Delaware Liberal

The December 10, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

Martin Longman on the coming G20 summit in Germany in 2017, which will be President Trump’s first foreign summit, but also almost certainly not his first chance to embarrass America on the world stage, since his mere election has already done that:

We can take it for granted that he will not achieve anything significant. It’s not that he is a sociopathic grifter and egomaniac: that is all in the day’s work for professional diplomats, who deal with such rulers all the time. It’s that he is a vain con-man who can’t be trusted for half an hour. It’s the difference between a Khamenei or a Putin, thugs you can make a deal with, and Kim Jong-Un or Gaddafi, nutjobs you can’t rely on to act in their own interests. Trump clearly falls into the second group. Iranian President Rouhani seems to have already come to this conclusion, with a flat refusal to renegotiate the nuclear weapons deal, even under a pretty clear threat of war. The rest of the G20 will too. If they want to get anything of substance done, they will have to become the G19+1, leaving Trump as the village idiot in the corner.

The rules of the institution are no help to Trump here. […] Anyway, as I understand it the G20 procedure is therefore entirely in the hands of the host country, that is Germany. Merkel can cut Trump’s microphone if he overshoots his allocated time, or have the communiqué adopted by the majority. She will try very hard to avoid either, but if the alternative is disruption by Trump and complete failure, she is quite tough enough to do the necessary.

Josh Marshall wonders if maybe Trump cannot divest, because if he did, his empire would collapse.

Since Donald Trump’s surprise election one month ago, there’s been a bubbling conversation about the mammoth conflicts of interest he will have if he is running or even owning his far flung business enterprises while serving as the head of state. I’ve suggested that the whole notion of ‘conflicts of interest’ doesn’t really capture what we’re dealing with here, which is really a pretty open effort to leverage the presidency to expand his family business. But a couple things came together for me today which make me think we’ve all missed the real issue.

Maybe he can’t divest because he’s too underwater to do so or more likely he’s too dependent on current and expanding cash flow to divest or even turn the reins over to someone else…. The idea that Trump is heavily leveraged and reliant on on-going cash flow to keep his business empire from coming apart and collapsing into bankruptcy was frequently discussed during the campaign. But it’s gotten pretty little attention since he was elected.

This tweet held up well. I wonder if Trump pardons Snowden or executes him. Or maybe Putin will disappear him.

President Obama has ordered a “full review” of Russian hacking during the November election, as pressure from Congress has grown for greater public understanding of exactly what Moscow did to interfere in the electoral process, the Washington Post reports.

Said homeland-security adviser Lisa Monaco: “We may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned.”

Obama wants the report before he leaves office on January 20.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller (R) suggested that journalists were unfair to scrutinize his habit of posting fabricated or unsupported information on social media, the Texas Tribune reports.

Said Miller: “I’m not a news organization. Y’all are holding me to the same standards as you are a news organization, and it’s just Facebook.”

He added: “If it’s thought-provoking, I’ll put it up there and let the readers decide. Everyone that reads that is grown ups. It’s like Fox News: I report, you decide if it’s true or not.”

Mr. Miller does not understand the meaning of “report” and the news. You see, you report the news, if you are a journalist or an anchor. Normal citizens or Agricultural Commissioners don’t report the news. And if what you are “reporting” is not news but instead are lies, you are not reporting, you are lying.

Advisers to President-elect Donald Trump are trying to identify staff in the Energy Department who played a role in promoting President Obama’s climate agenda, Bloomberg reports.

“The transition team has asked the agency to list employees and contractors who attended United Nations climate meetings, along with those who helped develop the Obama administration’s social cost of carbon metrics, used to estimate and justify the climate benefits of new rules.”

NBC News: “There’s not a Bush or Romney (at least not yet) — nor are there key members of past GOP administrations or campaigns (except for Elaine Chao, who served as George W. Bush’s Labor secretary). Indeed, outside of Chao and U.N. ambassador pick Nikki Haley, it’s hard to see how any of these names so far would have surfaced in, say, a Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio administration. Even the one U.S. senator Trump has selected so far, Jeff Sessions, isn’t exactly a card-carrying member of the GOP establishment club. Now this theme could change if Trump chooses Romney to be his secretary of state. But right now, there are more outsiders than insiders.”

Gideon Resnick at The Daily Beast details the reaction to Donald Trump’s attacks on union leader Chuck Jones:

[O]n Thursday, a number of unions throughout the country, who had kept close watch on the situation, expressed disappointment and anger with a future leader of the free world using his position to bash one of their own. After all, Trump put up the best numbers in union households since Ronald Reagan won his second term in 1984.

“The attacks on Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, must stop immediately,” Elaine Kim, of 32BJ SEIU, the largest building service workers union in the country, said in a statement to The Daily Beast.

“Jones was doing his job defending working men and women and the families that depend on them by speaking out and sharing the facts about the deal with Carrier. To attack Jones and his family is not only beyond the pale but anti-worker and un-American. To speak the truth is a freedom generations of Americans died for, and worth defending today and forever. We call on those who cherish that freedom, including those in positions of influence, to join us in standing with Chuck Jones, loudly and publicly.”

The message of solidarity was apparently heard loud and clear.

Paul Waldman points out that Democrats must also stand firm and not help Republicans dismantle progress on health care and health insurance:

There are times when being the party of no is smart not just for political reasons, but for substantive ones as well. This is one of those times.[…] soon enough, Republicans will own health care. If and when they pass some form of repeal and some form of replacement, they’ll be on the hook for everything anyone doesn’t like about the American health care system. Premium increases? Republicans’ fault. Narrow provider networks? Republicans’ fault. High copays? Republicans’ fault. Can’t afford coverage? Republicans’ fault. Had to wait 45 minutes and the doctor was rude to you? Republicans’ fault. Now they’ll see what Barack Obama has been dealing with.

Joan Walsh at The Nation says Democrats should fight all of Donald Trump’s nominees:

[S]o far, presented with these political gifts, Democrats have been fairly silent. They’ve pledged to fight Sessions, and they should, but no one else has come in for much attack, although today Senator Ed Markey said he would oppose Pruitt’s nomination to head the EPA, and Schumer had some tough words for Pudzer as labor secretary. That’s good news, but it’s not enough.

On one level, I understand the need for Democrats to “pick their battles.” They may be more likely to win GOP support to actually block a nominee or two by being selective. But no one has yet marshaled an argument to Trump voters that they’ve been hoodwinked: that the outsider candidate has picked a cabinet of insiders, who make an utter mockery of his promises to look out for the “forgotten man.” Democrats should be making the case, as Ben Adler argues in The Guardian, that Trump is “a self-dealing political profiteer and a tool of the business and political elite.” Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project has suggested that Democrats refuse to consider any appointments until Trump discloses and then divests himself of his global and largely secret financial empire—especially since we can’t trust Trump’s picks to monitor his self-dealing.

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