<....More than 1,000 executive branch roles are subject to Senate approval in addition to the Cabinet positions, according to The Washington Post. The Constitution authorizes the president to fill vacancies if Congress is in recess, and presidents of both major parties have done so. Strict rules and procedures over both recessing and making recess appointments have made outfitting a Cabinet with such picks a challenge.

In 2014, the Supreme Court held that the upper chamber had to be adjourned for at least 10 days before a president could make an appointment following former President Barack Obama's use of a short recess to fill three empty positions on the National Labor Relations Board.

Either chamber of Congress requires approval from the other to recess for more than three days, and with the Republican majority in the House narrow at just 218 seats, calling a recess could be difficult.

Both chambers usually convene pro forma sessions, brief procedural meetings in which no formal business is conducted, during recesses specifically to block the president from making recess appointments and sidestepping congressional approval.

Senate Democrats could also slow down a vote to adjourn by objecting to ending the session and upending the typical unanimous vote sought for such decisions. While this would require overcoming a 60-vote threshold, Huder says stalling the process could run the risk of "[slowing] the institution to a crawl" and giving the majority greater incentive to "go nuclear" on majority votes.

"It's one of those situations where, if the minority goes too far in gumming up the works, the majority will have incentives to press their prerogatives and do things by majority vote," he said. "That hasn't been done in history yet, but obviously we're getting to some territory in the not too distant past where majorities have been considering these types of things."

The other avenue left open to Trump — though historically unprecedented — would be to attempt to instruct Congress to recess in order to install his nominees without their approval. The Constitution empowers the president to adjourn Congress if the chambers can't agree on the timing of a recess.

Huder said that whether Trump is able to accomplish either means of bypassing the Senate comes down to the votes — and the president-elect is unlikely to have the broad support from lawmakers needed to push Congress to adjourn for more than 10 days or create the circumstances that would compel that unilateral, presidential action.

"That is possible, but I don't think it's very likely at all," Huder said. "In fact, I think it's very, very, very, very, very unlikely that Congress actually allows this to happen."

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told the Post that Republicans allowing Trump to circumvent the Senate's advice and consent role would be "frustrating."

“I think people on both sides of the aisle would express that and from what I’m hearing from senators on both sides of the aisle, is that folks are not going to let that happen,” he said.

Senate Republicans have also had mixed responses to the suggestion that Trump's nominees should subvert the confirmation process.

“I’m hesitant to give up any aspect of our role when it comes to advice and consent. That’s what we do,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who has signaled her opposition to Gaetz’s nomination, told the Post.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told the outlet that he believed Trump is within his constitutional authority to make recess appointments, adding that it could push Republican leadership to confirm nominees quickly and send a message to Democrats should they seek to interfere with Trump's nominees.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Sunday also left open the possibility of adjourning Congress to allow Trump to appoint his Cabinet nominees outside of the confirmation process, depending on how the Senate moves.

In the grand scheme, Huder said, Congress will have to play a role in whether Trump can circumvent the Senate. The upper chamber's advice and consent role extends back to the framing of the Constitution and is "at the core of the constitutional construct."

"When you look at the Constitution, it's really Congress's Constitution," he said, noting the legislative body is empowered with "the most power and the most authority."

"You can't just prorogue Congress like the king could prorogue Parliament back in the day," he added. "You can't just get rid of them. It requires their consent at some level.">

<First things first: It is absolutely the case that the harassment of Sarah McBride, the newly elected Democratic representative from Delaware, is rooted in Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., having an insatiable desire for attention. Mace's narcissism is legendary even by Capitol Hill standards. In one of the juicier exposés in recent memory, the Daily Beast reported that the congresswoman's "abusive" behavior created a "toxic" work environment that eventually led to a total staff turnover in the space of a couple of months. Mace's latest bid for camera time was purchased by introducing a bill that might as well be titled the "Sarah McBride Defamation Act" because it only targets one person and lies about her.

Hate is more exciting when aimed at a person with a face and a name. So when you dangle out a random person and falsely accuse them of being a threat, it's a lot easier to whip people into a frenzy.

McBride is trans, and Mace is using this as an excuse to put forward a bill barring McBride from using the women's restroom on Capitol Hill. Mace shamelessly claims to be afraid of McBride. "I know how vulnerable women and girls are in private spaces, so I'm absolutely 100% going to stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women's restroom," she said, lying about McBride's gender. Notably, Mace loudly supported Donald Trump's presidential bid, despite a 2023 jury finding him civilly liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room. As Tim Miller at the Bulwark argues, "Nancy Mace doesn't really feel unsafe," and "it's all farce" and a bid to get attention by being a bully.

It is tempting, therefore, to argue that the best response is to not feed the troll by giving her the attention she craves. This is the classic "deplatforming" argument, which continues to persist because, in the past, there were some victories of the "ignore them and they go away" variety. (Anyone heard from Milo Yiannopoulos lately?) But, as Zack Beauchamp of Vox wrote after the election, "Trump’s wins are proof that gatekeeping doesn’t really work anymore." Media fragmentation "means there's not enough cultural unification to ever really expel anyone from the discourse." Even if all liberals collectively agreed never to say "Nancy Mace" again, she can take advantage of the robust right-wing propaganda machine to get attention with hate.

There's an even more disturbing aspect to this harassment campaign against McBride. It's the latest example of how the mainstream GOP has embraced a tactic that hateful trolls first developed online during the "Gamergate" fiasco of 2014 and has become a favorite tool of the far-right for recruitment and radicalization: selecting random, innocent people to dangle out to their audiences as the hate object of the day. Back then, it was a handful of female video game developers and critics who were presented to largely male crowds online as targets for relentless, inchoate abuse.

The tactic has since become rote on the right, largely through the Twitter account Libs of TikTok. Run by far-right influencer Chaya Raichik, Libs of TikTok offers a bloodthirsty audience a constant stream of photos and videos of random people — usually from their small, personal social media accounts — usually for no other reason than they are queer or queer-positive. Her followers, whipped into a hateful frenzy, flood the victim du jour with hateful messages and often escalate to offline contact of harassing phone calls and bomb threats. We can see how this is already manifesting in the attacks on McBride. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is going along with the abuse. Less than a day after initially saying he wanted to "treat all persons with dignity and respect," he switched to attacking McBride by saying, "a man cannot become a woman."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose every instinct is to join a bullying mob, joined in, saying it's "like a physical assault" to share a restroom with a trans woman. Like Mace, Greene is an avid supporter of Trump, despite the civil jury's legal finding that he committed sexual assault, which corresponds with a tape of him bragging about doing so.

The psychology of Gamergate or the Libs of TikTok is nothing new. We see it in the long history of witch hunts, lynchings, gang rapes, or even just schoolyard bullying. A mob forms to target an innocent and often helpless victim, and the members of the mob draw on each other's energy to justify their sadism and turn it into entertainment. It's also a potent political weapon. Hate is more exciting when aimed at a person with a face and a name. So when you dangle out a random person and falsely accuse them of being a threat, it's a lot easier to whip people into a frenzy....>

<....Making a spectacle out of private parts of the target's life — which are usually not the subjects of polite conversation — is a crucial aspect of this dehumanization. We saw this in Gamergate, where wild speculation about the sex lives of the victims reinforced the framework that the victims do not deserve the protection of basic respect and decorum. Libs of TikTok does this daily, by mining the social media accounts of people who thought only their close friends would see their posts, but who are now being exposed to a large audience that they never intended to speak to.

Anti-trans bigots love "debating" the bodies and biological functions of their targets. Their language is often focused on the scatological, where they shamelessly talk about what they believe to be the genital shapes, chromosomal make-up, and sexual habits of their victims, usually with no actual evidence to go on. This prurience is wrapped in moralizing language, such as Mace declaring, "I'm not going to stand for a man, you know, someone with a penis, in the women's locker room." The real purpose is to insinuate that this person doesn't deserve the basic presumption of privacy. Mace certainly knows there will never be a national news cycle in which people discuss what her genitals might look like.

One reason the flying monkeys tactic works is that it isolates the target. People often avoid coming to the victim's defense, for fear that they will be the next person targeted. Multiple innocent victims of Libs of Tik Tok find themselves fired or otherwise shunned by their community, and not because people actually believe Raichik's deplorable equation of LGBTQ people with pedophiles. This is a fear response, the classic "throwing them to the wolves" strategy of feeding the victim to the mob, in hopes they don't eat you next. We see this in Johnson's change of heart, as he realized it's easier for him to placate the MAGA mob than to ask members of his own caucus to act like adults.

The good news is there is a way to disable the gang-up tactic. It just requires the courage to rally around the victim. "Safety in numbers" isn't just a saying. It is much easier to terrorize one person, especially with harassment tactics, than it is to go after a collective. We saw this during Gamergate. Once the harassment campaign started to get more national attention, thousands of feminists logged on to defend the targets, flooding Twitter with memes and counterarguments that recognized the true villains as the Gamergaters themselves. It took the wind out of Gamergater sails and, eventually, the harassment died down.

Many Democrats in Congress seem to grasp this, and are rushing to McBride's side. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called Mace's behavior "just plain bullying" and many others mocked Mace for being ridiculous. "This is your priority," questioned House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. "You want to bully a member of Congress, as opposed to welcoming her to join this body so that all of us can work together to get things done and deliver real results for the American people?"

The more people who do this, the harder it will be for Republicans to pass a law singling out one member for humiliating treatment, just to appease the sadism of their voters.>

<That was fast. Barely two weeks after winning reelection, Donald Trump has already so thoroughly owned the news cycle that I’m not sure anyone even recalls that Joe Biden is still President. (It was his eighty-second birthday on Wednesday, by the way.) One of the themes of this year’s campaign was the apparent mass amnesia among many Americans of just what the Trump Presidency was like. Every day since Trump won has been a crash course in remembering: the cryptic all-caps social-media posts at all hours, containing major government announcements; the erratic decision-making that stuns even his most senior advisers; the casual shattering of norms, rules, and traditions, any one of which would have provoked days of controversy for another politician. Scandals were endemic to the first Trump Presidency. But this many? In just the first two weeks of an incoming Administration? No, there is no precedent.

Consider this sampling of CNN headlines from Thursday morning: “Police report reveals new details from sexual assault claim against Hegseth”; “Linda McMahon, Trump’s Education pick, was sued for allegedly enabling sexual abuse of children”; “New document details the trail of payments Gaetz made to women.” The metastasizing plotlines forced impossible choices. Should you spend your time trying to decipher the leaked chart from the Matt Gaetz sex-trafficking investigation, the one with all the complicated lines tracing Venmo payments between Trump’s would-be Attorney General and women he allegedly compensated for sex? Or reading the twenty-two-page police report documenting the allegations of a woman who says that she was sexually assaulted at a Republican conference in California a few years back by Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host chosen by Trump as Secretary of Defense? As pure distraction, it was hard to beat the video playing in an endless social-media loop of McMahon, the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, dressed in business attire, appearing to violently slap her own daughter, all in good fun, of course. Which was enough to divert from reports that McMahon, Trump’s nominee to head an Education Department that he pledged on the campaign trail to eliminate, once falsely claimed to have a college degree in education.

At such a moment, it was hard to even remember the other Trump outrages. R.F.K., Jr., Trump’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, seeking to ban fluoride from the water and undermining public confidence in lifesaving vaccines? So last week. (Though I missed a few updates in the past few days on the Kennedy front, including a former babysitter for his children speaking out publicly about how Kennedy sexually accosted her and the revelation that Kennedy previously compared Trump to Hitler and praised descriptions of his supporters as “outright Nazis.”) On Tuesday, Trump named Sean Duffy, a former congressman from Wisconsin turned lobbyist, as his choice for Transportation Secretary. Duffy, who has no known experience in the transportation sector, is a Fox News contributor; when Trump announced the pick, he praised Duffy’s “STAR” wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, who, along with Hegseth, is a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend.” If confirmed, Duffy will be the first Cabinet member to have been on the cast of MTV’s “The Real World.” On Wednesday, it was reported that Trump was expected to choose Russell Vought, his first-term budget director, to return to his post as head of the Office of Management and Budget; Vought is a chief architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the radical nine-hundred-page agenda for a second Trump term that Trump repeatedly disavowed during the campaign. By the Washington Post’s count, Vought is the fifth senior Trump nominee who has been credited by name as a contributor to Project 2025. The other four are Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar”; John Ratcliffe, his choice to run the C.I.A.; Pete Hoekstra, his nominee for Ambassador to Canada; and Brendan Carr, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on transforming the Federal Communications Commission, which Trump now wants him to lead.....>

<....But there was little time to consider the implications. By lunchtime on Thursday, Gaetz announced that he was withdrawing from consideration as Attorney General. In a statement on X, Gaetz, who had long been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, complained “that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition” at a moment when “there is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle.” Soon after, CNN reported that the Ethics Committee had been told of a second, previously unknown, alleged sexual encounter between Gaetz and a seventeen-year-old. Was this, one instantly wondered, what had prompted his sudden announcement? Or, was it instead, the brutal math he faced in the Senate, where it appeared there were at least four Republicans implacably opposed to his confirmation, the magic number required to sink him? Coming a mere sixteen days after the election, Gaetz’s retreat was the fastest-collapsed Cabinet nomination in modern history. By Thursday evening, Trump had already anointed a new appointee, one with presumably more surmountable controversies: Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida.

Trump overwhelms. He exhausts. Back in 2018, that was one of the original impetuses for this column—as a response to the condition of not being able to remember by Thursday the deeply upsetting things that Trump had done on Tuesday. The first couple of weeks of Trump redux suggest that this will be even more the case during his second four years in office. Yet it is striking how little having lived through it before provides in the way of wisdom for how to navigate the onslaught once again. Tuning out will be the answer for many, I suspect—an understandable response, but hardly a desirable one, at least from the point of view of democracy’s survival. Remember all that earnest discussion about “deplatforming” Trump in 2021? A certain number of liberals probably slept better at night as a result. But if the assumption was that Trump was a spent force in American politics, or that excluding him from front-page coverage would somehow erase his political appeal to a large swath of the population, well, that was not correct.

If anything, I fear we’ve collectively slipped right back into the status quo ante-Biden. There’s a muscle memory to it; after all, it’s only been four years. During Trump’s first term, I found that one of the benefits of having covered Washington for so long was the ability to observe when Trump was departing from the accepted playbook of past Presidents—when he was actually making history, as opposed to merely infuriating his many critics in extreme but still familiar ways. This time, that challenge remains, but is compounded greatly by his much more explicit agenda of blowing up the federal government, of revenge and retribution, of seizing power for himself and an ever-more-unconstrained White House. Trump 1.0 was a test for the system, but it was also a trial for an inexperienced leader who had the inclination of a wrecking ball but often lacked the capacity or the cadres to follow through; Trump 2.0 is about an all-out attack on that system by a leader who fears neither Congress nor the courts nor the voters whom he will never have to face again....>

<....Will Trump overreach with more Matt Gaetzes? Undoubtedly. Will he be able to find a way despite narrow Republican majorities on Capitol Hill to pass some of his more extreme proposals into law? Probably so. But no one can yet say for sure what will happen if Trump actually follows through on threats to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, or tanks the economy by imposing across-the-board tariffs on goods from all our major trading partners. My fear, for now, is a different one: that the stories we don’t have time to scream about amid all the other outrages could end up being the most outrageous ones of all.

Consider that, in just the past few days, while the investigative reporters were doing the grim, necessary work of digging up the personal skeletons that Gaetz and Co. preferred to hide, there were also reports about Trump’s decision to flout federal ethics and conflict-of-interest rules; his refusal to subject some appointees to the customary F.B.I. background checks; his plan to set up a new board to vet military generals for political reliability; and his decision to vest sweeping unauthorized and unaccountable authority in a new commission, co-headed by his campaign benefactor Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to recommend cuts of up to two trillion dollars in the national budget.

Eight years into Trump, none of us can honestly claim to have figured out how to cover Trump. I certainly have not. We’re all worn out, and he hasn’t even been inaugurated, again, yet. At such a time, perhaps moving to Canada is an appropriate response. I haven’t ruled anything out. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing it all down. I don’t need a catchy slogan. It’s another Thursday in the Trump era, and a lot of crazy s*** has happened.>

<Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services once compared the president-elect to Adolf Hitler and praised criticism of his followers as "belligerent idiots," "outright Nazis," and "bootlickers," according to a new report.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made these comments on his radio show "Ring of Fire" in 2016, according to audio revealed by CNN Thursday morning.

"Kennedy applauded descriptions of Trump’s base as 'belligerent idiots' and suggestions that some were 'outright Nazis' and 'spineless fellow travelers,'" CNN reported.

"Kennedy also likened Trump to historical demagogues like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, accusing Trump of exploiting societal insecurities and xenophobia to amass power."

Kennedy told CNN in a statement that he is now proud at the prospect of serving in Trump's administration and regrets comparing his new boss to the perpetrator of a mass genocide.

“Like many Americans, I allowed myself to believe the mainstream media’s distorted, dystopian portrait of President Trump," Kennedy said. "I no longer hold this belief and now regret having made those statements."

People who have compared Trump to Hitler include Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, his former White House chief of staff John Kelly and former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney.

CNN reported Kennedy's criticism began to soften only after the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, and admitted bear cub crime scene-stager, was shunned by the Democratic Party during the 2024 primary.

But in 2016, Kennedy compared Trump to segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace and praised journalist Matt Taibbi’s critique of his base, reading a passage he said was “beautifully” written, according to the report.

"The way that you build a truly vicious nationalist movement is to wed a relatively small core of belligerent idiots to a much larger group of opportunists and spineless fellow travelers whose primary function is to turn a blind eye to things,” Taibbi wrote in the quotation read by Kennedy.

“‘We may not have that many outright Nazis in America, but we have plenty of cowards and bootlickers, and once those fleshy dominoes start tumbling into the Trump camp, the game is up."

Then Kennedy added his own views.

“And, you know, he’s not like Hitler,” Kennedy said. “Hitler had like a plan, you know, Hitler was interested in policy,” Kennedy went on. “I don’t think Trump has any of that. He’s like non compos mentis. He’ll get in there and who knows what will happen.”>

<A tech entrepreneur featured on a Forbes "30 Under 30" list in 2021 could be facing more than 40 years in prison. Joanna Smith-Griffin, now 33, has been charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, and identity theft, Quartz reports. Smith-Griffin founded the artificial intelligence start-up AllHere Education in 2016. Federal prosecutors say Smith-Griffin, who was arrested in North Carolina on Tuesday, lied to investors about the company's revenue and contracts. She allegedly sold some of her stake in the company after its valuation went up and used the proceeds to pay for her wedding and a new house.

In 2021, Smith-Griffin told investors that the company had generated $3.7 million in revenue in 2020, when the real figure was $11,000, prosecutors said. She also falsely claimed that eight school districts, including the New York City Department of Education and Atlanta Public Schools, were using her company's technology, prosecutors said. Only two districts were using AllHere technology at the time and New York and Atlanta were not among them, the New York Times reports.

・AllHere's products include the AI chatbot "Ed," used by districts including the Los Angeles Unified School District. A district spokeswoman tells the Times that the "indictment and the allegations represent, if true, a disturbing and disappointing house of cards that deceived and victimized many across the country."

・"Her alleged actions impacted the potential for improved learning environments across major school districts by selfishly prioritizing personal expenses," FBI Assistant Director in Charge James E. Dennehy said in a statement.

・"AllHere is now in Chapter 7 bankruptcy, its employees have been laid off, and AllHere is under the control of a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee," prosecutors said.

Smith-Griffin joins the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried, Charlie Javice, Martin Shkreli, and Caroline Ellison on the list of "30 Under 30" picks who have been imprisoned or indicted. Boston University School of Law's Review of Banking & Financial Law calls it a "pipeline to prison" phenomenon. Arwa Mahdawi at the Guardian says it "isn't just a list, it's a mentality: a pressure to achieve great things before youth slips away from you"—and "the pressure can lead certain ambitious people to take shortcuts." Millennials, she writes, "grew up being told to 'fake it till you make it,' cash in now until you become a withered, irrelevant, 30-year-old prune. If you exaggerate a little bit, that's not fraud, that's hustle! Until, of course, the Justice Department comes knocking.">

<Representative Thomas Massie voted against giving President-elect Donald Trump's Treasury secretary more power over nonprofit organizations.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise teed up another vote this week for the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act after the legislation failed to pass last week, even with bipartisan support. The bill passed with a majority vote on Thursday, with all but 16 Republicans voting in favor. Massie was the lone nay vote from the Republican Party and 15 Republicans did not vote.

The Republican-led bill, HR 4945, would give the United States Treasury secretaries the power to designate nonprofit organizations as "terrorist-supporting" and, thus, strip those groups of their tax-exempt status. Massie also voted against the bill last week, which failed after it didn't get enough votes to pass the two-thirds vote threshold.

The Republican defector joined 183 Democrats opposing the bill's passage. It now goes to the Senate.

The bill's passage would apply the amendments to taxable years after its enactment, including those of the incoming Trump administration. The current version of the legislation is paired with a provision that offers tax relief to Americans who are "unlawfully or wrongfully detained abroad, or held hostage abroad."

Once an organization is notified about its "terrorist supporting" designation, it would have 90 days to appeal before it is stripped of its 501(c)(3) status. Treasury officials would not be required to give reasoning for the decision, nor would the department need to provide evidence.

Opponents of the bill argue that the president-elect could use the new powers granted to the Treasury secretary under H.R. 9495 to stifle free speech or target political opponents.

The American Civil Liberties Union warned that the bill grants "the executive branch new powers to investigate and functionally shut down and silence its critics."

The National Organization for Women called the legislation "another piece of performance by the extremists in Congress" aimed at giving Trump "dictatorial power" to mobilize against groups like theirs.

Pro-Palestinian groups, advocates and politicians have also argued that the incoming Treasury secretary could use the power against nonprofits supporting their cause. Trump has not yet announced who he wants to lead the Treasury, although reports suggest it's likely to be investor Scott Bessent.

The Arab American Institute, which advocates in the interest of the 3.7 million Arab Americans in the U.S., warned in a Monday press release that "This vague and expansive legislation would disproportionately target groups working on these issues, especially in the context of the genocide in Gaza."

"Even the mere threat of investigation could chill donors, stifle advocacy, and financially devastate organizations before they have a chance to defend themselves. The bill's lack of due process further compounds these risks, making it nearly impossible for accused nonprofits to clear their names," the institute said.

"If passed, H.R. 9495 would chill not only advocacy for Palestinian human rights but the whole broader nonprofit ecosystem by weaponizing the U.S. government against us."

During last week's vote, 52 House Democrats voted in favor of the bill. On Thursday, only 15 voted in favor. The bill now goes to the Senate for a vote and if it passes, President Joe Biden will have to sign it into law.>

<House Democrats are gearing up to put maximum pressure on House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) agonizingly small House majority.

Just a few complications on the GOP side could hobble Johnson's efforts to pass President-elect Trump's sweeping agenda, fund the government and raise the debt ceiling.

On any GOP-only legislation, there is "going to be enormous pressure" on Republican centrists to break away, said Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.).

Morelle pointed to Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), predicting some GOP bills will be "problematic for him" as he mulls a run for New York governor.

Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) said of flipping GOP members: "It's hard, but it can be done. And if we can entice some of those people on the other side to do that, it can stop a lot of bad things from happening."

The five-seat majority that Johnson has struggled to manage in the 118th Congress is set to dwindle next year.

Democrats managed to flip slightly more House seats than Republicans, and President-elect Trump has plucked several GOP House members for his Cabinet.

Republicans may end up with as small as a temporary one- or two-seat majority until seats can be filled with special elections. That puts House Republicans in a significantly weaker position than they were in during Trump's first term in 2017, when they had a 20-seat buffer.

Several House Democrats told Axios that there is already a sentiment that dutifully attending major votes will be paramount.

"Given the narrow margins, there's going to be a real emphasis on making sure people are here," said Morelle.

"To vote against shi**y legislation ... if I get struck by lightning, I'm going to drag myself here," said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), in a statement to Axios, said showing up to votes is "what House Democrats do every day."

Democrats may face complications on their own side – with a high risk of lawmakers in districts Trump won defecting on key votes.

Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), a co-chair of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, told Axios that Democratic leadership can only "count on me to do what I think is best for Maine and the country."

Golden hinted that he could end up supporting Trump's tariff proposals, for instance, pointing to his own bill to institute a universal 10% tariff.

Even some Republicans acknowledged that governing may be difficult and chaotic with a tiny House majority and Trump as president.

One House Republican forecast a "high" likelihood of a government shutdown because it "really can just take one or two Republican members of Congress to twist the president's arm off now."

The lawmaker added that "the tables have kind of been reversed to where the House Freedom Caucus will just do whatever President Trump says and the people in the middle who are in tougher districts won't."

Some Republicans argued Trump will be a focal point around which GOP lawmakers can rally in a way they couldn't over the last two years.

"If Trump's going to sign [a bill], you immediately have a momentum that wasn't there before," said one senior House Republican.

Said a third House Republican: "I think you're looking at a very prepared, very focused, very mission-driven Trump second term ... I think it's going to be much cleaner, much more orderly.">

<Trump incited a deadly assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

His extremist justices took away women’s right to control their own bodies.

He wants huge tariffs, which are essentially a tax on American consumers.

He stole top secrets and left them in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom.

He bragged about grabbing the private parts of women he’d just met.

He called for a “day of violence” in which police could do whatever they wanted with no accountability.

He says his mass deportation of undocumented immigrants will be “a bloody story.”

He pushed the fake-electors scheme to overturn a fair election.

He called his opponents “vermin,” echoing hate speech from the Holocaust and the 1994 Rwanda massacre.

He invited the Taliban to Camp David.

He claimed you need an ID to buy cereal.

He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

He said a 2nd Trump administration would give a major health policy role to anti-vaxxer RFK Jr., a disturbed person who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park and cut off the head of a dead whale with a chainsaw and strapped it to the roof of his minivan. (Really.)

He was friends with Jeffrey Epstein.

He helped the Saudis cover up the murder and dismemberment of a U.S.-based journalist.

He wants to use the military to put down “the enemy from within” – Democrats.

He thinks windmills cause cancer.

He used a Sharpie to doctor an official weather map rather than admit he was wrong about a hurricane hitting Alabama.

He lied that “Dems want to shut your churches down, permanently.”

He said falsely that Mexico would pay for the wall.

His administration separated migrant children from their parents and then lost track of the parents.

He said he'd be a dictator, but only on “Day 1” (which is not how dictators operate).

He denounced Denmark’s leader because she wouldn’t sell him Greenland.

He increased the national debt by 39% in just 4 years while giving the rich a big tax cut.

He said of his daughter Ivanka: “She does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

He lied publicly that Covid-19 was “like a regular flu that we have flu shots for” while he privately said it was “more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

He suggested that putting light in people's bodies and injecting them with disinfectant could kill Covid.

He had to pay $2 million in a lawsuit over the Trump Foundation’s misuse of charity funds.

He called Mexican immigrants “rapists.”

On 9/11, he bragged that the fall of the Twin Towers meant his building was NYC's tallest. That boast was tasteless — and false.

He touted his business acumen but couldn’t make a profit from casinos and filed for bankruptcy six times.

He said a judge in one of his legal cases should be removed because he was of Mexican descent.

He called Haiti and African nations “s***hole countries.”

He threatened to withdraw the U.S. from NATO, a key alliance for global stability.

He urged supporters to "knock the crap out of" protesters at a 2016 rally.

He made false statements more than 30,000 times as president.

He lied that an “extremely credible source” told him Obama’s birth certificate was fake. After years of pushing the birtherism hoax, Trump admitted it was bunk — and he blamed it on Hillary Clinton.

He took Putin’s word over the word of U.S. intel agencies.

He insulted Gold Star parents whose son, a U.S. soldier, had been killed in Iraq. It was no coincidence that the family was Muslim.

A NY judge found Trump and his adult sons liable for business fraud and canceled the Trump Organization’s business certification.

He exploited the assault on a NYC jogger by taking out newspaper ads calling for the death penalty. The young Central Park 5 suspects were exonerated, but Trump never apologized.

He paid actors to pose as supporters at his June 2015 campaign launch event.

In a bizarre speech to a Boy Scout Jamboree, Trump described a cocktail party for “the hottest people in New York.” He later claimed the group’s leader called to say it was “the greatest speech that was ever made to them.” The Scout leader denied any call happened.

He cheats at everything, including golf. There's a book: "Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump."

Trump claimed he “helped a little bit” to clear 9/11 rubble, but there’s no evidence it happened.

He lied about being named Michigan’s Man of the Year.

After a MAGA supporter massacred Latinos in El Paso, Trump and his wife went to the city and used a newly orphaned baby as a prop for a photo op.

He lied that “we're the highest taxed nation in the world.” Nope.

He bragged about his penis size on national TV, and Stormy Daniels later fact-checked that as false.....>

<....He tweeted in 2019: “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas.” In fact, the plant had opened nearly 6 years earlier.

He makes the absurd claim that people weren’t allowed to say “Merry Christmas” until he came along.

He accused Ted Cruz’s father of a role in the JFK assassination and said Cruz’s wife was ugly. But Cruz is so low that he sucked up to Trump anyway.

He claimed he coined the phrase “priming the pump,” which has been around since 1932. He said he gave Defense Secretary James Mattis the nickname “Mad Dog”; he didn't.

He lied that there were “205,000 more ballots than you had voters” in PA.

He made the U.S. a laughingstock when he gave a speech at the United Nations.

He denounced 4 women in Congress who are members of minority groups, telling them to go back where they came from, even though 3 were born here and the 4th immigrated as a child.

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Trump wanted to shoot social justice protesters. "We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at Gen. Milley and said, 'Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?'"

He lied that the strategic oil reserve was “mostly empty” and he filled it. In fact, the reserve was lower at the end of his term than at the start.

He lied that "the entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED!"

He overruled experts to give a security clearance to Jared Kushner, who later leveraged his access to get $2B from the Saudis.

He bathes in his cult of personality: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot people and I wouldn't lose voters."

After the right demonized Anthony Fauci, Trump claimed not to know who gave Fauci a presidential commendation. It was Trump.

He said he got to know Putin “very well” when they were on the same episode of “60 Minutes.” But Trump was in NY, Putin in Russia.

Discussing the breakup of his marriage to Ivana in 1990, he said: “When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!— there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.”

He said in 1991: “I have black guys counting my money. … I hate it. The only guys I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes all day.”

He said in 2015 he favored the creation of a database to track all Muslims in the U.S.

Asked in 2016 if women should be charged with a crime for having an abortion despite a ban, he said: “The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.”

He defended Putin in 2015: "Nobody’s proven that he’s killed anybody."

In 2016, he called for not only killing terrorists but killing their family members, too.

He invited Russians into the Oval Office and shared classified information.

He tried to revoke CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s credentials because Acosta did his job.

His company, the Trump Organization, was convicted of 17 tax crimes, including conspiracy and falsifying business records.

He called for government crackdowns on MSNBC and CBS because he didn’t like their coverage of him.

His pardon got Steve Bannon out of federal fraud charges in a “build the wall” scam. Right-wing disinformation is Bannon’s game: "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with s***."

He falsely accused 2 Georgia election workers of election fraud – the same allegations that led to a $148M judgment vs. Rudy Giuliani.

His bid to monetize the presidency by hosting the G-7 summit at his Doral golf club sparked outrage, and he backed off.

As Notre Dame Cathedral burned, Trump embarrassed the U.S. by tweeting: “Perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out. Must act quickly!”

He declared publicly in 1999 that he was “pro-choice in every respect.” But he tossed that aside for politics.

He’s always been a sore loser. After Ted Cruz beat him in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, he tweeted: “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.” Sound familiar?

He praised Hungarian despot Viktor Orban as “one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world.”

A Trump golf club put up a marker about a “River of Blood” at a Civil War battle that supposedly took place there. But no such battle occurred. It’s a lie.

Several Trump golf clubs displayed a Time magazine cover featuring him. You guessed it: It's fake.

He pardoned Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of ignoring a court order to stop profiling Latinos.

He tweeted about MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski “badly bleeding from a face-lift.”...>

<....He lied about Brzezinski’s husband/co-host: “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so.”

He hired Kellyanne Conway as a professional liar, and she fulfilled that role, saying early in the pandemic that Covid was “contained,” calling lies “alternative facts” and referring to a terrorist attack that never happened: the “Bowling Green Massacre.”

He uses phrases like “brilliant” and “strong like granite” to describe China’s dictator Xi Jinping.

He quit the Iran nuclear deal, raising the chances of nuclear war.

He told his Cabinet that the Soviet Union was justified in invading Afghanistan in 1979.

After former Klan leader David Duke endorsed him for president, Trump said: "I don't know David Duke. … I just don't know anything about him." But researchers found video clips showing Trump talking about Duke on national TV multiple times.

He refused to attend his successor’s inauguration, becoming the first president to boycott the transition since Andrew Johnson in 1869.

He tore up official documents, forcing aides to tape them together to preserve them as required by federal law.

He encouraged a “lock her up” chant about Hillary Clinton and her private email server, but Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner improperly used personal messaging services such as email and WhatsApp for hundreds of government communications.

He endorsed NC gov hopeful Mark Robinson, a Holocaust denier who called Obama a “top-ranking demon” and said "I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn't vote.”

Trump's social-media Christmas wish for his opponents: “May they rot in hell.”

He used the South Lawn of the White House for a partisan event, ignoring precedent and propriety, when he gave his 2020 Republican National Convention speech there.

In late 2020, sore loser Trump delayed transition talks with the Biden team even though the stonewalling hurt public health efforts during a pandemic.

Trump's administration asked Japan to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. Japan did so to curry favor.

Asked about QAnon, the conspiracy cult that claims JFK Jr. is still alive and Democrats kidnap children to harvest their blood, Trump said: “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand that they like me very much, which I appreciate.”

He lied that U.S. Steel was building 6, 7, 8, or 9 new plants (the number varied). But the company built no new plants.

He was asked about charges vs. Ghislaine Maxwell for conspiring with sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. Trump said: “I wish her well, frankly.”

He bragged that he received “the highly honored Bay of Pigs award” from Cuban Americans in Florida. There’s no such award.

He retweeted a GOP pol's post suggesting duct-taping Nancy Pelosi’s mouth so “she won’t be able to drink booze on the job as much.”

After a 75-year-old social justice protester in Buffalo, NY, was shoved to the ground by police and suffered a fractured skull, Trump suggested it was a “set-up” by “an antifa provocateur.” Trump tweeted that the activist “fell harder than [he] was pushed.”

A 1973 New York Times story said Trump “graduated first in his class” from Penn’s Wharton School. Nope. It was an early case of media swallowing Trump lies.

He said about Covid in June 2020, “If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.”

He encouraged police to be more violent. After describing how police put their hand over a suspect’s head to prevent injury as they’re loaded into a police car, Trump said, “You can take the hand away, OK?”

He lied that Obama spied on his campaign.

He said: “We will be ending the AIDS epidemic shortly in America and curing childhood cancer very shortly.”

Trump’s Agriculture Dept. ordered staff to stop referring to "climate change" and call it “weather extremes” instead.

He is selling watches, crypto, and sneakers.

He secretly shipped Covid test equipment to Putin when it was needed in the U.S.

There is credible evidence that Egypt gave Trump's campaign a $10M bribe.

He says he’d withhold aid and let California burn if the governor opposed him politically.

He opened most of Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging and other development, removing protections for a temperate rainforest. Biden reversed the move.

Trump's coup attempt projected such instability that Gen. Mark Milley assured his Chinese counterpart that the U.S. planned no attack. This infuriated Trump, who suggested Milley deserved execution: “In times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”>

<....As he plotted to keep power despite losing in 2020, Trump considered naming conspiracy crackpot Sidney Powell as a special counsel to "investigate" the nonexistent voter fraud he claimed. Powell later pleaded guilty to conspiring to interfere with an election.

Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bibles were printed in China.

Trump wants to pardon the rioters who beat up police officers at the Capitol.

Trump did nothing but watch for 187 minutes as his followers stormed the Capitol. Why? Because he liked it.

Trump said he'd “withhold aid and let California burn” if the governor didn’t support him politically.

He claimed to have built hundreds of miles of new border wall, but most of it was just repairs to existing sections.

He spread false claims that mail-in voting would lead to massive fraud, even though it’s been used safely for decades.

Trump falsely claimed that the U.S. would lose its energy independence under Biden, even though the U.S. was energy independent before and after his presidency.

He downplayed the importance of wearing masks during the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to unnecessary deaths.

Trump hosted super-spreader events during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to multiple outbreaks.

He tried to block the publication of a book by his niece, Mary Trump, which described his unfit mental state and corrupt behavior.

Trump pressured the FDA to speed up the approval of a Covid vaccine for political gain ahead of the 2020 election.

He repeatedly lied about voter fraud to undermine confidence in the 2020 election.

He encouraged his followers to storm state capitals and “fight like hell” to overturn the election results.

Trump attempted to overturn the election results by pressuring Georgia officials to “find” votes in his favor.

He used his presidency to enrich himself by directing government business to his hotels and resorts.

Trump’s administration cut taxes for the wealthy while leaving middle-class and lower-income Americans with a growing national debt.

He separated migrant children from their parents as part of a cruel immigration policy and failed to reunite many families.

Trump praised dictators like North Korea's Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, while alienating democratic allies.

He pardoned political allies and criminals, including those convicted of corruption and war crimes.

He repeatedly attacked the media, calling them the “enemy of the people” and undermining free speech.

Trump continued to profit from his businesses during his presidency, violating the emoluments clause.

He refused to condemn white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys, telling them instead to “stand back and stand by.”

He tried to use the Department of Justice as his personal legal defense team, undermining the rule of law.

Trump undermined pandemic relief efforts by refusing to sign stimulus bills until they included unrelated demands.

He attacked democratic institutions, including the FBI and CIA, when they didn’t support his narrative.

Trump criticized peaceful protests against police brutality while encouraging violence by his supporters.

He refused to release his tax returns, breaking decades of tradition and transparency.

Trump suggested delaying the 2020 election, which would have been unconstitutional.

He pressured foreign governments, including Ukraine, to investigate his political rivals, leading to his impeachment.

Trump downplayed the threat of Covid-19 despite knowing how dangerous it was, as revealed by journalist Bob Woodward.

He mocked a reporter with a disability during a campaign rally, showing a lack of basic decency.

Trump’s administration failed to address the growing opioid crisis, leading to more preventable deaths.

He repeatedly insulted veterans and military leaders, calling them “losers” and “suckers.”

Trump attempted to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service ahead of the 2020 election to disrupt mail-in voting.

He refused to support measures to protect against Russian interference in U.S. elections.

Trump tried to pressure governors to reopen their states during the Covid-19 pandemic against public health advice.

He failed to address the rising threat of domestic terrorism, including from right-wing extremists.

Trump repeatedly violated the Hatch Act by using government resources for political purposes.

He ignored intelligence reports about Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Trump’s administration rolled back environmental protections, contributing to climate change and pollution.

He falsely claimed that U.S. troops voted overwhelmingly for him, when military ballots showed otherwise.

Trump pushed baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, including claims of rigged voting machines.

He endorsed violence against protesters, saying “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”...>

<....Trump withdrew from the World Health Organization during a global pandemic, weakening international cooperation.

He promoted unproven Covid-19 treatments like hydroxychloroquine, which endangered public health.

Trump repeatedly lied about his administration’s accomplishments, including jobs created and trade deals made.

He defunded essential public services like the CDC during a public health crisis.

Trump ordered the violent removal of peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square so he could stage a photo-op with a Bible.

He claimed without evidence that wind turbines cause cancer, undermining clean energy efforts.

Trump’s administration ignored early warnings about the Covid-19 pandemic, delaying critical responses.

He sought to criminalize peaceful protests while defending violent actions by his supporters.

Trump tried to politicize the U.S. military by using them to suppress protests against racial injustice.

He insulted John McCain, a decorated war hero, saying he prefers “people who weren’t captured.”

Trump’s handling of natural disasters like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was widely criticized for incompetence.

He downplayed the severity of climate change, reversing policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

Trump repeatedly undermined the credibility of U.S. elections, a cornerstone of democracy.

He called for imprisoning political rivals, a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.

Trump’s administration failed to protect whistleblowers and actively retaliated against them.

He used his platform to promote dangerous conspiracy theories like QAnon, endangering public safety.

Trump’s trade wars, particularly with China, hurt American farmers and manufacturers.

He falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from him, inciting violence and division.

Trump refused to fully divest from his business interests, leading to conflicts of interest throughout his presidency.

His administration’s family separation policy left lasting trauma on thousands of children.

Trump’s reckless foreign policy decisions alienated key allies and damaged the U.S.'s reputation globally.

He attempted to overturn the results of a free and fair election, threatening the future of American democracy.

He bragged that he received “the highly honored Bay of Pigs award” from Cuban Americans in Florida. There’s no such award.

He retweeted a GOP politician's post suggesting duct-taping Nancy Pelosi’s mouth so “she won’t be able to drink booze on the job as much.”

After a 75-year-old social justice protester in Buffalo, NY, was shoved to the ground by police and suffered a fractured skull, Trump suggested it was a “set-up” by “an antifa provocateur.” Trump tweeted that the activist “fell harder than [he] was pushed.”

A 1973 New York Times story said Trump “graduated first in his class” from Penn’s Wharton School. This was false and an early example of media swallowing Trump lies.

He said about Covid in June 2020, “If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.”

He encouraged police to be more violent, saying: “You can take the hand away, OK?” when discussing how suspects are loaded into police cars.

He lied that Obama spied on his campaign.

He said: “We will be ending the AIDS epidemic shortly in America and curing childhood cancer very shortly.”

Trump’s Agriculture Department ordered staff to stop referring to "climate change" and call it “weather extremes” instead.

In unprecedented behavior for a presidential hopeful, he is selling watches, crypto, and sneakers.

He secretly shipped Covid test equipment to Putin when it was needed in the U.S.

There is credible evidence that Egypt gave Trump's campaign a $10 million bribe.

He opened most of Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging and other development, removing protections for a temperate rainforest. Biden reversed the move.

Trump's coup attempt projected such instability that Gen. Mark Milley assured his Chinese counterpart that the U.S. planned no attack. This infuriated Trump, who suggested Milley deserved execution, saying, “In times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

As he plotted to keep power despite losing in 2020, Trump considered naming conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell as a special counsel to "investigate" the nonexistent voter fraud he claimed. Powell later pleaded guilty to conspiring to interfere with an election.

Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bibles were printed in China.

Trump wants to pardon the rioters who beat up police officers at the Capitol.

Trump did nothing but watch for 187 minutes as his followers stormed the Capitol. Why? Because he liked it.>

<President-elect Donald Trump and his allies disavowed the conservative Project 2025 during the election, seeing the conservative transition plan and policy blueprint as a liability after Democrats used it to attack his campaign. Some close to Trump even suggested those tied to the effort would be shut out of a potential administration.

“They made themselves nuclear,” Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition and his nominee to serve as Commerce Secretary, told CNBC in September.

But with the campaign over, Trump’s transition team is turning to Project 2025 to help staff the next administration.

Already, transition officials are taking suggestions for potential hires from the extensive personnel database created by Project 2025, a person familiar with the situation told NBC News.

While Project 2025’s massive book of conservative policy recommendations received most of the attention from Democrats, a central part of the effort was putting together a database that officials had framed as a conservative LinkedIn to help staff an incoming Republican administration.

The person familiar with the transition said officials overseeing plans for some departments and agencies have started to reach out to potential hires whose names and contact information were part of that database.

Individuals helping fill out the personnel teams for the Trump transition operation have sought and used information from the Project 2025 database because of the enormity of the task of filling out the more than 4,000 political appointee jobs that will become vacant in 2025, this person said.

“There’s a lot of positions to fill and we continue to send names over, including ones from the database as they are conservative, qualified and vetted,” the person, who worked on Project 2025, said. “Hard to find 4,000 solid people so we are happy to help.”

The receptiveness to using the Project 2025 database for potential hires comes as the transition has already shown it is open to tapping contributors to the effort for administration jobs, including Tom Homan as border czar, Brendan Carr as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and John Ratcliffe as CIA director. Both Homan and Ratcliffe were listed as contributors to Project 2025, while Carr authored a chapter on the FCC.

Additionally, former Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, a Project 2025 author who also served as the Republican National Committee’s platform policy director, is thought of as a potential administration pick too.

But not everyone is being welcomed aboard. Politico reported Thursday that the transition rejected a push for former Trump administration official Roger Severino, who authored Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, to serve as deputy secretary of the agency, over concerns about the anti-abortion policies he laid out in the policy blueprint.

The personnel database was a cornerstone of Project 2025. Under Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official who led Project 2025, the group built a database of more than 10,000 candidates vetted for their MAGA credentials who sought to build out the administration in the event Trump won, as ProPublica reported in August. The idea behind the effort was to ensure that a future Trump administration would have the foot soldiers necessary to rapidly enact his agenda upon taking office.

But as tensions grew between the Trump campaign and Project 2025 — which culminated with Trump repeatedly lambasting and disavowing the effort — officials said they would not consult the database for potential hires. In his September interview with CNBC, Lutnick said he “won’t take a list from” Project 2025.

“The transition team of Donald Trump has not touched it, has not gone near it,” he said. “And anybody who says it’s got anything to do with us is just not telling the truth on purpose. Because I am clear, clear, clear. Zero.”

Lutnick reiterated his point to the New York Post before last month’s vice presidential debate, calling Project 2025 “radioactive.”

That wasn’t the first time team Trump took aim at the Project 2025 personnel database. In July, a top Trump campaign adviser told Semafor: “If you’re an organization that is purporting to be pushing ‘Trump policies,’ it’s probably the last organization that we’ll take references from for personnel.”

But a Republican operative who spoke with NBC News shortly after Trump’s electoral victory said “it’s kind of bulls--- if they really try to keep all those dudes out.”....>

<....I think it would be a big mistake,” this person said. “There’s a lot of people with their name in Project 2025. That’s going to be a tough one to really stick by. I think they’ll make an example of a few people. Hopefully some of them will be able to make it through.”

Asked about the transition using the Project 2025 database, a Trump transition official said: “The transition is working to ensure great people are in position to deliver the promises made through President Trump’s common sense agenda and overwhelming victory on Election Day.”

Project 2025 played a huge role in Democratic campaign advertising and in the party’s anti-Trump message during both President Joe Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ bids, sparking Trump and his allies to ratchet up their condemnations and claim the policy agenda was not Trump’s.

There was plenty of overlap between the Trump agenda and Project 2025 — which featured contributions from dozens of officials from Trump’s first administration. For instance, the Project 2025 policy blueprint and Trump’s “Agenda 47” featured similar ideas on mass deportations and slashing the federal bureaucracy.

There were some differences, though, as Project 2025 included calls for banning pornography and dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It also featured stringent anti-abortion rights policies that clashed with Trump’s abortion message during the campaign.

At a July campaign event in Grand Rapids, Trump said people on “the severe right came up with this Project 2025.”

“Very, very conservative,” he said. “Sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right. They came up with this. I don’t know what it is. … Then you read some of these things and they are seriously extreme. But I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

A September NBC News poll found that 57% of registered voters viewed Project 2025 negatively while just 4% said they viewed the effort positively.

But even over the summer, Project 2025 insiders weren’t sweating Trump and his campaign’s disavowals, viewing them as an effort to boost his electoral chances, not to flatly reject the ideas and people tied to the effort.

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who railed against Project 2025 with a very large copy of the policy book at the Democratic National Convention in August, said Democrats need to focus on their policy response to the elevation of Project 2025’s officials and ideas. She shared an Instagram post in which she promoted new legislation tightening restrictions around the collection and management of reproductive health data.

“It’s easy to say ‘we told you so,’ but more importantly, we now know what they’re going to do, so it’s on Democrats to decide how to fight back,” McMorrow said. “Which is exactly what I’m doing.”>

<Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) reached a late-night deal with Republicans on Wednesday to speed up the process for voting on some of President Joe Biden’s remaining judicial nominees, while agreeing not to hold votes on others.

The agreement ― cut by Schumer, independent Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.), and some Republicans ― means Schumer is teeing up votes on nine of Biden’s district court nominees and planning to confirm all of them when the Senate returns from Thanksgiving. GOP senators agreed not to impose delays on the process for these nine nominees.

Schumer plans to hold votes on more of the president’s court picks, not part of this deal, once those nine are done. The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday reported out five additional district court nominees, and another two are slated to get hearings in December. All will likely get confirmation votes.

If everything goes as planned, Schumer will push through as many as 16 of Biden’s judges in the coming weeks. The president could then leave office having confirmed a total of 236 lifetime federal judges, surpassing former President Donald Trump’s massive number of 234 lifetime federal judges in his first term.

However, in exchange for the GOP clearing the path for nine district court nominees, Schumer agreed not to try to confirm any of Biden’s remaining nominees to appeals courts, which are more powerful seats.

There are four appeals court nominees ready for Senate votes, but they haven’t moved in months and face stronger opposition from Republicans. Schumer’s office said that Wednesday’s bipartisan deal allowed Democrats to focus their energy on nominations where they were set up to win, and that the appeals court picks didn’t have the votes to prevail anyway.

“The trade was four circuit nominees — all lacking the votes to get confirmed — for more than triple the number of additional judges moving forward,” a Schumer spokesperson said.

Biden’s appeals court picks whose nominations are now officially dead because of this deal are Adeel Mangi, nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; Karla Campbell, nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit; Julia Lipez, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit; and Ryan Park, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

This agreement is not sitting well with progressive judicial advocacy groups.

“Any deal that would result in President Biden’s four remaining circuit court nominees being denied a vote is categorically unacceptable,” Maggie Jo Buchanan, managing director of Demand Justice, said in a statement. “These are critical seats that have real impacts on everyday Americans ― we cannot allow Trump to fill them with radical extremists.”

“If Democratic Senators are already rolling over this easily while they still have power, we are in for trouble when Trump actually assumes office,” she said.

“Abandoning efforts to confirm pending  Circuit Court nominees is unacceptable,” Svante Myrick, president of People For the American Way, said in a statement. “Each of these nominees will protect people’s fundamental rights ― exactly the opposite of Trump’s present and future judges. And as appeals court judges, they would have significantly more impact on justice for all, compared with trial court judges.”...>

<....Lena Zwarensteyn, senior director of the fair courts program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, also denounced the judge deal.

“When senators return from the holiday break, Leader Schumer and senators must do whatever it takes — for as long as it takes — to confirm every single pending judicial nominee, including all circuit court nominees, to provide an important guardrail for our democracy,” Zwarensteyn said.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Schumer has been aggressively confirming Biden’s judges in the lame-duck period, to the point where Republicans are complaining about some of their GOP colleagues being absent for all these votes, thereby making it easier for Democrats to rack up wins.

One of the Republican senators who’s been missing for these votes is Vice President-elect JD Vance. He’s still an Ohio senator, but he tweeted on Tuesday that he’s too busy to pitch in with Senate business because he’s doing more important things, like helping Trump pick a new FBI director.

As it turned out, Vance screwed up by revealing this, since he inadvertently confirmed that Trump is planning to fire current FBI Director Chris Wray when he takes office. Vance also seemed to incur Trump’s indirect wrath for not being in the Senate to try to slow Democrats’ rapid-fire confirmations of Biden’s judges.

“The Democrats are trying to stack the Courts with Radical Left Judges on their way out the door,” the president-elect bellowed on social media Tuesday. “Republican Senators need to Show Up and Hold the Line — No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day!”

Hours later, Vance was back in the Senate, voting against one of Biden’s nominees to an Oregon federal court. And his tweet was deleted.>

<Last December, Rep. Michael Guest (R-Mississippi) walked down the House steps to explain why he went the extra mile to lead the expulsion of the disgraced George Santos from the House.

The House Ethics Committee issued a report showing the New York Republican’s history of lies and financial deception but stopped short of recommending specific punishment. “That almost would have been a dereliction of my duty if I did not support this — if all we did was issue this report and then, you know, the Ethics Committee stays in the background,” the committee chairman told reporters on Dec. 1.

Instead, on his own, Guest filed a motion to expel Santos and, with support from every Democrat on the committee, gained large bipartisan support in a 311-114 vote, making Santos just the third House member expelled since the Civil War.

Nearly a year later, the committee is back in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

The investigation into former congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) opened up questions about the panel’s independence from political pressure, which is considered central to its role as the internal affairs unit of the House.

After Gaetz got briefly picked to become attorney general, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) led a public effort to pressure Guest and the other four Republicans on the panel to bury their probe into allegations regarding payments for sex and the use of illicit drugs.

Johnson contended, despite several historical precedents, that because Gaetz had just resigned, the committee could not release any details of the investigation.

Of course, Gaetz did not skip town entirely.

When the House Ethics Committee gathered Wednesday afternoon to consider its next steps, Gaetz was across the Capitol, holed up in a small conference room off the Senate floor, trying to persuade GOP senators to confirm him as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Once the more than two-hour meeting ended, the committee fractured in a way that rarely appears in public.

Rep. Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat, walked out into a wall of media cameras as reporters shouted questions at her, refusing to say anything.

A few minutes later, Guest walked into the same media crush and answered a few questions, trying not to say much, yet also implying that the case was closed.

“There was not an agreement by the committee to release the report,” the Republican said.

He suggested that other regularly scheduled meetings would happen through the remainder of the year, declining to answer questions about whether the Senate Judiciary Committee could see the investigation’s conclusions.

“I said there was not an agreement by the committee to release the report,” he said.

That suggestion infuriated Wild, who narrowly lost reelection in a brutal campaign with about $36 million in advertising from all sides. She rushed back to the media maelstrom to announce that the issue had come to a deadlocked vote behind closed doors and would continue to be considered next month.

“He has implied that there was an agreement of the committee to not disclose the report. That is untrue,” Wild told reporters, suggesting Guest “betrayed the process by disclosing our deliberations.”

This type of back-and-forth is commonplace on other House committees, but not on Ethics, which has long been evenly divided between five Republicans and five Democrats, regardless of which party holds the majority.

Former Ethics members did not like Johnson publicly declaring he would “strongly request” that Guest shut down the probe without any material even being viewed by senators.

“I don’t think Speaker Johnson did anybody any favors by running his mouth and saying this shouldn’t go public. You know, when I got appointed to this committee, the only thing John A. Boehner ever asked me to do is just make sure the committee functions. That’s it,” former congressman Charlie Dent (R-Pennsylvania), who spent eight years on the committee, said Thursday in a CNN appearance.

Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration Thursday, in part because he demonstrated a lack of understanding of how the Justice Department worked, gives a temporary reprieve to Guest, Wild and the rest of the committee. Their Dec. 5 meeting will come without the pressure of a Cabinet post hanging in the balance as the controversial Gaetz returns to life as a private citizen.

But the House panel must figure out how to reclaim its independence and forge trust between the two sides.

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) must choose another Democrat to replace Wild. Guest has also served six years on the committee, the usual limit for a term, so Johnson could replace him and appoint a new chair early next year.....>

<....Guest’s close friends view him as a trusted, behind-the-scenes lawyer who is most happy taking the tasks that do not bring much attention, someone not suited for the partisan showdowns that someone like Gaetz lived for on the House floor or on cable news.

“He’s got a servant’s heart, and he will take the job no one else is willing to do,” said Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-North Dakota), who was first elected in the same 2018 class as Guest and served two years with him on Ethics.

Most committee members have legal backgrounds, and Guest spent more than two decades in a local district attorney’s office prosecuting capital murder cases. Wild was partner at a Lehigh Valley law firm, specializing in medical malpractice, and became the Allentown solicitor in 2015, before also winning her House seat in 2018.

Guest and Wild have seen some high-profile cases, such as Santos’s and Gaetz’s, and also more nettlesome actions like enforcing rules of wearing masks on the House floor and the requirement of passing through security mags before walking onto the chamber floor for almost two years after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Those pandemic-era rules drove the committee into fits. Many Republicans viewed the mask rules as a violation of their personal freedom, and Democrats considered the rules a medical necessity. GOP lawmakers considered the security checks an overreaction to the insurrection.

Guest and Wild got promoted to the top posts late in 2022, after Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Indiana) died in a car crash and Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Florida), then the committee chairman, resigned.

Armstrong credited those top committee leaders with keeping the peace on the committee and avoiding open political warfare, noting that a sense of trust remained when he left the panel two years ago.

“The committee survived that,” Armstrong said.

Then came the Santos and Gaetz investigations, putting the panel into an uncomfortable spotlight.

With Santos, the panel remained unified. The committee forged ahead even as the Justice Department ran a separate criminal probe, concluding the investigation a year ago. It outlined a collection of criminal fraud regarding campaign finances and financial disclosure forms filed with the House.

The committee sent its findings to Justice Department investigators and informed the public that “Santos’ conduct warrants public condemnation, is beneath the dignity of the office, and has brought severe discredit upon the House.”

One committee member, Rep. Michelle Fischbach (R-Minnesota), opposed Guest’s motion to expel Santos, but the committee voted unanimously to expose Santos’s misdeeds to the full House.

“We felt it was important that the information that we had compiled, the report, be sent to the body as a whole so that then they can make a finding,” Guest said last December.

With Gaetz, things seemed headed in a similar direction.

After initially standing back while the Justice Department investigated, the Ethics Committee kick-started its own probe in early 2023. In June, Guest and Wild released a remarkably detailed update noting allegations that Gaetz engaged in “sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship.”

The investigators stayed quiet during the political campaign season but appeared ready to come down against Gaetz in some manner this month or early next month.

Then came Gaetz’s resignation, brief Cabinet selection and Johnson’s intervention.

Dent, who was appointed chairman in 2014 by Speaker John A. Boehner, also served on the committee during the speakerships of Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Paul D. Ryan (R-Wisconsin). He said none of them ever attempted what Johnson did in broad daylight.

“I never was involved with any of them ever trying to interfere with any type of an investigation,” he said.>

<After watching Kamala Harris lose the White House and Republicans wrest back full control of Congress, Democrats were bracing for disaster in state legislatures. With the party defending narrow majorities in several chambers across the country, some Democrats expected that Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race would allow a red wave to sweep through state legislatures.

Yet, when the dust had settled after election day, the results of state legislative elections presented a much more nuanced picture than Democrats had feared.

To their disappointment, Democrats failed to gain ground in Arizona and New Hampshire, where Republicans expanded their legislative majorities, and they lost governing trifectas in Michigan and Minnesota.

But other states delivered reason for hope. Democrats held on to a one-seat majority in the Pennsylvania house even as Harris and congressional incumbents struggled across the state. In North Carolina, Democrats brought an end to Republicans’ legislative supermajority, restoring Governor-elect Josh Stein’s veto power. Perhaps most encouragingly for the party, Democrats made substantial gains in Wisconsin, where newly redrawn and much more competitive maps left the party well-poised to gain majorities in 2026.

The mixed results could help Democrats push back against Republicans’ federal policies at the state level, and they offer potential insight on the party’s best electoral strategies as they prepare for the new Trump era.

“We must pay attention to what’s going on in our backyard with the same level of enthusiasm that we do to what’s happening in the White House,” said Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC). “And I feel like that’s never been more true.”

The implications of the state legislative elections will be sweeping, Williams said. Democratic legislators have already helped protect abortion access in their states following the overturning of Roe v Wade, and with Republicans overseeing the federal budget, state legislatures could play a pivotal role in funding critical and underresourced services for their constituents.

Those high stakes have made Democrats increasingly aware of the importance of state legislatures, where Republicans have held a significant advantage in recent years. In 2016, when Trump first won office, Republicans held 68 legislative chambers compared with Democrats’ 29, according to the DLCC. Following the elections this month, Democrats expect to control 39 chambers, down from 41 before the elections but still a notable improvement since the beginning of Trump’s first term.

As Democrats have turned more of their attention to state legislative races, outside groups have joined the fight. The States Project, a Democratic-aligned organization, poured $70m into legislative elections this cycle, while the Super Pac Forward Majority devoted another $45m to the effort. The funding provided a substantial boon beyond the resources of the DLCC, the party’s official state legislative campaign arm that set a spending goal of $60m this cycle.

“It’s not rocket science that dollars, tactics and message are potent ways to communicate with voters,” said Daniel Squadron, co-founder of the States Project. “We provide the dollars to candidates that let them get off the phones, separate themselves from in-state special interests and allow them to talk to voters and to treat these campaigns like the big-league contests they are.”

Historically, Democratic state legislative candidates have trailed several points behind the party’s presidential nominee, but early data suggests legislative candidates actually outperformed Harris in some key districts. Squadron believes face-to-face interactions with voters, as well as the high quality of many Democratic state legislative candidates this cycle, helped stave off larger losses down ballot even as the party suffered in federal races.

“That is the only way it was possible to hold the Pennsylvania house when the statewide results were so disappointing. It’s the reason the North Carolina house supermajority was broken,” Squadron said.

Democrats’ strategies appear to have proved particularly potent in Wisconsin, where the party picked up 10 seats in the state assembly and four seats in the state senate. Andrew Whitley, executive director of the Wisconsin senate Democratic caucus, credited the wins to savvy candidates who combined a message about the importance of abortion access with hyperlocal issues important in their specific districts. The strategy allowed candidates to outperform Harris and/or Senator Tammy Baldwin in four out of five targeted senate races, according to data provided by Whitley.

“It’s very rare when you have bottom-of-the-ticket state legislators over-perform Kamala and Senator Baldwin,” Whitley said. “They worked their asses off.”.....>

<....In senate district 14, which stretches north-west from Madison, Democrat Sarah Keyeski appears to have benefited from some of Trump’s supporters failing to vote down ballot for the Republican incumbent, Joan Ballweg. But in senate district 8 in the Milwaukee suburbs and district 30 in Green Bay, a small yet decisive number of voters split their ticket between Trump and Democratic legislative candidates.

The results suggest that Trump’s playbook may not be enough to elevate Republican state legislators to victory, presenting an opening for Democrats in future election cycles. As further evidence of that trend, Democrats managed to hold four Senate seats in states that Trump carried on election day.

“The Maga [‘Make America Great Again’] playbook doesn’t work at the state legislative level,” said Leslie Martes, chief strategy officer of Forward Majority. “Trump is Trump, and he’s incredibly masterful at what he does, but as we see time after time, Republicans struggle to duplicate it.”

The next big test for Republicans will come next year in Virginia, where Democrats hope to flip the governor’s mansion and maintain control of both legislative chambers.

“This will be Trump’s first task after this election, to see if he can push that playbook,” Martes said. “He’ll want that to keep his mandate going.”

Williams and her team are already gearing up for 2025 and 2026, when Democrats will have another chance to expand their power in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Although the 2026 target map is still taking shape, Williams predicted it would look quite similar to this year’s map.

“I feel like we can all kind of expect to see some of those familiar faces back,” she said. “They are really competitive states, and that is where we are going to be focusing our attention.”

Even though Democrats remain in the legislative minority in Wisconsin, Whitley expressed enthusiasm about the results and the road ahead. This year marked the first time since 2012 that Wisconsin Democrats had the opportunity to run on competitive maps, and they broke Republicans’ iron grip on the legislature.

“It’s going to be truly historic,” Whitley said. “Gone are the days where a manufactured majority can override vetoes and pass super-regressive policies. We’re actually going to have some balance, and we’re on the cusp of not only having a balanced legislature, but a trifecta.”

Democrats’ performance in Wisconsin may offer a silver lining to party members who are still reeling from the news of Trump’s victory and terrified about the possibilities of his second term in office.

“It’s very easy to get lost in that hopelessness,” Whitley said. “But then on the state legislative front, it’s also very easy to be inspired by these folks who are just regular, everyday people, who are standing up for their communities and fighting.”

• This article was amended on 23 November 2024 to correct the number of legislative chambers that Democrats controlled in 2016, which was 29, not 31, and how many they will control after the 2024 elections, which will be 39, rather than 38 as an earlier version said.>

<President-elect Donald Trump is coming for the executive branch. Eight years ago, he thought he could shake up federal agencies and left after four years with little to show for it. This time, with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy leading the charge, he is talking about even more radical changes. Will he do any better the second time around?

Trump isn’t the first president to try to shrink or reorganize the executive branch, or the first to claim to be leading an assault on waste, fraud and abuse that would deliver significant cost savings and more efficient government. Richard M. Nixon had his Ash Commission. Ronald Reagan had the Grace Commission. Bill Clinton had his National Performance Review, known as “reinventing government,” or “REGO,” led by then-Vice President Al Gore.

Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy have huge ambitions and no humility about what they are undertaking. What they have talked about amounts to a wholesale attack on federal agencies designed to eliminate thousands of regulations, reduce the federal workforce by an order of magnitude that could cripple the delivery of vital services, and effect cost savings that would amount to nearly one-third of the federal budget, or the entire discretionary part of the budget and then some.

All government bureaucracies need occasional overhaul and rejuvenation. Trump’s motivation is more about punishment and retribution. His Cabinet choices point to that. At the Justice Department, as The Washington Post reported, he is prepared to fire the team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith on two indictments of the president-elect. More broadly, he looks to dismantle what he regards as an unresponsive and oppositional administrative state.

Previous attempts to make the government smaller or more efficient have fallen far short of what was promised. Of those earlier efforts, Gore’s reinventing government initiative might have been the most successful. The Grace Commission, named for businessman J. Peter Grace, by contrast, came up with recommendations that promised $424 billion in savings over three years. Closer scrutiny by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office (now renamed the Government Accountability Office) pegged the savings at about $98 billion. Most of what the Grace Commission recommended went nowhere.

Could that be the outcome for Trump in his second term in the White House, roughshod attacks with little to show for it? Experts say what Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy are talking about — both in terms of money saved and workforce reductions — is unrealistic and that they will soon bump into political and economic realities that will leave them far short of what they claim. That doesn’t mean, however, that at the outset the president-elect should not be taken seriously about how disruptive he will try to be in his efforts. Musk has claimed he can cut the budget by roughly $2 trillion, but analysts say that would require drastic (and unpopular) cuts in entitlements programs, defense of other vital services.

Trump has created what he calls the “Department of Government Efficiency", or DOGE, which is not an official agency of government but simply a unit designed to empower Musk, the world’s richest person, and Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former presidential candidate, to begin their work. The two wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that outlined their plan. It is worth a read for anyone wondering about their intentions.

Rhetorically, it is a call to arms “to cut the federal government down to size” and attack “the entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy [that] represents an existential threat to our republic.” The plan is premised, in part, on recent Supreme Court rulings that limit the power of the agencies to write and impose regulations and that Musk and Ramaswamy say give the president considerable latitude to make big changes.

Musk and Ramaswamy said they will serve as outside volunteers. They will oversee the hiring of “a lean team of small-government crusaders” who will work with “legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these [Supreme Court] rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies.” They expect that work to identify vast numbers of regulations that can be eliminated — and that with that will come a reduction in the federal workforce.....>