Donald Trump’s NFT digital trading card collection sold out early Friday, the day after its initial release, Coin Desk reports.
CNET: “Though the NFTs were widely mocked by both Trump supporters and detractors alike, all 45,000 sold out in around 12 hours… At $99 each, that means $4.45 million has been raised. The collection’s creators also receive 10% of every sale on secondary markets.”
“Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has a simple message for Republican investigators lining up to grill him on climate change and electric vehicles: Bring it on,” Axios reports.
“The anticipated GOP hearings next year will give the former South Bend mayor the very thing he needs — attention — to raise his profile in a crowded Democratic field in 2024 if President Biden decides not to run.”
“Buttigieg is the rare Democrat who not only agrees to appear on conservative media like Fox News, but actually seems to enjoy it. The hearings will give him another platform he’s eager to use.”
“Struggling to unify after another disappointing election, the Republican National Committee is consumed by an increasingly nasty leadership fight as the GOP navigates its delicate relationship with former President Donald Trump,” the AP reports.
“With a vote for RNC chair not scheduled until late January, the public feud may get worse before it gets better.”
Said RNC member Ron Kaufman: “It’ll be ugly as hell for a while.”
Even Steve Bannon has had enough of Donald Trump’s latest stunts — demanding everyone behind his wacky NFT collection be “fired today,” the New York Post reports.
Said Bannon, on his podcast: “I can’t do this anymore.”
Republican pollster David Winston writes in Roll Call that the GOP’s “election problems are strategic more than tactical.”
“Mail-in and early voting, while worth exploring, are convenient scapegoats that miss the bigger problems: an overreliance on outdated, negative messaging when voters want positive solutions to their problems, and campaign strategies based more on personality than policy.”
Amy Walter: “In other words, simply running hundreds of millions of dollars tying Democrats to the unpopular president wasn’t enough to beat them. Republicans needed to give voters a reason to support Republican candidates beyond being a check on an unpopular president.”
Cook Political Report: “Sinema’s change in alignment comes just as the 2024 Senate map — already brutal for Democrats — is coming into focus. She was already going to face a bruising primary where she was the underdog to win re-nomination, given how many times she’s infuriated her now-former caucus and the more liberal wing of the party, many of whom helped her in 2018 turn Arizona’s Senate seat blue for the first time in more than 40 years.”
“However, her odds for re-election were already bleak, with Rep. Ruben Gallego vocally exploring a primary challenge where he would have been the favorite over the incumbent. And now the prospect of running as an independent gives her an equally hard path to victory. Polls have shown her underwater across party identification.”
A New York Times investigation shows how Donald Trump stored classified documents in high-traffic areas at Mar-a-Lago, where guests may have been within feet of the materials.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer did their first-ever joint interview with CNN.
It’s worth watching, but this line from Pelosi was great: “If he had a regular smartphone, we could reduce the number of conversations, because I could just text him.”
A New York Post editorial calls Donald Trump a con artist, after his “major announcement” releasing $99 digital trading cards.
“Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us 1,438 times, and it may finally be too much.”
Also interesting is that “grifter” is now trending on the Political Dictionary.
Aaron Blake: “One of the undersold trends in American politics is just how narrowly elections are suddenly being decided. After a series of mostly wave elections from 2006 to 2014, three of the past four elections have been decided by exceedingly fine margins.”
“Shifts of less than one percentage point across the board could have flipped both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The current and next Congresses account for two of the five most closely divided Houses in the past century, with either side winning just a nine-seat majority. And the Senate has moved from a 50-50 Senate controlled by Democrats to a 51-49 Senate controlled by Democrats.”
Peter Thiel has made his first public comments on this year’s U.S. midterms, declaring the results “a depressing disaster” after plowing more than $30 million into Republican races, the Financial Times reports.
Said Thiel: “If you can’t sort of win in that kind of a context, how are you ever going to win?”
“Thousands of people rallied in Turkey on Thursday to oppose the conviction and political ban of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, chanting slogans criticising President Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AK Party before elections next year,” Reuters reports.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is pushing for Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) bill to ban TikTok on government devices to be added to the omnibus spending package, Punchbowl News reports.
The immigration negotiations between Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-VT) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) are over, leaving millions of Dreamers facing an uncertain future, the Washington Post reports.
Also important: Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell was unwilling to attach an immigration deal to the omnibus spending package, its best remaining route to passage.
Washington Post: “When Trump suggested in an online post earlier this month that the Constitution could be terminated to redo the 2020 election or declare him the winner, the ‘UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD’ that he said required this ‘UNPRECEDENTED CURE’ was no longer a conspiracy involving counterfeit mail ballots or sabotaged voting machines. Those claims have been thoroughly debunked in audits, litigation and outside reviews.”
“Instead, Trump was now advancing a new theory of how the election was “stolen” from him: a supposed scheme among social media companies, the FBI and the Democrats to suppress information that might have helped Trump’s campaign. The claim is fueled in part by new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s decision to release internal documents about the platform’s brief suppression of a 2020 news story about then-candidate Joe Biden’s son amid concerns it might be the result of disinformation efforts.”
A request by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to share a message of world peace prior to kickoff at the World Cup final on Sunday has been rebuffed by FIFA, CNN reports.
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.