Good morning. Today, I’d like to tell you about two very different things, entirely unrelated. The first is about how President Trump’s grip on the Republican Party may be slipping. The second is about Thanksgiving, which is barreling toward us. You need to start getting ready. After that, all the news.
Looking beyond TrumpThe president is a lame duck (at least if the Constitution holds), and it’s beginning to show. For years, Trump was “seemingly impervious to setbacks,” our chief Washington correspondent, Carl Hulse, writes. The laws of political gravity haven’t applied to him. He’s been unsinkable through indictments and impeachments, buoyed always by tens of millions of MAGA-aligned voters. But his control over the G.O.P. is beginning to soften, Carl points out. In a series of decisions, Republicans have defied him outright, a prospect that seemed unthinkable earlier this year. The Epstein vote. Trump lobbied members of Congress not to push his administration to release its files about Jeffrey Epstein. When lawmakers ignored him, he flip-flopped. The filibuster. During the shutdown fight, Trump exhorted congressional leaders to kill this procedural hurdle so they could send through a spending bill over Democratic objections. Republicans worried they’d regret that in a future Democratic majority, and they refused. Redistricting. Some states have pushed back against Trump’s demand that they redraw the maps of congressional districts to help ensure Republican wins. Boat strikes. Republican lawmakers are raising questions about whether the administration has the right to kill people it calls drug smugglers on boats off the coast of South America. Russia sanctions. Some Republicans have joined a bipartisan effort to enact more Russia sanctions that Trump doesn’t want. Sending people checks. Trump said he’d give Americans $2,000 “tariff rebate” checks. Senate Republicans would rather use the money to reduce the deficit. There are several reasons for the insubordination, Carl writes. The first is public sentiment. Recent polling shows Trump and the Republicans weakening as Americans react to rising costs. Trump was supposed to fix that! The second is the beating the party took in the off-year elections this month. (Those defeats were, in Carl’s artful phrasing, “much worse than anticipated.”) Finally, legislators have started to look beyond Trump’s tenure. I know. Trump is still massively popular with his base. But time ticks away. The midterms next year will seat senators for six-year terms. Those who win will be in government after the president retires to Mar-a-Lago. They probably won’t depend on Trump for their future re-election. This is the normal arc for a president in his second term. “He’d be the outlier if it didn’t happen,” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, told Carl. “The closer you get to the midterms and then beyond, everybody is measuring their own state or congressional district, and maybe people are a little more independent. Read the rest of Carl’s analysis here.
It’s go timeThanksgiving is six days away. I write as someone who has — literally! — written the book on the holiday: This is the weekend to get yourself squared away for the feast. You don’t want to end up standing in a line at the store on Wednesday night, wondering how quickly you can defrost the turkey in your cart. (Not quickly enough. You’ll be ordering takeout.) Decide on your menu. Make sure you have what you need both to make and to serve that food. Rough out a game plan for the night before and the day of the feast, and build a lot of flexibility into it. In feasting as in war, plans don’t always survive first contact with the enemy. (Which is probably time, but could be one of your relatives.) My old colleagues on Cooking can help. There’s a smorgasbord of time-tested recipes on the site and the app, and some wonderful new ones to consider as well. (Looking at you, char-grilled sweet potatoes.) You’ll find everything you need to make and serve whatever sort of Thanksgiving plenty you desire, from a classic Norman Rockwell situation with all the trimmings to vegetarian blowouts and pescatarian banquets — and, naturally, plenty of pie. Also, we have some hot takes about the day and its obligations. Are you with us on those, or nah? Here we go!
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Half a century ago, when the Brazilian government set out to build a dam in the Amazon, it flooded hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforest, transforming a mountainous peak into an island. That island now supplies seeds to replenish deforested areas and to preserve native species throughout the Amazon. Workers arrive by boat and scale towering trees — avoiding venomous snakes and poison frogs — to reach the fruit that contains the seeds they collect. Those seeds are then donated to schools, government agencies and farmers. Ruth Fremson, a Times photographer, traveled to the island to document their efforts. See more of her photos here.
Zohran Mamdani has no mandate to steamroll state government, Nicole Gelinas writes, and Gov. Kathy Hochul should reassert herself before any negotiations between them take place. The cruelty that ICE has shown isn’t reserved for undocumented immigrants, Sarah Wildman writes. Read her essay on how it has treated noncitizens who are here legally. The Times Sale: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year.
The typewriter repairman: Paul Lundy left a corporate career to repair typewriters. It was a calling, and it fixed his life. The Kryptos panels: An anonymous bidder paid nearly $1 million for a secret to decode a C.I.A. sculpture. Optical illusion: This weekend, Saturn’s rings will seem to disappear. Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about twins who chose to end their lives together.
16 million— The number of years, at least, since the world’s first kiss, according to scientists. They define smooching as a “nonagonistic” act involving “oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer |
