We Don’t Want to Jinx It, But . . .

Some notable elected Republicans are showing faint signs of independent thought on Trump’s nominations and our commitments abroad.

Thanksgiving week! Two more Morning Shots after today’s, then we’ll give your inboxes a well-earned rest on Thursday and Friday. (If this announcement leaves you with a yawning void in your lives and no plan for how to while away the hours, allow us to recommend Sonny Bunch’s new series on the best things worth watching on each of the major streaming platforms.) Happy Monday.

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(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: Shutterstock / Getty Images.)

Hey, Some Swallows!

by William Kristol

Hark! Are those a few swallows gliding and darting and swooping above, elegantly braving the Trumpian winter skies?

Perhaps.

On Saturday, Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), incoming chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined to commit to supporting two of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees: Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch told Jewish Insider at the Halifax International Security Forum.“These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

The next day, on CNN’s State of the Union, another Republican senator, James Lankford (R-Okla.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Dana Bash that his committee will have “lots of questions” to ask Gabbard. Lankford brought up Gabbard’s meeting with and praise of Bashar al-Assad. “We’ll want to get a chance to talk about past comments that she’s made and get them into full context,” Lankford said. He also stressed that “it’s really important that we have leadership there that’s able to support” members of the intelligence community.

Risch and Lankford are respected figures among their colleagues in the more establishment wing of the Senate Republicans. And that group isn’t small—as indicated by the fact that both John Thune and John Cornyn ran ahead of Rick Scott in the contest for Senate Republican leader two weeks ago, and that Thune went on to win the final vote.

It’s of course also true that the establishment GOP senators have not been a profile in courage during the Trump years. But could it turn out that the prospect of a second–and presumably last!—Trump term has liberated some of these senators a bit? On the one hand, the newly elected Trump has never been more powerful. But on the other hand, he’s about to be a lame duck.

In any case, it does seem that some of the Senate Republicans may be planning to take seriously the Senate’s responsibility for advice and consent. Matt Gaetz’s withdrawing his nomination was a good start. We’ll see if it begins a trend in the cases of Gabbard and Hegseth.

And this pushback to Trump could extend beyond his nominations. At the Halifax Forum, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), another member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered an impassioned defense of the cause of Ukraine: “We need to ask ourselves—do we really think this tyrant [Vladimir Putin] will stop if you give him part of a free country? Or will he say, ‘See? When we stand strong, the decadent West is weak’?” House Foreign Relations Committee chair Mike McCaul (R-Tex.) also reiterated his support for Ukraine late last week in an event with the Atlantic Council.

And here’s another swallow in the winter sky: The incoming national security advisor, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), said on Fox News Sunday that he’s spoken with Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to ensure the White House and the Trump transition team are working well together:

For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity, that they can play one administration off the other, they’re wrong. We are hand in glove. We are one team with the United States in this transition.

Waltz sounds markedly different from the Vance-Musk-Ramaswamy-MAGA types who express only contempt for anyone now in power, and only disdain for any thought of continuity or comity with previous administrations.

One last swallow, barely visible over the horizon: Has Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) so overplayed her hand in her demagogic targeting and bullying of the newly elected transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride (D-Del.), that even some of her Republican colleagues are embarrassed? McBride has responded with impressive grace and dignity. Perhaps there are still some Republicans, even in the era of Trump, for whom the cruelty is not the point?

Now, let’s not go overboard. As the sober Aristotle reminds us in the Nicomachean Ethics, “For as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.” We are not anywhere close to springtime in America, let alone to a blessed and happy state. But perhaps we’re seeing a few signs that we don’t have to resign ourselves to the next four years being one long, cold, and unrelieved winter.

It would be good to see more such signs. More swallows, please!

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What Goes Unnoticed

by Andrew Egger

On Friday, we noted Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s shocking claim that his organization Children’s Health Defense had produced and funded the Plandemic documentary that went so viral in early 2020.¹ In terms of its immediate, real-world impact on trust in public health institutions working to blunt the spread of a deadly pandemic, the film may go down in history as one of the most damaging pieces of conspiracy-theorizing propaganda of all time.

But what’s particularly notable is that this revelation wasn’t even new. The social media account that unearthed the clip, Patriot Takes, first posted it back in June 2023. At the time, nobody noticed it. The clip racked up a total of 175 likes on X.

Keep in mind, Kennedy was already running for president. And he was drawing plenty of headlines, mostly about his wild vaccine views—a Michelle Goldberg New York Times column from that month on his “coalition of the distrustful” has aged very well. And yet the fact that he had played (or at least claimed to have played) such a hands-on role in bringing Plandemic into the world surfaced and vanished without leaving a trace.

Part of this was poor timing: RFK wouldn’t really start drawing massive political attention until September, when he dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary and announced he would run as an independent, transforming himself from a side show with no chance of winning into a possible race-altering spoiler.

But the fact that “RFK Jr., Plandemic funder” didn’t make it into the popular consciousness—even for us news-mainlining sickos!—is more than anything a reminder of how overwhelmingly insane all our politics has gotten. We talk a lot about how short the lifespan of any given controversy has become in the age of Trump—you barely have time to process one outrage before he and his allies spark a new one. There’s only so many plates you can keep spinning in your brain at once. Now, stories that would create major scandals in a saner time are crowded from ever firing anybody’s synapses at all.

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THE SOFT BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS: We’ve been giving Republican senators, as a group, a bit of credit lately for showing some backbone regarding Trump’s unqualified nominees. Still, though, we’re only talking about a handful of defections from any given nomination; the bulk of the senators remain as servile to Trump as anticipated.

If you needed a reminder of that, check out Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, who argued on Meet the Press yesterday that Trump should fire every Department of Justice employee who had a hand in any of the federal cases against him:

First and foremost, the people involved with this should be fired immediately. And anybody part of this, this effort to keep President Trump off the ballot and throw him in jail for the rest of his life because they didn’t like his politics . . . [The cases] all fell apart under the weight of law. And so I do think there needs to be accountability. I think that getting it back to crime-fighting is important, but there has to be accountability for these kinds of abuses.

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ALL THE PRESIDENT’S KENS: The council of the DOGE—Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s government efficiency commission—is beginning to take shape. And it’s pretty much as you’d imagine: a smattering of tech bros and their like-minded money men who believe they are the great disruptive force of the modern era. If this crew could turn self-confidence into an energy resource, that alone would save the government trillions. The Washington Post has the names:

Top Musk surrogates from his business empire—including private equity executive Antonio Gracias and Boring Company President Steve Davis—are involved in planning, the people said, along with a coterie of Musk friends and Silicon Valley leaders, including Palantir co-founder and investor Joe Lonsdale, who funds a libertarian-leaning nonprofit dedicated to government efficiency; investor Marc Andreessen; hedge fund manager Bill Ackman; and former Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick.

The Post story notes the history of Musk and his deputies going into institutions they purchase and just ripping the fabric off the walls. The paper also notes that Musk hasn’t bought the U.S. government (yet); that there are laws in place that could make this commission pretty feckless. Still, we’re all excited to see both Musk and Ackman get inspired by a post from BigMagaEnergy2315 on X, pointing to some fictitious line item in the federal budget that needs ending. Perhaps the ABC whistleblower can help Ackman sort through the fine print.

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WHAT’S NEXT FOR KAMALA?: With two lame-duck months left on her vice presidential term, Kamala Harris will soon be out of government for the first time in decades. But Politico reports that Harris “has been instructing advisers and allies to keep her options open—whether for a possible 2028 presidential run, or even to run for governor in her home state of California in two years.”

Out of concern for our sanity and yours, we’re not going to start doing 2028 candidate speculation here. But it will be interesting to see how Harris chooses to handle her time on the outside, should she want to keep her political brand—fresh off meteoric rise and catastrophic fall—current for future cycles.

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PLAYING HARDBALL: U.S. colleges “have tightened rules around protests, locked campus gates, and handed down stricter punishments after the disruptions of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments last spring,” the New York Times reports:

When students have protested this fall, administrators have often enforced—to the letter—new rules created in response to last spring’s unrest. The moves have created scenes that would have been hard to imagine previously, particularly at universities that once celebrated their history of student activism. . . .

The changes follow federal civil rights complaints, lawsuits and withering congressional scrutiny accusing universities of tolerating antisemitism, after some protesters praised Hamas and called for violence against Israelis.

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Cheap Shots

Now wait just a minute. Are you telling us that Donald Trump’s constant outbursts denying he’d ever heard of any such thing as a Project 2025 in his life were just election-season lies??

1. Correction (November 25, 2024, 10:48 a.m. EST): As originally published, this newsletter mistakenly listed the name of RFK Jr.’s organization as Children’s Defense Fund—a real but unrelated organization—instead of Children’s Health Defense.