The December 1, 2016 Thread

The Washington Post says this will be the wealthiest administration in all recorded human history: “His announced nominees for top positions include several multimillionaires, an heir to a family mega-fortune and two Forbes-certified billionaires, one of whose family is worth as much as industrial tycoon Andrew Mellon was when he served as treasury secretary nearly a century ago. Rumored candidates for other positions suggest Trump could add more ultra-rich appointees soon.”

“Many of the Trump appointees were born wealthy, attended elite schools and went on to amass even larger fortunes as adults. As a group, they have much more experience funding political candidates than they do running government agencies.”

“Their collective wealth in many ways defies Trump’s populist campaign promises. Their business ties, particularly to Wall Street, have drawn rebukes from Democrats. But the group also amplifies Trump’s own campaign pitch: that Washington outsiders who know how to navigate and exploit a ‘rigged’ system are best able to fix that system for the working class.”

Medicare IS NOT WHAT THE ELECTION WAS FOUGHT OVER. If Ryan wants to change Medicare, then run for president on that & see how far you get. https://t.co/NrJfdXC6C3

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 27, 2016

I… agree…. with… Anne Coulter. Excuse me, I have to go kill myself.

Politico: “Congressional Republicans are setting up their own, self-imposed deadline to make good on their vow to replace the Affordable Care Act. With buy-in from Donald Trump’s transition team, GOP leaders on both sides of the Capitol are coalescing around a plan to vote to repeal the law in early 2017 — but delay the effective date for that repeal for as long as three years.”

“They’re crossing their fingers that the delay will help them get their own house in order, as well as pressure a handful of Senate Democrats — who would likely be needed to pass replacement legislation — to come onboard before the clock runs out and 20 million Americans lose their health insurance. The idea is to satisfy conservative critics who want President Obama’s signature initiative gone now, but reassure Americans that Republicans won’t upend the entire health care system without a viable alternative that preserves the law’s popular provisions.”

LOL. So they will repeal it, but then keep the law in place. Uh huh. And when those three years are up they will have no replacement and have to either pass another delay, or pass some minor change and call it Trump Care.

Meanwhile, a timely new Kaiser Health poll finds just a quarter of Americans say they wanted to scrap the Affordable Care Act, down from nearly a third in October. By contrast, nearly half say they want the law expanded or implemented as it is. Another 17% say they want the law scaled back.

The GOP has no replacement, probably because the Conservative idea for Health Insurance Reform was Obamacare. So if they repeal and do not replace, it will be a political disaster for them.

“Donald Trump promised that he was not going to have a government that was going to work for Wall Street. He promised that he was not going to have a revolving door. And then he turns around in his first big economic appointment is to appoint a Wall Street insider.” — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), quoted by Politico.

#ACASignups Estimated number of people who’d lose coverage in event of full #ACA repeal:
MI: ~970K
PA: ~933K
WI: ~170K
= 2.07 million total

— Charles Gaba (@charles_gaba) December 1, 2016

Washington Post: “On Thursday, the top Democrats on Senate committees that will hold confirmation hearings for Trump’s Cabinet nominees will announce plans to require the picks to release three years of tax information before being referred to the full Senate for a final confirmation vote.”

“It’s unclear whether such a rule could pass in Republican-controlled committees that will hold confirmation hearings, but it’s the opening salvo of Democratic attempts to put GOP colleagues on the record of either siding with or bucking Trump, especially on the unpopular aspects of his personal background and policy positions.”

Hahaha. The President was not forced to review his taxes. Why should his nominees?

Retailers begin dropping Ivanka brand as boycott gains steam https://t.co/G3Za2AviG1 via @MailOnline #BoycottIvanka #GrabYourWallet

— WakeUpAmerica (@thatmexicanthin) November 30, 2016

Anonymous posted about this yesterday in the comments, but it deserves front page attention. Jonathan Chait at NY Magazine points out that David Brooks and other so-called centrists on the Republican side who could not accept either Obama or asymmetric extremism destroyed their own credibility and took the country down:

The effect of all this commentary was not to empower the moderate ideas Brooks favored, but to disempower them. Brooks was emblematic of the way the entire bipartisan centrist industry conducted itself throughout the Obama years. It was neither possible for Obama to co-opt the center, nor for Republicans to abandon it, because official centrists would simply relocate themselves to the midpoint of wherever the parties happened to stand. The well-documented reality that the parties were undergoing asymmetric polarization was one they refused to accept, because their jobs was to be bipartisan, and it is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon not understanding it.

The centrists could have played a role in braking the growing extremism of the Republican party. It would have meant telling the country that there was now one moderate, governing party and one extremist faction, and parking themselves with the moderate party until such time as the dynamic changed. They could not do it. If there’s not much of a center left to stop Trump from trampling democratic norms, it is because the centrists abdicated their responsibility and destroyed themselves.

John Nichols points out that Hillary Clinton’s growing popular vote lead deprives Trump of any mandate:

After Trump was declared the winner, his supporters rushed to claim a mandate. Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman who is now set to serve as the White House chief of staff, announced on ABC’s Good Morning America that November 8 had produced “an electoral landslide” in which “the American people agreed that Donald Trump’s vision for America is what this country has been waiting for.” PolitiFact reviewed the chairman’s statement and concluded: “We rate Priebus’ claim False.”

That’s an understatement. As the votes continue to be counted in a process that will not be completed until mid-December, the myths of election night are giving way to the cold, hard reality that voters turned out in large numbers to reject Trump’s vision. They favored Clinton over the Republican nominee by a significant popular-vote margin. Trump is succeeding not based on the popular will but by assembling an Electoral College majority based on exceptionally narrow margins in a handful of battleground states.

Rick Klein: “Mitt Romney may or may not be selected as Donald Trump’s secretary of state. But Romney has already performed a valuable service for Trump – by proving him right, about Romney, and about the broader political class. Romney is according extraordinary deference and respect to a man he famously labeled ‘a phony, a fraud’ just months ago…. Trump can now be nice to a man he once said wasn’t very smart, now that Romney has eaten crow along with his frog legs. But it leaves Romney where Trump suggested he belonged from the start: as a politician whose words don’t really matter.”

“If Romney’s words from the campaign had meaning, how could he be swayed by the words Trump has uttered, or even his early actions, now? Trump’s rise was powered by his big called bluff on the political process – that he always knew voters think politicians’ words had no real meaning. Romney surely has the best of intentions in wanting to help and to serve the next president. But he is making Trump seem more right by the day.”

The Washington Post says Trump’s takeover of the GOP is complete: “One by one, Republicans who stood up to Trump or questioned his statements and antics have made a pilgrimage to Trump Tower to kiss the president-elect’s ring, or joined his administration, or decided uncharacteristically to just keep their mouths shut.”

“And at long last Tuesday night, the figurehead of the “Never Trump” movement also capitulated. After an intimate dinner with Trump of frog legs and diver scallops at a fine Manhattan restaurant (in a Trump-owned building, naturally), Romney publicly acquiesced.”

“In an apparent attempt to secure Trump’s trust in him as a possible secretary of state, Romney lavished praise on the president-elect… Romney’s turnabout illustrates the power that comes with winning — the ability to reshuffle the political hierarchy.”

Chris Cillizza on Romney is even auditioning for a job in a Trump Administration: “The terrific answer is that Romney still feels a call to public service. That the same motivation that drove him to run for governor or take over the failing Salt Lake City Winter Olympics or even run for president — a desire to make things better and a belief he can do so — is what compels him to make nice with someone that, from a personal perspective, he clearly holds in utter contempt. Under this theory, Romney believes the best way to preserve his vision for the country and its role in the world — and protect those things from potentially harmful decisions by Trump — is to insert himself between the president-elect and the world. That only by going into the Trump administration can he keep really bad things from happening.”

“The terrible answer for Romney is that this willingness to subjugate his personal views about Trump is all in service of an overarching ambition for power that has defined his life. Romney critics — and those are the people pushing this theory — point to his past flip-flops on such issues as abortion and gay marriage as evidence that when a deeply held belief comes up against Romney’s ambition, ambition always wins. So, Romney wants to be secretary of state more than he hates Trump. It’s that simple a calculation.”

Frank Rich says do not believe Trump for a second regarding his alleged distancing himself from the operations of his Trump businesses.

Trump may reverse his stand on any issue in any given hour depending on whom he last talked to or which talking head he last caught on cable. But he does have one ideological imperative that has been and always will be sacrosanct: making money any way he can without regard for ethics, propriety, the suckers on the other end of his “deals,” or the rule of law. Trump University was merely a preview of the Trump White House’s coming attractions. He’ll leave his “great business in total” on that same day he releases his tax returns.

The Trump administration promises to be a kleptocracy that will make Harding’s look like an object lesson in good government by comparison. After all, Harding only countenanced the Teapot Dome scandal — in which the secretary of Interior took bribes from oil companies eager to plunder Navy petroleum reserves — rather than masterminding it. Trump, by contrast, arrives in office as the leader of a family syndicate with international financial interests and decades of training in buck-grubbing chicanery. We’re still almost two months away from Inauguration Day, and already the president-elect is formulating foreign policy predicated on promoting his foreign real-estate holdings. His daughter has used her new First Family status to hawk a cheesy product line, and his son-in-law has no interest in deaccessioning his own real-estate empire, which, per The Wall Street Journal, “has hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from domestic and foreign financial institutions” and also “markets condominiums to wealthy U.S. and foreign buyers.”