A Trumped-Up Tuesday

Happy Wednesday! Washingtonians found a new favorite measure of time Tuesday, replacing the “Scaramucci”—which represents roughly 11 days spent in a job—with the “Emmer,” which represents roughly four hours.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) chief of staff, said on Tuesday that the military has completed its preparations for a ground offensive into Gaza. The announcement, however, came amid reports that Israel is reportedly willing to delay the start of a ground operation to pursue negotiations for the release of hostages held in Gaza. “We will make a decision with the political echelon regarding the shape and timing of the next stage,” Halevi said.
• House Republicans met multiple times on Tuesday in an attempt to finally select a winning speaker nominee. Majority Whip Tom Emmer won the conference’s nomination Tuesday afternoon over Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana by a vote of 117-to-97 (five members voted for other candidates and one voted present), but he quickly dropped his bid after it became clear that he lacked the support to get 217 votes on the House floor. Former President Donald Trump publicly opposed Emmer, labeling him a “Globalist RINO” who “never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement.” The conference held a second candidate forum late last night with Johnson clinching the nomination after receiving 128 votes. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy received 43 votes and Rep. Byron Donalds received 29. A floor vote is tentatively scheduled for this afternoon.
• Jenna Ellis, a former Trump attorney, pleaded guilty on Tuesday in the Georgia election interference case concerning her role in assisting Trump’s legal team in making false statements about the 2020 election. Ellis cooperated with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to a single felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, becoming the fourth member of Trump’s former legal team to accept a plea deal. As part of the agreement, Ellis agreed to testify against other defendants in the case, including Trump. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis said during a tearful statement. “I look back on this whole episode with deep remorse.”
• The Senate voted 98-0 on Tuesday to confirm Mike Whitaker as the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for a five-year term. Whitaker, a former deputy administrator of the FAA and United Airlines executive, fills the position after an 18-month vacancy and inherits an agency facing increased scrutiny over alarming safety incidents and near-collisions between aircraft in recent months.
• More than 30 state attorneys general filed a federal lawsuit against Meta on Tuesday, alleging the company violated federal child privacy protections, as well as state consumer protection statutes, by knowingly making their social media services more addictive and lying about the effects of their services on children’s mental health. The lawsuit drew bipartisan support from state officials—15 of the 33 attorneys general that signed onto the lawsuit were Republicans and 18 were Democrats. Additionally, attorneys general in eight states and the District of Columbia also filed separate lawsuits in state courts yesterday, alleging Meta violated state consumer protection laws.
• The United Auto Workers (UAW) called a strike at another General Motors factory on Tuesday, leading approximately 5,000 workers to walk off the job at an Arlington, Texas factory. This expansion followed 6,800 workers at a Stellantis plant in suburban Detroit joining the strike on Monday. More than 45,000 UAW members across GM, Stellantis, and Ford Motor have now joined the walkout as negotiations with automakers continue.
• Chris Christie’s campaign announced on Tuesday that the former New Jersey governor had received enough donors to qualify for the third GOP presidential debate, which is scheduled to take place in Miami on November 8. The Republican National Committee’s requirements mandate that candidates on the debate stage have at least 70,000 unique donors and register at least four percent support in two national polls or one national and two state polls—a threshold Christie had already met. Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy have also qualified for the debate. Mike Pence has reached the polling threshold but has apparently struggled to come up with enough donors, and Sen. Tim Scott has yet to fulfill the polling or donor requirements.
• The 2023 World Series matchup is set: After defeating the Philadelphia Phillies 4-2 on Tuesday, the Arizona Diamondbacks will travel to Arlington to take on the Texas Rangers in a best-of-seven series starting on Friday. 

Just Another Manic Tuesday

On the same day that he hit a dominant 59 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average, former President Donald Trump flexed his muscle as leader of the GOP and ended Rep. Tom Emmer’s quest for the speaker’s gavel in its infancy. Meanwhile, his former lawyer cried in court as she pleaded guilty to crimes she committed in furtherance of a scheme to overturn election results—an effort rooted in claims that even Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows reportedly told prosecutors were baseless. Just another day in Trump’s Grand Ol’ Party.

After Rep. Jim Jordan’s speaker bid flamed out on Friday, House Republicans gathered on Tuesday to vote on their next sacrificial lamb, settling on Emmer, the majority whip from Minnesota. Within hours, however, Emmer had ended his bid—and Trump was reportedly taking credit for his quick demise. 

Publicly, Trump’s charges against Emmer included being “totally out-of-touch with Republican voters” and a “RINO.” Privately, Emmer was done in by his reluctance to endorse Trump’s 2024 campaign and decision not to support Trump’s assertion that the 2020 election was stolen—which eagle-eyed readers might recognize as the “baseless” claims mentioned in the first paragraph of this item. 

Republicans then went back to the drawing board, holding another conference vote and settling on Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana as their fourth nominee to become speaker. Unlike Emmer, Johnson vociferously supported Trump’s election claims—and even led the charge to collect signatures for a lawsuit that sought to overturn the election.

Despite facing 91 felony counts and a growing number of former attorneys agreeing to testify against him, Trump still wields enormous influence at every level of his party—able to end a speakership bid with a single post on Truth Social and maintain a solid grip on primary voters without appearing at a single debate. While we’re still sorting out exactly what Meadows may have divulged in testimony to a grand jury—and the circumstances in which that testimony was offered—yesterday’s events are exemplary of the predicament in which the Republican Party finds itself.

Tuesday began with a tale of two courtrooms. In Georgia, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis tearfully pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting false statements and writings, expressing “deep remorse” over her efforts to try to overturn the 2020 election results. “What I did not do but should have done,” Ellis said, “was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true.” As part of her plea deal, Ellis agreed to testify against her co-defendants—including Trump—as the case proceeds. Meanwhile, the former president himself sat in a New York courtroom, watching as his one-time fixer Michael Cohen testified against him as part of a separate, ongoing civil fraud suit regarding Trump’s business assets.

In the House of Representatives, which has been without a speaker for nearly all of October, Republicans initiated their now-weekly cycle of selecting a candidate for the top job. After several rounds of voting, Emmer emerged as the speaker-designate—only to be met almost immediately with blowback from the hard-right wing of his party and a closed-door airing of grievances. His fate was sealed, however, when Trump issued his own veto of the Minnesota Republican, calling him a “Globalist RINO” on Truth Social—though Emmer’s real crime might have been voting to certify the 2020 election.

Mere hours after winning the support of a majority of his conference, Emmer withdrew his candidacy for speaker. “He’s done,” Trump reportedly told an ally. “It’s over. I killed him.”

Hours later, the very lie that Emmer was punished for refusing to endorse—that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump—took another body blow, with ABC News reporting that Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, has delivered damning testimony to a grand jury as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump. Meadows’ attorney later claimed the story was “largely inaccurate”—though he neglected to explain how—and Trump himself doubted his onetime ally would “lie about the RIGGED and STOLLEN” election. Bloomberg later corroborated key details of the story, however—including that Meadows received immunity from prosecution—adding that the former chief of staff could have been held in contempt of court if he did not comply with a court order to testify.

For now, even Trump is leaving open the possibility that the reporting is accurate, conceding that plenty of “weaklings and cowards” would take a deal to throw him under the bus if it kept them out of jail. “I don’t think that Mark Meadows is one of them,” he wrote on Truth Social. “But who really knows?

What is known for sure is that the GOP’s next candidate for speaker—the fourth in just two weeks—is a creature of Trump’s Republican Party. Johnson, who defeated a handful of other Republicans last night to claim the nomination, not only defended Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, but helped spearhead the movement to rally Republican lawmakers around efforts to challenge the election results.

Despite Trump’s myriad legal troubles—or perhaps because of them—his endorsement is still necessary to survive in the modern GOP, and a lapse in loyalty, perceived or real, has spelled certain doom for multiple newly minted RINOs. At time of writing, the next vote for speaker is scheduled for later this morning—though is it unclear if Johnson can clear the necessary 217 threshold that has hung over Republicans’ heads like the sword of Damocles. Or perhaps more fittingly, like a well-timed Truth Social sucker punch.

Playing Defense or Playing Catch Up?

No one likes to feel useless—but with the House gridlocked over its efforts to elect a new speaker, that’s an apt description for our legislative branch. The Senate, functional as it may be, doesn’t have much recourse to move forward on appropriations bills to fund the government or supplemental aid for Ukraine and Israel, among other job requirements that depend on the lower chamber. Maybe that’s why senators have recently been jetting overseas on trips to China, Saudi Arabia, and Israel: At least they can feel like they’re doing something in the face of spiraling crises in the Middle East, an increasingly aggressive Beijing, and an ongoing war in Ukraine. 

Though the request is falling on mostly deaf ears in the House chamber, hawkish Republicans and most Democrats are eager for Congress to push forward President Joe Biden’s requested supplemental funding package for aid to Ukraine and Israel, as the former conflict grinds on and the latter threatens to intensify in the coming weeks. The supplemental request underlined concerns in the defense establishment about U.S. weapons stockpiles and the ability of the defense industrial base to ramp up production at a time when the U.S. is supporting two international partners—and perhaps a third—facing potentially existential threats. 

Last week, Biden made the case for U.S. support to Israel and Ukraine in a rare Oval Office address to the country. “Hamas and [Vladimir] Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy,” he said. “That’s why, tomorrow, I’m going to send to Congress an urgent budget request to fund America’s national security needs, to support our critical partners, including Israel and Ukraine.”

The mammoth request—which rang up to a total of about $105 billion—included more than $61.4 billion funding related to Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel-related aid. But that’s not all that’s in the president’s request. According to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) letter to Congress, the supplemental also contained funding for the the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA); money for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to bolster these international organizations as viable alternatives to Chinese financing; and further funding for border security measures like additional Customs and Border Protection and asylum officers and new technology for detecting fentanyl. “When I worked in OMB, we used to joke that supplementals were like Christmas trees because everybody wanted to hang their ornament on it,” Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told TMD. “And in this case, the ornaments were programs that they couldn’t get funded through the regular budget processes.”

Extra ornamentation aside, the metaphorical tree itself is the funding for Ukraine and Israel. Since Putin’s invasion, the U.S. has primarily had two mechanisms to supply Kyiv with lethal aid to defend itself against Moscow’s aggression: The first, Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), allows the president to transfer weapons sitting in U.S. military stockpiles to countries experiencing an “unforeseen emergency.” The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which gives the president that power, caps the value of that arms transfer at $100 million. But Congress has raised that ceiling for Ukraine several times since the invasion began—to $11 billion in fiscal year 2022, and $14.5 billion in FY 2023.

That PDA power does not require Congress to appropriate more money to backfill the transferred weapons with new ones, though Congress has repeatedly passed supplemental funding for the Pentagon to do just that. That congressional supplemental funding has allowed the DoD to purchase weapons—often newer and more expensive than what they gave away—to replace what it has sent to Ukraine. In the supplemental Biden requested last week, more than $18 billion was allocated toward that purpose to arm Ukraine. The additional Ukraine-focused money included funding for U.S. military and intelligence operations related to the war—like training allies in Eastern Europe and intelligence investigations into potential Russian war crimes—that wouldn’t be taking place if not for the war, and cash to help the Ukrainian government match its expected budget shortfall. 

The second vehicle for aid to Ukraine has been the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which allowed Kyiv to enter into weapons contracts with U.S. defense contractors, though the delivery on those contracts can often take more than nine months—not much immediate help on the battlefield. The supplemental would add $12 billion to that fund.

While the U.S. has supplied Ukraine with military aid intermittently since 2014, its commitment to Israel has a much longer history. The U.S. already agreed to provide its ally with $3.3 billion in security assistance every year, and the supplemental would add to that figure this year. While some of the aid would support the government of Israel with air and missile defense by bolstering its Iron Dome and David’s Sling systems, much of the funding would also be used to replenish U.S. stockpiles.

Even as the U.S. transfers literal tons of weapons from its stockpiles, the supplemental request signaled real concern for the capacity of the defense industrial base amid uncertainty—not just about global threats, but about Congress’ willingness and ability to keep defense spending steady and increase it if required. The war in Ukraine has already placed strain on key weapons stockpiles—like 155mm artillery rounds, of which the Ukrainian military is shooting between 6,000 and 8,000 per day. Such ammunition “doesn’t compete well” in the battle for contracts to build up supply during peacetime, Cancian said, since, unlike a tank or armored vehicle, it sits in a warehouse when it’s not in use. 

Shortages in such munitions have already played out on the battlefield: Such shortfalls were a key reason Biden decided in favor of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. The Pentagon has moved to ramp up production, and the U.S. military industrial base is now producing about 28,000 rounds per month. That’s double what it was 6 months ago, but will still take years to reach the goal of 100,000 rounds per month. 

Those shortages may become doubly dire, as 155mm artillery rounds represent one item where Israel and Ukraine may be increasingly in need of the same supply. Additional 155mm rounds, which were being stored in Israel, have already been diverted from Ukraine to the Israeli Defense Forces.  

The overlap on the venn diagram of Israel and Ukraine’s needs isn’t currently very large, as the IDF hasn’t used significant amounts of 155mm artillery, and has relied instead on small diameter bombs fired from air force jets—weapons of which Ukraine, by contrast, has very few. Ukraine has relied more heavily on ground-launched missiles, like High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) than Israel. 

But that overlap may not remain small forever. “If it becomes a big long war where artillery gets involved, then there will be some competition between Israel’s needs and Ukraine’s needs,” Eric Edelman, former undersecretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration, told TMD. 

The Biden administration asked Congress to appropriate more than $50 billion for the DoD to spend on weapons procurement. A significant portion of this stockpile has not yet been earmarked for a certain system, but the request is perhaps instead intended to signal to the military industrial base that the Pentagon is seeking to reverse two decades of inconsistent declines in military spending as a percentage of the GDP since the end of the Cold War. “We need to be able to mobilize the defense industry to be able to surge production in times of crisis or war,” Edelman said. “And we’re not on a footing to do it.” 

Upheaval in the House—significant battles over government funding that almost resulted in a shutdown and ultimately saw a speaker ousted for dealmaking—has not helped defense contractors trying to figure out how to allocate capital. The November 17 deadline to fund the government is approaching without a speaker of the House in place, much less most appropriations bills passed. And if all 12 required appropriations bills aren’t signed by the end of the calendar year, the Fiscal Responsibility Act—the deal former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated in the spring to suspend the debt ceiling—mandates all discretionary spending, including the typically carved-out defense spending, be cut by 1 percent. 

It’s just another element of unpredictability likely to discourage the defense industrial base from committing to staffing increases, expanding factories, and other investments. “[Defense contractors] don’t want to make these investments if there’s just a lot of uncertainty about whether there’s going to be a payoff at the end,” Edelman told TMD.

Defense planning in recent years has focused mostly on great power competition—and the potential for outright conflict—with China, a strategy now complicated by unforeseen aggression from Russia in Europe and Hamas in the Middle East. Those threats are linked together by backing from Iran and economic support from China to both Moscow and Tehran. But there’s an opportunity in these crises, Edelman said. 

“I think Putin did us an enormous favor by exposing how frail that [defense industrial base] is and how difficult it is for us to ramp up production,” Edelman said. “But now we’ve got to take advantage of having to have that happen. Everyone likes to say, ‘We shouldn’t just throw money at problems.’ This is actually a problem where we just have to throw money at it.” 

Worth Your Time

• With some stories, the facts truly are better than fiction, and that rings true in a Wall Street Journal profile of a Danish antiquities dealer who exposed a massive heist at the British Museum. Ittai Gradel came across an eBay seller—called “Sultan1996”—offering antiquities at severely discounted prices. “Gradel inquired as to how the seller, an Englishman whose name was listed as Paul Higgins, had come across these items,” Max Colchester wrote. “Sultan1966 said he had acquired them from his grandfather, who owned a junk shop in York, in northern England, and died in 1953. Gradel checked the death records and found that such a man with the matching name did indeed die, but in 1952. The ludicrously low prices and oddly credible backstory left Gradel comfortable that he had encountered every dealer’s dream seller. ‘He was clueless,’ recalls Gradel. Then, in 2016, Sultan1966 posted a piece on eBay by mistake. It showed a fragment of a sardonyx cameo dating from Roman times engraved with the head and shoulder of a girl stooping to her right. Intrigued, Gradel screenshotted the item. Sultan1966 quickly removed it from the website and said that it actually belonged to his sister, who didn’t want to sell it. Gradel thought not much more about it. But in 2020, he came across an image on the British Museum’s website that showed the exact same item in its collection. Furthermore, the color photograph was recent. It suddenly dawned on Gradel: There was a thief in the British Museum. ‘And he was likely still within the walls,’ he says. So began an antiques whodunit—whose cast of characters includes an Oxford-based priest-cum-archaeologist, a handful of rare-gem dealers and some of the British Museum’s most august researchers—that has shaken the premise behind the museum’s most important reason for existing: that it is the best place to safely house some of the world’s greatest treasures.”

Presented Without Comment

CSPAN: “You don’t have to vote,” former President Donald Trump said at a rally in New Hampshire on Monday. “Don’t worry about voting. The voting, we got plenty of votes.”

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Nick weighed (🔒) how much forgiveness former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis is due over her role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
• On the podcasts: Jonah is joined by NPR’s Steve Inskeep on The Remnant to discuss Inskeep’s new book, Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, while Adaam talks with Robert Satloff about the regional implications of Hamas’ recent massacre and what Israel hopes to achieve in a ground invasion.
• On the site today: Paul Miller argues the United Nations should be responsible for Gaza if Israel eliminates Hamas, Emma Rogers explains how the laws of war function and what constitutes genocide and crimes against humanity, and Jonah weighs in on the circus in the House.

Let Us Know

How concerned are you about the United States’ ability to ramp up defense production in the coming years?