Story
Election pressure
Confidence 4/5
★★★★★Fuckup rating 5/5
Five-alarm fuckup
The incoming new year did not slow the Trump team’s campaign to overturn the election. On January 1, the pressure effort was still in motion, with the president’s allies pushing fraud claims, lining up arguments for Georgia and other battleground states, and setting the table for the January 2 call that would soon become one of the clearest pieces of evidence in the post-election record. The damage was not just rhetorical. It was procedural, organized, and aimed at state officials who had already rejected the lies.
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Story
Pardon favoritism
Confidence 3/5
★★★☆☆Fuckup rating 3/5
Major mess
Trump’s end-of-term clemency habits were already prompting criticism by January 1, as the outgoing administration leaned hard into a pattern of rewarding allies, donors, and politically useful figures. The final weeks of the presidency had produced a wave of pardons and commutations that sharpened concerns about favoritism and the kind of message the White House was sending on accountability. Even before the biggest last-minute grants landed, the broader problem was obvious: the pardon power was being treated less like a constitutional safety valve and more like a get-out-of-jail card for the connected.
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