• Trump sues Des Moines Register: Fresh off a $15 million mea culpa from George Stephanopoulos and ABC News, the president-elect is now suing Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register, they of that rotten piece of electioneering disguised as polling purporting to show, on the weekend before the November 5 election, that Kamala Harris was leading Trump in Iowa 47-44. The shocking poll upended the political news cycle and energized the Harris campaign at the eleventh hour, and yet the good people of Iowa handed Trump a resounding 13-point victory on Election Day. Still, it was “brazen election interference,” according to Team Trump and all intellectually honest pollsters. According to Trump’s lawsuit, filed under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, “The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election.” It’s said that elections have consequences. It’ll be interesting to see whether election interference also has consequences.

• CNN gets duped by war criminal: Last week, CNN war correspondent Clarissa Ward and her team freed a man locked in a cell in an abandoned jail in Damascus, Syria. The man identified himself as “Abel Gharbal” but turned out to be Salama Mohammad Salama, a former intelligence officer in the Assad regime who was notorious for “extortion and harassment” of Syrian residents in Homs. After CNN broadcast Ward freeing the prisoner, numerous fact-checks surfaced over social media identifying the man as Salama. Verify-Sy, a Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network member, reported, “Salama has a grim history. He participated in military operations on several fronts in Homs in 2014, killed civilians, and was responsible for detaining and torturing numerous young men in the city without cause or on fabricated charges.” CNN eventually admitted that he had duped their correspondent but added, “The decision to release the prisoner featured in our report was taken by the guard — a Syrian rebel.” Salama’s current whereabouts are unknown.

• Bye-bye, Trudeau? On Monday, Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned, citing Donald Trump’s threat of 25% tariffs as the final straw. The truth is, Freeland is jumping ship before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government collapses. In her resignation, Freeland advised withstanding Trump’s tariff threat by “keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war." But Trudeau seemingly only wants to keep on spending money. His party is trailing in the polls by roughly 20 points, and it would seem that the writing is on the wall. Under his leadership, Canada has seen its economic position sink, with the Canadian dollar now valued at 70 cents to the U.S. dollar. Speculation is growing that Trudeau may soon be following Freeland out the door.

• Biden ties Trump’s hands with China tech deal extension: It’d be one thing, a welcome thing, if Joe Biden’s handlers had honored the decision of the American electorate. Instead, they’re doing everything they can to gum up the works for Donald Trump. If they aren’t selling off the American taxpayers’ border wall for pennies on the dollar, they’re shackling Trump to disadvantageous deals with our geopolitical foes. As columnist Tom Rogan writes, Team Biden "just agreed to a five-year extension to the science and technology sharing agreement with China. Established by President Jimmy Carter, the agreement has attracted increasing scrutiny in recent years because of China’s endemic use of U.S. scientific knowledge to bolster its military and intelligence services.” Why the fuss? Rogan explains: “The main problem here is that China views its access to U.S. science and technology through the fixed prism of one key interest: specifically, how that knowledge can be employed to boost the power of the Chinese Communist Party. And that includes Beijing’s key concern of increasing China’s military power.” Joe Biden will surely pass power peacefully, but that doesn’t mean he’ll do it decently.

• TikTok’s last gambit: The Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok is desperately seeking to avoid being shut down in the U.S. Earlier this year, Congress passed and Joe Biden signed a law requiring ByteDance, which owns TikTok, to either sell its social media platform to an American-owned and U.S.-based entity or see the platform banned. ByteDance has fought against the law, but to no avail, as just over a week ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the law. ByteDance has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the law infringes on First Amendment free speech protections. Furthermore, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew met with Donald Trump on Monday, hoping to gain his support. Trump stated, “I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” and he noted that the social media platform impacted securing his election victory. However, it’s not clear what Trump could do to save TikTok for China.

• Harris staffer admits they lost the culture battle to Trump: We noted it long ago, and a Harris campaign staffer is now admitting it: Culture is king in American politics, and Kamala Harris lost badly on this front despite the Democrats having for decades enjoyed a historical and institutional advantage on this front. As Harris deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty has now acknowledged: “Campaigns, in many ways, are last-mile marketers that exist on terrain that is set by culture, and the institutions by which Democrats have historically had the ability to influence culture are losing relevance. You don’t get a national eight-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.” The late, great Andrew Breitbart said it, and the present-day Donald Trump is living proof of it: Politics is downstream from culture. Time will tell whether the Republicans’ advantage on this front can continue to be harnessed when Trump passes from the political scene.

• NSC employee spills the beans on Biden’s mental decline: No, Joe Biden isn’t literally “dead,” but he’s figuratively so — at least according to a National Security Council adviser inside the Biden White House. As James O'Keefe, CEO of the eponymously named O'Keefe Media Group, reports, “Henry Appel, a former spy who currently works at the Intelligence Programs Directorate for the NSC, reveals: ‘We’re concerned about Trump coming after us. … We’re trauma-bonded… there were a lot of tears.’” We can only imagine. O'Keefe’s hidden camera thus strikes again. As Hot Air’s John Sexton writes, “Summing up the president’s condition, Appel said, ‘Joe Biden is, like, dead. Not literally. He, like, can’t say a sentence.’” Appel then seems slack-jawed that the president’s condition didn’t cause a media uproar until after his debate with Trump. “I can’t believe it wasn’t a bigger scandal earlier,” he said. Oh, it was a scandal all right — and long ago. Just not in the mainstream media.

• Ninety-three mail trucks for $3B: And you thought those electric vehicle charging stations were bad… A blatant example of government waste comes courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service under Joe Biden. Thanks to Biden’s foolish green dream, the USPS has spent over $3 billion on developing and producing its Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDVs), with the majority planned to be electric. This comes from Biden’s falsely named Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated almost $10 billion to develop and produce these NGDVs. Defense contractor Oshkosh won the contract. However, as of November, the USPS has only received 93 NGDVs, well below the expected 3,000 at this time. The reason for the manufacturing delay is a story of too many cooks in the kitchen. The attempt to make these NGDVs check off the numerous boxes, including making them “green,” has resulted in a confusing mess of a vehicle. As one exasperated individual involved in production explained, “This is the bottom line: We don’t know how to make a d*mn truck.” This sounds like a perfect conundrum for Elon Musk’s DOGE to solve.

Headlines

• Judge refuses to toss Trump’s hush-money conviction based on immunity (Newsweek)

• Over 120 retired flag officers endorse Hegseth (Flag Officers 4 America)

• AOC loses key vote in House Oversight race (Axios)

• Gun control activist David Hogg running for vice chair of DNC (Breitbart)

• Democrat senators seek to ax transgender care ban from defense bill (NBC News)

• Biden’s economic goodbye: Store closures have surged 69% in 2024 (CBS News)

• Ketanji Brown Jackson debuts in queer Broadway musical knockoff of “Romeo and Juliet” (NY Post)

• Derek Chauvin allowed to examine George Floyd’s heart tissue in challenge to federal conviction (Minnesota Star Tribune)

• Germany’s government collapses amid economic turmoil (Morning Brew)

• Ukraine kills Russian chemical weapons chief in Moscow (Reuters)

• U.S. fears military buildup by Turkey signals preparations for incursion into Syria (WSJ)

• Humor: Joe Biden pardons wife Jill for impersonating a doctor (Babylon Bee)

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