The November 28, 2016 Thread

The New York Review of Books on what Republican Operative James Comey did: “The announcement predictably played right into the hands of Trump, who immediately took the occasion to repeat his charge that Clinton should be locked up. None of this should have happened; under long-standing Justice Department practice, Comey should have kept silent about the fact of further investigation, especially so close to an election.”

“Whether Comey’s imprudent intervention changed the outcome of the presidential election, the damage to the integrity of both the political and criminal processes has been done. The criminal process has been politicized, and the political process has been tainted by misuse of official power. The question that remains is what should happen now. At a minimum, the Justice Department policies that Comey violated must be strengthened and formalized to ensure that this never happens again.”

“The presence of millions of citizens lacking health insurance remains a uniquely American problem” https://t.co/WlMpbq04kp

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 28, 2016

Donald Trump tweeted without evidence that millions of people voted illegally in November’s presidential election, Politico reports. Said Trump: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” This is a lie taken directly from InfoWars. But if Trump does believe that there are millions of frauduelent votes out there, it would seem that he just endorsed a nationwide recount. Thanks Donald.

Ezra Klein: “This tweet is an example of one of Trump’s other dangerous qualities: his tendency to believe what he wants to believe about the world, facts be damned. Trump lost the popular vote, and he lost it by a wide margin — more than 2 million votes and counting. A wise man would take that information seriously and think about how to staff his White House, set priorities, and moderate his message to win over a majority of the public. Instead, Trump appears to have told himself the vote count was riddled with fraud and that he really did win a majority of the legitimate vote — and thus he doesn’t need to consider what it means that most voters didn’t want him to win the presidency.”

The question is why is Trump lying about illegal voting? Because he can't accept his loss in popular vote? https://t.co/A3pTxs4rYp

— Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) November 28, 2016

Peggy Noonan on the fact that Trump’s conflicts of interest will end his Presidency: “I don’t know if there’s anyone around him who can convince him that the attitude with which he’s operated for 50 years must end, and something wholly new and different begin.”

“But whoever does must be aware of this: The press, which wants to kill him, is going to zero in on his biggest weak spot: money, profit, the deal. Democrats too will watch like hawks. And this is understandable! Presidents shouldn’t ever give the impression things aren’t on the up and up. And Mr. Trump campaigned saying he’d dismantle the rigged system, drain the swamp, fight the racket.”

“The press does not believe, not for a second, and Democrats do not believe, not for a second, that Mr. Trump will be able to change the habits of a lifetime. They are relying on it.”

Our story on the moment in @realdonaldtrump's life when he was caught in 30 falsehoods, one after the other. https://t.co/cRBZa19Xfw

— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) November 28, 2016

Appointing Mitt Romney as secretary of state would be viewed by many supporters of President-elect Donald Trump as a major betrayal, former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told CNN. Said Conway: “It’s just breathtaking in scope and intensity.” She added: “I’m all for party unity, but I’m not sure we have to pay for that with secretary of state position.”

Romney was never in contention for State. Trump just wanted to humiliate him one more time. But then again, two sources at the top of the Trump transition team confirm to MSNBC that Donald Trump was furious at Kellyanne Conway’s comments on Sunday suggesting Trump betrayed his supporters by even considering Mitt Romney for a position in his cabinet. Said one: “Kellyanne went rogue at Donald Trump’s expense at the worst possible time.”

“Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus have reportedly been growing frustrated by Kellyanne Conway’s failure to become a team player in a transition process where the top players are forming a tight knit group around the president-elect.”

I would not be upset if Trump fired Conway. Seeing Conway’s soulless face on TV has aged me 10 years.

Who is Francois Fillon? The man who could be the next French president? https://t.co/zn0oPNUbnP pic.twitter.com/cmMvCnwbcj

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) November 28, 2016

“While much of the attention in Washington is on who will fill the Trump cabinet, it is already clear who some of the most important people will be when it comes to fulfilling the Trump agenda,” the New York Times reports.

“One group will be particularly well positioned to either accommodate or infuriate Donald Trump: a handful of independent-minded Republican senators who have shown a willingness to break with the president-elect and have readily split with their own party on issues in the past.”

“Given the narrower divide in the Senate after the election, these senators must be kept on board if Mr. Trump and the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate want to advance legislation and nominations in the face of Democratic opposition. Some are already making known their readiness to take on the new administration.”

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that GOP senators are wary of nuking filibuster.

This factless madness shows @realDonaldTrump to be unhinged. If PresNixon had a Twitter account it would not reflect this much paranoia.

— Carl Bernstein (@carlbernstein) November 28, 2016

New York Times: “The globe is dotted with such potential conflicts. Mr. Trump’s companies have business operations in at least 20 countries, with a particular focus on the developing world, including outposts in nations like India, Indonesia and Uruguay, according to a New York Times analysis of his presidential campaign financial disclosures. What’s more, the true extent of Mr. Trump’s global financial entanglements is unclear, since he has refused to release his tax returns and has not made public a list of his lenders.”

Thanks, NY Times, for waiting three weeks after the election to finally getting around to this.

Brian Beutler on the GOP’s insanely reckless Trump gamble:

On Sunday evening, perhaps to clutter front pages and news programs with something other than his administration’s pre-inaugural corruption, he peddled the outrageous lie that he is the rightful winner of the national popular vote (which he will lose by well over two million ballots) but has been denied by ubiquitous fraud.

In between, he announced that an erratic conspiracy theorist will be his most powerful national security aide, and that another somewhat less erratic conspiracy theorist will be the first erratic conspiracy theorist’s deputy. Trump’s administration-in-waiting spent much of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend undertaking a kind of ritual humiliation of Mitt Romney, who emerged at least for a time as a top contender to run the State Department. These surrogates spread word that Romney—once a fierce Trump critic—may be required to publicly apologize for his earlier disloyalty, then used TV appearances and social media to claim that nominating Romney would be an act of betrayal.

There are only two weathered institutions—Congress and the media—with the tools and clout required to draw scrutiny to these and other dangers, but only Congress has the power to actually curtail them.

With almost no exceptions, Republicans on Capitol Hill have ignored all of this—not because they aren’t alarmed, but because they’ve decided that acting to constrain Trump now would be inconvenient. Trump is effectively testing, increment by increment, how much damage to democracy Republicans will tolerate in pursuit of right-wing ideological goals. We are watching that test play out in real time, and the only question now is whether the GOP’s gamble will pay off, or fail catastrophically before they have a chance to accomplish anything.

Paul Krugman: “Remember all the news reports suggesting, without evidence, that the Clinton Foundation’s fund-raising created conflicts of interest? Well, now the man who benefited from all that innuendo is on his way to the White House. And he’s already giving us an object lesson in what real conflicts of interest look like, as authoritarian governments around the world shower favors on his business empire.”

“Of course, Donald Trump could be rejecting these favors and separating himself and his family from his hotels and so on. But he isn’t. In fact, he’s openly using his position to drum up business. And his early appointments suggest that he won’t be the only player using political power to build personal wealth. Self-dealing will be the norm throughout this administration. America has just entered an era of unprecedented corruption at the top.”

Hard to argue against an audit/recount if the president-elect asserts, without any evidence, that were millions of illegal votes

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 27, 2016

Andrew Prokop at Vox on whether economic populist truly is the answer for Democrats. The answer is no if you look at our Senate candidates in the Midwest:

It’s only been two and a half weeks since the 2016 election, and Democrats are still hotly debating what went wrong. Could a different platform or messaging strategy have helped lead Hillary Clinton to victory? Would, perhaps, a more economically populist candidate have performed better? These questions will be picked over for years and are probably impossible to settle conclusively.

But as a first pass, it’s at least worth noting how Clinton performed compared with other Democratic candidates on the ballot with her — for instance, the party’s Senate candidates. Here’s how much their margins were better or worse than Clinton’s margin, according to the latest vote totals…

Interestingly enough, in two of those crucial Midwestern states that flipped to Trump, Democratic Senate candidates campaigned on economically populist platforms — but they did notably worse than Hillary Clinton. Russ Feingold underperformed Clinton by 2.4 points in Wisconsin, and Ted Strickland underperformed her by 12.8 points in Ohio. Feingold amassed a populist record of challenging big money and special interests when he was in the Senate, and Strickland harshly condemned trade deals during his campaign against Rob Portman (who served as George W. Bush’s US trade representative).

Meanwhile, the two Democratic Senate candidates in competitive races who outperformed Clinton the most both self-consciously presented a moderate image rather than running as liberal firebrands.

That would be Kander in Missouri and Bayh in Indiana. I take the Kander example, but Bayh in Indiana doesn’t work since he has a history in the state that earned him some good will across the aisle even if he lost.

Ned Resnikoff of Media Matters says Trump’s lies have a purpose. They are an assault on democracy.

Donald Trump is winning the war on reality. Welcome to the age of nightmares.

President-elect Donald Trump does not create new realities. He tells lies that are seemingly random, frequently inconsistent, and often plainly ridiculous.

He says or tweets things on the record and then denies having ever said them. He contradicts documented fact and then disregards anyone who points out the inaccuracies. He even lies when he has no discernible reason to do so — and then turns around and tells another lie that flies in the face of the previous one.

If Bush and Rove constructed a fantasy world with a clear internal logic, Trump has built something more like an endless bad dream. In his political universe, facts are unstable and ephemeral; events follow one after the other with no clear causal linkage; and danger is everywhere, although its source seems to change at random. Whereas President Bush offered America the illusion of morality clarity, President-elect Trump offers an ever-shifting phantasmagoria of sense impressions and unreliable information, barely held together by a fog of anxiety and bewilderment. Think Kafka more than Lord of the Rings.