The December 16, 2016 Thread

Mike Mayles: “California whites, who have plenty of experience with actual immigrants, voted against Trump by a 5 percentage point margin. Reading and triangulating 2016 election exit polls shows Californian whites vote very differently from other whites around the country – including those in New York, a similarly affluent, educated Democrat bastion. New York whites supported Trump by a 6-point margin, a pro-Republican switch of 12 percentage points from 2008. At the opposite political node, Texas’ white folks may be tasting diversity but want none of it; they handed Trump a 43 percentage point landslide.”

“Speculatively, California’s white population may be self-selected for greater tolerance. Those who stay in the first major state where whites have become not just a demographic minority, but a voting minority, may be inured to racist, xenophobic demagoguery more than those in states where whites are just beginning to lose their majority grip.”

James Hohmann notes that Donald Trump said that he’s a fan of Ayn Rand and identifies with Howard Roark, the main character in The Fountainhead.

The same is true for many of his prospective cabinet members: “Rex Tillerson prefers Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s novel about John Galt secretly organizing a strike of the creative class to hasten the collapse of the bureaucratic society… Andy Puzder, tapped by Trump last week to be secretary of labor, is an avid and outspoken fan of Rand’s books… Mike Pompeo, who will have the now-very-difficult job of directing the Central Intelligence Agency for Trump, has often said that Rand’s works inspired him… Trump has been huddling with and consulting several other Rand followers for advice as he fills out his cabinet.”

“The fact that all of these men, so late in life, are such fans of works that celebrate individuals who consistently put themselves before others is therefore deeply revealing. They will now run our government.”

Matthew Yglesias: “While it’s true that fake news appears to have circulated widely in Trump-friendly corners of the internet — possibly with some assistance from the Russian government — the idea that fake news was central to the outcome of the campaign has little basis in fact. The very nature of viral fake news is that it’s mostly likely to be shared by people who are already bought into a partisan or ideological worldview, with pro-Trump fake news largely shared by Trump supporters to other Trump supporters.”

“Clinton’s campaign did have a fake news problem, but the problem was with the real news coverage — coverage that dwelled overwhelmingly on a bullshit email server scandal, devoted far fewer resources to investigating Trump’s shady foundation than Clinton’s life-saving one, largely ignored Trump’s financial conflicts of interest, and almost entirely avoided discussion of the policy stakes in the campaign.”

Brian Beutler says Trump’s witch hunts are having a chilling effect. That’s fascism for ya:

It is to be expected that a Republican president will appoint like-minded experts and operatives throughout the executive branch, and that civil servants will not always be thrilled about changes in the direction of federal policy. But what the Trump team attempted at the Department of Energy is much more insidious.

“[W]hat seems unusual,” Yale environmental historian Paul Sabin told the Post, “is singling people out for a very specific substantive issue, and treating their work on that substantive issue as, by default, contaminating or disqualifying.”

Trump hasn’t limited his intimidation to government employees who present obstacles to untrammeled power, either. His targets have included not-particularly-sympathetic institutions like Boeing and highly vulnerable individuals, like Chuck Jones, the president of the local steelworkers union that represents employees of Carrier.

Menacing phone calls followed after Trump attacked Jones on Twitter. So far none of Trump’s named enemies has been hurt, but the risk of harm is plain, as anyone who’s followed the Comet Pizza saga knows.

The less tangible threat, though, is to the willingness of dissidents to criticize the Trump government, out of fear that Trump will harm their businesses, or that his unhinged supporters will harm their families. How many people will see what happened to Jones and others and decide raising objections isn’t worth it?

Ed Kilgore says the race for DNC Chair need not be a battle royale for the party’s soul:

As the contest for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee revs up, one obvious pitfall for Democrats is that it will simply continue the rivalry between the people who supported the two major candidates for the 2016 presidential nomination. Without question, the initial front-runner Keith Ellison was an important part of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and new candidate Tom Perez was an important part of the Obama administration, which supported Hillary Clinton.

The odds are good that some well-meaning peacemakers will try to lower the temperature of an Ellison-Perez fight by celebrating their equally strong progressive credentials, and encouraging a competition to show which of them can most eloquently present a policy agenda and message that meets the current perceived need for a clear “party line.”
Is that really the party chair’s job? And is the selection of someone to oversee the rather boring mechanics of the party the right forum for the kind of battle ideology and messaging many Democrats seem to crave as the Obama Era ends? […]

Democrats would be well advised to put away those noisily grinding axes about moving the party to the left or the center or to “populism” for a bit and get someone working on the party mechanics, which always need work after a failed presidential campaign sucks the life out of every other endeavor. Ellison and Perez both have fine organizational credentials and so, too, do the two state party chairs currently in the field for the national job. Let those be the basis of the party’s choice for a chairman.

I tend to agree. I will be fine with either Ellison or Perez, so long as either commits to 1) being a full time chair, 2) fighting for a message that is both economics and equality and 3) will concentrate on state legislatures and local parties like Howard Dean did.

Josh Marshall says the DNC race cannot devolve into score settling.

It seems to me that Democrats are now involved in a pointless proxy battle between what we might call a “deep causes” explanation of the 2016 loss (strategy, ideology, candidate) and one focused on illegitimate outside interventions: Russian hacking and subversion or James Comey’s week-out intervention in the presidential race. Any effort to hold these two explanations as alternatives, as though one obviates the other seems either dishonest, pointless, distracting or simply silly. […]

Everybody who wants to be vindicated by Clinton’s defeat won’t stand for anything that doesn’t place the matter 100% on her shoulders and those who supported her. Much the same applies to Clinton’s historically large popular vote margin for someone who lost the presidency. There’s no reason you can’t trumpet the fact that Clinton was the popular choice while also noting that consequences all stand or fall by engineering wins through the math and logic of the electoral college.

Which brings us to the other clarifying point. Hillary Clinton will never be the Democratic presidential nominee again. The intricacies of her emails or James Comey’s decisions about the investigation into them will never be campaign issues again. Whatever you think about the Clinton Foundation will never matter again in a presidential campaign. That means that figuring out the future of the Democratic party just has nothing to do with any of those things. I’m tempted to say
Russian hacking won’t happen again. But frankly, I’m not so sure. They already appear to be pulling the same thing with Angela Merkel. In any case, external subversion, cybersecurity just belongs to a separate conversation and realm.

The truth is it shouldn’t have been close enough for these outside interventions to have allowed Trump to win. But it was. Was that because Clinton was a terrible candidate and Sanders should have been the nominee? Maybe. But I doubt it. At a minimum I don’t think it is so clear as to be treated as a given. Clinton always had serious liabilities – some tied to her personally and others of historical circumstance. Sanders lacked many of Clinton’s liabilities. He also had numerous other liabilities that no money or real adversary was ever put up to exploring and exploiting. But again, personalities … I guess it’s somewhat more possible that Sanders will run for President than Clinton. But I highly doubt either will.

Hear Hear! It is time to move on from this fight. I know, I am one to talk, right?

A group of former Democratic congressional staffers share insider info on how to influence Congress to stand up to President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda.

We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own members of Congress to reject President Obama’s agenda. Their ideas were wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism – and they won…

If a small minority in the Tea Party can stop President Barack Obama, then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump.

A new Pew Research poll finds that 45% expect Barack Obama to be remembered as an above average or outstanding president, while 26% expect he will be viewed as average, and about as many (27%) say he’ll be seen as a below average or poor president.

“Obama fares well when compared with past presidents. Expectations for Obama’s historical record are far more positive than those of George W. Bush at the end of his term (when 57% predicted that he would be remembered as a below average or poor president), and are roughly on par with views of Bill Clinton when he left office.”

Kevin Drum:

Everyone wants to draw big, world-historical lessons from this election. That’s understandable, since the result was the election of an unprecedentedly dangerous and unqualified candidate. But the data just doesn’t support any big lessons…

Nevertheless, the identity politics critics insist that the lesson for Democrats is to ditch identity politics. The economic lefties say the lesson is that Democrats need to be more populist. The Bernie supporters are sure that Bernie could have won. The DNC haters think it was a massive FUBAR from the Democratic establishment. The moderates blame extremism on social issues for alienating the rural working class.

These have one element in common: All these people thought all these things before the election. Now they’re trying to use the election to prove that they were right all along, dammit. But they weren’t. This election turned on a few tiny electoral shifts and some wildly improbable outside events. There simply aren’t any truly big lessons to be drawn from it.

First Read: “First time since ’89 that white men will fill Top 4 cabinet posts: As NBC’s Peter Alexander pointed on Today this morning, this will be the first time since 1989 when the top four cabinet posts — for secretary of state, attorney general, Treasury secretary, and Defense secretary — all went to white wen. And as Rachel Maddow noted last night, if Trump’s eventual Agriculture secretary pick is a white man, then the line of succession to the presidency will be 12 white men. That’s not a lot of diversity.”

Steven W. Thrasher at The Guardian tells Democrats: don’t try to work with Donald Trump. Just say ‘no’:

All Democrats must say “no” to working with Donald Trump and his lazy, shiftless thugs who want to steal the labor of our bodies, the sanity of our minds, and the beauty of our natural resources. Democrats need to say “no” to him, on everything, with the same forceful confidence Trump displays.

Any collaboration with Trump will yield nothing more than humiliation, anyway. Al Gore met with Ivanka Trump about climate justice only to have a climate denier nominated to helm the EPA, the ExxonMobil CEO named to lead the state department and a witch hunt against any government scientist who has gone to a climate change conference. Similarly, labor leaders who signaled they were interested in working with Trump in repealing Nafta were shown to be chumps when he named a fast-food CEO to oversee the labor department.

But there is a more important reason than salvaging dignity that Democrats shouldn’t do business with the president-elect: every time they say “I hope to find common ground with him,” they are saying that their pet issue is more important than the fact Trump has said Mexicans are rapists, “you can do anything” to women, Muslims should be registered or banned, the exonerated Central Park Five still deserve to be executed, and differently abled people deserve to be mocked. Each time a Democrat says “yes” to Trump’s choices or meetings or policies, they are normalizing his hate, ceding any moral ground they might be able to muster in future fights.

“The agency that manages federal government real estate has determined that President-elect Donald Trump will be in violation of the lease on the Washington, D.C., hotel bearing his name the moment he is sworn into office on Jan. 20,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The Democrats said a senior official with the General Services Administration had informed members of Congress that the agency had determined Mr. Trump ‘will be in breach of the lease agreement the moment he takes office’ unless he divests his interests in the property, the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

President-elect Donald Trump “has rapidly assembled a dozen picks for his cabinet, with about a half-dozen left to be named,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“It is a pace that is slightly ahead of his predecessors, but there also are signs some of Mr. Trump’s choices haven’t been rigorously vetted during the informal deliberation process.”

“In many cases, Mr. Trump has announced his prospective nominees without requiring a review of extensive paperwork about their background and financial records, including tax returns… That leaves open the possibility that the first officials to study such material will be the Senate committees that next year will conduct the confirmation hearings, a process that can be grueling and disqualifying.”

Quartz: “The 17 people who President-elect Donald Trump has selected for his cabinet or for posts with cabinet rank have well over $9.5 billion in combined wealth, with several positions still unfilled. This collection of wealth is greater than that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined—over one third of the 126 million households total in the US.”

“Affluence of this magnitude in a US presidential cabinet is unprecedented.”

Mark Leibovich brings us Sen. Al Franken’s thoughts about the next four years. It all begins with a fascinating observation from the former comedian.

“Donald Trump never laughs,” Al Franken said.

This was the senator’s first observation to me on a recent afternoon. It was exactly three weeks from the day the punch line became the president-elect. And Trump’s mysterious absence of laughter had never occurred to me before, even though I’d spoken to him a fair amount and he has lived pretty much nonstop in our faces for 18 months, no end in sight.

Franken, the second-term Democratic senator from Minnesota and, before that, a longtime writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live,” has studied this. He provided commentary for MSNBC at the Al Smith Dinner, the Catholic charity fund-raiser in October where presidential nominees engage in good-natured ribbing of themselves and each other (Trump mostly skipped the “good-natured” part and was booed). “I wanted to see if Trump laughed,” Franken said. “And he didn’t. He smiled, but didn’t laugh. I don’t know what it is.”