one after the other, a series of Cabinet picks that were not just eyebrow-raising but fear-inducing for much of Washington — and even some within the GOP.

It culminated with Trump tapping Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general on Wednesday, selecting one of the House’s top flamethrowers and grandstanders who himself has been under investigation by the chamber’s ethics committee. Trump chose former congresswoman and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as his director of National Intelligence, and Fox News host Pete Hegseth as Defense secretary. Both Hegseth and Gabbard served in the military, though each were dark-horse selections by Trump known more for being media personalities than for their influence on national security matters.

I think out of deference to us, he issued his resignation letter effective immediately,’ Johnson said

The speaker pointed out that Florida state law gave the governor “about an eight-week period” to fill a House vacancy and that by doing so, “we may be able to fill that seat as early as Jan. 3.”

But multiple Republican senators have already signaled they have some heartburn over Gaetz, an outspoken bomb-thrower who was previously under a yearlong DOJ investigation stemming from accusations he had a sexual relationship with a minor. The DOJ ultimately did not press charges.

President-elect Trump picked Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for attorney general for one, big, telling reason: Gaetz will proudly do the dirty work on controversial legal topics that others won’t.

• Why it matters: Get used to this. It’s your future foretold: On some topics, Trump wants to seem reasonable. On others — like anything related to his suspicion of a hostile “deep state” — he demands his own personal, controllable wrecking ball.

Republicans hope Gaetz is simply a sacrificial sucker, put up to be rejected so Trump can smuggle through a controversial but more acceptable alternative. Perhaps. But Gaetz is a Trump favorite and Mar-a-Lago regular.

• Trump has assurances from Senate Republican leaders that he can use a controversial workaround, recess appointments, to smuggle in unpopular picks, at least for a few years.

Once I recovered from the initial shock, I spent some time trying to figure out why Trump would do this. There are three reasons I can think of:

1. Gaetz is a loyal solder who will do what Trump wants — always.
2. To troll liberals whose heads will explode at the very idea of Gaetz as AG
3. To dare Republican Senators to oppose him (and his picks) publicly

It’s that last reason that I think is the real motivation here — mixed, undoubtedly, with a little of #1 and #2.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has been elected Senate majority leader, setting the stage for him to replace retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who has held the top Senate GOP leadership job for the past 18 years.

Thune has served as Senate Republican whip, the No. 2-ranking position in the Senate GOP leadership, since 2019, and largely managed operation of the Senate floor after McConnell suffered a concussion from a fall in 2023.

Thune beat Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) by a vote of 29 to 24, according to two sources familiar with the vote.

First, the 2024 election was extremely close. Once all the votes are counted, it will probably end up being the closest popular vote contest since 2000. In addition, it’s possible that Donald Trump will fall below 50% of the popular vote. Any loss is difficult, but this is hardly the 49-state drubbing that Democrats endured against Ronald Reagan in 1984.

In addition, the 2024 results fall pretty close to the outcome predicted by election models that were based on economic fundamentals. This suggests that voters were registering dissatisfaction with poor economic conditions rather than offering a wholesale rejection of the Democratic ideology.

And even if the public has become less enamored of liberal governance over the past four years, this is both natural and temporary. Political scientists have long observed the thermostatic nature of American politics. That’s a fancy way of saying that when a Republican occupies the White House, the public becomes more liberal. Conversely, under Democratic presidents, the American people become more conservative. Given this pattern, it seems very likely that in four years the public will be in a more liberal mood.

One reason Trump supporters are undercounted could be that Trump disparages pollsters and the media, creating a sense of distrust that could dissuade people from participating in a survey.

“The so-called low-propensity voters, which Trump gambled on showing up, did vote for him,” Miringoff added. “Likely voter models, which incorporated enthusiasm, understated these low-propensity voters. And although it looks like there were an unusually high number of ticket splitters, it was really ‘Bullet Voters’ — folks who voted for Trump and then left. This resulted in Democrats doing better in Senate contests compared to the top of the ticket.”

Another factor that could have thrown pollsters off of Trump’s scent: Trump won late deciders by double-digits.

The transparency bill would require that labs publicly release the following documents:

1. Responsible scaling policies—documents outlining a company’s risk governance framework as model capabilities improve. Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind already have published such documents.
2. Model Specifications—technical documents detailing the developer’s desired behavior of their models.

An overwhelming majority of Americans say they’re concerned about the treatment of animals raised for meat, and many believe they can help by simply selecting from one of the many brands that advertise their chicken or pork as “humane.”

But nearly all farmed animals in the US live on mega factory farms, where they’re mutilated without pain relief and fattened up in dark, overcrowded warehouses before being shipped off to the slaughterhouse. Only a tiny sliver of livestock are actually reared on the small, higher-welfare farms that many companies conjure on their packaging  — and even those operations can be rife with animal suffering.

This summer, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) had an opportunity to fix the false advertising problem pervasive in the meat aisle when it published updated guidelines that companies must follow when making animal welfare claims on their labels.