Good Tuesday to you,

Today’s big story is The New York Times’ report with new details on how Donald Trump wanted to impound voting machines. In December 2020, he directed Rudy Giuliani to call the acting head of Homeland Security to press him about whether he had the legal authority to impound voting machines. This was a man named Chad Wolf. Thankfully, Wolf said no, he had no such authority.

The Times also reveals, for what it says is the first time, that this order came shortly after Trump pressed Attorney General Bill Barr to do the same thing. Barr also said no. There’s also the previously reported (by Politico recently) effort to make the Pentagon do the same thing. Finally, the story says that Trump “also tried to persuade state lawmakers in contested states like Michigan and Pennsylvania to use local law enforcement agencies to take control of them.” Those lawmakers said no.

So picture it in your mind: Trump, frantically counting down his days in the house he once called “a real dump,” trying four different ways to get voting machines impounded so that he and his people could find a way to cheat and change the outcome. Four ways. The order seems to have been: Justice Department, state lawmakers, Pentagon, Homeland Security. The lesson Trump surely took away from all this? Next time, if there is a next time, install people who’ll say yes.

Now let us turn to Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina House Republican who once tweeted a chirpy selfie from a notorious elite Nazi lair in Bavaria, which he was interested in visiting for historical purposes only, of course. He gets a little less attention than Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, but he is arguably the most fascist of them all. Last summer, he warned of “bloodshed” if the next presidential election was, um, shrouded in doubt. Monday, in a video interview with the Daily Caller, he averred—perhaps in honor of Black History Month!—that during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, “we had all of our major cities burned to the ground.” He also said he talks to Trump “just about every single day.”

Pausing here for a way-too-early pondering of this disturbing question: Who might be Trump’s 2024 running mate if he’s the nominee? Cawthorn has to be on that list. If Trump is being strategic, he’ll find a Latino running mate. My guess is he won’t feel the need to be strategic (Mike Pence was a strategic choice, given Pence’s closeness to evangelicals, but now Trump has that base covered himself). 

On the somewhat lighter side of life, it appears that Joe Theismann let slip the new name of the Washington Football Team, which is set to be announced officially Wednesday. In a radio interview, the former Washington quarterback said the team will be called the Commanders. Eh. In this age of reappropriation, they really should have gone with the Generals. Cuz, you know, Washington was a general. Yes, there’s that Globetrotters history, but nobody under 40 even knows what that means. The real question here is whether they keep or cashier the burgundy-and-gold color scheme. One advantage of an oft-bruited name that I kind of liked—the Red Hawks, named after a Black air regiment in World War II, which would have been a nice corrective to the franchise’s deeply racist history—would have permitted keeping the color scheme. The guess here is that Dan Snyder wants to change it. It doubles the marketing possibilities, after all, as they can get older sentimentalists to keep buying burgundy gear while the youngs eat up the new stuff. By the way, for as thorough an account of that racist history as you’ll ever need to read, check out my 2011 piece in The New York Review of Books on the topic. I think it’s one of my better ones.

Finally today, Twitter asks the timeless musical question: Who is this Paul McCartney guy?

At NewRepublic.com, Alex Shephard takes a deep dive into the mystery that’s had the publishing world wondering who’s been stealing all those manuscripts for the last five years. Well, we know—it’s Filippo Bernardini. What we don’t know is why, but Alex gets us closer to the answer than anyone has. Kate Aronoff reports that the planned Ukraine defense bill in Congress has some green provisions but in fact could end up promoting fossil fuels. And from the magazine, Sophie Pinkham reviews a memoir from an academic who grew up in Stalinist Albania that is very unlike the standard somber fare of that genre.

Thanks for reading,

Every day, our journalists are exposing the right’s assaults on our democracy—and pushing the Democrats to go bold to preserve the republic. Here’s a special offer from The New Republic so you won’t miss their scoops and sharp analysis.

Yesterday’s international politics question: Name the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Name three of the 10 currently serving nonpermanent members. Name the current secretary-general of the U.N. And finally, name four former secretaries-general. Back in the day, the U.N. secretary-general was much more famous than he is now, kind of like the heavyweight boxing champion.

Answer: The Big Five are the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France. The 10 current rotating members of the security council are Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Norway, and the United Arab Emirates. The current sec-gen is Antonio Gutteres. As for former secretaries general, you can see the full list here. I’d say the four most famous are Trygve Lie (he was first), Dag Hammarskjöld (died in an air crash in Africa), Kofi Annan (there during the Iraq War), and Kurt Waldheim (ex-Nazi). But ymmv.

Today’s politics question: In that Daily Caller interview, Cawthorn also said that a certain high-profile public official “deserves to spend five years in jail” for lying to Congress. To whom was he referring?