Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClearPolitics,

In the spring, James Blair, political director for the Trump campaign, called a meeting in West Palm Beach. The occasion: Marc Elias had changed the world.

It was Elias who had petitioned the Federal Election Commission at the beginning of the year to allow a George Soros-funded political action committee to coordinate with campaigns. And the Democratic super lawyer had won. A nine-page advisory opinion followed in March. For the first time, the FEC ruled that federal candidates could coordinate with outside organizations. And now politics would change forever.

Blair sensed opportunity. All he had to do, the reason he gathered the most loyal MAGA captains of the biggest grassroots armies around a conference table inside Trump campaign headquarters last April, was convince them to accept a little heresy. The political director had to teach them to love the mail-in ballot.

Trump had taught his base to hate mail balloting, a practice he blamed for his loss in 2020. Now Blair was urging the former president’s most faithful followers to embrace what was previously verboten. According to sources inside the room that day, the conversion did not go smoothly.

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, balked. A confidant of the Trump family, Kirk and his lieutenant Tyler Bowyer were allegedly “horrified” by the idea of pushing absentee ballots for fear of alienating MAGA diehards. Ned Ryun, CEO of American Majority Action, insisted absentee ballots were half the battle, arguing that Republican hopes would languish in long lines on Election Day without them. One source described the mood that day as “snippy.”

Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet dismissed that characterization and told RealClearPolitics the organization was making plans as early as 2022 to “hammer home” the early vote.

“There were skeptics,” Blair said in retrospect. Without singling anyone out, he told RCP that “less sophisticated” operatives on the right still subscribed to “this theory that ‘well, if the votes come in early, then [Democrats] know how many they need to cheat.’” His counter-argument as he showed the grassroots the math: “No, once a vote is banked, that’s good.”

This was easier said than done, as Trump had hardwired a deep distrust into the minds of millions of Republicans by arguing that anything other than same-day voting was synonymous with fraud. “We have to get rid of mail-in ballots,” Trump said during his January victory speech after winning the Iowa caucuses. As he began his easy march through the GOP primary field, Trump added, “Once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections.”

Data alone would not be enough to convince the base to abandon that belief. Only Trump could change their minds. “He had to create the permission structure for his voters,” Blair explained, “which is that voting early, whether by mail or in person, can be a pathway to victory, not to defeat.”

Clearing a primary field of Republican challengers too afraid to attack him was one thing. Unseating an incumbent president would be another. Enter Susie Wiles.

She came from Florida, just like Blair, where Republicans had built majorities for decades despite being outnumbered by Democrats on registered voter rolls. As campaign co-chair, she had just helped Trump brush aside the primary challenge of Florida’s own governor. Then Wiles looked to the general election, directing Blair to draft a memo outlining a new Trump way to win. In short, they planned to export the Florida model.

They laid out the data, pointed to successful case studies, and ran sophisticated election simulations. But the final argument that changed Trump’s mind? “Look, sir,” the former president was told, according to sources familiar with the discussions, “people are really excited to vote for you, and they want to vote for you as soon as they have the chance to vote.” On the evening of April 19, in characteristic all caps, Trump did something very uncharacteristic: He reversed himself and blessed the mail ballot. Wrote the former president on his social media website Truth Social:

ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS. REPUBLICANS MUST MAKE A PLAN, REGISTER, AND VOTE!

Once the green light was given, the Trump machine kicked into another gear. They would still drive turnout on Election Day, but they would work just as hard to bank votes in advance. This has an obvious tactical advantage. Every supporter who cast their ballot early represented one less voter the campaign had to spend time and resources on getting to the polls on November 5. All campaigns do this. But the FEC decision that allowed federal candidates to coordinate with outside groups, the one ushered in by liberal lawyer Marc Elias, turbocharged everything. Tim Saler, chief data consultant for the Trump campaign, took full advantage.

Saler was the analytical brain behind the GOP’s ground game juggernaut. Despite all the massive reporting from the Associated Press to the New York Times suggesting the opposite, he insisted in an interview with RCP that Trump actually had one. “It was not outsourced at all,” Saler said of the get-out-the-vote apparatus. “It was coordinated.”

Flashback to Florida. Many of the groups inside Trump headquarters, almost a dozen in total, were already planning their own canvassing programs. Some had more experience than others.

Turn Out for America, a political action committee bankrolled by conservative billionaire Dick Uihlein, was on board from the beginning and widely considered among Trump operatives as “the gold standard.”

American Majority Action, Ryun’s group, had just run two pilot programs the year before, one in Louisiana and another in Virginia. Ryun was convinced Republicans could win by banking votes. “We had faith in what they did,” said a source with direct knowledge of the Trump operation. The newest addition: Turning Point Action.

Kirk and Bowers leveraged their influence with millions of conservative students to create a turnout machine. “Turning Point will just need to keep evolving,” a Trump operative said of the newest edition while stressing that their efforts were welcome and helpful.

America PAC, the Elon Musk upstart that would eclipse all the rest in spending, would come later.

Saler loves them all and says each did good work. Ahead of Election Day, the first order of business was making sure the assorted groups “did no harm.” Under the new FEC paradigm, and for the first time, the campaign could communicate priorities, coordinate strategy, and share best tactics. Hence the second priority discussed at the West Palm Beach meeting: A data-sharing agreement.

“There was a real misnomer, or just a false attack, that we didn’t have a field program,” Saler said of the idea “that our field program had been farmed out.” The campaign already had in-house volunteers, a program called Trump Force 47, that fanned out to all 50 states and knocked on millions of doors on its own. What the new coordination rules provided for was the creation of the outside armies fanning out to each of the seven battleground states in search of the all-important low-propensity voter.

“The president’s coalition is more rural, lower propensity, and more down scale,” Saler explained. “Think a 35-year-old man who turns a wrench in small-town, central Wisconsin, who never engages face-to-face with anybody in politics.”

To turn out a coalition like no other, Saler had to assemble an apparatus like no other. The campaign would be at the center. They shared targeting priorities with the outside groups, who then sent their people into the field to find and identify Trump voters, building a real-time data loop. They didn’t just go where other GOP presidential campaigns had been in years past. Because of the new canvassing rules, Trump HQ could send outside groups, not just to big population centers, but door to door even in the most rural areas. On front porches, outside grocery stores, and everywhere in between, canvassers sought out the MAGA faithful, registered them to vote, and pushed them to do it early.

“The president is a unique character in American history; He is the champion of the forgotten man and woman,” Saler said before adding that the campaign was just as unique. “We also didn’t forget them.” In the moment, though, skepticism abounded. Some Republicans, many of them on the outside looking in, questioned the wisdom of relying so heavily on mercenary doorknockers ahead of what was sure to be a make-or-break election. Even Ben Shapiro was worried. In an October interview, Shapiro warned the former president that he was hearing mixed reviews about the ground game. Was his campaign up to the job? Trump avoided the question. In the final stretch, no one had a definitive answer.

A team of rivals, meanwhile, was working on his behalf in pursuit of low-propensity voters.

A staple on the college circuit, Kirk focused on the youth vote while directing his organization’s political arm, Turning Point Action, to decamp from campus and field an army of more than a thousand paid doorknockers across each of the swing states in pursuit of low-propensity voters overall. A spokesman denied that there was any hesitation about registering voters for absentee ballots. Instead, the organization modeled its early-vote strategy off of the Democratic playbook while making accommodations for lingering concerns over mail-in ballots.

The emphasis was on early voting, but if a voter preferred to cast their ballot in person on Election Day, the organization was ready to drive them to the polls. Explained Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet, “We only care about getting ballots in the box.”

At times, the organization took “low propensity” to the extreme. Scott Presler, a conservative activist who partnered with Turning Point in Pennsylvania, courted a normally apolitical and untapped constituency: the Amish. 

That community’s aversion to politics wasn’t the chief obstacle. It was the calendar. “Get this,” he told RCP, “Amish get married on Tuesdays in November.” Otherwise, they generally match the voter profile of a normal social conservative, he reported. Armed with that information, Presler parachuted into rural farming communities west of Philadelphia and north of Pittsburgh with absentee and mail-in ballot applications.  

While Turning Point and their partners earned praise for that kind of innovation, elsewhere, some questioned the efficiency of their organization. One Turning Point intern attracted online criticism when he bragged in a social media post that he knocked on just 500 doors over the course of nine weeks, a seemingly low number. Another paid Turning Point Action employee, currently under contract in Wisconsin through November, told RCP that management had set a daily goal of just 10 voter contacts.

“We set out on a mission to chase low-prop and first-time voters across the country,” Kirk wrote in a social media post the week after the election. Across four states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin), according to their internal numbers, Turning Point Action had helped no less than 300,000 low-propensity voters cast their votes. “Mission accomplished,” he wrote.

American Majority Action took a more traditional approach with Ryun at the helm. The hard-nosed operative, who helped former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker become just the second state executive to survive a recall 13 years prior, had raised and deployed as many grassroots armies in the time since. The difference this time? Ever since the “Red Wave” fizzled in the 2022 midterms, Ryun had been on a one-man crusade to force Republicans to embrace absentee and early voting in earnest.

After running two successful pilot programs in state races, he was convinced the GOP could take the approach national. Trump supporters would learn to love the mail-in ballot, he was convinced, once they won with it. Toward that end, American Majority picked four targets: Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. They hired 1,600 staff, drilling into each canvasser two numbers: Seven and nine. Between seven and nine is how many times a single low-propensity voter, on average, must be contacted before they will return a mail-in ballot. A blunt Ryun calls it “targeted harassment.”

According to an after-action report, the group made more than 11 million phone calls in support of Trump and sent just shy of four million texts to voters in each of their four target states. They knocked on nearly 2 million doors.

On the eve of the election, Ryun wrote in an op-ed for “American Greatness” that Republicans had experienced their fair share of growing pains. It would take time for the GOP to catch up to Democrats on the early voting front, but overall, the conservative movement earned a passing grade: “A solid B to B+ level with lots of room for growth.”

America PAC was the last big group to arrive. Elon Musk endorsed Trump after the first assassination attempt, and while Republicans welcomed the many millions of dollars from the world’s richest man, the political novice attracted his fair share of scrutiny. His group planned to compete in all seven battleground states. They initially hired just a handful of vendors to execute a one-size-fits-all, top-down strategy.

By the end of the summer, though, Musk fired his initial team and hired Genera Peck and Phil Cox, veterans of the defunct DeSantis campaign, to put together a national plan with individual directors in each of the battleground states. They took a tailored approach, and by the end, Musk lent his celebrity to the Pennsylvania campaign, a state he often told voters was the key to the whole election. His group spent north of $200 million, a deep war chest that lent itself to sending canvassers nearly everywhere.

The scope of all of this was relatively new territory. Few national, grassroots organizations previously had the resources and expertise to chase votes across multiple states concurrently. Each additional battleground added another level of complexity and difficulty. But it wasn’t all top-down. A patchwork of groups supplemented the work in the individual swing states.

Motivated by the frustration that the right had “yielded voter registration to the left,” former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler launched “Greater Georgia” in the Peach State. The group identified tens of thousands of conservative Georgians and helped get them registered to vote. Another state-specific get-out-the-vote engine to the north: PA Chase. Founded by Cliff Maloney, that organization canvassed throughout Pennsylvania in search of low-propensity voters in need of a mail-in ballot. “We’re finally catching up to the Democrats,” Maloney said of his efforts before Election Day. “This is straight out of their playbook, right?

In this way, the Trump campaign and its allies chased the low-propensity voter. And it worked. He not only swept each swing state on his way to becoming just the second president in history to win non-consecutive terms, but Trump also won the popular vote, something Republicans haven’t achieved since 2004. Said Saler of the electorate that returned the former and future president to the Oval Office, “He created them.” Many were first-time voters. Some voted only for him. Now every Republican operative involved in planning for the midterms and the next general election is focused on one question: How to keep these voters in the GOP fold? It will likely include a heavy emphasis on the early vote.

Trump World, even in victory, sees the mail-in ballot as a pragmatic necessity, not an ideal way to vote. “Look, they’re not perfect, and if we could just do away with them, we probably would, but that’s not the world we live in,” Blair said. “They exist. So, it is what it is.”

For his part, Ryun has become their biggest apostle of early voting and the mail-in ballot. After Republicans won big, he isn’t in a hurry to see the GOP set them aside. “I’m telling you, this works, and this should be our game planning forward,” he said, before adding that a more pressing question for the right was discerning which groups did real work and which did little more than gobble up donor dollars.

“There are some vaporware organizations, like Turning Point, that I’m afraid were not as effective as they could have been because they were on a journey of self-discovery in politics,” Ryun said. “My concern for the future is, how do we make sure that some of these voters who turned out for Trump-only become consistent Republican voters.”

A Turning Point spokesman dismissed that criticism. Said Kolvet, “We’re not in the business of getting down in the mud.” The results, he said, speak for themselves. “The campaign, which knows the data and accomplishments well, knows how successful our program was,” the spokesman concluded.

Republicans will have their work cut out for them in the midterms. They have historically underperformed whenever Trump is not on the ballot. The coordination between federal candidates and outside groups – that the FEC allowed at the insistence of Democrats like Elias – will not change. It was central to a Trump victory.

“Thank you, Marc,” quipped Saler, the Trump data consultant who helped engineer the former, and future, president’s comeback. “We appreciate you.”

Contrary to expectations for a self-defeating flood of new energy production under the second Trump admin, Exxon’s Upstream President Liam Mallon said that oil and gas producers in the US will not raise output significantly in the coming years despite calls from President-Elect Donald Trump to “drill, baby, drill.”

“I think a radical change is unlikely because the vast majority, if not everybody, is primarily focused on the economics of what they’re doing,” Mallon said on Tuesday at a conference in London, according to Bloomberg.

Trump is expected to open up federal lands for more oil and gas drilling, in part to execute on Scott Bessent’s “3-3-3 plan” which envisions boosting US oil production by an addition 3 million barrels per day (from the current record 13.3 million), but much of the land in the country’s largest oil and gas producing state, Texas, is private. Still, there’s plentiful federal land in neighboring New Mexico which includes the oil- and gas-rich Permian Basin.

“If those rules were substantially changed, you would be able to drill more, assuming you have the quality and met your economic threshold,” Mallon said. “But I don’t think we’re going to see anybody in the drill, baby, drill mode. I really don’t.”

Exxon’s European rival TotalEnergies is also skeptical of Trump’s vow to open US taps.

“Maybe he has a magic recipe to push them to drill like mad,” TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanne said at the conference. He cited US producers’ commitment to return cash to shareholders and said “it’s not only decisions by politicians” that drive American output.

The US is pumping more than 13 million barrels of crude a day, exceeding every other nation and up almost 45% in the past decade. With a surplus looming next year, the global oil market is watching to see at what rate American explorers drill new wells. Many of the biggest US operators are taking a long-term approach to production, weighing when to bring certain wells online against their overall inventory. Many have throttled their output to maximize shareholders returns (i.e. higher prices) over total production (higher volumes).

Mallon’s comments mark the second time since the election that the largest US oil company has diverged from Trump’s policies. CEO Darren Woods discouraged the president-elect from withdrawing the US from the Paris climate pact, arguing that it’s better to participate and push for “common sense” carbon-cutting policy.

Mallon reinforced Woods’s recent remarks supporting the US Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump has characterized as Washington’s “green new scam.” Some IRA incentives — including tax credits for capturing carbon, producing hydrogen and making sustainable aviation fuel — are particularly popular with oil companies.

“Our position on the IRA is very good,” Mallon said. “We strongly believe in what it is, what it stands for and the incentives it’s providing.”

Authored by Riley Donovan via The Epoch Times,

Both Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump want to revive the long-dead cross-border Keystone XL pipeline project, but is that feasible?

A major challenge in resuscitating the project will be ginning up enough political will and corporate determination to wade through the legal and regulatory requirements to begin construction, not to mention tackling the growing anti-fossil fuel advocay across the continent.

Former owner TC Energy terminated the project in June 2021. The pipeline system is now part of the spinoff company South Bow, and that adds to the challenges of resurrecting the Keystone XL expansion.

On Nov. 12, California water solutions company Cadiz announced the purchase of 180 miles of 36-inch steel pipe from the terminated Keystone XL project. The pipe will be transported from where it is stored in North Dakota and repurposed to pump groundwater from deep under the Mojave Desert into major water networks in the Southwestern United States.

The timing of the purchase announcement, just a week after the U.S. election, indicates that the pipe was going to be sold off regardless of whether or not pro-energy Republicans came to power with a mandate to reduce regulatory burden on fossil fuel projects.

Trump has promised to reinstate the project on his first day in the White House. The last time he attempted to revive Keystone XL was in 2017, when he issued a permit reversing the Obama administration’s rejection of the project in 2015. The project was first proposed in 2008 by TC Energy, then called TransCanada.

The Trump administration saw Keystone XL as an opportunity to boost economic growth. The pipeline would have run 1,947 kilometres from Hardisty, Alta., to Steele City, Neb., and have the capacity to carry 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Western Canada’s oilfields to American Gulf Coast refineries.

The goal was to get the pipeline built quickly. What followed was years of wading through legal quagmire, finally cut short by the Biden administration’s decision to axe the project in 2021.

In November 2018, Montana judge Brian Morris issued an order blocking construction of the Keystone XL permit pending further study of environmental impacts. In February 2019, the same judge denied a request to green-light the construction of worker camps for the project.

In response, the Trump administration revoked its first permit and issued a second one in March 2019. Things were looking up for proponents of the project until Morris revoked a key water-crossing permit, suspending construction efforts. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that decision in July 2020, and the final nail was driven into the coffin when the newly elected Biden administration killed the project in January 2021.

Risks

Issuing a pipeline permit is easy—navigating the labyrinthian legal process that follows is the hard part. If the Trump administration issues yet another Keystone XL permit next year, the legal battle could be initiated once more with another round of lawsuits from environmental groups.

With lengthy delays comes the additional possibility that the project may be cancelled before construction begins, if Trump’s last term is followed by a Democratic administration that is less supportive of large fossil fuel projects.

Since Keystone XL is a project on both Canadian and American soil, reviving it would require political will on both sides of the border. The federal government in Canada had been supportive of the project, but the main proponent was Alberta. Premier Smith’s government would probably not have to contend with the same legal hurdles as the Trump administration. It would, however, have to make the potentially difficult decision of whether to back the project with taxpayer funds as former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s government did.

In a March 2020 announcement that was largely overshadowed by the pandemic, the Kenney government declared that it would provide a $1.5 billion equity investment in the Keystone XL project, explaining that the pipeline was “expected to be completed and in service in 2023”.

Kenney described the move as “a wise and prudent investment” that would eventually yield a net return of over $30 billion. After the pipeline was cancelled the following year, the Alberta government reported that the investment had resulted in a loss of $1.3 billion.

A similar situation has been playing out with the federal government’s decision to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project from Kinder Morgan Canada for $4.5 billion in 2018. The purchase has come under fire for overruns, with the estimated cost of building the pipeline rising significantly from $12.6 billion in 2020 to $30.9 billion in 2023.

The controversy continues now that the project is up and running. According to a Nov. 8 report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the pipeline might be worth between $29.6 billion and $33.4 billion, while the cost of building it came in at $34.2 billion. Selling the project, which the government has long promised to do, may therefore mean a financial loss.

‘De-risking the Project’

The precedent set by the Kenney government’s investment in Keystone XL and subsequent loss, as well as the cost overruns and delays after Ottawa’s purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline, puts Smith in a difficult situation in regard to embarking on a similarly high-risk investment.

Smith said on Nov. 25 that her government is looking to get more Alberta oil and gas to the United States in ways that would carry less risk than investing directly in a cross-border project.

“Maybe de-risking the project involves having an American partner, an American pipeline company, partner with our companies here,” she told reporters during an event at the Leduc No. 1 oil discovery site south of Edmonton.

“We just don’t think the best way of doing it is putting government dollars into it, but we think there are other things we can do to change the risk profile.”

Two major factors would need to come together to get the Keystone XL project started up again: renewed corporate enthusiasm and sufficient political will on the part of the United States and Alberta governments to tolerate the risk of another failed attempt.

Even if these factors come together, the project would need to successfully run the legal gauntlet of environmental challenges and then complete construction before a potential future fossil fuel-skeptical Democratic administration comes to power.

Despite the many challenges, the reinvigorated enthusiasm around Keystone XL could signal a period of renewed cooperation between Alberta and the United States stemming from a shared worldview on the energy industry.

Celebrations have broken out across Lebanon as the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel has held since early this morning. Heavy traffic returned to Beirut, after months of constant aerial bombings mainly of the southern suburbs.

A main north-south highway, the Sidon-Tyre highway, has been jammed with cars as Lebanese civilians from the southern region can finally return to their homes. “Enough wars, tragedies and catastrophes,” Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said, hailing the ceasefire deal.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column on Fox.com on the new effort to “reimagine” the resistance to Trump, including the recognition of the failure of lawfare. While some figures on the left are expressing doubts over the efficacy of weaponizing the legal system, it is doubtful that we have seen the end of it. They are only regretting that it did not work. The center of gravity of lawfare will now likely shift to the states and Democratic attorneys general and District Attorneys. “Reimagination” is rarely a form of self-examination, let alone self-criticism. That is evident in some of the most recent writings of lawfare warriors. They are like wandering Ronin samurai, warriors who lost not just their master but their purpose. What they seem to lack most, however, is principle. Whatever “reimagining” occurs, it should start with a recognition that lawfare was an abuse of the legal system for political ends.

Here is the column:

The reaction to the reelection of Donald Trump in the media has ranged from histrionic to outright hysteria. MSNBC analyst and former Sen. Claire McCaskill wept openly on television as CBS News anchor John Dickerson got choked up on national television in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, still struggling to discuss the news days after the election.

However, arguably the most perplexing responses came a few days ago when the New York Times ran a column from one of the advocates of the lawfare used against Trump since 2016.

Yale Law Professor Samuel Moyn has long been a favorite of the New York Times as part of what I have previously described as a counter-constitutional movement in higher education. As I discuss in my book, The Indispensable Right, Moyn and others have insisted that the constitution itself may be the problem with America.

In a previous New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” Moyn and Harvard Professor Ryan D. Doerfler called for liberals to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

While the New York Times publicly condemned a U.S. senator for writing about the use of the National Guard to stop violent protests (as would be done at both the White House and the Capitol), it has published a long line of figures who have engaged in violent or extremist rhetoric from the left.

However, this particular column may be worth the ink and hypocrisy needed to publish it. The New York Times long lionized those who brought raw partisan prosecutions against Trump and his allies, including efforts to cleanse ballots to deny citizens the opportunity to vote for the man who just won the popular vote.

Moyn’s column “Liberals Bet They Could Beat Trump With the Law, regrets the lawfare, not because it distorted the law and weaponized the legal system, but because it did not work.

He even quotes Benjamin Wittes, who helped create the Lawfare website, which was used, in Moyn’s words, “to hem in Mr. Trump.” Wittes wrote, “I have no interest in recriminations.” Perhaps, but the public does.

The election—which handed both houses of Congress and the White House to the GOP—was arguably the largest verdict in history. However, it was not necessarily a verdict for Trump as much as it was against the lawfare and advocacy journalism that had been used openly for years.

After all, the “Let’s Go Brandon!” movement developed at the start of the Biden Administration and was as much a criticism of the media and political establishment as it was Joe Biden —  a type of “Yankee Doodling” of the governing elite.

For years, these figures ignored the “recriminations” of some who objected to using the legal system for political purposes, particularly in the New York cases.

To his credit, Moyn now admits that “the more uncomfortable truth is that our search for political salvation primarily through the law has backfired.”

However, he remains remarkably uncritical of such tactics in the first place. Instead, he insists that these losses were due to simply “legalistic tactics.” Some of us call that the law.

Moyn plays Shakespeare’s Othello in claiming to be “one that lov’d not wisely but too well.” The problem, he explains to the fragile Times readership is that they “rooted their opposition to Mr. Trump in the law since his first month in office.” He even refers to efforts early on to block Trump’s immigration policies.

As soon as Trump came into office, he faced an acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, who ordered the department to stand down and not assist the new president in his immigration orders. I wrote at the time that the order was an outrageous and partisan act by Yates, who was planning on leaving in a matter of days.

While I criticized the initial Trump orders as poorly crafted (perhaps due to the lack of legal support) and in need of revision, I noted that he was likely to prevail on his claimed underlying authority. He ultimately prevailed after revising the orders. Yet, the New York Times and other publications again lionized Yates for an act that some of us view as unprofessional and arguably unethical.

The problem with the lawfare campaign is that it did not just treat the law as an extension of politics, but treated the public as chumps. A large part of the public saw these cases for what they were: the use of motivated judges in favorable jurisdictions for political advantage.

These same figures claim to be “saving democracy.”

The result was that liberals convinced many citizens that democracy was at risk . . . from them. What they saw was efforts at ballot cleansing to remove Trump and other Republicans from the ballots. They saw raw lawfare in New York courts. They saw Kamala Harris and other Democrats supporting an unprecedented system of censorship that one court called “Orwellian.”

Liberals continue to ignore that obvious disconnection despite the polls showing that they were increasingly viewed as the threat. Voters in swing states felt that Trump is more likely to protect democracy than Kamala Harris, who was running on a “save democracy” platform. One poll asked whether Trump or Harris “would do a better job” of “defending against threats to democracy,” 43% picked Trump, while 40% picked Harris. Likewise, free speech registered as one of the greatest concerns for voters in this election after years of censorship and blacklisting from the left.

Now, one of the academics who previously said that we have to reimagine our democracy and trash our constitution is advising that the election left “a Democratic Party in dire need of reimagining.”

There is a point where “reimagining” everything from the police to democracy becomes less of an exercise of self-evaluation than self-delusion. What many figures like Moyn are not willing to admit is that what Democrats attempted to do with lawfare was wrong and that the public rejected it … and them.

*  *  *

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

The Russian Investigative Committee announced Wednesday that is has opened a formal probe into a ‘terrorist act’ launched from Ukraine which resulted in the deaths of two Russians in the Kursk region. “A criminal case has been initiated over the deaths of two individuals in Russia’s Kursk Region after the Ukrainian military struck the area with ATACMS missiles on November 23,” a statement in Moscow-funded media said.

Crucially this is the first time Russian authorities have acknowledged that the US-supplied long range system has killed Russians. It is a rare and unexpected admission, and is likely geared toward showing the Russian population and Moscow’s allies that it faces an existential threat from NATO.

“On November 23, Ukraine attacked the positions of an S-400 air defense system division with five ATACMS missiles in the Kursk Region, three missiles were shot down and two reached their target,” according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

The statement further acknowledged that a radar station was damaged and that soldiers were injured.

“A criminal case has been opened against Ukrainian militants involved in the shelling of civilians in the Fatezh district of the Kursk Region,” the Russian investigative committee said.

There have been at least two rounds of attacks on Russian territory with US-made ATACMS since Washington gave the greenlight for Kiev to use them last week. According to more details in Russian media:

Last Saturday, Ukrainian forces fired US-provided ATACMS ballistic missiles at an air-defense battery stationed a few kilometers from Bolshoye Zhirovo, according to a Russian military report.

Another ATACMS strike followed on Monday, the Defense Ministry reported on Tuesday. In both cases, some of the weapons were intercepted, but others caused damage on the ground and injured military personnel.

And BBC has observed of the escalation, “But Monday’s strike on an S-400 air-defense missile battalion at Lotarevka northwest of Kursk on Saturday could be seen as more serious. The S-400 is considered the closest Russian equivalent of the US Patriot missile system.”

Pantsir anti-air system and a remnant of a shot down ATACMS missile on the same image from Kursk: pic.twitter.com/aBSMpZ4tjO

— Bashkarma🇺🇸🌏🇷🇺 (@Karmabash) November 26, 2024

Photos have also been published showing debris from the US missiles. Russia’s defense ministry says it is now preparing a significant ‘retaliation’ for these latest attacks, at a moment ground forces are still trying to repel Ukrainian forces’ occupation of Kursk oblast.

Authored by Lance Roberts and Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

A recent article in the Financial Times sheds a concerning light on U.S. corporate executives. Per the Financial Times:

Record numbers of US executives are selling shares in their companies, as corporate insiders from Goldman Sachs to Tesla and even Donald Trump’s own media group cash in on the stock market surge that has followed his election victory.

The rate of so-called insider sales has hit a record high for any quarter in two decades, according to VerityData. The sales, by executives at companies in the Wilshire 5000 index, include one-off profit-taking transactions as well as regular sales triggered by executives’ automatic trading plans. The Wilshire 5000 is one of the broadest indices of US companies.

Insiders sell stock for various reasons, many of which are unrelated to their company’s prospects. Therefore, record selling is not necessarily a dire warning. However, given recent returns, high valuations, the growing use of leverage, and a generally highly speculative environment, insider sales are another warning that markets may underperform expectations in 2025.

In regards to correlating insider sales and market performance, Ben Silverman of VerityData shares the following from the Financial Times article:

“Generally with selling, in terms of predictiveness, insiders are early by about two or three quarters,” he said.

“As they start seeing froth in the market is when they try to generate liquidity more aggressively.”

Trade accordingly…

In perhaps the most direct confirmation that most pollsters suck at their jobs, senior Kamala Harris campaign adviser David Plouffe revealed that internal polling never had Harris ahead of Donald Trump despite many ‘accredited’ public polls showing Harris leading the former president.

“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” said Plouffe during and appearance on the Pod Save America podcast. “I think it surprised people because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.“

Here’s where Kamala Harris advisor David Plouffe admits internal polling never showed Kamala Harris ahead of Trump in battleground states — even after spending $1 billion pic.twitter.com/AVnH2kfll7

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) November 27, 2024

Would Harris have had $1 billion in donations to incinerate (and end up in the red) had people known the truth?

The internal panic from the Harris campaign was unknown publicly, helping contribute to a widespread perception that the race was a toss-up. The results were the best for Republicans since 2004, with Trump winning the popular vote and sweeping every swing state. -Washington Examiner

Meanwhile, ‘the polls.’

“The Harris campaign’s internal polling apparently never had her ahead of Trump.”

👇 pic.twitter.com/iq82an8Ro3

— Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@Mark_R_Mitchell) November 27, 2024

Perhaps most notably wrong was Ann Selzer — a famous (and now retired) pollster, who was a stunning 16 points off the actual result in Iowa, where she predicted Harris would beat Trump +3, while Trump actually beat Harris +13.

And of course, Polymarket participants had Trump solidly in the lead for the last month of the race.

What’s more, internal polling didn’t change much throughout the election after Harris became the Democratic nominee for president in July because Joe Biden’s brain was pudding.

Harris campaign head Jen O’Malley Dillon, who was also on the podcast, along with Quentin Fulks, deputy campaign manager; and Stephanie Cutter, who oversaw messaging and communications, couldn’t disagree.

“The truth is that we really thought this was a very close race; we talked about the entire time we saw it as a margin-of-error race,” said Dillon.

The Harris campaign officials portrayed the race as doomed from the start, according to the Washington Examiner.

The comments section on YouTube was unkind…

“This interview was absolutely bananas. They admit zero fault. What a disaster,” posted one person.

“The long and the short of it is that none of these people should ever run a national campaign ever again. The Obama era is over,” said another.

There were leaks at the time saying this, but then the campaign started lying to the press and they ate it up. https://t.co/3jaf5uMa1q

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) November 27, 2024

Suppression polls were a conspiracy theory. https://t.co/DoZLnUcUqg

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) November 27, 2024

Authored by Lance Roberts and Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

In a recent Commentary- MicroStrategy Is A Leveraged ETF In Disguise – we discussed the company’s business model, which revolves almost entirely around highly speculative bitcoin and leverage. To wit:

So, what is MicroStrategy? It’s a leveraged Bitcoin fund disguised as a non-profit technology company.

Regarding leverage and speculation, we also recently discussed the surging use of options, particularly those with short time frames.

Options employ significant leverage.

Thus, record options volume, especially in calls with short periods until expiration, is another sign that speculation is rising.

In addition to the two examples of growing leverage and market speculation, we see surging volume in leveraged single-stock ETFs.

An example of such an ETF is Granite Shares NVDL. The ETF offers a 2x leveraged holding of Nvidia shares. If Nvidia falls by 3%, the ETF will decline by 6%. Conversely, if Nvidia rises by 5%, the ETF will climb 10%. Accordingly, leveraged single-stock ETFs can be incredibly speculative. Furthermore, the massive surge in volume in such ETFs, as we share below, further confirms speculative behaviors are growing.

Leverage and speculation can drive markets higher than most investors forecast. However, in the process, they create a divergence between fundamentals and valuations, thus exposing the markets to risk.

Increased leverage and speculation are not reasons to sell immediately, but they indicate that markets are getting frothy, warranting our close attention.

After a stellar 2Y, and a solid 5Y auction earlier this week, today’s sale of $44 billion in 7Y paper closed out the week’s accelerate coupon issuance, and it did so in style, with another solid auction.

The auction prices at a high yield of 4.183%, down from 4.215% last month and stopping through the When Issued 4.197% by 1.4bps, the third consecutive stop through in a row.

The bid to cover was 2.709, down from 2.737 but above the 2.585 six auction average.

The internals were weaker with Indirects taking down 64.1%, down from last month’s 71.2% and below the recent average of 72.3%. However, the foreign demand was more than made up by Directs who, like yesterday, saw a surge in demand and took down 25.9% of the auction, the highest since March 2022.

Overall, this was a solid if not spectacular result, yet the big stop through was enough to leave the 10Y flat near session lows, and about 6bps below Tuesday’s close.