The December 11, 2016 Thread

James Hohmann notes, this really ought to be one of the biggest storylines from the 2016 election:

One big reason that elites along the Acela Corridor were so caught off guard by Trump’s victory is that they’re so insulated from the stomach-churning scourge of addiction and cycle of brokenness. Washington has never been richer or further removed from the pain of everyday Americans, as Hillary Clinton called them in the video announcing her candidacy. Trump’s solutions may not actually help the “the forgotten man” that he talked so much about on the stump. In fact, his administration may very well push policies that ultimately only add to their pain. The tax cuts he wants will disproportionately benefit the most affluent people in the bluest states, for example. But the system has failed them. Trump promised to blow it up; Clinton represented more of the same.

On Friday night, bombshell news reports noted that the CIA had assessed Russia intervened in the US election to help Trump win; that during the campaign senior congressional Republicans, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, had resisted a private White House request to be part of a bipartisan effort to call out Russian hacking of Democratic and political targets; and that Moscow had penetrated the computer system of the Republican National Committee but had not publicly disseminated any of the stolen material.

Aaron Blake: “The report highlights and exacerbates the increasingly fraught situation in which congressional Republicans find themselves with regard to Russia and Trump. By acknowledging and digging into the increasing evidence that Russia helped — or at least attempted to help — tip the scales in Trump’s favor, they risk raising questions about whether Trump would have won without Russian intervention.”

“Hillary Clinton may have lacked Obama’s (and Bernie Sanders’s) personal appeal among younger voters, but she still carried the under-30 vote by an 18-point margin over Trump, according to the 2016 exit polls, while voters over the age of 45 opted for Trump by nine points — confirming that the contemporary political generation gap will outlast the Obama era,” the Washington Post reports.

“This is a significant divide by historical standards. None of the 1960s-era elections produced a comparable partisan difference, despite the decade’s prominent youth-led protest movements and memorable ‘don’t trust anyone over 30’ rhetoric.”

Joy-Ann Reid to Trump voters: “You’re probably going to read this as sour grapes, and I certainly am sour about a family of kleptocrats moving into the White House because 80,000 of your votes in states that get more federal tax dollars than they put in trump 2.7 million of ours, even though we carry you financially, and California and New York could function just fine as our own countries, without you.”

“But the reality is, I do live in a blue state. My governor and mayor are Democrats. Undocumented immigrants are safe where I live. Two of my kids attend a private college, so they wouldn’t have gotten free tuition anyway, and the third goes to a really good public school, where they teach science. I have a job (actually, multiple jobs) that can’t be outsourced to Mexico. And I’ll probably get a tax cut. So I’ll be fine over the next four years, as long as I don’t encounter an angry cop who’s had a bad day. But allow me to be blunt, since I don’t have any desire to pander to you, and it wouldn’t work to pander to you anyway.”

“You voted for Donald Trump, thinking that he was on your side; that he will save your jobs and your way of life, whatever you imagine that is. Well, you got played.”

Remember when the former Secretary of State told Trump a televised debate that he’s Putin’s puppet?

— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) December 10, 2016

Michael Kinsely: “For close to a year, and especially since his election as president, people have been trying to figure out Trump’s political principles: What does he stand for, how will he act as president? Various theories have been advanced…”

“But now that we’ve seen a bit of him in action, it seems that Trump actually does have a recognizable agenda that explains how he simultaneously can pander to big business generally while ‘strong-arming’ (the words of a Post editorial Friday) an air conditioning manufacturer to save a few hundred jobs for a while. Or how he can make nice with the authoritarian Vladimir Putin while making bellicose foreign policy noises in general. Or how he can blithely upset with a phone call the absurdly delicate balance of our relations with China and Taiwan. All this seemingly erratic behavior can be explained — if not justified — by thinking of Trump as a fascist. Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world. He spent his previous career negotiating with the government on behalf of corporations; now he has switched teams. But it’s the same game.”

We are in an unprecedented situation: a president that 54% of voters opposed elected with the help of a Russian intelligence operation.

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) December 10, 2016

If you’re wondering why it’s taking so long for Trump to announce a nominee to be Secretary of State, Gabriel Sherman says it’s all about a Game of Thrones battle going on between Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus.

The Priebus–Bannon power struggle is playing out most prominently in Trump’s search for a secretary of State. According to sources, Bannon has advocated for naming Rudy Giuliani, while Priebus has made the case for a more moderate choice. When concerns were raised about Giuliani’s business conflicts hurting his chances to be confirmed by the Senate, Bannon lobbied Trump not to settle for Mitt Romney and to expand the search for new candidates to include ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, and Senator Bob Corker, a source close to Bannon told me.

So since it looks like Tillerson is the nominee, it looks like Bannon has won. And so has Russia. And Exxon.

Tillerson at State and Flynn as National Security Adviser would put two people w direct Putin connections at the highest levels of gov't

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) December 10, 2016