The News You Need To Read This Morning

Trump's 2024 presidential run, Dave Chappelle’s fall from grace, and Casey Anthony’s side of the story.

This is an excerpt from Incoming, BuzzFeed News’ morning newsletter dedicated to making sense of this chaotic world we live in. Join the club here.

Donald Trump says he will run for president in 2024

donald trump wearing his own lil red maga hat

Donald Trump? Yes, the former president who:

  1. Incited an attempted insurrection at the US Capitol with lies about his 2020 election loss — lies he continues to spread to this day

  2. Spent much of the last few years openly vowing revenge against political enemies

  3. Is currently battling a suite of federal and state criminal investigations

Yes, that Donald Trump now wants American voters to let him once again lead the democratic system of government he has worked so tirelessly to undermine.

"America's comeback starts right now," Trump told the crowd at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida on Tuesday. "Two years ago, we were a great nation, and soon we will be a great nation again."

His announcement comes as Republicans largely underperformed nationally in last week’s midterm elections. Many in the GOP have blamed Trump for the outcome since many of his endorsed candidates, such as Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, and Blake Masters and Kari Lake in Arizona, lost to Democrats.

Trump’s latest campaign would also be something unseen in mainstream American political history: He would be an explicitly anti-democratic candidate after pressuring state officials for years to overturn the 2020 election results in his favor. And at this point, whatever happens at the election, the breed of toxic and damaging politics known as Trumpism will likely continue for the rest of our lives.

A missile strike in Poland kills two and raises NATO concerns

  • Poland announced that a missile hit the village of Przewodow and killed two people on Tuesday. US intelligence said that evidence indicates it was a Ukrainian missile defending itself against Russian strikes.

    • “This is not Ukraine’s fault, Russia bears the ultimate responsibility,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at a news conference Wednesday.

  • As the Washington Post's Emily Rauhala writes, the strike on NATO member Poland "reverberated quickly across a continent on edge after months of war, underscoring fears that the conflict could spread beyond Ukraine’s borders."

SNAPSHOTS

The Grammy nominees for 2023 have arrived. Beyoncé led the way with nine nominations — and is now tied with husband Jay-Z as the most nominated artist of all time — but Kendrick Lamar, Adele, and Brandi Carlile were close behind.

Four University of Idaho students were found dead at a home off campus in what police say was a targeted attack. Authorities continue to search for a suspect, but said there's no imminent threat to the community.

Casey Anthony never told her story. Now she's finally speaking out. “There’s a big distance here from the person we initially saw on that courtroom stand who was very, very closed and was fighting with some demons,” Alexandra Dean, the filmmaker behind the new documentary about Anthony's life, told BuzzFeed News. “This woman that was sitting in front of me clearly had thought through everything in a really, really profound way.”

Taylor Swift concert tickets went on sale Tuesday, but Ticketmaster crashed immediately and sent thousands of Swifties into all-out pandemonium. "It's me. Hi, I'm the problem. It's me." —Ticketmaster, probably.

Dave Chappelle no longer merits our attention

dave chappelle stands in a black leather jacket holding a mic against a pitch black background

Dave Chappelle hosted Saturday Night Live last weekend and was unable to escape controversy. Spanning more than 15 minutes — three times longer than the average five minutes — Chapelle’s lengthy opening monologue has been accused of normalizing Kanye West's recent antisemitic comments and making light of antisemitism’s potentially violent consequences.

Furthermore, a Page Six report claims that Chappelle opted to show a “fake” monologue during the dress run because he didn’t want SNL staff “to know what his real monologue is.” It’s a brutal decline for someone who once used his incisive comedy to hold a mirror to those in power, Albert Samaha argues.

Chappelle's subversive, biting humor was once a moral compass who defended underdogs and kneecapped authorities. In the mid-aughts, SNL offered an incisive catharsis for an increasingly absurd political reality, mocking the powerful people driving our nation into senseless wars. Less than two decades later, Chappelle on SNL is no balm but rather confirmation that those fears were right all along, that the status quo has held as old powers perpetuate old ideas.

IMAGE OF THE DAY

He preserved every Twitter meme since 2019 in a Google Doc

a meme featuring two stick figures in combat that reads "my need for x vs. my desire to y"

If Twitter, which is already changing drastically under the control of Elon Musk, disappears, then we’ll lose a beautiful monstrosity with the power to make text-based memes intolerable in less than a day. At least we’ll have our memories, though.

Thanks to Nathan Allebach, you can now look back on (almost) every Twitter meme since 2019: the good, the bad, and the annoying. On Nov. 13 this year, the 31-year-old creative director shared a massive 105-page Google Doc listing joke formats and text memes that was once a resource for other social media managers hoping to keep up with Twitter’s joke format du jour. Now, it’s a cultural artifact for all of us.

"There was never a method to the madness,” Allebach told Buzzfeed News. “I would just copy memes into the doc whenever I saw them. Shoutout to all the brilliant people who create these meme formats and rarely ever get the credit they deserve!"

When asked about his connection to Twitter, Allebach said, "Like most people bound to the hellsite, we have a love-hate relationship. It elevated my career, led to real-life relationships, and gave me some sense of meaning. At the same time, it's broken my brain, been a relentless source of random people harassing me, and has probably done more damage to public discourse than any platform."

Still reading, eh? Seems like you might want to get this in your inbox. No pressure though. Just some food for thought.

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