Bess Levin: One Of Donald Trump’s Biggest Nightmares Just Came True (No, Not The One In Which He’s Forced To Give Don Jr. And Eric Regular Hugs)

Since Donald Trump kicked off his original bid for the presidency in 2015, he’s gone to comical lengths to keep his tax returns secret. From making up a rule that he couldn’t release them because they were under audit to begging the Supreme Court to come to his rescue to installing a Treasury secretary who basically vowed to shred every copy of his returns into tiny little pieces and then swallow them whole before letting Congress get its hands on them, it’s been a long, ridiculous run. And now, after seven long years, that run has come to its bitter end.

On Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee was officially given access to six years of Trump‘s tax records. This came after the Supreme Court last week rejected the ex-president’s bid to keep them from being released to the legislative body, which first asked the Treasury Department for them way back in 2019. In a statement, a spokesperson for the department told The New York Times that the “Treasury has complied with last week’s court decision.” She did not provide further details, noting only that the records were handed over “consistent with the guidelines of 6103,” which is the section of law that gives the Ways and Means Committee chairman—in this case, Richard Neal—the power to request them.  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/donald-trump-tax-returns-ways-and-means-committee

Mona Charen: Why the Right Needs Hunter Biden

President Biden is hardly the first president to have troubled family members. But Joe Biden didn’t hire Hunter at the White House, and if there is any evidence of the president using official influence on Hunter’s behalf, we haven’t seen it. The Department of Justice under President Trump opened an investigation into Hunter Biden. President Biden has left it alone. It’s ongoing.

The right has a deep psychological need for the Hunter Biden story. They desperately want Joe Biden to be corrupt and for the whole family to be, in Stefanik’s words, “a crime family” because they have provided succor and support to someone who has encouraged political violence since his early rallies in 2015, has stoked hatred of minorities through lies, has used his office for personal gain in the most flagrant fashion, has surrounded himself with criminals and con men, has committed human rights violations against would-be immigrants by separating children from their parents, has pardoned war criminals, has cost the lives of tens of thousands of COVID patients by discounting the virus and peddling quack cures, has revived racism in public discourse, and attempted a violent coup d’etat.

They know it. It gnaws at them. That’s why the Hunter Biden story is their heart’s desire. But here’s something else they need to meditate on: Even if everything they’re alleging about Joe Biden were true; even if he did pull strings to help his son and even profited unjustly thereby, it still wouldn’t amount to a fraction of what Trump did. And it still won’t wash out the “damn’d spot.” https://www.thebulwark.com/why-the-right-needs-hunter-biden/

Rick Wilson: Winning Florida isn’t the flex DeSantis and his stans think it is.



There was a key moment that ensured Donald Trump would re-enter the 2024 race, and it came courtesy of Charlie Crist. There was a moment in the one debate between DeSantis and Crist where Charlie knocked Ron back hard. DeSantis stood there for a noticeably long pause before he could respond. Trump saw that. He processed that. He knew and assessed the weaknesses of DeSantis on the debate stage and in the media space, where he is the unquestionable master. He smelled blood. DeSantis of 2024 is the Jeb Bush of 2016; inevitable, beloved of the money people and the conservative intellectual class…until he’s not. https://politicalwire.com/2022/12/01/the-jeb-bush-of-2024/

Thomas Edsall: Trump Is Unraveling Before Our Eyes, but Will It Matter

How, in a matter of less than a decade, could this once-proud country have evolved to the point at which there is a serious debate over choosing a presidential candidate who is a lifelong opportunist, a pathological and malignant narcissist, a sociopath, a serial liar, a philanderer, a tax cheat who does not pay his bills, a man who socializes with Holocaust deniers, who has pardoned his criminal allies, who encouraged a violent insurrection, who, behind a wall of bodyguards, is a coward, and who, without remorse, continuously undermines American democracy? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/trump-2024-republican-party.html

Ross Douthat: Warnock Wins, and Once Again Trump Loses

Like a miracle sports team, the ’69 Mets or this year’s Moroccan World Cup soccer squad, Trump earned himself a storehouse of belief with his stunning upset in 2016. That the Republican Party then lost the House in 2018 — well, that was to be expected, since incumbent parties generally struggle in the midterms. That the G.O.P. lost the presidency in 2020 — well, there was a plague, mass protests, rejiggered election rules and a general atmosphere of craziness, and anyway the polls were wrong and Trump almost pulled it out in the Electoral College, the miracle juice still there but just not quite enough.

But to disappoint again in 2022, in a context where many Republicans expected to do extremely well — and more, to have so many of Trump’s preferred candidates flop while other Republicans won easily — well, at a certain point the memory of 2016 fades, and the storehouse of faith and good will is depleted. At a certain point even a potent demagogue needs to post some actual wins to hold his coalition together. At a certain point — maybe it isn’t here yet, but it’s closer — the leader who loses just starts to look like, well, a loser. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/warnock-walker-trump-georgia.html

A.B. Stoddard: Yes, He Will Burn It All Down

Trump rode to power by fighting the Republican establishment because he understood that it was weak. He realized that whatever Republican elites might say, they’ll always come to heel. Grab ’em by the insurrection. You can do whatever you want.

Does the Republican establishment seem more powerful today than it was in 2015? And if, for some reason, Republican elites do hold out this time and line up against him, is there any reason to think that Trump will not torch them all on the way out the door?

When Republican elites say they want to move on from Trump because he hurts their party’s electoral chances, they’re telegraphing their own vulnerability. They’re admitting that they care more about winning Republican seats than anything else. Donald Trump does not care if the GOP ever wins again. And this gives him leverage over them.

If Republicans don’t understand this already, they soon will.  https://www.thebulwark.com/yes-he-will-burn-it-all-down/

Jonathan Chait: Trump Brought Nazis Into the GOP. DeSantis Won’t Expel Them

Trump has woven white-supremacist themes into his rhetoric, sharing Groyper videos and hailing his Nazi-loving loyalists as J6 martyrs. Pro-Trump Republican members of Congress such as Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene — now a Republican power broker who is set to have her committee privileges restored by the new GOP majority — participated in a white-nationalist conference. The status of these ideas is revealed by the refusal of the party’s leadership to cast them out.

The Republican mainstream has shrugged off Trump as an idiosyncratic personality whose behavior indicates no deeper racist or authoritarian tendency within the party. They have accordingly presented DeSantis as the solution. “DeSantis would be a Republican nominee without Donald Trump’s worst and most destructive impulses and habits, Jim Geraghty argues.

But far from restoring the party’s pre-Trump identity, DeSantis would reify its Trump-era transformation. One way he would do this would be to carry forward Trump’s goal of turning the state into an Orbanist weapon to entrench Republican rule. But the other is to preserve the new coalition Trump created. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/donald-trump-nick-fuentes-ye-white-nationalist-nazi-anti-semite-ron-desantis.html

Tina Nguyen: Has Trump Already Lost ’24?

The Trump ’24 campaign, after all, was hardly off to a rollicking start even before Ye and his entourage rolled into Mar-a-Lago. First there was Trump’s deflating campaign announcement—a long-winded diatribe that prompted multiple audience members to attempt a mid-speech Irish exit—only a few days after a dismal midterm outcome. Trump had already been blamed by many in the G.O.P. for putting his thumb on the scale for a half-dozen oddball or extremist gubernatorial and midterm candidates, including Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker, among others, who likely cost Republicans the Senate. In the days and weeks afterward, Trump spent the bulk of his time holed up in Mar-a-Lago, shit-posting about stolen elections and imagined enemies, his own mounting legal headaches, and the gall of would-be primary challengers.

That Trump closed out this second week on the trail bunkered down in Mar-a-Lago with Ye has only punctuated the growing fear among allies and insiders that the ex-president, in the throes of his post-Twitter and post-double-impeachment woes, cares far more about his own personal relevance than his party (duh) or even his own potential victory.

Said a GOP strategist: “Set aside the Fuentes thing. He is a relatively obscure figure, despite the attempts of the press to make him a household name. But Kanye alone—what are you doing? Why are you having dinner with him? What’s the upside here? We know the downside. He’s mentally disturbed. And if the answer is oh, he’s my friend and I’m trying to give him some tough love and advice, that’s fine. You can do that over the phone.” https://puck.news/has-trump-already-lost-24/

Rick Wilson: Trapped: The GOP Is Stuck With Trump

The biggest fantasy of the Republican world is that they finally bred the correct mutant strain of Trumpism, authoritarianism, and cute family in the form of Ron DeSantis.

Allow me a moment to detonate that dream. First off, in person, Ron DeSantis is a strange no-eye-contact oddball. Is he smart? At least academically, but smart and electable aren’t an overlapping Venn diagram. Is he a great candidate? Get the fuck out of here. A conservative governor with infinite financial resources at his disposal running in a conservative state against a spent-force three-time loser hated by both his old party and his new party?  https://resolutesquare.com/articles/5TxumAQ2xQmuDiXNujcn6T/maga-trump-election-gop-desantis-younkin-mccarthy

Peter Baker: Trump Embraces Extremism as He Seeks to Reclaim Office

Former President Donald J. Trump once again made clear on Thursday night exactly where he stands in the conflict between the American justice system and the mob that ransacked the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power nearly two years ago.

He stands with the mob.

Mr. Trump sent a video statement of support to a fund-raiser hosted by a group calling itself the Patriot Freedom Project on behalf of families of those charged with attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “People have been treated unconstitutionally, in my opinion, and very, very unfairly, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he said. The country, he warned, “is going communist.”

The video underscored just how much the former president has aligned himself with forces that used to be outside the mainstream of American politics as he seeks to reclaim the White House through a rematch with President Biden in 2024. With the Justice Department targeting him as well as some of his violent allies, Mr. Trump’s anti-government jeremiads lately sound like those once relegated to the outer edges of the political spectrum. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/us/politics/trump-extremism-candidacy.html

Ron Brownstein: The role of extremist white nationalists in the GOP may be approaching an inflection point.

The backlash against former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist, anti-Semite, and Christian nationalist, has compelled more Republican officeholders than at any point since the Charlottesville riot in 2017 to publicly condemn those extremist views.

Yet few GOP officials have criticized the former president personally—much less declared that Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and Ye, the rapper (formerly known as Kanye West) who has become a geyser of anti-Semitic bile, renders him unfit to serve as president again. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/12/gop-lawmakers-distancing-extremism-trump-fuentes-ye/672328/

The Twitter Files Revealed One Thing: Elon Musk Is Trapped

Moderating Social Media platforms is hard. Just ask the former Twitter employees whose decision to block a 2020 New York Post story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter was picked over yesterday in tweets from Substack writer Matt Taibbi.

Or ask Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner and self-declared Chief Twit, who hyped Taibbi’s tweets, which were littered with screenshots claiming to show internal company messages. Despite their billing as evidence of a history of political bias at the company, the records depicted people caught in a trap that now ensnares Musk himself, who must make any tough decisions about what to allow on Twitter.

The tweet thread, which Taibbi dubbed the “Twitter Files,” shows company executives rushing to make a thorny moderation call in a no-win situation. With a presidential election looming, the New York Post reported that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden held evidence that he had inappropriately attempted to broker a meeting between a business client and his father when Joe Biden was vice president of the US.

What did the world learn about Twitter’s handling of the incident from the so-called Twitter Files? Not much. After all, Twitter reversed its decision two days later, and then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the moderation decision was “wrong.” Instead, the thread provided fresh fodder for conspiracy theories that have swirled around the laptop saga, including the insinuation—not backed by evidence—that government officials intervened to suppress the Post story.

Yet the most salient lesson from Taibbi’s thread may apply to Musk himself, who has taken to making big moderation decisions at Twitter almost unilaterally.

In the past two weeks Musk reinstated the account of former US president Donald Trump based on the results of a Twitter poll and unblocked a series of other users previously banned from the site for breaching content rules. Musk also championed the return of Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, whose account was restricted in October after Ye posted an anti-Semitic tweet. (Restricted accounts still appear on the platform, but its users can’t post or interact with them.)

Yet Musk this week announced that Ye would be suspended all over again after tweeting an image of a swastika inside the Star of David. His reasoning, which academics and journalists have called out as unclear, was that the post was a breach of Twitter’s rule against incitement to violence.

Like the Twitter staffers who deliberated on the New York Post story in 2020, Musk was caught in a tough spot and appeared to feel under pressure to make a decision. And, as with those past arbiters of Twitter policy, the behind-the-scenes action seemed a little messy.

Musk’s work as a moderator has undeniably drawn more attention to the platform he is trying to reinvigorate. So did his participation in the Twitter Files, which he insinuated in tweets might provide evidence, somehow, of a breach of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. “Transparency is the key to trust,” Musk wrote last night. It is unclear whether he will apply the same rule to his own stewardship of Twitter. https://www.wired.com/story/the-twitter-files-revealed-one-thing-elon-musk-is-trapped/