Inside The Papal Election

Mother Jones: “Jeff Bezos and his companies have seemingly been doing everything they can to get into Donald Trump’s good graces before he returns to the Oval Office.” “This includes: Donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration via Amazon; Dining with Trump and Elon Musk recently at Mar-a-Lago; and, of course, spiking an editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris slated to run in the Washington Post, which Bezos also owns—a decision that reportedly cost the Post as many as 300,000 subscribers who canceled in the immediate aftermath.” “As of this weekend, there appear to be new additions to this list.

“I think he’ll do all sorts of bad shit. I think he’ll continue to sue us and drop lawsuits and make new lawsuits and whatever else. — OpenAI’s Sam Altman, talking to Bloomberg about Elon Musk.

“Iran’s recent nuclear advances give President-elect Trump a crucial decision to make in his first months in office: Try to neutralize the threat through negotiations and pressure, or order a military strike,” Axios reports.

The most notorious of all Jan. 6 defendants — former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio — has formally asked President-elect Donald Trump to pardon him for his seditious conspiracy conviction related to the attack on the Capitol, Politico reports.

Congress has certified President-elect Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory in the 2024 election in a meeting that took roughly 30 minutes, Punchbowl News reports. Not a single lawmaker challenged the result of the election. It stood in extraordinarily stark contrast to Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob attacked the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election.

President-elect Donald Trump publicly said that he’s open to a two-bill approach to budget reconciliation, slightly walking back his Sunday night endorsement of tackling the border, energy and taxes in one mammoth package, Politico reports. Said Trump: “While I favor one bill, I also want to get everything passed. And you know, there are some people that don’t necessarily agree with it.” Trump did reiterate his “preference” for “one big beautiful bill,” while noting it would take longer, which he could “live with” and he thinks would be “cleaner.”