Mary Trump will follow her bestselling exposé of her dysfunctional family life with a new book titled, The Reckoning, The Guardian reports.
According to the publisher, the book “will examine America’s national trauma, rooted in our history but dramatically exacerbated by the impact of current events and the Trump administration’s corrupt and immoral policies.”
The book will be published in July 2021.
President Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit in Wisconsin seeking to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the state, claiming that voter fraud “irrefutably altered the outcome,” CNBC reports.
“Some establishment Republicans are sounding alarms that President Trump’s conspiratorial denials of his own defeat could threaten the party’s ability to win a Senate majority and counter President-elect Joe Biden’s administration,” the AP reports.
“The concerns come ahead of Trump’s planned Saturday visit to Georgia to campaign alongside Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who face strong Democratic challengers in Jan. 5 runoffs that will determine which party controls the Senate at the outset of Biden’s presidency.”
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Sources tell the New York Post that Melania Trump has been taking meetings about writing a book about her time as first lady.
Said one insider: “Melania is in meetings to write her White House memoir. And it would be her money — a chance for her to earn on her own.”
The source added: “I’m told her husband is encouraging her… She’s not done, or going as quietly as you might expect.”
Arwa Mahdawi: What can we expect from the first lady’s rumored memoir?
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Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC) announce he’ll run for the Senate in a race that may end up becoming the most hotly contested and expensive Senate battle in the 2022 midterm elections, Fox News reports.
“Walker is the first candidate to launch a campaign in the race to succeed retiring three-term Republican Sen. Richard Burr. But it’s doubtful he’ll be the only Republican to declare his or her candidacy. The president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is mulling a bid for the Senate in the state where she was born and raised.”
The co-author of the million-selling Game Change has a book of his own coming about the 2020 election, the AP reports.
Simon & Schuster announced Monday that John Heilemann is working on a “dramatic, first-hand account” of Joe Biden’s victorious campaigns over his Democratic Party rivals in the primaries and over President Donald Trump in the general election.
Heilemann had collaborated with Mark Halperin on Game Change, about the 2008 race, and on Double Down, about 2012. Their anticipated book on 2016 was cancelled after Halperin faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment.
Jonathan Chait: “White women voted for Trump. Or so you have probably heard. In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, the finding from early exit polls that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump formed the basis for a million social-media posts, op-eds, and rally placards. That this “fact” is not true is not even close to the biggest problem with its ubiquitous place in progressive social-justice discourse.”
“The 53 percent figure turned out to be erroneous, and corrected analyses eventually pegged Trump’s share of the white female electorate closer to 47 percent. Nonetheless, the impulse that propelled so many writers to blame white women for electing Trump proved strong enough to survive even after the factual basis was undercut. Indeed, left-wing opinion writers continued churning out polemics based on the erroneous 53 percent figure for years.”
“Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer who has led the most extensive efforts to damage his client’s political rivals and undermine the election results, discussed with the president as recently as last week the possibility of receiving a pre-emptive pardon before Mr. Trump leaves office,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Giuliani’s potential criminal exposure is unclear. He was under investigation as recently as last summer by federal prosecutors in Manhattan for his business dealings in Ukraine and his role in ousting the American ambassador there, a plot that was at the heart of the impeachment of Mr. Trump.”
The Fix: Here’s who a lame-duck Trump could pardon.
“The Pentagon policy official overseeing the military’s efforts to combat the Islamic State was fired on Monday after a White House official told him the United States had won that war and that his office had been disbanded,” the New York Times reports.
Neil Irwin: “For the first time since the pandemic shuttered the economy eight months ago, the end is in sight.”
“The development of vaccines that appear to be safe, effective and ready for wide distribution in the months ahead means it’s now possible to envision a post-Covid economy by summer.”
“There is a distinct possibility that the economy could roar back to full health quickly as soon as public health conditions allow. But for that to happen, the United States will need to make it through what might be a cold, dark winter in which damage could be done to the tissue of the economy that prevents that rapid healing.”
American Prospect: “For many in the political establishment, joining the Trump administration was initially considered to be a mark of shame. In 2016, more than 100 Republican staffers signed a Never-Trump letter.”
“Trump alumni may have worried that they might struggle to find new jobs in Washington or Silicon Valley or Wall Street. (And certainly a lot of people have cycled out given the administration’s record turnover.) But almost universally, former Trump appointees are profiting from their time in the White House. Even before Trump concedes the election and leaves the White House, they have been normalized.”
“Despite those initial expectations of a Trump stigma, it’s in fact the people who quit in protest who have suffered most.”
Quinta Jurecic: “Donald Trump will not serve a second term. The litigation launched by his campaign and the Republican Party to overturn the election results has no chance of preventing Joe Biden from swearing the oath of office on January 20—as Trump himself seemed to haltingly recognize last week after his administration finally allowed the presidential transition to begin.”
“But even though the worst has not come to pass, Trump and his team are doing lasting damage to American democracy as the president struggles to come to grips with the reality of his loss. And yet, these lawyers and officials will likely face no real consequences for their actions—and if they do, those repercussions will not be enough to address the scale of the problem.”
A witness in Sidney Powell’s new Michigan lawsuit challenging President Trump’s loss in the state says in a declaration he thinks there’s something fishy about election returns in Edison County, Michigan.
Bridge Michigan notes one problem: There is no Edison County in Michigan.
Ron Brownstein: “The silence of congressional Republican leaders as President Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud grow wilder and more venomous increasingly resembles the party’s deference to Sen. Joe McCarthy during the worst excesses of his anti-Communist crusade in the early 1950s.”
“In McCarthy’s era, most of the GOP’s leaders found excuses to avoid challenging conspiracy theories that they knew to be implausible, even as evidence of their costs to the nation steadily mounted. For years, despite their private doubts about his charges and methods alike, the top GOP leadership — particularly Senate Republican leader Robert A. Taft, the Mitch McConnell of his day — either passively abetted or actively supported McCarthy’s scattershot claims of treason and Communist infiltration.”
“A significant faction of Senate Republicans didn’t join with Democrats to curb McCarthy’s power until the senator immolated himself with his accusations, in highly publicized 1953 and 1954 hearings, that the Army was riddled with Communists during the presidency of fellow Republican Dwight Eisenhower.”
“A bipartisan group of senators is expected to unveil an approximately $908 billion stimulus proposal on Tuesday, aiming to break a months-long partisan impasse over providing emergency federal relief to the U.S. economy,” the Washington Post reports.
“While trying to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) has faced throngs of armed protesters at the statehouse and crowds outside his own home. Now, he is now facing efforts from within his own party to push him out of office entirely,” the Washington Post reports.
“A group of four Republican state lawmakers filed a dozen articles of impeachment against DeWine on Monday, saying the governor violated state and federal laws by requiring face masks in public and ordering some businesses to close.”
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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