Chief of Breitbart
Oh dear god – the Breitbart guy might be chief of staff. Breitbart. Twitter trolls running the country.
Steve Bannon, the conservative provocateur and Mr. Trump’s campaign chief, is now a leading candidate to become White House chief of staff, but he’d have to beat out another campaign veteran in the running, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
Mr. Bannon, the executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart News, who took a leave to help manage the final weeks of Mr. Trump’s campaign, is well liked among Mr. Trump’s circle of overlapping advisers, who see him as a favorable influence on the president-elect.
What’s a “favorable influence”? I have no idea what that means.
After the White House, it was on to Capitol Hill to meet with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and the speaker of the House, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin. Mr. Ryan only reluctantly endorsed Mr. Trump, called his attack on a judge of Mexican heritage the “textbook definition” of racism, and then stopped campaigning for him after a video emerged of the candidate bragging about sexual assault.
On Thursday, it was all smiles.
“Donald Trump had one of the most impressive victories we have ever seen, and we’re going to turn that victory into progress for the American people,” Mr. Ryan said, “and we are now talking about how we are going to hit the ground running to get this country turned around and make America great again.”
One of the most impressive victories? What’s he talking about? It was a squeaker, and he didn’t even get the popular vote.
Mr. Trump added: “We had a very detailed meeting, and we’re going to lower taxes, as you know, health care, we’re going to make it affordable. We are going to do a real job on health care.”
How?
How are they going to make health care “affordable”? And what does that mean anyway, when different people have different incomes? What’s affordable to President Pussygrabber isn’t affordable to me.
Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and an ardent opponent of immigration, has been added to Mr. Trump’s transition team, according to local news reports.
Mr. Kobach, who provided guidance on immigration policy to Mr. Trump during the campaign, will help the president-elect in the weeks before he takes office, according to The Wichita Eagle.
He told the paper he did not expect to get an offer to serve in the Trump administration, but just having him in a formal role in the new Washington could send shudders through the nation’s immigrants. Mr. Kobach has been one of the loudest anti-immigration voices in the Republican Party for years. He added Mr. Trump’s call for a border wall along the southern tier into the party’s platform over the summer.
Great. What’s David Duke going to be doing?
There you go again, insisting on that reality-based thinking!
Seriously, they apparently aren’t living in the same world we are.
I’m thinking maybe HUD. That sounds like something D.D. would salivate over.
Also, Ryan might think the fact that it was a victory at all was impressive.
Seth, I suspect you’re right on that point.
Quite how you lower taxes while increasing access to health care and spending even more money on an already grossly inflated war budget, while balancing the budget and reducing debt I don’t know. But there I go thinking about reality again. Maybe trump’s plan is to borrow even more money, declare bankruptcy for the USA and then apply the tax write-off to his family’s foundation to ensure they don’t pay tax for the next ten thousand years or so? Someone needs to tell him that plan works once in a lifetime and he’s already used it.
“Affordable” is code for “don’t worry, you’ll still be able to pay for health insurance after I shut down Obamacare.”
Actually, learie, I think affordable is “affordable if you’re a billionaire”.
I laugh, a bitter laugh, every time I am told $200 printer is “so cheap it’s disposable; we don’t fix those”. When you become a world where a person can be told to just throw away a 2 month old, $200 printer because it’s just meant to be cheap and disposable, then you become a world where you allow Donald Trump to define affordable health care.
My health care is still free (probably not for long; my husband just got charged huge amounts for his formerly free insurance, and he’s on a pension now). I can barely afford the deductibles or co-pays. And I make a decent living. I think back 20 years, when I could barely put food on my family (sic), and cringe to think about what I would have done then.