We are getting a government shutdown for Christmas! Or Hanukkah!

Here’s what happened and what might come next.

On Thursday night, a vote on a continuing resolution was taken, which some viewed as 1) a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump 2) raising fears of a shutdown.

The first claim is almost certainly incorrect, and the second is possibly wrong.

Last minute gift idea! Get yourself a subscription.

The root of the conflict lies in the Republican House conference’s inability to unite behind ANY Continuing Resolution to fund the government. There are a handful of Reps that simply don’t vote for them. Ever. For anyone.

This is not a problem for the Democrats who do not have fiscal hawks in their ranks. It’s just a part of the game.

But Speaker Mike Johnson needs to pass a CR. So he has no choice but to negotiate with Democrats. But they know that he knows that they know he needed their support. Sensing leverage, Democrats demanded extensive concessions, transforming a slim resolution into a sprawling 1,500-page bill resembling an omnibus. Republican leaders, frustrated by being excluded from these negotiations, learned details of the bill from lobbyists who had inside knowledge.

The situation intensified when media narratives blamed Trump and Elon Musk for killing the bill. In reality, internal GOP dissension doomed the Quasibus CR as soon as the text hit the internet. It would have died when it went to a vote.

Did Trump and Musk accelerate its collapse and prevent a vote? Sure. But it woke up dead. It was never happening.

Trump’s Truth Social missives did set a new course, advocating for a clean continuing resolution with disaster relief and other GOP priorities while proposing a two-year suspension of the debt ceiling—a strategic move to avoid draining political capital on recurring debt ceiling battles. Specifically the Trump tax cuts which are a top priority in 2025.

House conservatives, especially fiscal hawks like Ralph Norman, Chip Roy, and Thomas Massie oppose eliminating the debt ceiling (a key Republican cudgel when Dems run things) unless there are other massive spending cuts to go along with them. Their resistance in the Rules Committee prevented the bill from advancing traditionally, forcing a long-shot vote requiring a two-thirds majority on Thursday night, which was never realistic.

GOP leadership permitted the vote anyway to gauge opposition and explore potential concessions.

To put simpler, the bill that failed last night was always meant to fail. The question was by how much and who would vote no. One GOP House staffer expressed to me that more rock ribbed conservatives that talk a big game about government spending voted to suspend the debt ceiling than he would have guessed.

Looking ahead, the bill will likely shrink more, possibly making the debt ceiling provision more palatable. If Johnson can flip one of the three hardliners on the Rules Committee, a party-line vote might succeed. Alternatively, a few Democrats might cross over, given the approaching holidays and the general desire to avoid a government shutdown.

However, if the government does shut down, the practical impact could be limited since most federal employees would still receive holiday paychecks. Political fallout, however, would be inevitable, with intensified pressure to strike a deal after the new year.

Despite the chaos, some GOP insiders view the vote as more promising than expected. Though 33 Republicans voted against the resolution, party leaders seem cautiously optimistic. If Trump and key Senate allies like J.D. Vance begin actively whipping votes, a slimmed-down resolution could pass. The next steps remain uncertain, hinging on whether enough conservatives can be persuaded to compromise in the days ahead.

Or we shut down and reload for the new year as Trump 2 begins as Trump 1 ended: messy.

Chapters & Timecodes

* [00:00:00] Introduction and Upcoming Topics

* [00:01:59] U.S. Government Shutdown and Congressional Infighting

* [00:12:02] Trudeau’s Political Crisis in Canada

* [00:49:19] Musa Al-Gharbi on U.S. Electoral Trends

I don’t think Kamala Harris will ever be president.

I don’t think she has a connection with Americans beyond a core Democratic base who can be easily woo’d by another shiny object. I think she would do best in the one-party state she came from and run for governor of California where she might even pass for the centrist she positioned herself as nationally.

But I may well be wrong. If I am Bill Scher will have told me otherwise.

He believes she enters our four-year cycle to select the next president as the most well positioned Vice President loser in recent American history.

Damning with faint praise? Maybe.

We discuss 2028 and everything we got wrong about the election in this chat!

Chapters:

00:00:00 - Introduction and Overview

00:03:06 - Bill Scher on 2024 Election Insights

00:15:01 - Trump’s Continued Popularity

00:40:02 - Trump’s Lawsuit Against Iowa Pollsters

00:45:02 - House GOP Budget Standoff

00:46:47 - AOC’s Leadership Challenge in Congress

00:50:09 Handicapping 2028 Contenders

I’m diving deeper into DeButts.

Yes friends, there’s been a crack in the DeButts case.

To recap, on December 3rd, Anna Navarro tweeted that Hunter DeButts, the brother-in-law of Woodrow Wilson, was pardoned. This is not true. There is no historical record of a Hunter DeButts connected to Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson certainly did not pardon him. Navarro later admitted this was incorrect, blaming a ChatGPT search result.

However, nobody could recreate the exact hallucination she posted, and the citation icons in her screenshot resembled an outdated ChatGPT interface.

Curious, I discussed this with Andrew Mayne, my co-host on The Attention Mechanism, a podcast about AI. I also asked listeners to try replicating Navarro’s prompt in ChatGPT. Shortly after, I received an email from a listener named Bret, who provided screenshots showing that while he got the same initial answers Navarro referenced—Bill Clinton pardoning Roger Clinton and Donald Trump pardoning Charles Kushner—Hunter DeButts was nowhere to be found.

Brett’s search led to a site called living.alot.com, which featured a listicle titled “Five Presidents and Governors Who Have Pardoned Family Members.” Interestingly, this article was last edited on the same day Navarro tweeted. My next move was to contact the article’s supposed author, Ron Winkler. However, the author photo appeared unmistakably AI-generated, suggesting the entire article was likely created by a generative AI model.

Investigating further, I found that living.alot.com is owned by Inuvo.com, an ad-tech company specializing in AI-driven marketing solutions. This suggested that the hallucination might not have come from ChatGPT itself but from living.alot.com, an AI-generated listicle site, possibly due to SEO optimization targeting AI-driven search engines. If ChatGPT search pulled from this listicle, it would explain the strange result Navarro saw.

Speculating further, it seems plausible that Inuvo.com, focused on generating ad revenue, might have tweaked its content after seeing traffic driven by the controversy to avoid being de-ranked or blacklisted by search algorithms. Bret’s recreation of almost the exact same search result strengthens this theory.

If anyone at OpenAI working on ChatGPT Search is reading, I recommend a hard look at de-ranking or blacklisting the alot.com suite of sites. The credibility of search-powered AI depends on filtering out such low-quality content.

In the end, the mystery of Hunter DeButts appears to be a hallucination generated by an ad-tech company leveraging AI-driven SEO tactics.

Navarro’s strange ChatGPT result wasn’t directly ChatGPT’s fault—it was fed a falsehood generated by a content-churning AI.

And with that, the Hunter DeButts saga is solved.

All’s well that ends well.

Chapters & Time Codes

* (00:00:00) Introduction: Media, Politics & New Ventures

* (00:01:20) Unmasking the Hunter DeButts Hoax

* (00:15:01) Political Shifts: Murkowski and Ocasio-Cortez

* (00:17:27) Government Shutdown Negotiations

* (00:20:26) Chris Cillizza

This episode includes a serious, hour-long discussion with Ryan McBeth on Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Israel and everything in between.

AND

We dive deep into this tweet…

Of course, on December 24, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson issued the controversial pardon for his brother-in-law, Hunter DeButts, convicted of arms smuggling during World War I.

DeButts, married to Wilson’s sister-in-law, Alice, was sentenced to 15 years after British intelligence exposed his fraudulent shipping scheme. Though furious, Wilson faced mounting political pressure amid war preparations. The White House cited new evidence suggesting DeButts was manipulated by foreign spies, and critics accused Wilson of nepotism, while supporters framed the pardon as holiday clemency. After his release, DeButts vanished from public life, reportedly living quietly in Cuba until his death in 1933.

Except. Wait a minute. What you just read, isn’t true.

I fabricated it by directing ChatGPT using Model 4o with the Mac app to make up a fictional reason why Hunter DeButts received a pardon from Woodrow Wilson.

Because Hunter DeButts never received a pardon from Woodrow Wilson.

Hunter DeButts did not marry Wilson’s sister.

Nor did he receive a pardon.

There are other Hunter DeButts involved with Wilson or that time in history.

And yet, Anna Navarro tweeted about it. Upon a simple Google search Navarro wound up getting serially dunked on as people realized very quickly something wasn’t accurate.

And so Anna Navarro posted the following explanation:

She blamed ChatGPT’s hallucinations.

Oh, well. We’ve all been there.

But have we?

While conservatives dunked on Navarro even further for believing ChatGPT, I am here to tell you, as a reporter through and through, I don’t know if ChatGPT hallucinated this. And really, I am following the research of my friend, Andrew Mayne, who first sent this to me and said, he could not replicate the Hunter DeButts answer on any ChatGPT model. Not 4o, not any model that is available, and specifically was available to Navarro on December 2nd.

Now, here’s something that you guys might not know about large language models: they are fairly replicable. You can get similar answers based on similar questions. It’s not exact, but a hallucination is something that you should be able to recreate. It would be odd if you couldn’t.

And my friend Andrew should know. He worked at OpenAI. He was a science communicator. He made a lot of videos that demonstrated OpenAI products up to and including ChatGPT itself and is known as the first prompt engineer for that company. He spent a lot of time with these models.

And with that, I went down my own reporting rabbit hole. Because one of the other things is that the screen grab that Anna Navarro showed was a ChatGPT search that had web results.

See those little brackets with quotes in between them. Those would be annotations. Theoretically, you could click on them and they would bring you to a webpage that would show you where ChatGPT got this information.

What’s odd about it is that those are not the annotations that ChatGPT uses now. And they certainly were not used on December 2nd when Anna Navarro said that she did this search.

So where’d she get it? What version of ChatGPT is she using? And what large language model is going to be the origin story of dear sweet DeButts?

I had a theory.

Let’s say you’re not particularly tech-savvy, if you don’t know exactly what ChatGPT is or OpenAI is, then it is very easy, as ChatGPT has become more and more popular, to just go into the iOS app store and find a lot of — I’m going to call them copycats.

What they really are are other apps that are using the ChatGPT API, but they do a skin on top of it and they often charge you a subscription service.

Do not use them.

But I did because my theory was that Ana Navarro was using one of these apps, one of these apps that are not using similar if not exact user interface the official ChatGPT app is. Maybe they are using those old annotations?

All is revealed!

We get to the bottom of DeButts, on this episode of the Politics Politics Politics.

If I could change one thing about the Democratic Party it would be this:

Stop demanding blind loyalty to the One True Message.

Yes, coalition building is hard.

Yes, your most passionate members will be the loudest.

Yes, things could go wrong.

But the alternative is what you’ve had and that is what you are about to hear from the Harris-Walz campaign leadership in this episode. We invented a totally implausible and frankly laughable narrative and then were frustrated when progressives, the media and voters didn’t buy it.

They are to blame! Not the candidate. Not the message. Certainly not the brilliant team that put this in motion.

It would have been easy if everyone just blindly repeated that Kamala Harris is a bi-partisan deal maker who understands the best ideas come from beyond the beltway. Sure, it’s plain to see that she’s a Democratic stalwart from the most iconic liberal state in the union. But if you keep repeating the first one, the dumbs will believe it!

We discuss the Democratic obsession with messaging with ettingermentum.

Also, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico on the future of the Pro Choice movement.

It’s a warm, expansive Px3 for a winter weekend.

Chapters

2:26 Pod Save America Breakdown

1:00:00 Update: Musk, Hegseth

1:09:17 Future of Pro Choice Movement w/ Alice Ollstein

1:31:28 Ettingermentum

Happy Thanksgiving!

For your travel Px3 is happy to present to you the only political conversation you will want to hear. Our old friends Tom LoBiano and Michael Cohen breaking down what we have learned in the weeks since the election.

BREAKING:

Former Congressman Matt Gaetz has withdrawn his nomination for U.S. Attorney General, citing concerns that his confirmation process was becoming a distraction for the Trump-Vance transition team. Gaetz, a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump, had faced intense scrutiny since his nomination due to allegations of sexual misconduct.

The allegations, which include claims that Gaetz paid women for sex and had inappropriate encounters with a minor, have been the subject of investigations by the Department of Justice and the House Ethics Committee. Reports suggest the House Ethics Committee may release a detailed report on these allegations, though its jurisdiction ended when Gaetz resigned from Congress shortly after his nomination.

Gaetz’s decision to step aside marks the end of a short-lived bid for the top legal post in the Trump administration. The move comes amid ongoing investigations and growing political pressure. It remains unclear what impact this development will have on Gaetz’s future in public life, as he continues to face scrutiny over the allegations.

The Trump-Vance team has yet to announce a replacement for the role.

We discuss this and other Florida political stories with Kimberly Leonard of Politico.