Edition · December 15, 2020
The Daily Fuckup: December 15, 2020
A backfill look at the Trump-world damage that was landing on the same day the White House was still pretending the election fight was some kind of legal strategy.
December 15, 2020 was one of those days when the post-election Trump machine kept running face-first into reality. The legal fantasies were still being pushed, but the courts, the paperwork, and the public record were all pointing the other way. The result was not one neat collapse, but a stack of them: failed pressure campaigns, increasingly reckless claims, and a lame-duck presidency drifting into open procedural contempt.
Closing take
By December 15, the pattern was unmistakable: Trump and his allies were not uncovering a stolen election, they were manufacturing an ever-more embarrassing record of failed attempts to overturn one. The legal and political cost of that choice kept compounding, and the gap between the rhetoric and the evidence was getting harder to cover with anything except louder lies.
Story
Court collapse
Confidence 4/5
★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5
Serious fuckup
On December 15, 2020, Trump’s post-election legal campaign was still trying to live on momentum that the courts had already been stripping away. The underlying problem was simple: the campaign and its allies kept filing, pressuring, and repeating allegations that were not surviving contact with judges, affidavits, or basic election administration records. The day was another reminder that this wasn’t a serious litigation strategy so much as a political ritual of denial.
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Story
Fake-elector push
Confidence 3/5
★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5
Serious fuckup
On December 15, Trump-world’s efforts to keep alternate-elector schemes and election-overturn pressure alive were becoming a bigger legal and ethical liability. Official and quasi-official records show the operation moving through Republican officials and outside allies even as the normal certification process kept advancing. The problem was not only the false premise, but the fact that the premise was now producing documentary evidence of coordinated attempts to subvert the vote.
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Story
Pardon politics
Confidence 3/5
★★★☆☆Fuckup rating 3/5
Major mess
By December 15, the Trump orbit was deep into the kind of clemency politics that made the presidency look more like a protection racket than a governing institution. The pardon chatter and lobbying environment reflected a White House where proximity, loyalty, and personal ties mattered more than principle. Even before the final holiday wave of pardons, the smell test was already bad.
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