Delaware Liberal

The November 16, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

So a week later, and the Trump transition is in total chaos. Who could have predicted?

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition operation “plunged into disarray on Tuesday with the abrupt resignation of Mike Rogers, who had handled national security matters, the second shake-up in a week on a team that has not yet begun to execute the daunting task of taking over the government,” the New York Times reports. Two sources close to Mike Rogers, who was ousted from the Trump transition team, told NBC News that he had been the victim of what one called a “Stalinesque purge,” from the transition of people close to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who left Friday. It was unclear which other aides close to Christie had also been forced out.

Meanwhile, “Gov. Mike Pence took the helm of the effort on Friday after Mr. Trump unceremoniously removed Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who had been preparing with Obama administration officials for months to put the complex transition process into motion. Now the effort is frozen, senior White House officials say, because Mr. Pence has yet to sign legally required paperwork to allow his team to begin collaborating with President Obama’s aides on the handover.”

Perhaps because of that, according to TPM, Donald Trump’s transition team has not reached out to officials at the State Department or the Pentagon for briefings as the President-elect prepares to take office in January, according to officials from those agencies. State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said on Tuesday that the department has not heard from Trump’s transition team, according to Al-Monitor reporter Laura Rozen.

Indianapolis Star: “Now that the presidential campaign and most of the furor over Hillary Clinton’s email scandal are behind us, the Pence administration is going to court to argue for its own brand of email secrecy. The administration is fighting to conceal the contents of an email sent to Gov. Mike Pence by a political ally. That email is being sought by a prominent Democratic labor lawyer who says he wants to expose waste in the Republican administration.”

“But legal experts fear the stakes may be much higher than mere politics because the decision could remove a judicial branch check on executive power and limit a citizen’s right to know what the government is doing and how it spends taxpayer dollars.

First Read: “After their shocking defeat a week ago, Democrats will have a new roster of leaders in the coming months, especially with President Obama gone from office. A new DNC chair. A new Senate leader (Chuck Schumer). The one remaining question, however, is whether Nancy Pelosi will continue to hold her job as House leader.”

“As NBC’s Kasie Hunt reported, House Democrats have circulated a letter asking to postpone Thursday’s leadership elections — to better reflect on the election’s results.”

Politico: “House Democrats returned to Washington Monday searching for answers after their Election Day drubbing — and their longtime leader, Nancy Pelosi, confronted the first real stirring of discontent within the ranks since the last Democratic wipeout six years ago. While Pelosi has years or even decades of accumulated loyalty to fall back on, anger within the Democratic Caucus over what happened last week is palpable. The California Democrat faces a possible long-shot challenge from Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who hails from the kind of working-class Rust Belt district in which Democrats got trounced.”

A report from the Pew Research found that 20% of social-media users modified their stance on a political or social issue because of something they saw posted to social media. Additionally, 17% reported that social media helped alter their perspective on a specific candidate. Democrats were found to be more likely than Republicans to say that they changed their views because of social media. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Facebook and Google announced they would take stands against fake news.

Politico: “For eight years, Republicans hammered President Barack Obama for exploding the national debt. But now a GOP-led spending spree is coming, with Donald Trump riding to the White House on trillion-dollar promises and a Republican Congress that looks likely to do his bidding. It’s a potential echo of the last time Republicans ran Washington, when then-Vice President Dick Cheney memorably remarked, ‘Deficits don’t matter.’”

“Trump campaigned heartily on a spending splurge and nothing he’s said since his shocking election suggests he will reverse course. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, are papering over divisions with the man who frequently tossed party orthodoxy aside on the trail.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) opposes the nomination of two of Donald Trump’s reported top choices for secretary of state: former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

Well, it has happened. I miss George W. Bush. At least his incompetence was of the bubbling variety, rather than the malicious and evil kind. According to CNN, in a speech at an event at his presidential library in Dallas, former President George W. Bush warned against allowing anger to shape policy, especially in instances where it could shut the United States off economically from the rest of the world. “I understand anger, and some people may have been angry when I was president. But anger shouldn’t drive policy. What needs to drive policy is what’s best for the people who are angry.”

That’s almost wise.

Conservative health wonk Philip A.Klein:

Should they repeal it outright, however, there would be a number of consequences. There are already about 20 million people receiving coverage through Obamacare — either through its insurance exchanges or Medicaid. To put it in context, that number is higher than the record number of people who voted for Trump in the Republican primaries and it is roughly equal to the population of his home state of New York. Democrats, and the media, will highlight all of the most sympathetic stories of those standing to lose coverage, particularly those with pre-existing conditions. Republicans, who spent years hammering Obama on his broken “if you like your plan, you can keep it” pledge and railing against unaffordable insurance will have to be willing to explain why so many people would be losing their plans. It’s unclear whether they would have the stomach for that fight.

Fully repealing the law without simultaneously replacing it would also complicate the budget math. The reason is that as long as Obamacare is on the books, any plan to replace the law is judged relative to Obamacare. That means if Republicans want to, say, offer tax credits toward the purchase of insurance, it could be deemed a spending cut, because they’d simultaneously be saving trillions of dollars by slashing Medicaid and Obamacare exchange subsidies. But if they wipe Obamacare off the books first, and then try to replace the law, any spending – on tax credits, on addressing those with pre-existing conditions, and so forth – would count as a spending hike.

So, they’d ideally want to replace the law as they repeal it. The problem is, despite the urgings of people such as myself and others for years, Republicans have not resolved their differences over healthcare policy and united around an alternative.

Ed Kilgore:

As the days go by after Donald Trump’s upset presidential victory, he is managing to keep his options open in terms of his basic strategy for governing — and particularly his relationship with a congressional Republican majority that is ready to rock and roll with a legislative blitzkrieg based on the Ryan budget. Perhaps that is because he never gave serious thought to what he would do if he actually won the election. Maybe he just hasn’t made up his mind. And quite possibly he’s just keeping potential opponents guessing. But so far he has not closed off any of the three very different paths I outlined last week: pursuing a sort of chaos administration resembling his candidacy; becoming the unlikely enabler of the Ryan agenda; or trying to remake the GOP into a populist/nationalist party.

What Democrats should keep in mind, however, is that whichever way he goes he is very likely going to betray his white working-class “base” — the people who put him into office — sooner or later. The “later” part is the most certain. Donald Trump does not have the power to bring back the Industrial Era economy he has so avidly embraced. He will not be able to reopen the coal mines, rebuild the manufacturing sector, or repeal the international economic trends that would exist with or without NAFTA or TPP. And for that matter, he has little ability to reverse the demographic and cultural trends most of his voters dislike.

But Trump may betray his white working-class followers more immediately if he does indeed sign something like the Ryan budget into law, rewarding every wealthy and powerful GOP constituency, making the tax structure significantly more regressive than it already is, and gutting a social safety net that poorer white folks depend on as much as do poorer minority people. Add in something like a push toward tighter credit and an abandonment of fiscal stimulus — which congressional Republicans will be urging on the new administration with every other breath — and you could see a reactionary administration that has to rely even more powerfully than the Trump campaign on atavistic cultural appeals to the white working class and the alleged magic he can perform as president. As a New York Times analysis of Trump voters in Michigan explains, there will always be an irreducible Trump/GOP vote that is essentially ethnocentric (or even racist) in nature. But some of the voters are persuadable for Democrats going forward.

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