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@ISIDEWITH submitted…2mos2MO
Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: “You have more to lose than she does.” And now he’s lost it. Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.In the hours after Harris’s defeat, I called and texted members of Biden’s inner circle to hear their postmortems of the campaign. They sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite. They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view.Although the Biden advisers I spoke with were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign, based on the months they’d spent strategizing in anticipation of the election. Embedded in their autopsies was their own unstated faith that they could have done better.One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump’s oligarchical allegiances. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, “We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.
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Republicans on Wednesday elected Senator John Thune of South Dakota, their No. 2 in the chamber, to serve as majority leader in the next Congress, choosing a G.O.P. institutionalist to replace Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate’s longest-serving leader.In elevating Mr. Thune, 63, G.O.P. senators turned to a traditional Republican in the mold of Mr. McConnell, and rejected a challenger more aligned with President-elect Donald J. Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.Mr. Thune made his case in an opinion essay on Fox News on Monday, arguing that Senate Republicans needed to fulfill Mr. Trump’s promises to voters in order to keep the support of a multiethnic, multiracial coalition that swept him into a second term.“If we fail to deliver on President Trump’s priorities, we will lose their support,” he wrote. “They have trusted us with their votes. Now we have to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”He also pitched colleagues on his plans to open up the Senate floor to more debate and amendments and said he would meet regularly with Speaker Mike Johnson.The newly elected leader will take the reins during a critical time for the Senate GOP. The party has a highly ambitious legislative agenda, including top priorities like tax cuts, the debt limit, government spending and more. Republican lawmakers are also openly eyeing a budget reconciliation package — a limited-use procedural option that would allow Republicans to pass a consequential bill without Democratic support. That’ll require major collaboration and potential deal-making from GOP leaders, both in the House and the Senate.
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CNN commentator and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said President-elect Donald Trump’s team missed Pete Hegseth’s payoff to a sexual assault accuser when they vetted him to be secretary of defense.Hegseth is among a raft of cabinet picks facing tough confirmations, and who aren’t being subjected to the customary FBI checks, instead being vetted by private firms. Over the weekend, Hegseth’s attorney dropped the bomb that there was a confidential settlement with a woman who accused the former Fox News host of sexual assault. On Monday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Haberman revealed that her sources in Trump world did not know about the payoff, which was missed in the vetting “because it was a private settlement”HABERMAN: There’s more concern from some people around Trump than there is from Trump himself, about this whole issue. Trump has really dug in, and has told advisers that he is going to stick with Hegseth. Now, we’ll see if anything else emerges.They did do a vet, we are told. This did not show up, this issue, because it was a private settlement, according to the people, who were briefed on what took place. Trump really likes Pete Hegseth. But this did introduce the thing Trump doesn’t like, which is an element of surprise and a negative headline. And so, we will see where this goes.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has taken to Instagram to listen to split-ticket voters from last week’s election, posting a question box asking “People who supported [President-elect] Trump & me OR voted Trump/Dem, tell us why” on her story. She received a variety of responses from her 8.1 million followers and beyond, citing reasons ranging from Trump and Ocasio-Cortez’s “care for the working class” to the war in Gaza. “I’m LISTENING,” she wrote. “Sometimes you gotta dig in and see it to understand and adapt! Even if it makes you want to barf.”“I support you and did this. Felt like I didn’t have a choice after Biden’s administration,” one reply said. “You are focused on the real issues people care about. Similar to Trump populism in some ways,” another said.“This is why I say that we should be signing up to knock on doors and be on the phones,” Ocasio-Cortez said in another story in response to a comment that said responses were “blowing [their] mind. “If you’re only tuning in to [mass media], you will think that most people fall along this spectrum, and a lot of people don’t.” She added that door knocking and phone banking are not a “junior thing” that politicians should grow out of. She also posted stories also asking about where leftists and Trump-supporting voters get their news from and shared some of those responses as well. Ocasio-Cortez glided to victory in her reelection race in New York last week, and will continue to represent the state’s 14th Congressional District.
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JD Vance explained what comes next after Trump is elected. The following interview was filmed before the election:1. Trump will fire all the people within the federal government who will work to obstruct him.2. Media will then work to manipulate the public and political leaders into not doing things the American people actually want.3. Trump will start mass deportations which will trigger the media to release fake public polls claiming Americans don't actually support mass deportations even though they do.The fight just started.
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Matt Gaetz announced he is withdrawing his name from consideration as President-elect Donald Trump's pick as attorney general, noting in a social media post that his nomination had become a distraction.Gaetz held multiple meetings with GOP senators over the past couple of days as he sought to game out his chances of getting confirmed.
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