Delaware Liberal

The November 29, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

What flag tweet, you say? This: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!” — President-elect Donald Trump, on Twitter. I think both are worthy of conversation. 50 million lose health insurance and thus healthcare, and the President wants to end the First Amendment. Yes, both worthy of discussion.

The national polls were right. The Cook Political Report shows Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead over Donald Trump is now 2.32 million votes, or 1.7%. The final RealClearPolitics polling average showed Clinton leading the presidential race by 1.7%.

Politico: “[Kellyanne] Conway, who served as Trump’s campaign manager, has slowly receded from the president-elect’s innermost circle — she is not included either in interviews with potential cabinet nominees or in the deliberations over those candidates, said two people briefed on the matter.”

“Conway has rejected an offer to be Trump’s White House communications director, and is now seen as increasingly unlikely to take on a formal role inside the administration, according to a source familiar with the transition process — which helps to explain why she has displayed little compunction about bucking her boss in public.”

But then again the New York Times: “In fact, people familiar with the dynamic inside Trump Tower — who were granted anonymity to discuss the unusual process that Mr. Trump has allowed for his transition — said Ms. Conway had been neither insubordinate nor acting directly on the president-elect’s instruction.”

“By denouncing Mr. Romney even as Mr. Trump was preparing for their second meeting, this time over dinner on Tuesday, Ms. Conway was simply doing what she knows Mr. Trump likes: encouraging a public airing of conflicting views when he is unsure of what path to take.”

Benjy Sarlin: “As a candidate, Trump’s often unsubstantiated attacks on political opponents, foreign governments, election officials, law enforcement, a federal judge, news outlets and Muslims shattered political norms and sowed division. As president, his decisions will carry the full weight of White House policy, raising concerns about where he gets his information and whether he might act on false or flawed reports.”

“Part of the problem in assessing Trump is that it’s not always clear what his motive is when he directs his followers to phony stories or unsubstantiated conspiracies.”

Donald Trump says his electoral college win was massive. Landslide he says. Nate Silver says it was the 44th largest out of 54 Presidential Elections: “In a historical context, Trump’s Electoral College performance is decidedly below-average… There have been 54 presidential elections since the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804. (Before that, presidential electors cast two votes each, making it hard to compare them to present-day elections.) Of those 54 cases, Trump’s share of the electoral vote — assuming there are no faithless electors or results overturned by recounts — ranks 44th.”

I love that there is now a Twitter account @HRCintheWild. When the Electoral College votes her into office next week, she can be found in a local supermarket, bookstore, or woods.

President-elect Donald Trump “is preparing to announce his pick for Treasury secretary as early as the end of the week, the Wall Street Journal reports. “Finalists for the Treasury job include Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), who heads the House Financial Services Committee; Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs Group banker and prominent Trump campaign supporter; and John Allison IV, who built one of the largest regional banks, BB&T. “The shift to the top economic posts, which have been overshadowed by the internal fight over the secretary-of-state position, signals that the administration-in-waiting is seeking to get back on to its relatively brisk track.”

Washington Post: “Romney plans to have a private dinner Tuesday with Trump, who is said to be intrigued by the notion of reconciling with one of his fiercest Republican antagonists — even as he also weighs rewarding the loyalty of former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani with one of the administration’s most prized jobs or selecting a decorated military officer in David H. Petraeus.”

“Trump is looking for assurances that Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee who has championed a muscular and at times interventionist foreign policy, could be trusted to defend and promote Trump’s markedly different worldview in capitals around the globe, the people familiar with the president-elect’s deliberations said.”

“Congressional Republicans are aiming to cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood early next year, according to GOP sources on and off the Hill, as social conservatives press for a milestone win under Donald Trump’s presidency after years of thwarted attempts to defund the health care group,” Politico reports.

More Nate Silver: “Let’s not call it a ‘recount,’ because that’s not really what it is. It’s not as though merely counting the ballots a second or third time is likely to change the results enough to overturn the outcome in three states. An apparent win by a few dozen or a few hundred votes might be reversed by an ordinary recount. But Donald Trump’s margins, as of this writing, are roughly 11,000 votes in Michigan, 23,000 votes in Wisconsin and 68,000 votes in Pennsylvania. There’s no precedent for a recount overturning margins like those or anything close to them. Instead, the question is whether there was a massive, systematic effort to manipulate the results of the election.”

“So what we’re talking about is more like an audit or an investigation. An investigation that would look for signs of deliberate and widespread fraud, such as voting machines’ having been hacked, whole batches of ballots’ intentionally having been disregarded, illegal coordination between elections officials and the campaigns, and so on. Such findings would probably depend on physical evidence as much or more than they do statistical evidence. In that sense, there’s no particular reason to confine the investigation to Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania, the states that Hillary Clinton lost (somewhat) narrowly. If the idea is to identify some sort of smoking gun indicating massive fraud perpetrated by the Trump campaign — or by the Clinton campaign, or by the Russian government — it might be in a state Clinton won, such as New Hampshire or Minnesota. Or for that matter, it might be in a state Trump won fairly easily, like Ohio or Iowa.”

Politico: “[Pennsylvania Congressman Lou] Barletta is a member of Washington’s newest and most exclusive club, a small band of Republican lawmakers who got behind Trump when their own party establishment had him pegged as a surefire general election loser, if he even managed to win the nomination. The few who were willing to endure the ridicule of other GOP lawmakers by placing their chips on Trump early have been vaulted from backbench obscurity to now arguably rivaling the influence of GOP congressional leaders.”

“They, more than the high-profile pols flocking to Trump since he won, have the ear of the president-elect. They are among a handful of gatekeepers to the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world.”

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