“Elon Musk has become the first person to reach $400 billion in net worth, the latest milestone for the world’s richest individual,” Bloomberg reports.
“The most recent catalyst was an insider share sale of his privately held SpaceX, which boosted Musk’s net worth by roughly $50 billion in one fell swoop to $439.2 billion.”
A new CNN poll finds most Americans “expect President-elect Donald Trump to do a good job upon his return to the White House next month (54%) and a majority approves of how he’s handling the presidential transition so far (55%).”
“The findings suggest the president-elect has earned a honeymoon period with the public as he prepares to return to the White House after being voted out four years ago amid broadly negative approval ratings of his own.”
Politico: “The Pennsylvania senator appears to be the first Democrat in the chamber to join President-elect Donald Trump’s social media site.”
“In his ‘first truth,’ Fetterman advocated for Trump to be pardoned from the New York hush money case for which he was found guilty of 34 felony counts, comparing the case to Hunter Biden’s and saying they were ‘both bullshit.'”
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Marshall Project: “Earlier this fall, Florida officials ordered transgender women in the state’s prisons to submit to breast exams. As part of a new policy for people with gender dysphoria, prison medical staff ranked the women’s breast size using a scale designed for adolescents.”
“Those whose breasts were deemed big enough were allowed to keep their bras. Everyone else had to surrender theirs, along with anything else considered ‘female,’ such as women’s underwear and toiletry items.”
“The incoming Trump administration intends to rescind a long-standing policy that has prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from arresting immigrants at or near so-called sensitive locations, such as houses of worship, schools and hospitals or events like funerals, weddings and public demonstrations without approval from supervisors,” NBC News reports.
“President-elect Donald Trump plans to rescind the policy as soon as the first day he is in office.”
“House Democrats launched a new effort Wednesday to recruit challengers for Republican districts in Arizona, Michigan, California and Virginia that were not contested this year, as a first step to taking back control of the House after falling just three seats short,” the Washington Post reports.
“Eric Trump flew across the world to headline a cryptocurrency conference in the United Arab Emirates this week and told thousands of enthusiastic attendees that he and his father, the U.S. president-elect, were effectively working in tandem to push crypto, a business sector the family is directly invested in,” the New York Times reports.
“The message was notable because it contrasted drastically with the promise the family made when Donald Trump entered the White House four years ago, to keep business and government operations separate.”
Don Moynihan: “In the short run, we should be very worried about what Trump will do with a military repurposed to serve him, and not the constitution. In the long run, the politicization of the American military will undermine its capacity.”
“What happens if every new President distrusts the generals in place because they were selected via a politicized process? They then choose their own, adding to the instability in leadership. Under such circumstances, expect a Putinification of the military, where officers are afraid to tell the President the truth.”
A man was arrested Tuesday night and accused of assaulting Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) in a Capitol Hill office building, the Washington Post reports.
Said Mace: “I was physically accosted tonight on Capitol grounds over my fight to protect women.”
“Wisconsin prosecutors filed 10 additional felony charges Tuesday against two attorneys and an aide to President-elect Donald Trump who advised Trump in 2020 as part of a plan to submit paperwork falsely claiming that the Republican had won the battleground state that year,” the AP reports.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes the CIA had a role in assassinating his uncle, President John F. Kennedy — part of RFK Jr.’s motivation for pushing his daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, for deputy CIA director,” Axios reports.
“RFK Jr. has been telling people that Fox Kennedy — his presidential campaign manager, who is married to his son Bobby Kennedy III — would help get to the bottom of the JFK assassination.”
“Donald Trump is slated to ring the New York Stock Exchange’s opening bell on Thursday, presenting a president-elect who has vowed to rejuvenate the US economy a celebratory photo opportunity at an iconic symbol of American capitalism,” Bloomberg reports.
“Diplomatic and depressed as they have been in public, a small group of Democratic governors are deep into behind-the-scenes preparations and deliberations over how to balance the politics of pushing back on what they are expecting from President-elect Donald Trump’s next turn in the White House,” CNN reports.
“Since long before the election, they’ve been poring through Project 2025 — it’s helpful, several Democratic governors told CNN, to have a blueprint in public. They’ve been studying their own executive powers and state laws. They’ve been collaborating on how to shame any extreme Trump actions in the court of public opinion, rather than debating the principles, as often happened when Democrats took on Trump last time.”
“President-elect Donald Trump bolstered his national profile on NBC’s The Apprentice before first running for the White House. Now he’s turned his second transition into a casting call, pulling from the ranks of entertainment and media to find loyal allies to carry out his agenda,” Bloomberg reports.
“While critics say some of Trump’s picks are short on experience for the agencies they are being tapped to run, they offer to bring a different set of qualities, including telegenic looks or a flair for showmanship that play well on screen. Trump makes clear he values those attributes, given his own political rise has been heavy on theatrics.”
Jon Favreau: “Even if we don’t agree with the views of leftists or liberals or Never Trumpers or MAGA Republicans, we understand them (or at least we think we do). The people whose views we don’t understand tend to be the people who simply don’t follow politics that closely.”
“And yet, that’s most Americans.”
“This majority still votes, but not in every election. They typically vote for the same party, but not always. Their political beliefs can be all over the map: left on some issues, right on others; willing to compromise on some issues, not on others. They tend to be less partisan (which doesn’t mean they’re centrist), less ideological (which doesn’t mean they’re moderate), and less likely to see politics as a black-and-white, life-and-death struggle with clear heroes and villains (which doesn’t mean they don’t care). They’re also less likely to have a four-year college degree, which is now the best predictor of how Americans vote and the central divide in American politics—a divide that continues to grow.”
“The Democratic Party is currently on the wrong side of an unforgiving math problem. Fewer than four in 10 Americans have graduated college, and that number is even smaller in the battleground states that decide the presidency and control of Congress. In each of the past three elections, Trump has picked up millions of new votes from Americans without a degree who had previously supported Democrats. And every time, Democrats have taken comfort in explanations that, although plausible, absolve us from the hard work of winning back these voters.”
“We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before world war two. Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.”
–Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), in an interview with the Financial Times.
Andrew Egger: “How are House Republicans taking the news that Donald Trump wants to see their colleagues who served on the January 6th Committee put in jail? For a remarkable number, the response has been somewhere between open and enthusiastic.”
Said Rep. James Comer (R-KY): “With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable.”
Said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN): “If they broke the law, then they should be imprisoned. Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely.”
“A thirst to see one’s colleagues imprisoned does not make for the most congenial of workplaces. One has to imagine that the next session of Congress could turn cantankerous quickly, owing to Trump’s insistence that the lawmakers who investigated him be jailed—and his repeated lies about their conduct.”
“Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with killing Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthCare, was found with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting,“ the New York Times reports.
Wrote Mangione: “What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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