'This is great hope'

President-elect Joe Biden received his first dose of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine yesterday, in a live broadcast from ChristianaCare Hospital in Newark, Del. "I'm doing this to demonstrate that people should be prepared when it's available to take the vaccine," said Biden, who also credited the Trump Administration for its efforts accelerating the development and distribution of coronavirus vaccines through Operation Warp Speed. This morning, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Health and Human Services Sec. Alex Azar received doses of the Moderna vaccine, the second coronavirus vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration. —CBS News

• — Covid hypocrisy? Members of Congress have been prioritized for inoculation to maintain governmental continuity on Capitol Hill. But some Republican lawmakers are facing criticism for receiving vaccines ahead of other Americans after downplaying or misrepresenting the virus earlier this year. However, public health experts have encouraged top elected officials to receive the vaccine to relay its safety to the public, and many in Congress are at high risk for COVID-19 complications because of advanced age. —CNN
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• — Mob floods Oregon Capitol. A group of about 300 demonstrators attempted to force their way into two separate entrances of the Oregon State Capitol yesterday as lawmakers were holding a special session closed to the public. The crowd was a loose collection of members of the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and other far-right groups, many armed with pistols and rifles, protesting pandemic restrictions. Police working to repel the protesters ended up in a standoff with them, eventually dispersing most of the crowd with pepper spray. —The Daily Beast
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• — Deadliest year in U.S. history. Deaths in the U.S. in 2020 are expected to top 3 million for the first time ever—due mainly to the coronavirus pandemic. While final mortality data for this year will not be available for months, preliminary numbers suggest that the U.S. is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019. —Associated Press

Another day, another insane meeting

The White House has become a bastion of baseless conspiracy theories and seditious schemes of late, and yesterday was no different. Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks and fellow Trump loyalists met privately with President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence as the lawmakers prepare to mount a long-shot bid in Congress in January to overturn the Electoral College results that made Joe Biden the official winner of the presidential election. Brooks said the meeting was attended by a "double digit" number of lawmakers, but he wouldn't say if senators were part of the meeting. Senate Majority Whip John Thune has called the House plot futile and warned Senate Republicans not to join the effort. —CNN

• — You knew he was a snake... Trump is turning on longtime allies for failing to assist him with his attempted coup. In an email to fellow Republicans last night, he lashed out at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for acknowledging that Biden won the election. Other targets of his outrage have included Pence, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and even some of the president’s closest advisers are reportedly unnerved by his state of mind. —Axios
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• — Cease and desist. Over the weekend, Fox News hosts Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro all aired the same fact-check video about the election conspiracies they've spread on their programs since the presidential election. Voting machine company Smartmatic, one of the companies at the center of the bogus claims, issued a letter to Fox News and other right-wing media outlets demanding a retraction and threatening legal action. Yesterday, Newsmax viewers were treated to a similar disclosure from the network's hosts: That Newsmax has no evidence that Dominion or Smartmatic manipulated votes in the 2020 election. —Associated Press
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• — Dead people really did vote. Or at least one did...and she voted for Trump. A Pennsylvania man has been charged with two felony counts of perjury and one count of unlawful voting for casting a ballot in the name of his deceased mother in this year's presidential election. Bruce Bartman was also able to secure an absentee ballot in the name of his mother-in-law, who is also deceased, but did not cast a ballot in her name. —The Hill

MORE: David Frum: Trump's attempted coup is dangerous. How long can this continue? —The Atlantic

Waldman: An important win in the culture wars

"The removal of a Confederate statue sends as much of a message as putting it up in the first place was, one made possible by the combination of cultural and political evolution. The battle over whether we should continue to honor traitors who waged war against the United States of America to preserve their right to enslave other human beings is one the right is emphatically losing." —Paul Waldman in The Washington Post

Paul Waldman is a Washington Post columnist covering politics.

MORE: This is the woman whose statue will replace that of Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol —CNN

Legal trouble for Rudy?

President Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, is reportedly at the center of an investigation headed by the Justice Department's Southern District of New York—the very office where he first made a name for himself as a U.S. attorney in the 1980s. Two sources familiar with the ongoing probe told NBC News that prosecutors at the SDNY have requested permission from their D.C.-based counterparts to file a request with a judge for the former New York mayor's email history, including emails that may be protected by attorney-client privilege. 

• — Giuliani reportedly fell under investigation due to his dealings in Ukraine, part of a larger campaign to dig up compromising information about President-elect Joe Biden ahead of the presidential election. Since then, Giuliani has been wrapped up in the effort to overturn the election, which Trump ultimately lost to Biden.
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• — Giuliani's attorney says he has "no reason to believe there's any truth to the allegations that there is renewed interest in my client," according to NBC News. But officials familiar with the investigation contend that the probe is "very active" and continues to center around Giuliani.
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• — "I would not be surprised if he gets indicted," said Mimi Rocah, a former prosecutor with the SDNY, in an interview with Bloomberg last year. "It's clear Giuliani is up to his ears in shady stuff, and there's tons of smoke." —The Hill

Austin, Anderson & Hanson: Defeating populism begins in the rust belts

"Around the world, rust belt regions like these—locked in a difficult and prolonged phase of economic restructuring—are crucibles of neopopulism. Everywhere, former economic powerhouses have become fertile ground for anti-immigrant sentiment and ethnonationalism, nostalgia for an economy and society of yesteryear, and retreat from the international order. Rust belt regions are not the sum total of the geography of populism—rural areas are equally significant—but they represent a uniquely concentrated and intense manifestation of the populist moment, especially in the United States and Europe, which undermines from within support for democracy and, by extension, support for the international political order that has delivered decades of political stability, global security, and economic opportunity." —John Austin, Jeffrey Anderson, and Brian Hanson in Foreign Policy

John Austin directs the Michigan Economic Center and is a nonresident senior fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Brookings Institution. Jeffrey Anderson is a professor at Georgetown University and former director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies. Brian Hanson is vice president of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

How social media manipulates democracy

A NATO-accredited research group has released the results of a recent study that shows just how vulnerable to manipulation even verified social media accounts are. A vast, globalized industry of low-cost social media manipulation service providers purchase fake likes, views, and shares of posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok—including content from verified accounts, like those of Sens. Chuck Grassley and Chris Murphy, who agreed to participate in the study—to distort commerce, politics, and more.

• — Social media manipulation is a threat to national security, NATO StratCom director Janis Sarts says. "These kinds of inauthentic accounts are being hired to trick the algorithm into thinking this is very popular information and thus make divisive things seem more popular and get them to more people. That in turn deepens divisions and thus weakens us as a society," he explained.
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• — "What’s most galling is the simplicity of manipulation," says Ben Scott, executive director of Reset.tech, a London-based initiative that works to combat digital threats to democracy. "Basic democratic principles of how societies make decisions get corrupted if you have organized manipulation that is this widespread and this easy to do."
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• — "We've seen how easy it is for foreign adversaries to use social media as a tool to manipulate election campaigns and stoke political unrest," Murphy said. "It's clear that social media companies are not doing enough to combat misinformation and paid manipulation on their own platforms and more needs to be done to prevent abuse." —ABC News

Wehner: Getting back to basics

"There are still things worthy of our love. Honor, decency, courage, beauty, and truth. Tenderness, human empathy, and a sense of duty. A good society. And a commitment to human dignity. ... Maybe we understand better than we did five years ago why these things are essential to our lives, and why when we neglect them or elect leaders who ridicule and subvert them, life becomes nasty, brutish, and generally unpleasant. Just after noon on Jan. 20, a new and necessary chapter will begin in the American story. Joe Biden will certainly play a role in shaping how that story turns out—but so will you and I. Ours is a good and estimable republic, if we can keep it." —Peter Wehner in The Atlantic

Peter Wehner is a former speechwriter for the administrations of three U.S. presidents. He is a vice president and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank.

To borrow from John Kasich, I didn't leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me. Every other democracy has their center-right party, their center-left, and their fringe parties. The New Republicans have already shown themselves to be on the fringe with no intention of coming back. We need a center-right. —Will C., Mississippi

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