Good morning, everybody, and welcome to another edition of TNR Daily. I’m Jason Linkins, editor of The Soapbox, TNR’s political vertical. Soon it will be Friday night, and we can free ourselves of the burden of our workweek. 

 

It’s been an especially busy week for the January 6 commission—that wide-eyed group of House lawmakers tasked with getting to the bottom of who knew what, and when, and did how, and why, during the Capitol riot. Just a few days ago, the commission dropped a load of piping hot subpoenas (or is it “subpoenae”?) on a host of Trump luminaries—including Bill Stepien, whom our own Daniel Strauss singled out as a key figure of interest. But the hot action may lie elsewhere: the documentary record of the calls Donald Trump made and the actions he took that day.

 

Trump’s attorneys have been fighting to keep these records under wraps, which of course only makes them more interesting. Earlier in the week, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that executive privilege no longer applies to this material and ordered that the documents be handed off to the commission. But as The Washington Post reported yesterday afternoon, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit “granted a temporary injunction while it considers Trump’s request to hold off any release pending appeal, and fast-tracked oral arguments for a hearing” on November 30.

 

Good news for Trump? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As BuzzFeed reporter Zoe Tillman was quick to point out, this was just an “administrative injunction and not a decision on the merits.” TNR’s Matt Ford tells me that this is absolutely to be expected in a case like this. The real news from yesterday is that the three-judge panel that will decide this case includes two Obama appointees and a Biden appointee. As Reuters legal reporter Jan Wolfe put it, Trump “faces long odds here.” 

 

Of course, if things don’t go his way, Trump could appeal his executive privilege case all the way to the Supreme Court. But Matt told me that he feels that “there’s a pretty strong chance SCOTUS doesn’t bail him out.” Why would they? When it comes to talking about Trump’s relationship to the Supreme Court and the judges he appointed, a lot of people—including Trump himself—badly misconstrue who was the “means” and who was the “end.” 

 

In other news, if you’ve been keeping up with the Lincoln Project—that ragtag band of Never Trumpers who have for some reason expanded their original purview into rabid Terry McAuliffe fandom—you may remember how, in the waning days of the Virginia gubernatorial race, the group dispatched a quintet of operatives to Charlottesville, Virginia, to stand in front of Glenn Youngkin’s bus while cosplaying as neo-Nazis, in an effort to tie the GOP candidate to Trump. 

 

The boneheaded stunt went sideways almost immediately, bringing shame and embarrassment on the group. Thursday night, one of the Lincoln Project’s top members, Steve Schmidt, appeared on a YouTube show called America at a Crossroads, where he decried the action as “recklessly stupid … dishonest and cheap.” “It showed appalling judgment by the day-to-day leadership, management of the Lincoln Project,” Schmidt opined, having apparently missed this week’s reminder that his Lincoln Project colleague Rick Wilson was behind a very famously dishonest and cheap political ad that compared war hero Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden. Maybe Google the names of the terrible people you work with, Steve!

 

Here’s something I didn’t know about this year’s celebration of Veterans Day until I read Michael Shear’s piece in The New York Times late Thursday night: With President Biden finally bringing the Afghanistan War to a close, this marks “the first Veterans Day in two decades without troops engaged in an active war overseas.” Of course, “active war” is a term that neatly excludes drone wars, dirty wars, covert operations, and other military-industrial-complex chicanery, but let’s try to think positively about this moment in time: A 20-year-old scam is over, and that’s a good thing. In further news to mark the occasion, TNR’s Walter Shapiro recommends we all read a lovely piece by the Editorial Board’s John Stoehr, recommending that we switch back the November 11 commemoration to its original name, Armistice Day. 

 

Today at NewRepublic.com: Remember Chris Christie? He parlayed a ton of media hype earned from yelling at teachers unions into a brief career as a Republican presidential also-ran, which subsequently led to his governorship ending in disapproval and scandal, eventually landing him the plum job of Donald Trump burger-fetcher. Well, now he’s back in the headlines because he’s taking shots at Trump. Can Christie reclaim the GOP from Donald’s clutches? Hellllll no, writes Alex Shephard. Fans of Booker Prize–winning novels can rejoice: The 2021 winner has been announced, and it’s Damon Galgut’s The Promise. TNR’s Jo Livingstone runs down this year’s banner book. And Kate Aronoff files another dispatch from the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in which we learn that the higher-ups at the planet’s premiere fossil fuel concerns are ever so pissed at the media, because of its tendency to … you know, apply scrutiny to their claims!

—Jason Linkins, deputy editor

Yesterday’s trivia question: As the First World War began, a member of the British government told a friend: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Who said it, to whom did he say it, what famous poet was the nephew of the person to whom he said it, and what cruelly appropriate physical ailment did the person who said it have that would advance during the war?

 

Answer: The person who said it was Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary. The person to whom he said it was John Alfred Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette. The poet Stephen Spender (“I think continually of those who were truly great”) was Spender’s nephew. The physical ailment that advanced during the war in Grey, by painful irony, was the loss of much of his eyesight.

 

Today’s trivia question: Dutch footballer Vivianne Miedema is only 25 years old but has already run up a substantial number of career achievements, including two Frauen-Bundesliga titles with Bayern Munich and the 2017 Women’s European championship with the Dutch national team. She was named the Professional Footballers’ Association Women’s Player of the Year and shortlisted for the Ballon d’Or Féminin in 2019, as well as being named Women’s Player of the Year at the London Football Awards and by England’s Football Writers’ Association in 2020. What career achievement did she notch on September 9, 2021, and which city was she in when she did it?