Forget how corrupt Trump’s first presidency was? Watch this

The corruption of Donald Trump’s first administration was so constant that it’s easy to forget every scandal. Thankfully, on Monday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow is here to remind us as Trump begins to stock his incoming White House with bigots, sycophants, and even a puppy killer.

“The first Donald Trump presidential term had so many cabinet officials forced out of office in disgrace and referred to the Justice Department to face criminal charges,” Maddow recalled. “It’s actually hard to remember them all.”

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We don’t need no education: Trump and his goons target America’s kids

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education and allow states to oversee education—or the lack thereof. 

“One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education working needs back to the states,” he said in a video message on Truth Social. 

Trump added that the Department of Education is staffed by people who “in many cases, hate our children” and “we want states to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse.”

But that could mean that children could get widely different education depending on where they grow up. For years, the GOP has been attacking education by implementing book bans in red states and attacks on transgender children by falsely claiming teachers are trying to assign sex changes for their students. Now, they’re in a position of power to dismantle education completely. 

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Elon Musk trumps Trump, wielding his power over GOP

Donald Trump’s name may have been on the ballots when Republicans won the presidential election, but there are already signs that billionaire Elon Musk is asserting ultimate control over the party.

When Trump first accepted the 2016 Republican nomination, he infamously proclaimed, “I alone can fix it.” But eight years later, showing signs of physical and mental decline, Trump is relying on Musk to prop up his political ambitions.

Musk’s political action committee, America PAC, spent a reported $200 million to support Trump in the election. Some of its money was used to prop up X, formerly Twitter, which is owned by Musk. This served a dual purpose of feeding X advertising funds it lost after sponsors left largely due to racist content, but it also aided a social media network that was the center of multiple pro-Trump falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and attacks.

Trump’s own social media network, Truth Social, has effectively been an also-ran in this respect, and other than Trump’s posts there, its content receives almost no mainstream attention.

America PAC is not winding down after the election. Musk has said it will continue to operate, backing Republican candidates, including likely contestants in the 2028 presidential primaries. Before this development, the biggest influence in Republican primaries since 2016 has been Trump. His hand-selected candidates have frequently underperformed, but now Musk’s actions threaten to overshadow Trump’s power base.

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Trump taps dog killer Kristi Noem to brutalize Homeland Security

Hide your dogs, hide your goats—Donald Trump is nominating violent and unhinged South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to head the Department of Homeland Security, CNN reported.

As secretary, Noem would oversee the country’s immigration and border enforcement and help Trump carry out his goal of mass deportations, which are expected to cripple the country’s economy and make immigrant families suffer.

The Department of Homeland Security from Trump’s first term in office is notorious for crafting and carrying out a “zero tolerance” border policy wherein government officials separated thousands of children from their parents—a policy that left children traumatized.

Noem at the helm of Homeland Security is a terrifying prospect. She has proven to have no humanity after she gleefully bragged about killing her family’s puppy as well as a goat. 

She claimed the dog—a 14-month-old wirehair pointer—had an “aggressive personality” because it killed her neighbor’s chickens. That crime was enough for Noem to take the dog out to a gravel pit and shoot it dead, such a horrifying act of animal cruelty that even Fox News couldn’t defend her.

xdogs getting the Kristi Noem news this morning pic.twitter.com/GroNBKV0Sh— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 12, 2024

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Trump rewards ‘Liddle Marco’ Rubio for his years of sucking up

 Donald Trump is expected to nominate Sen. Marco Rubio, who he once described as a “lightweight” and a “choker” to be secretary of state.

The impending announcement marks another major milestone in Rubio’s transition from somewhat feisty Trump political opponent to a complete submissive. During the 2016 presidential primaries, Rubio emerged for a moment as a possible alternative to Trump before the nomination had been decided. Trump then directed a barrage of insults at the Florida senator.

He made fun of Rubio’s height, giving him the nickname “Liddle Marco.” He accused Rubio of running “phony television ads” against him, said he was a “record no-show in the Senate” who was “scamming Florida.”

At one point, Trump even wrote, “Marco Rubio is a total lightweight who I wouldn’t hire to run one of my smaller companies—a highly overrated politician.”

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How the government is bracing to be led by a criminal fascist

In some ways, living through the second Trump presidential transition is much like the first. 

Everyone is trying to figure out which of his unhinged campaign promises will come to fruition first and which Trump true believers will be given portions of the government to wreck. 

But there’s one huge difference this time around: Donald Trump is a convicted felon who spurred his followers into a violent insurrection based on lies. The very text of the 14th Amendment bars him from holding office, but the United States Supreme Court decided it would be a bridge too far to actually enforce the Constitution when it comes to Trump. 

Regrettably, the majority of American voters also decided the whole convicted felon thing wasn’t a deal-breaker either. 

There’s no precedent for this, no roadmap for how American democracy might survive it. So now we’re watching government institutions try to strengthen themselves against the onslaught of personal and political illegality that Trump represents. 

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You can’t blame turnout for Harris’ loss

Democrats have long banked on the idea that the more people who vote, the better their chances of winning are. But in 2024, that just wasn’t true.

While nationwide turnout this year is projected to be down very slightly from 2020, the swing states tell a different story. Across six of the seven states that decided the election—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin—more voters cast a ballot in the 2024 presidential election than in 2016 or 2020, according to a Daily Kos analysis of Associated Press vote totals as of Monday at 3:30 PM ET.

The only swing state with lower turnout was Arizona—but there’s a big caveat here. Only 92% of the state’s estimated vote has been reported. And if you add another 8% to its current vote total, it shows a net increase from 2020 of about 20,000 votes. In other words, after everything is tallied, Arizona’s raw vote total this year will likely be on par with 2020’s, if not a little higher.

As it stands, on net, over 367,000 more people voted in the seven battleground states this year than in 2020. And compared with 2016? It’s not even close. In those seven states, a combined 4.9 million more people voted this year than in 2016.

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Ruben Gallego beats Kari Lake in Arizona Senate race

Democrat Ruben Gallego has been elected Arizona’s first Latino U.S. senator, defeating Republican Kari Lake and preventing Republicans from further padding their Senate majority.

Gallego’s victory continues a string of Democratic successes for the Senate in a state that was reliably Republican for those seats until Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Arizona voters had rejected Trump-endorsed candidates in every election since, but the president-elect won Arizona this year over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Gracias, Arizona!” Gallego wrote on the social platform X.

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