STEVE BANNON (HOST): Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci.

Now I actually want to go a step farther but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right, I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone -- time to stop playing games. blow it all up, put Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI, that'll light them up, right.

Can we talk about Never Trump for a minute?

Its various iterations—The Lincoln Project, Republicans Against Trump—made some fine commercials and a lot of noise. They raised a lot of money, especially TLP, which is now going to morph into a multi-platform media network that likely will become a permanent (and very conservative) factor in elections going forward. Starting from scratch, TLP raised $60 million. Republicans Against Trump got started late, but they hoovered up $10 million. This is nice work if you can get it.

The problem is that, despite their fat bank accounts and some terrific publicity, these people didn't materially affect the presidential race at all. Their entertaining commercials got great run, but they didn't move 10 votes. They certainly didn't materially affect the Republican side. What data we have at the moment indicates that the president* got more of the Republican vote this time than he did in 2016. He certainly got more votes generally than he did four years ago. Take them all in all, and Never Trump is about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party. The problem for all the rest of us is that they should be.

Never Trump should have been a haven for Republicans and conservatives revolted by the notion that their party and the government had been appropriated by a vulgar talking yam. As should be obvious, there just aren't that many people like that. Most of the Never Trump movement is on salary to the Never Trump movement. Everybody else is completely With The Program. The president* has utterly subsumed American conservatism in general and the Republican Party in particular and, win or lose, he's not going to go anywhere.

If Joe Biden becomes president, this president* will be the center of resistance to him. He's already established among his followers that any result that produces President Biden is prima facie illegitimate. That feeling will be set in concrete among the president*'s followers by the turn of the New Year. There is no viable counterweight to him within or without the party. Unless he ends up destitute and/or in jail—and neither one is necessarily a longshot—he's going to continue to barge into Republican politics and scatter everything like monkey poo. A well-financed, clever opposition should be viable within the Republican infrastructure and should flourish there, if the Never Trump propaganda is to be believed. Taking the party back should be a saleable pitch.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York sailed to an overwhelming victory on Tuesday over a first-time Republican challenger who, despite his long-shot credentials, raised more than $10 million to make the race the second most expensive House contest in the country.

John Cummings, a 60-year-old Catholic high school teacher and former New York Police Department officer, built his war chest from donors around the country, playing on Republican resentment of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s status as a star of the Democratic Party’s left flank.

Mr. Cummings was able to hire leading Republican consultants, buy millions of dollars in advertisements and distribute more than 700,000 pieces of mail to the district, which includes parts of the Bronx and Queens. Yet he trailed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez by nearly 37 percentage points with all districts reporting, and The Associated Press called the race at 10:09 p.m.

There is already speculation that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 31, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, may soon consider a run for higher office, a scenario that she did not dispel in a recent interview.
“I don’t know if I’m really going to be staying in the House forever, or if I do stay in the House, what that would look like,” she told Vanity Fair. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said she would not seek a higher position just for the sake of it but wanted to assess whether a new job would make her more “effective.”

No Kennedy had ever lost a Democratic primary, or a general election, in Massachusetts. From June 18, 1946, when a young World War II vet named John Fitzgerald Kennedy won the Democratic nomination to fill a congressional seat representing Cambridge and parts of Boston and Somerville, Kennedys had won every race they entered in the state.

Until September 1, 2020, when Representative Joe Kennedy III failed in his Democratic primary challenge to Senator Ed Markey by a 55-45 margin statewide. Markey won 60 percent of the vote in Boston and 80 percent in Cambridge and Somerville. Political narratives, at least as they have been written by pundits and political insiders, don’t usually end that way. Kennedys aren’t supposed to lose in Massachusetts. And 39-year-old challengers with “star power,” 100 percent name recognition, and mounds of money—and who start their campaigns with double-digit poll leads—aren’t supposed to get crushed by earnest 74-year-old veterans of the state legislature, the US House, and the US Senate who have spent decades focusing on the complexities of issues like nuclear disarmament and net neutrality.

What happened?
When the future of Democratic Party politics took shape in 2016 and ’18, Markey understood that everything was changing. He had always been a liberal with an instinct for reform. But Markey saw a new politics emerging, and he was ready to embrace it.

“When I first got to Congress, the reception I got was (very) chilly,” AOC recalled Tuesday. But, she added, “Ed Markey wasn’t afraid. He offered his expertise and partnership. He wasn’t scared of big policy and he didn’t use kid gloves.” The unlikely duo introduced a groundbreaking Green New Deal resolution in the House and Senate, and they found common ground on a host of issues concerning economic, social, and racial justice. A year ago, at a point when pundits were predicting that a challenge from Kennedy would force Markey out of politics, Ocasio-Cortez provided a critical endorsement for the senator: