NYT 'Connections' November 16: Clues and Answers for Game #524

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Christmas lights at a house in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, New York City. | Roy Rochlin/Getty Images After last week’s presidential election, something unusual started happening in my neighborhood: On a walk to a wine bar on November 11, I saw stoops lined with pine garlands next to skeletons and spider webs, relics from Halloween a mere week and a half prior. Someone had set up two life-size nutcrackers on their front porch; someone else’s brownstone windows offered a peep into their living room, where a fully lit Christmas tree was already aglow inside.  But according to people all over the country, it wasn’t just my neighborhood. The early start to the most festive season seemed to be a reaction to — what else — the results of the election, which plunged many Americans into an uncanny mood they haven’t experienced since the last time Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Or, as Massachusetts social worker Dylana Becker put it: “Holiday lights because my daughter may have no fucking rights.” Becker started putting up Christmas decor on November 6th. Rachael Kay Albers, a marketing professional in Chicago, told me she “just bought a 10-foot tree, not even on sale,” with the philosophy, “Fuck it, it’s time for twinkles.” Rachel Lewis, a social media manager in North Carolina, erected an inflatable penguin on her roof that same week. “Our neighbor said, ‘Isn’t it early?’ And we said ‘No, it’s not.’” Much like how interest in elaborate skincare routines exploded in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election, Americans seem to be diverting their anxieties into holiday cheer, if only by sheer force. It’s not exactly a mystery as to why: In uncertain times, we seek escape and comfort, and nothing occupies a cozier or more nostalgic place in the American imagination than Christmas. Couple that with a late Thanksgiving, and people are seeing little point in waiting for the turkey to be done to put up their trees.  For some, Christmas came even before the polls closed. Mia Moran, a children’s book editor in Queens, said she went shopping for Christmas pillows at Target in early November. “This year it just feels like we needed something,” she tells me. “[Christmas] is a good outlet, and also a neutral sense of pure joy. It’s not charged in any way.”  @alessandrabrontsema Decorating for Christmas brings me so much joy ✨???? #christmas #christmasdecor #holidaydecor #christmasdecorating #holidaydecorating #christmastree #christmastok ♬ Carol of the Bells – Instrumental – Russell Davis & Roy Vogt & Michael Green & Marty Crum & Jeff Kirk & David Angell & Carrie Bailey & Steve Patrick & Nancy Allen & Ginger Newman & Sarah Valley It’s ironic, considering the decades-long right-wing mania about the supposed “war on Christmas” by the media establishment. This year, for the first time in recent memory, perhaps it’s the left who’s more fervently embracing the holiday. “When the polls close in your state, you are officially allowed to begin playing Christmas music,” tweeted First Amendment lawyer Adam Steinbaugh on the evening of the election. After it became clear Trump was winning, comedian Mike Drucker posted, “I’m listening to Christmas music starting tomorrow cuz fuck this shit.” According to the Wall Street Journal, forcing holiday spirit is a “healthy response” to election stress, one that “beats sitting there saying, ‘Oh my god, this is an existential threat to the world and I’m going to enter a doom and gloom loop,’” explained Kevin Smith, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  It’s also entirely possible that it isn’t just the election that’s caused this year’s bout of “Christmas creep,” a term that’s been discussed and debated since the 1980s. The phenomenon itself has existed far longer, however: Early Christmas sales (and complaints about them) can be traced back to the Victorian era. It’s typical for customers to be annoyed by businesses using far-off holidays as marketing tools. What’s less common is for Americans to seemingly all agree, individually, that the time for twinkle lights is now.  This year, per Axios, retail experts say that holiday deals are starting early partly because of the fact that there are five fewer days between Black Friday and Christmas this year, and partly because of election uncertainty. Lowe’s, for instance, launched its holiday decor line in July, a month earlier than the year before, while Amazon moved its Prime Day up to early October.  America’s favorite coping mechanism has always been buying stuff, and if Christmas spending is any indication, we’ve been getting steadily more anxious for years. The National Retail Federation expects the typical consumer will spend $902 on Christmas gifts and decor, up $25 from last year, reports Business Insider. Prophecy Market Insights projects that the Christmas decoration industry will nearly double in the next decade, from $8.45 billion in 2024 to $13 billion in 2034.  Charles Scheland, a professional modern dancer in Manhattan, says that in addition to putting up his tree, string lights, and nutcracker statue, he’s also already started pulling his favorite Christmas music to teach in his dance classes. He says that part of that is due to the shock and disappointment of what began as a galvanizing Democratic campaign. “I really think that the joy of the Harris campaign and the optimism of that movement got people excited, and to have that so deafening crushed, people just want to get some of that joy,” he says.  There’s also another reason for the skip from Halloween to Christmas, he posits. “Thanksgiving is a tricky holiday because it is often celebrated with extended family, and sometimes we don’t agree with our extended family. So rather than getting into the trickier holiday, we’re just jumping ahead to the next.” In the years since 2020, holidays, and to an even greater extent, seasons, have become celebrations not just IRL in the form of decor and activities, but online. People on TikTok and Instagram began to document their “winter arcs,” their “Meg Ryan falls,” and their hot girl summers as a way of marking the passage of time when it seemed like the only way to feel alive was watching someone else’s life through a screen. As I’ve argued before, dividing one’s life into seasons and leaning heavily into seasonal aesthetics is a way of romanticizing your life while also dissociating from it, a potentially useful tool when it feels like nothing makes sense.  I’m not immune, either. After my unexpectedly festive neighborhood walk, two wines deep, I decided that I absolutely needed to make a reservation at one of those bars in Manhattan where they deck it out with festive decor for the month of December. In most respects, these are miserable establishments — the kind of bars that are overpriced and crowded to the point of sweltering, places marketed with the promise of quaintness and communal cheer but mostly exist as traps for tourists to take photos in. But in that moment, being surrounded by a million twinkling wreaths and giant red bows and exhausted holiday shoppers from New Jersey sounded like not the worst place to be. In fact, I could think of much worse things: a decaying democracy, or a man investigated for sex crimes being installed as attorney general, for instance. So screw it, it’s Christmas now. May we all find merriment where we can.

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President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a House Republicans Conference meeting at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill on November 13, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Allison Robbert/Getty Images With President-elect Donald Trump’s latest slate of extreme or controversial nominees — Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary — has come the question about whether even a Republican-controlled Senate will actually confirm them all. But what if that’s asking the wrong question? What if Trump has no intention of asking the Senate’s permission? Throughout the transition, Trump has made several references to his intent to use “recess appointments” to get his appointees in place more quickly. This refers to a longstanding presidential power to fill jobs that typically require Senate confirmation if Congress is in recess. The Constitution included that power in an era when reconvening a recessed Congress would take months of travel time; more recently, presidents have used it to get around Senate opposition for certain picks. Yet Trump’s references to recess appointments were vague, and it was unclear exactly why he sounded so insistent on them. The new Congress would not need to recess for some time. The Senate surely would consider his top nominees quickly. The new Republican majority would likely be deferential to most of his choices, and the Democratic minority has no power to actually block any of them. So why would recess appointments be necessary so soon? We got a potential clue about what Trump may have in mind when the well-connected conservative legal activist Ed Whelan heard a rumor. “Hope it’s wrong,” Whelan wrote on X Wednesday, “but I’m hearing through the grapevine about this bonkers plan: Trump would adjourn both Houses of Congress under Article II, section 3, and then recess-appoint his Cabinet.”  This may sound technical, but it would amount to a massive power grab: Trump would be forcing the Senate into a recess. This would mean that, for many of the most important posts in the federal government, Trump could simply ignore the Senate, thumbing his nose at the body to impose everyone he wanted, no matter how corrupt, extreme, or controversial they are. Moreover, it would mean Trump would be choosing to crash headlong into one of the biggest guardrails constraining the president’s authority: the Senate’s confirmation powers. If Trump were to try this and get away with it, Senate confirmation powers would effectively no longer exist. Currently, this remains in the rumor stage, and if it is truly something being considered by Trump, it remains unclear whether he’d go through with it. But it makes a lot of sense. It may reflect the influence of Elon Musk and the Silicon Valley right in Trump’s camp — it’s a risky, norm-shattering attempt to disrupt the way politics, governance, and presidential power work. (Musk has indeed been tweeting about recess appointments.)  It would mean starting off Trump’s term with a high-stakes showdown and certain litigation — with no one certain about exactly how things would play out. Why this recess appointment plot would be different than past recess appointment controversies Recess appointments have been the subject of political and legal controversy in the past. In 2012, President Barack Obama was frustrated at the Republican Senate minority’s constant filibusters of many of his key nominations. (At the time, 60 votes were needed to get nominees past a filibuster; rule changes have since lowered that threshold to a simple majority.) He wanted to use recess appointments to fill some posts, but Republicans were blocking the Senate from going into recess at all. Even though nearly everyone left town, they continued to hold “pro forma” sessions where nothing actually happened. So Obama decided to just do recess appointments anyway, filling three National Labor Relations Board seats and the directorship of the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The administration argued that the pro forma sessions were fake and Congress was actually in recess; therefore, Obama could do recess appointments. But the Supreme Court unanimously rejected his argument, saying it was up to Congress to determine whether it was in recess. Trump’s plan would be far more brazen. The Constitution states that during a congressional session, both chambers of Congress must consent if they want to adjourn Congress for more than three days. But it also says that “in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,” the president “may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” In layperson’s terms, that would seem to say that if the House and Senate disagree on when to adjourn, the president can force them to do so. This power has never been used by the president. But according to Whelan’s sources in the conservative legal movement, this is the plan Trump’s team is putting together. First, Trump would get the House of Representatives under Speaker Mike Johnson to propose adjourning Congress. Then, if the Senate refused to do so, President Trump would step in, saying that because the two chambers disagreed, he’d use his power to force the Senate to adjourn. He would then make recess appointments to his heart’s content. Such appointments would then inevitably be challenged in court, and the Supreme Court would eventually determine whether they were legal. Whelan has gone public because he’s appalled by this idea. “It’s a fundamental general feature of our system of separated powers that the president shall submit his nominations for major offices to the Senate for approval,” he wrote in National Review. “That feature plays a vital role in helping to ensure that the president makes quality picks.” If Trump pulled this off, it would be an utter humiliation for incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Republican senators generally — it basically would be taking a wrecking ball to the power of the Senate.  The scheme would also require, as Whelan points out, the cooperation of Speaker Johnson and his House majority. But it is far from clear whether Republicans in either chamber — or the courts — have the inclination or the spine to stand up to an unprecedented power grab by Trump. And the rumors of it bode ill for other Trumpian abuses of power that will surely lie ahead.

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