Good morning! Given that it’s December, we thought every day was cookie day. Apparently, some Grinches decided to limit that to a single day. Luckily, that day is today. If you’re looking for a list of National Cookie Day deals, USA Today has you covered. Crumbl’s is a 6-7 joke, though, so maybe avoid them. Or don’t. It’s meaningless either way.

PS: We don’t have a good place to put this (and it’s a little late), but we think it’s critical that you know the turkeys the president pardons every year get a fancy hotel room.

MONEY

💰️ Michael Dell may have just given your kid $250

Buying Dell laptops for all these years finally paid off. If you have kids, at least.

As any major piece of legislation does, President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill attracted a good deal of controversy when it passed over the summer. One provision that garnered a bit less animosity was the creation of Trump Accounts.

Trump Accounts: Everyone knows that rich kids enter adulthood with a leg up on everyone else. The government can't exactly replicate a legacy Harvard admission and an easy job at the family business. But it is pretty good at doling out cold, hard cash. Here’s how the program works:

1. A parent opens an account.

2. The U.S. Treasury contributes $1,000.

3. Private banks invest the money in U.S. stock market index funds.

4. The kid cashes it out later in life to help buy a house, pay for college, or go hog wild on spring break.

Any U.S. citizen born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028, will be eligible. Parents and employers can toss in an extra $5,000 per year, too, part of which is pre-tax (hello, new HR benefit).

What about older kids? Parents can still open an account and add money, but the Treasury won't contribute. That's where Michael and Susan Dell come in.

• Michael Dell is, of course, primarily known as a college roommate of the dad of a guy this writer went to elementary school with.

• He also founded his namesake computer company as a college freshman in 1984 and is now worth ~$150 billion.

The Dells are donating $6.25 billion to fund Trump Accounts for 25 million American kids between the ages of 1 and 10. Kids who live in zip codes with average family incomes less than $150,000 will get $250 loaded into their accounts. That should help ease the financial strife between kids born in 2025 and their older siblings born in 2024.

Trump accounts will open for contributions in 2026. Until then, you can follow along for updates at TrumpAccounts.gov.

Related: The Trump administration has spent 2025 making a big push to help the U.S. win the AI race. Now, the Departments of Commerce and Transportation are setting their eyes on the next tech frontier: robotics.

GOVERNMENT

🧊 Welcome to Operation Catahoula Crunch. New Orleans is the latest city undergoing a federal immigration crackdown, this time with support from the state’s governor. More than 200 agents hit the streets on Wednesday from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and their cousins at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Their goal is at least 5,000 arrests. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent of CBP and ICE, they're targeting real baddies. Otherwise known as "burglars, gang members, rapists." But it's safe to assume they'll also bring in plenty of lesser offenders. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, they're working on a new operation focused primarily on the area's Somali population.

🌍️ U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Mr. Ivanka Trump Jared Kushner sat down for a five-hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week. They hoped to make some progress on Trump’s plan for peace through profit. The (not new) idea is that economic integration can grease the wheels and prevent further war. Sadly, that's not quite working out. But one Kremlin (aka: Russia’s government) aide did call them “highly substantive.” So that’s something? Two major sticking points aren’t budging: Putin’s insistence that Ukraine limit the future size of its military and forgo joining NATO. Meanwhile, Ukraine is prepping for more meetings with its U.S. and European allies. It’s just meetings all the way down.

📉 If you work for a large business, November was probably good. If you work for a small business? Maybe not. According to ADP, a payroll company so large that it's long been a key data source for the Federal Reserve, the private-sector economy cut 32,000 jobs last month. Small businesses were hit hardest and lost 120,000 jobs. That's the biggest drop since March 2023 (so, not that long ago). Bigger companies -- that's any with at least 50 employees -- grew, and gained a net of 90,000 jobs. The official government view on this will come on December 16. That's when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is dropping its take.

PENTAGON

🏛️ What's going on with Pete Hegseth?

Scandal alert. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been in the news again, and the story doesn't seem to be going away.

The background: As part of the administration's fight against drug trafficking, the Pentagon has spent the last few months blowing alleged drug boats out of the water off the northern coast of South America.

The controversy: On September 2, the military struck a boat off the coast of Venezuela. Nine of the 11 passengers died in that first strike. Supposedly, Hegseth had given an order to "kill everybody." So the commander issued a second strike, which killed the last two men.

• The strikes in general are controversial, but that second strike is what’s causing issues now. If the above story is accurate, it could’ve violated the laws of warfare.

• Hegseth on Tuesday cited the "fog of war" in defending the second strike and said he saw no survivors in the water before the second strike.

The reactions: So far, President Trump is standing by his man. Many of his allies in Congress are, too. But Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican and the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called these "serious charges" and vowed to "find out the ground truth."

• Democrats, meanwhile, have compared the incident to murder and want Trump to dust off his “You’re fired” calling card.

The White House said the strike was lawful and that a Navy admiral, not Hegseth, ordered it. That admiral will brief lawmakers today on what went down.

Related: President Trump held his final Cabinet meeting of 2025 on Tuesday. The more than two-hour meeting featured speeches from each Cabinet member summarizing everything going on in their department. Also on the docket? Doodles, a misspelled nameplate, and potentially, a few unscheduled naps.

TRIVIA

Today is December fourth, which means Christmas is exactly three weeks away. It also means today is the 164th anniversary of the Confederate States Electoral College officially electing Jefferson Davis president of the Confederacy.

In the process of, you know, trying to destroy the Union to preserve slavery, the Confederates wrote their own constitution. It’s pretty similar to ours, but has a few key differences. One of which is the length of the president’s term in office. Under the Confederate Constitution, how long was the president’s term in office?

Hint: They didn’t last long enough for it to matter, but this was a one-term situation. Running for reelection wasn’t allowed.

POLITICS

🗳️ Trump pardons Democratic congressman

Back in July, a Nashville area congressman resigned his seat to take a better-paying job that doesn’t involve getting yelled at in the grocery store.

On Tuesday, Republican Matt Van Epps won a special election to fill the seat by 9%. That sounds like a solid margin, and it kind of is. But the last guy, the quitter, won in 2024 by 17%. And Trump won this district by 22%.

• Special elections are weird and often suffer from low turnout. Democrats are jazzed right now, so they heavily targeted this district in hopes of a major upset.

• That didn’t happen. But this race continued the trend of Democrats overperforming in special elections.

In the five congressional races this year, Democrats have improved on their 2024 margin by an average of 14%. That doesn’t mean they’ll do well in next year’s midterm elections. But if you’re a Republican, you’d probably rather that statistic not exist.

On the other side of the aisle, President Trump pardoned Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), a Texas Democrat, and his wife. The Cuellars were facing federal charges of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil company and a Mexican bank. Who among us hasn’t innocently gotten mixed up in similar schemes?

• In announcing the pardon, Trump said Cuellar had been indicted "simply for speaking the TRUTH" and praised him for speaking out “against Open Borders."

• Cuellar represents a district on the U.S.-Mexico border that Trump won by 7% in 2024. It’s a top target for Republicans next year.

• Cuellar is among the House’s most moderate members and has long been viewed as a potential party switcher.

This guy is just the latest in a long line of politicians pardoned by Trump during his two terms in office. That list includes eight former Republican congressmen and a former Republican governor of Connecticut … aaaaand a former Democratic governor of Illinois (who tried to sell Obama’s Senate seat) and a former Democratic mayor of Detroit.

Elsewhere in politics:

1. A California Republican* is considering switching to a friendlier seat in the face of a tough reelection fight next year. Why is that notable? Because the new seat is in Texas.

2. Indiana Republicans are proposing a new congressional map that would give them a good shot at winning all nine of the state's House seats, wiping out two Democrats in the process.

3. Down in Florida, Republicans are also planning a round of mid-decade redistricting next year. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is blaming an upcoming Supreme Court decision, which he says is likely to force his hand on the issue.

BRIEFS

● Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent isn't worried about Trump's tariffs potentially getting overturned by the Supreme Court. If the court rules the 1977 law Trump is using doesn't give him broad tariff powers, Bessent says they'll use a 1962 law instead.

● A few months after T-Mobile ended its DEI programs, AT&T has now joined the same club. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says DEI is discriminatory and requires the change before approving AT&T’s purchase of part of US Cellular.

● Forensics experts are verifying whether remains returned by Hamas match either of the final two Israeli hostages in Gaza. Remains tested on Tuesday didn’t match. Once all are returned, Israel will finally reopen the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

● Five months after seizing a Greek cargo ship in the Red Sea, Yemen's Houthi rebels have released the nine Filipino mariners they had captured. The Houthis have controlled Yemen's capital since 2014 and love clogging up Red Sea shipping lanes with piracy.

QUOTE

ANSWER

Had the South won the war, Jefferson Davis’s term as president would’ve lasted six years. Thankfully, that didn't happen, and ole Jeff here lived out his days running around from job to job trying to earn a living.