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Today, I’m going to break with tradition and lead NextDraft with something that is not news. Vanity Fair has a two-part story that covers eleven interviews with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The NYT (Gift Article) shares some of the lowlights. Wiles acknowledged that, while she has tried to stop the tendency, Trump is using Justice Department prosecutions to settle scores. “When there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.” (No way! Trump?) Wiles said that Trump “was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.” (A falsehood? From Trump? Say it isn’t so!) Wiles explained that “Vice President JD Vance has ‘been a conspiracy theorist for a decade’ and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was ‘sort of political,’” (Vance? Less than authentic and even political?), that Elon Musk is an odd duck and an avowed Ketamine user (Weird, Elon seems like a sober, rational thinker who comes off as just a regular guy), and Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is ‘a right-wing absolute zealot.’” (Funny, he’s always struck me as being sort of middle of the road). There were insider accounts that could still surprise us during the first Trump term, but that bar has been raised. The badness is not being concealed. It’s being celebrated. So are the mental issues. If Freud watched a Trump press conference, I’m guessing he’d make it through about five minutes before putting down his notebook and saying, “I really have nothing more to add.” What we’re seeing in front of our eyes is worse than what we once imagined to be taking place behind the scenes. None of the Wiles revelations are as bad or disturbing as what we’ve seen in the past 24 hours of livestreamed news coverage of Trump and his enablers, and we’ve learned from experience that the next 24 hours won’t be any different.
+ Yesterday, I got a lot of reactions to my take on the confluence of three stories that made the launch of the holiday season feel like the Hanukkah from hell. Candles in the Wind.
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Striking the Wrong Note
“If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.” Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article) on the new National Security Strategy. The Longest Suicide Note in American History. “The security strategy also talks, bizarrely, about Europe being on the verge of ‘civilizational erasure,’ which is not language used by many European politicians, even those in far-right parties ... In multiple indices, after all—health, happiness, standard of living—European countries regularly rank higher than the United States. Compared with Americans, Europeans live longer, are less likely to be living on the streets, and are less likely to die in mass shootings. The only possible conclusion: The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out. Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us.”
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The Wrath of Con
“Tennenbaum soon became Epstein’s supervisor. ‘He was proving to be quite talented,’ Tennenbaum told us. But in late 1976, he received a disconcerting phone call from the head of Bear Stearns’s personnel department. Employees had belatedly gotten around to checking Epstein’s résumé, which stated that he had received degrees from two California universities. ‘Are you sitting down?’ the H.R. official asked Tennenbaum. ‘Neither school has heard of him.’” People know a lot about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. But how did he become a rich and powerful player in the first place? The NYT (Gift Article) on how a college dropout clawed his way to the pinnacle of American finance and society. Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich.
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Crash Test Dummies for Dummies
“Dummies have been in the news lately, after an updated design for a female dummy took a step closer to widespread adoption. But for many decades, they’ve been quietly doing their work, taking hit after hit in the name of saving lives. And a crash test dummy’s story starts way before they’re buckled in for a collision. They have a life, of sorts, starting at this Huron plant, where their physical parts are born.” NPR: Built to spill: The life of a crash test dummy.
+ I recently posted a new t-shirt to the NextDraft Store: Crash Test Hitch-Hiker.
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Extra, Extra
Weapons of Mass Distraction: Using inflated numbers and shoddy logic, Trump designates street fentanyl as a WMD, escalating the militarization of the drug war. This paves the way for more military on American streets and more unauthorized bombing of boats abroad. Speaking which... U.S. military says strikes on 3 boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean kill 8 people.
+ Short Circuited: “The European Commission backed away from what had been the world’s most aggressive timeline for phasing out internal-combustion engines, granting manufacturers and consumers more time to move off gasoline. A day earlier, Ford Motor Co. announced $19.5 billion in charges tied to the retreat from an electric strategy it vowed to go all in on eight years ago.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): The Electric Car Transition Unravels Slowly, Then All at Once. (Things went smoother when Dylan went electric...)
+ Bondi Update: Bondi terror attack: alleged gunmen travelled to the Philippines before ‘Isis-inspired’ shooting. And there was more than one bystander who risked everything to save lives. A new video shows an elderly couple trying to stop and disarm a Bondi gunman. “The dashcam video shows a couple who were killed in the attack.”
+ Brown Update: “Police released images last night of a “person of interest” taken two hours before the shooting, showing a person wearing a black mask, and requested the public’s help in identifying them. A man detained over the weekend was released because of a lack of evidence, after President Donald Trump earlier referred to him as ‘the suspect.’” Here’s the latest from NBC News.
+ Front Not Center: Spencer Ackerman: The Largest and Bloodiest U.S. Battlefield in 2025? Somalia.
+ The Elephant in the Roomba: “iRobot says it’s business as usual for the millions of Roombas in people’s homes, which will continue to function as expected — for now. But how did the most popular household robot company in the world fall so far and fall so spectacularly?” How Roomba invented the home robot — and lost the future. M.G. Siegler blames the regulators for killing Roomba.
+ You Cannot Be Sirius (without Howard): Howard Stern Signs Three-Year Deal After Contract Standoff. I saw a lot of false rumors, not a lot of actual standoffing. Either way, Howard staying on the air is great news because my beagles and I have run out of things to talk about on our walks.
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Bottom of the News
“This is the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, 25 bands on three stages, 10 unbroken hours of heavy music, and all day, I’ve been watching the pit—the mosh pit, the area close to the stage where inflamed dancers whirl and collide. I’ve been watching it, and skulking around it journalistically, because I am possessed by an idea: What if the pit, this ritualized maelstrom at the heart of the hardcore-metal crowd, could teach us something about how to live together in 2025—about how to be? Heavy metal, of all music, knows just how sick we are.” The Atlantic(Gift Article): The Savage Empathy of the Mosh Pit.
+ I feel like I was ahead of the curve when it