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“Linda McMahon, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice as education secretary, incorrectly claimed in 2009 that she had a bachelor’s degree in education on a questionnaire for a Connecticut Board of Education post,” the Washington Post reports.

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) reportedly was using his “adopted” son’s PayPal account to pay women for sex, the Washington Post reports.

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, said on a podcast this week that he supported a system of “classical Christian schools” to provide the recruits for “an underground army” that will eventually launch an “educational insurgency” to take over the United States.

“Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme. I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.”

A Trump adviser familiar with the process explained to The Bulwark:
“None of the other attorneys had what Trump wants, and they didn’t talk like Gaetz. Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.’”

Garrett Graff: “Tragedy has always defined the public pathos of Joe Biden’s political career. And he will be a uniquely tragic figure now in American presidential history, for reasons that will be seen as entirely within his own control.”

Donald Trump’s attorneys are demanding the judge who presided over his New York hush money trial and conviction immediately throw out the case, saying it would be “uniquely destabilizing to the country” otherwise, NBC News reports.

President-elect Donald Trump designated Matthew Whitaker, a conservative firebrand who filled in briefly as his acting attorney general in the first Trump administration, to serve as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in his second administration, USA Today reports.

New York Times: “What demanded the dayslong presence of all these Trumpworld figures during some of the most important weeks of their careers? The fall gathering of a secretive group of wealthy tech executives and their allies who have ascended swiftly within the Republican Party’s donor class: the Rockbridge Network.”

Washington Post: “Since Donald Trump’s victory in the Nov. 5 presidential election, Biden has not taken questions about what he had repeatedly called the most important election in history, one he warned would change the country forever if Trump prevailed.”