Principals

☞ White House: Biden and other White House officials are using the Thanksgiving holiday to encourage Americans to get their updated COVID-19 vaccine shots.

☞ Chuck Schumer: Despite his desire for immigration legislation, Schumer and other Democrats are confronting “bleak odds” for a Dreamers deal before the next Congress, Politico writes.

☞ Mitch McConnell: The 80-year-old GOP leader is not following the lead of Democrat octogenarians in the House — he’s got no plans to step aside.

☞ Nancy Pelosi: California is still counting. And the Speaker’s still in campaign mode, calling for ballot curing phone banking volunteers as her home state awaits the elections results in a tight race in CA-13, two weeks after the midterm elections.

☞ Kevin McCarthy: The Republican leader is headed to El Paso, Texas today to visit U.S. Border Control and Protections personnel. He’s joined by four members of the Texas congressional delegation and Reps. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., and Mark Green, R-Tenn. The agenda: border operational briefings and thanking officers for their service.

Police identified five people who were shot and killed in a rampage at an LGBTQ night club in Colorado over the weekend. The suspect, 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, is being held on murder and hate crime charges. Army veteran Richard Fierro, who was in the crowd that night, spoke publicly about how he snapped into “combat mode” to subdue the shooter. “I just know I have to kill this guy before he kills us,” he told the New York Times. The mayor of Colorado Springs said he was one of “two heroes” who took down the shooter at Club Q on Saturday night.

Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo. announced his bid to become chair of House Democrats’ messaging arm, the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, a new position that Democrats are creating in the next Congress. Neguse had wanted to seek the chairmanship of the House Democratic Caucus in the event of a change in leadership, but those plans were disrupted when Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., decided to seek the position of assistant leader while Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer stepped down from their posts.

The Office of Congressional Ethics asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether outgoing Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. violated House rules by allegedly soliciting a ticket to the Met Gala.

David Valadao, a Republican representative from California who voted for Trump’s second impeachment, narrowly won reelection to the state’s 22nd congressional district.

— Morgan Chalfant

Punchbowl News: Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., who is expected to take over the top spot on the House Financial Services Committee in the new Congress, said “the attempt needs to be made for a bipartisan outcome with a Republican House, Democrat Senate and a Democrat White House.”

Playbook: Congress looks likely to approve “well more” than the $38 billion the White House has requested for Ukraine assistance during the lame duck.

Axios: A former Twitter staffer said that Elon Musk’s layoffs impacted some 90% of the team that is responsible “for helping content moderators review reports of abuse.”

Donald Trump’s third party threat looms over 2024

THE NEWS

Republicans who have spent the last two years wondering what happens if Donald Trump wins the 2024 nomination suddenly have another question on their mind as he begins to look more vulnerable: What happens if he loses?

Trump’s loose attachments to the Republican Party are already raising speculation about a potential third party move, which could be devastating to the eventual nominee’s chances. On Sunday, ABC’s Jon Karl asked former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan about Republican fears that Trump “marches across the street and declares he’s an independent candidate” if he doesn’t win the nomination.

It’s not an easy idea to dismiss. Trump first explored a run for president as a Reform Party candidate in 2000, and repeatedly refused to rule out a run outside the GOP if he lost the primaries during the 2016 cycle, claiming it gave him “a lot of leverage” over party leaders. Michael Short, who worked at the Republican National Committee at the time, likened it to a “hostage situation.”

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney and now a critic, told Semafor that Trump raised the prospect of leaving the GOP because he “wasn’t initially being taken seriously” by the party, which was under pressure to repudiate his campaign. “His threat to run as a third party candidate was to ensure people knew of his intent and that he would have no problem with destroying the party if they stood in his way,” he said.

More recently, Trump reportedly told RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel that he would ditch the GOP to start a new party just as Republican leaders were weighing whether to convict him in his second impeachment trial (both Trump and McDaniel denied the claim).

And while two sources close to Trump quickly dismissed speculation about a run outside the GOP — one person in Trump world said there was “quite literally nothing to” the claim while a source close to the former president’s campaign called it “an absurd idea” — one Trump administration veteran wouldn’t entirely rule it out.

“I don’t see that happening right now,” the former official told Semafor. “But Trump was so successful in part because he ran against the elite and out of touch political establishment on both sides, so I’d say it’s not totally out of the realm of possibility.”

MORGAN AND SHELBY’S VIEW

Mounting a competitive third party or independent bid would be challenging for Trump, who has already declared his candidacy as a Republican.

Roger Stone, who ran Trump’s 2000 effort, noted the Reform Party at the time had significant infrastructure, ballot access, and public funding after two runs by Ross Perot. Getting on the ballot now would be more expensive and logistically complicated and could run into “sore loser” laws. It would also “guarantee the election of a Democrat.”

Tim Miller, a Trump critic who served as communications director for Jeb Bush’s campaign, said Republicans should take the threat less seriously than they did in 2016, because Trump’s legacy is more closely tied to the party now and “accommodating him has been a disaster by every conceivable measure” already.

“Is he really going to end this run with a third place presidential blowout? I don’t think so,” he said.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Even if Trump doesn’t leave the party, some Republicans argue he could do just as much damage by refusing to endorse the nominee if it’s someone other than himself, or by discouraging people from voting based on false claims of fraud.

“I don’t know if he’s gonna be the nominee, but if he’s not the nominee, I don’t see him saying, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t win, but I’m gonna just get behind all these great candidates.’ He’s likely to be disruptive,” Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, told Semafor.

— Shelby Talcott and Morgan Chalfant

Check out more of the story here.

Mike Pompeo says Randi Weingarten is the most dangerous person in the world

Photo by Gage Skidmore / Flickr

During this weekend’s gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, Semafor caught up with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one of several politicians who attended the high-profile event to test the waters for a potential presidential run

When we asked Pompeo what issues he might campaign on, he first listed off “timeless” values like “limited government” and “protecting the capacity of people to practice their faith.” Then he tacked on one more: “Making sure we don’t teach our kids crap in schools.”

“I get asked, ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’” Pompeo continued. “The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.”

“If our kids don’t grow up understanding America is an exceptional nation, we’re done,” Pompeo later added. “If they think it’s an oppressor class and an oppressed class, if they think the 1619 Project, and we were founded on a racist idea — if those are the things people entered the seventh grade deeply embedded in their understanding of America, it’s difficult to understand how Xi Jinping’s claim that America is in decline won’t prove true.”

— David Weigel and Shelby Talcott

Randi Weingarten shoots back: “Pompeo is desperate to be labeled as the extremist in the Republican presidential primary”

Photo by Marc Nozell / Flickr

Attacking teachers’ unions is nothing unusual in Republican politics, but Pompeo’s comments, which we first reported in a Q&A on Monday, were more hyperbolic than most — and Randi Weingarten had plenty to say in response.

“He needs to fund his campaign,” she said. “He doesn’t have a base so he is trying to get millions from the anti-union, anti-public-education billionaires like Betsy DeVos.”

Weingarten said that Pompeo was tapping into the same culture war rhetoric that Republicans have used throughout the last two years to try to ban books and police what teachers can say about race, history, gender identity, and sexual orientation. That kind of talk, she said, has demonized teachers, riled up extremists, and put their safety at risk.

“Pompeo is desperate to be labeled as the extremist in the Republican presidential primary,” she said. “He’s using the same strategy, the extremist’s strategy that didn’t work for them in 2018, 2020, and ’22. And he’s flooding the zone with disinformation. And what’s dangerous about that is that it will lead to violence. He’s decided to use his campaign to foment hate and division.”

— Steve Clemons

One Good Text With ... Chocolate and Chip

• Another day, another development in a potential Trump prosecution. The New York Times reported late Monday that the Manhattan district attorney’s office has moved to jump-start its criminal investigation into the former president, taking a new look at the hush-money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
• Even in these strange political times, all-out war between Donald Trump and The National Review is still a bit of a head turner. But here we are. After Trump harrumphed last week that the NR is “failing fast” and should be allowed “to die peacefully,” editor Rich Lowry used the fracas as a fundraising tool. “There’s a reason that Mar-a-Lago wants us to die, and if you envision and hope for a better American future, you should help us live.”
• Republicans did lots of things wrong in underperforming on Nov. 8, but Michael Tomasky makes the case in the New Republic that the much-maligned president of the United States also deserves a huge amount of credit. “And lo and behold, something else happened: Joe Biden’s political judgment—not accorded much respect before the election, given his underwater approval numbers—was vindicated.”

WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: Arizona’s Republican attorney general asked for a report on voting machine issues in Maricopa County that contributed to voting delays.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: An elections official in the same Arizona county had to move to an undisclosed location on election day because of safety threats.

— with our partners at Ground News

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— Steve Clemons