A progressive daily ledger of Trump-world self-owns, legal pain, policy blowback, and bad-faith chaos.
A backfill edition for the day Trump-world kept tripping over its own paperwork, its own words, and its own fake-elector fantasy.
December 13, 2022 was not a good day for the Trump machine. In New York, the civil fraud case kept grinding forward with testimony that undercut the company’s long-running valuation games. In Washington, the January 6 evidence trail kept tightening around the fake-elector scheme and the people who were trying to turn a loss into a procedural coup. The throughline was simple: more paper, more testimony, more receipts, fewer believable excuses.
The worst Trump-world screwups rarely arrive as one grand collapse. They show up as a drip of documents, witnesses, and public contradictions until the whole story starts smelling like a fire you can’t quite put out. December 13 was one of those days: not the explosion, but the smoke alarm.
5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.
On Dec. 13, 2020, Kenneth Chesebro emailed Rudy Giuliani about a plan involving alternate electors, and later congressional and Justice Department records described it as part of the effort to complicate the Jan. 6 certification.
By Dec. 13, 2022, the Trump Organization’s criminal tax case was already over: jurors had convicted the company a week earlier, and Allen Weisselberg’s testimony had already laid out how untaxed perks were handled. The broader fight over valuations was a separate civil case, not the same record.
Testimony in New York pushed another hole into the Trump Organization’s credibility, with a company broker describing how inflated square footage figures circulated inside the business and wound up helping the broader fraud narrative. It was another reminder that the case is not built on vibes or politics, but on boring, humiliating paperwork that keeps reading like a self-incrimination seminar.