Washington Post:
Matt Gaetz attorney general confirmation was in doubt ahead of withdrawal
Trump’s pick to run the Justice Department faced an all-but-impossible path to confirmation, even in a GOP-led Senate next year.
Republican senators who expressed skepticism about the Gaetz nomination will now have to decide whether they defy President-elect Donald Trump again on other picks, including Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard leading the intelligence community and Robert F. Kennedy for the Department of Health and Human Services. Later on Thursday, Trump named Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida and one of his lawyers in his first impeachment trial, as his new pick for the role.
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
Whether hate-filled TV ads helped elect Trump is no reason to stop fighting for the humanity of 1 million transgender Americans.
While Trump’s narrow but decisive win over Democrat Kamala Harris is still Topic A, the early fights over the president-elect’s off-the-wall cabinet picks and TV debates over just how anti-democratically the Trump regime might govern are still an abstraction to most Americans. It’s very different in the transgender community. There, leaders like Sanchez are having gut-wrenching conversations with people wondering if they need to accelerate major life moves, like gender-affirming surgery or a legal name change, before an openly hostile government arrives on Jan. 20.
Indeed, fears of what life might be like under Trump 47 for at least 1 million transgender Americans already began to hit home this week when the community’s one bright star on Election Day — a victory for the first-ever transgender member of Congress, Delaware’s Rep.-elect Sarah McBride — quickly became a symbol of the GOP’s determination to turn ugly campaign rhetoric into harsh governing reality.
Jay Michaelson/Forward:
Just about every interpretation of Trump’s narrow election victory is wrong
What happened on Nov. 5 was not a referendum on anything other than discontent
Poppycock.
The data doesn’t support any of this I-told-you-so-ism. Every exit poll and dataset has shown that — much to the consternation of progressives — economic insecurity and dread drove swing voters to the right. Not only that, but this has been the case in every developed country this year. Post-pandemic inflation has hit people hard, and they are throwing the bastards out of office, whoever the bastards are. And in fact, Trump’s victory was narrower than most.
Sure, Republicans voted for an immigration crackdown, restrictions on abortion, and the rest. But those votes were already baked into pre-election polling. The swing voters — the ones that surprised pollsters and delivered the victory — voted on the economy.
POLITICO:
‘I think Elon may get frustrated fairly quickly’
Rep. Ro Khanna casts doubt on Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency and its small-government ambitions.
“There are a lot of commissions that have recommended a lot of things for less wasteful government, but they tend to be just that, commissions,” Khanna said. “And I think the real question here will be how effective will he be going after true waste and true abuse like you have in terms of defense contractors.”
On today’s POLITICO Tech podcast, Khanna also asserts Capitol Hill’s control of the federal purse and explains why Democrats need a post-election message to voters focused on using artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technology to rebuild the economy.
Listen to the full interview on POLITICO Tech.
Tressie McMillan Cottom/New York Times:
How an Empty Internet Gave Us Tradwives and Trump
If you are looking to understand Donald Trump’s unusual hold on our cultural politics, look to the tradwives, podcast bros and wellness influencers.
Tradwives are the social-media generation’s iteration of the 1950s white, suburban, middle-class housewife. They glorify domestic labor and the wealth that makes a single-income nuclear family seem like a respite from the paid labor market for women. With clear, if implicit, echoes of the Make America Great Again movement, a big part of the fantasy tradwives sell is that women can once again enjoy the trappings of upper-class consumption without the dangerous density of urban life or the hard labor of rural life.
The idyllic, impeccably groomed stay-at-home mom is an enduring symbol of the 1950s economy. It is also a fairy tale. As numerous feminist texts have detailed, the few women who did have access to that life were often miserable.
Sam Wolfson/The Guardian:
Don’t underestimate the Rogansphere. His mammoth ecosystem is Fox News for young people
Steve Bannon always said the doctrine behind Breitbart was that “politics is downstream of culture” and that to change politics one must first change culture. It’s a doctrine that guided Trump to victory during his first campaign, mostly with older white voters, but has been taken to a new apex by these podcasters. They blend liberal and conservative culture, blurring the lines of acceptability and making figures like Trump more palatable to those who might have previously abhorred him.
[Theo] Von, for example, has recently interviewed Trump, the conservative commentator Tomi Lahren, Robert F Kennedy Jr, JD Vance and the psychologist Jordan Peterson but also the softboy British producer James Blake, the progressive comedian John Mulaney and the nonfiction darling Malcolm Gladwell.
These podcasters are nothing like the extremist far-right white nationalist and men’s rights influencers, such as Andrew Tate and Gavin McInnes, who are explicit in their hate speech. Instead, they feature left-leaning and comic guests alongside hard-R Republican ones and then include extreme voices, normalising them by association (McInnes appeared on Rogan and Andrew Tate has appeared on Carlson; Rogan says Tate “says very wise things” among “ridiculous shit”). Kill Tony has an incredibly diverse mix of regular comedians, including a huge number of comics with disabilities. It also has lots of white comics who say the N-word. It’s not simple.
19th News:
Harris lost support from women overall — but not women over 65
Preserving Social Security and caregiving were decisive factors in their support for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
These women were motivated by the same issues that were important to the overall electorate, like the economy, threats to democracy, immigration and abortion, something central to Harris’ failed bid for the presidency. They were, however, more likely to name priorities like caregiving, aging in place and preserving the government retirement savings program Social Security as decisive factors, according to an AARP analysis of an AP VoteCast survey of 120,000 registered voters.
The specific priorities of women over 65 could explain why they voted for Harris at higher rates than men their age and moved more in Harris’ direction than younger women.
Cliff Schecter on Matt Gaetz:
