It’s a good thing that 2020 is coming to an end, for lots of reasons. But especially for this newsletter: It so happens that I’m running out of analogies. There was the time warp (um, twice actually), the whiplash, and the roller coaster. I thought I’d been really patient in waiting for a really crazy week to reference the scene in State and Main where Alec Baldwin’s character flipped a car, crashed into a light post, and then laughed, saying, “So … that happened.” That was February.  

But I’m not sure any of those rise to the level of the events of this week. We experienced the full complement of the good (Britain started distributing the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and the FDA approved it for use in the United States last night), the bad (the U.S. experienced a single-day record of 3,124 COVID deaths on Wednesday), and the ugly (that little matter of the Texas attorney general trying to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin at the Supreme Court to overturn the election).

We were just putting the finishing touches on Jonah’s G-File last night when the news broke that the Supreme Court had declined to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania. Jonah let out a bunch of frustration at the Republicans who had supported President Trump’s efforts to overturn a legitimate election and encouraged millions of Americans to believe in dangerous conspiracy theories. It was written before the decision came down, and we briefly discussed making some tweaks to account for the news. We decided that it was better to append an editor’s note and let you read it in full. We hope you will. (Speaking of analogies, he’s got a great one about the Kraken, courtesy of Game of Thrones.) 

One reason we did so, as he pointed out, is that the refusal of so many—including elected officials—to acknowledge the reality of Trump’s loss is both dangerous and unlikely to abate even though the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Texas case was unanimous. We’ll certainly have more on that in the coming days.