Edition · December 13, 2024

The Daily Fuckup — December 13, 2024

2 verified reports published on December 13, 2024.

This edition is the complete daily record. Reports remain separate so readers can see each claim, source set, correction, and update without one article being mislabeled as the entire edition.

Closing take

This was not a single catastrophic revelation so much as a day of compounding damage. The courts did not hand Trump the clean reset his team wanted, and the filings on display made the defense look less like command and more like panic management. For a political operation that depends on projecting inevitability, Friday’s news pointed in the opposite direction: more process, more scrutiny, more reminders that the baggage is still very much part of the brand.

Support the work

Help support this site

If this nightly edition saves you time, reader donations help pay for hosting, archives, publishing, email, and AI costs.

Donate

Ranked by how bad the fuckup was

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

Story

Trump’s team doubles down on the hush-money escape hatch, and it still looks flimsy

★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5 Serious fuckup

Trump’s lawyers once again asked a judge to toss out his hush-money conviction, while responding to a prosecution proposal that would keep the verdict alive even if sentencing is delayed. The defense called the government’s idea “absurd,” but the bigger story is that Trump’s team is still fighting to erase a jury’s verdict after the election and still hasn’t found a legally elegant way out. The filing keeps the case on the front burner and keeps Trump’s transition period tangled in criminal procedure.

Open story + comments

Story

Georgia judge swats down Chesebro’s plea undoing, keeping Trump’s election case scars visible

★★★☆☆Fuckup rating 3/5 Major mess

A Georgia judge rejected an effort by former Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Chesebro to invalidate his guilty plea in the 2020 election interference case. The ruling keeps one more ugly thread in the Georgia case from being pulled loose and undercuts another attempt to make the prosecution’s damage disappear. For Trump, it’s not the biggest hit of the day, but it is another sign that the conspiracy case remains sticky, documented, and hard to spin away.

Open story + comments