Edition · December 11, 2020

The Daily Fuckup: December 11, 2020

Trump world spent the day trying to litigate reality, prevent a shutdown, and keep the post-election fantasy alive. The courts and Congress both had other ideas.

On December 11, 2020, the Trump orbit logged another ugly day of denial and defeat: the Supreme Court swatted away Texas’s bid to throw out Biden wins in four states, the White House signed a stopgap funding bill to avert a shutdown, and the broader effort to pretend the election was still somehow in play kept running into hard institutional walls. The result was a familiar Trump-era combination of embarrassment, legal failure, and self-inflicted governing chaos.

Closing take

The pattern here was already unmistakable by December 11: Trump and his allies were not just losing on the merits, they were exhausting the political system with a fantasy that had no credible endgame. Courts, state officials, and Congress were all signaling the same thing in different languages — enough, already.

Ranked by how bad the fuckup was

5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.