Tag: Trump

Furthermore, the relationship between Donnie from Queens and the intelligence professionals is tanking. That could be a problem.

The simmering distrust between Donald Trump and U.S. intelligence agencies escalated into open antagonism Saturday after the president-elect mocked a CIA report that Russian operatives had intervened in the U.S. presidential election to help him win.

The growing tensions set up a potential showdown between Trump and the nation’s top intelligence officials during what some of those officials describe as the most complex threat environment in decades.

…

Trump’s reaction will probably deepen an existing rift between Trump and the agencies and raised questions about how the government’s 16 spying agencies will function in his administration on matters such as counterterrorism and cyberwarfare. On Friday, members of Trump’s transition team dismissed the CIA’s assessments about Iraq’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

“Given his proclivity for revenge combined with his notorious thin skin, this threatens to result in a lasting relationship of distrust and ill will between the president and the intelligence community,” said Paul Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

Oh well. It’s not as if we need accurate intelligence on who is stockpiling what kinds of weapons.

U.S. intelligence officials described mounting concern and confusion about how to proceed in an administration so openly hostile to their function and role. “I don’t know what the end game is here,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said. “After Jan. 20,” the official said, referring to Inauguration Day, “we’re in uncharted territory.”

Pillar added: “Everything Trump has indicated with regard to his character and tendencies for vindictiveness might be worse” than former president Richard Nixon, who also had a dysfunctional relationship with the intelligence community.

He’s almost certain to be worse. He has Nixon’s flaws along with a lot of flaws of his own. He’s more nakedly aggressive, more entitled, more conceited, more used to getting his own way and trampling on everyone else – more ignorant, more stupid, more unwilling to learn anything.

Intelligence agencies are tracking Russia’s military interventions in Syria and Ukraine, Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal, North Korea’s nuclear weapons testing and China’s maritime challenges in Asia and theft of trade secrets. The CIA is operating a covert program to arm and train moderate rebels in Syria to overcome the brutal rule of President Bashar al-Assad, even as Trump has praised Russia’s approach to backing Assad.

Since his electoral triumph last month, Trump has attended only a limited number of intelligence briefings, and he appointed as his national security adviser retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who was forced out of his job as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency by Obama administration officials.

Mavericks! They’re all a buncha mavericks, fixing the intelligence agencies by getting all mavericky up in there.

Or, to put it another way, this isn’t going to go well.

It’s disconcerting for the Republicans to have Trump jeering at the intelligence agencies.

Though Mr. Trump has wasted no time in antagonizing the agencies, to carry out priorities like combating terrorism and deterring cyberattacks he will have to rely on them for the sort of espionage activities and analysis that they spend more than $70 billion a year to perform.

At this point in a transition, a president-elect is usually delving into intelligence he has never before seen and learning about C.I.A. and National Security Agency abilities. But Mr. Trump, who has taken intelligence briefings only sporadically, is questioning not only analytic conclusions, but also their underlying facts.

“To have the president-elect of the United States simply reject the fact-based narrative that the intelligence community puts together because it conflicts with his a priori assumptions — wow,” said Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the N.S.A. and later the C.I.A. under President George W. Bush.

Wow, yes, but it’s what he’s done all along. He’s a liar and a denialist. He makes up his own facts, and disparages other people’s evidence-based fact claims. That’s Trump epistemology in a nutshell.

Mr. Trump’s team lashed out at the agencies after The Washington Post reported that the C.I.A. believed that Russia had intervened to undercut Mrs. Clinton and lift Mr. Trump, and The New York Times reported that Russia had broken into Republican National Committee computer networks just as they had broken into Democratic ones, but had released documents only on the Democrats.

What to do? Blow smoke.

Mr. Trump casts the issue as an unknowable mystery. “It could be Russia,” he recently told Time magazine. “And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

That’s what he said in that debate – it was some guy in a basement. Jersey, basement – it’s all the same thing.

Even one of Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican, said on Friday that he had no doubt about Russia’s culpability. His complaint was with the intelligence agencies, which he said had “repeatedly” failed “to anticipate Putin’s hostile actions,” and with the Obama administration’s lack of a punitive response.

Mr. Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that the intelligence agencies had “ignored pleas by numerous Intelligence Committee members to take more forceful action against the Kremlin’s aggression.” He added that the Obama administration had “suddenly awoken to the threat.”

Like many Republicans, Mr. Nunes is threading a needle. His statement puts him in opposition to the position taken by Mr. Trump and his incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has traveled to Russia as a private citizen for RT, the state-controlled news operation, and attended a dinner with Mr. Putin.

Now that that pesky communism is dead, they like Russian authoritarianism. I bet they wish they had some Cossacks too.

So, yeah, apparently it is the case that we have this rampaging idiot monster preparing to destroy everything because Putin put his elbow on the scale.

American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

I remember that. I remember it vividly. Especially after the “grab them by the pussy” video came out – it looked as if that had cooked his goose to charcoal, then along came WikiLeaks, drip drip drip.

Mr. Trump’s transition office issued a statement Friday evening reflecting the deep divisions that emerged between his campaign and the intelligence agencies over Russian meddling in the election. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” the statement said. “The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”

The election didn’t end “a long time ago.” November 8 is not “a long time ago.” It wasn’t one of the biggest EC victories in history. It’s not “time to move on” if Russia interfered with the election. What Trump is doing is not going to make America great, again or for the first time or at all.

One senior government official, who had been briefed on an F.B.I. investigation into the matter, said that while there were attempts to penetrate the Republican committee’s systems, they were not successful.

But the intelligence agencies’ conclusions that the hacking efforts were successful, which have been presented to President Obama and other senior officials, add a complex wrinkle to the question of what the Kremlin’s evolving objectives were in intervening in the American presidential election.

What could the objectives possibly have been? To weaken a rival power, obviously. To make a rival power a laughingstock to the world. To render the US basically irrelevant for at least four years.

It is unclear how many files were stolen from the Republican committee; in some cases, investigators never get a clear picture. It is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.

The Russians were as surprised as everyone else at Mr. Trump’s victory, intelligence officials said. Had Mrs. Clinton won, they believe, emails stolen from the Democratic committee and from senior members of her campaign could have been used to undercut her legitimacy. The intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia tried to help Mr. Trump was first reported by The Washington Post.

I suppose we could view it as the revenge of Mossadegh and Allende and quite a few others.

Intelligence officials and private cybersecurity companies believe that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by two different Russian cyberunits. One, called “Cozy Bear” or “A.P.T. 29” by some Western security experts, is believed to have spent months inside the D.N.C. computer network, as well as other government and political institutions, but never made public any of the documents it took. (A.P.T. stands for “Advanced Persistent Threat,” which usually describes a sophisticated state-sponsored cyberintruder.)

The other, the G.R.U.-controlled unit known as “Fancy Bear,” or “A.P.T. 28,” is believed to have created two outlets on the internet, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, to make Democratic documents public. Many of the documents were also provided to WikiLeaks, which released them over many weeks before the Nov. 8 election.

Make America great again.

John Glenn didn’t agree with Trump on the flag:

John Glenn played a key role in the U.S. Senate helping to defeat an amendment making the "descrecration" of the American flag a crime. pic.twitter.com/rgcyNH4Ayz

— ACLU (@ACLU) December 9, 2016

News in Trump from the Times:

Rex W. Tillerson, the president and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, is the leading candidate to be Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, according to a person with direct knowledge of the search process.

Mr. Tillerson went to Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday to meet with Mr. Trump, who is said to be close to making a decision. Mr. Tillerson has been strongly recommended by a number of business leaders.

What does running an oil company have to do with being the country’s foreign minister?

And then there’s this questionnaire.

President-elect Trump’s transition team has circulated an unusual 74-point questionnaire that requests the names of all employees and contractors who have attended domestic or international climate change policy conferences, as well as emails associated with the conferences.

The questionnaire appears targeted at climate science research and clean energy programs.

What’s he going to do, take them out back and shoot them?

Energy Department employees, who shared the questionnaire with The New York Times and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, described the questionnaire as unprecedented and worrying.

“These questions don’t just indicate an attack on civil servants here in Washington,” said an Energy Department employee. “They amount to a witch hunt in D.O.E.’s 17 national labs, where scientists have the independence to do their work — yet here are questions that are reminiscent of an inquisition rather than actual curiosity about how the labs work.”

The questionnaire asks for lists of employees involved in key climate change programs, including all those who have attended United Nations climate change conferences. It also asks for lists of employees involved in designing a metric known as the Social Cost of Carbon, a figure used by the Obama administration to measure the economic impact of carbon dioxide pollution, and to justify the economic cost of climate regulations.

It specifically asks which Energy Department programs are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama’s climate change agenda, which Mr. Trump has vowed to roll back.

We’re going to be living in the Burned-over District.

Giuliani has taken his name out of the secretary of state contest.

Some in Mr. Trump’s circle were concerned about the potential for a messy confirmation hearing over Mr. Giuliani’s tangle of foreign business ties and paid speeches.

Oh yeah? What a pity there is no confirmation hearing for Trump.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers is likely choice for interior secretary.

Ms. McMorris Rodgers, the highest-ranking woman in the House Republican leadership, is expected to be announced as Mr. Trump’s secretary of the interior as early as Friday, two people close to the transition efforts said. Ms. McMorris Rodgers comes from Washington, a state with large federal land reserves, and she was also critical of Mr. Trump at various points during the presidential campaign.

Peter Walker said this on Facebook:

Rodgers was the co-sponsor with Utah’s Rep. Nathan Chaffetz of legislation to sell off 3 million acres of public land to private interests, as well as a leading advocate for gas and oil development on public lands.

And, at his triumph of the will rally in Louisiana today, he went back to the “punish people who are rude to the flag” dream.

He also suggested that he would make broader cultural changes, arguing that desecrating the American flag should be outlawed or bring a penalty.

“I think it’s a disgrace, O.K.?” Mr. Trump said of burning or stamping on the United States flag. “I’m a big believer in free speech, but maybe we’re going to be putting something in” to address the issue, he said. “I think we’re going to have to do something about that.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning was a form of free speech protected under the First Amendment.

He still thinks he’s going to be a dictator.

Goldman Sachs. Clinton’s $200k fees for chatting to them over dinner probably cost her a good few votes, and certainly gave Donnie from Queens useful talking points, but now…well now is now, and all is transformed.

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name a top Goldman Sachs executive, Gary Cohn, to lead the National Economic Council, handing the Wall Street veteran significant sway over his administration’s economic policy.

The council includes the heads of various departments and agencies and works within the administration to coordinate economic policy. As director, Cohn would be in position to advise Trump as he attempts to fulfill some of his chief campaign promises, including lowering corporate taxes and rethinking U.S. trade policy.

And generally making life better for rich people and worse for poor people. Yay populism!

In Cohn, Trump would once again be picking a veteran of a New York investment bank that he repeatedly denounced during the campaign. During the campaign Trump argued that Goldman held “total control” over both Democrat Hillary Clinton and GOP rival Ted Cruz and he even released a television ad that flashed an image of Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and warned of a “global power structure” that was robbing American workers.

That was the ad that was packed with anti-Semitic tropes; it flashed an image of Blankfein along with images of a lot of other Jews, because Jews. But now is now, and all is transformed.

But Trump has relied on several Goldman alums for key positions, so far. Steven Mnuchin, a 17-year veteran of the bank, is nominated to be the next Treasury secretary, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, worked on mergers and acquisition deals for Goldman Sachs. Hedge fund manger Anthony Scaramucci began his career at the New York bank and has emerged as one of Trump’s closest advisers on his presidential transition.

We loves the bankers, precious. We just doesn’t say so during the campaign.

Yesterday I posted about union leader Chuck Jones’s fact-checking of Trump’s claims about the Carrier jobs. From Danielle Paquette in the Washington Post two days ago:

Jones, president of the United Steelworkers 1999, which represents Carrier employees, felt optimistic when Trump announced last week that he’d reached a deal with the factory’s parent company, United Technologies, to preserve 1,100 of the Indianapolis jobs — until the union leader heard from Carrier that only 730 of the production jobs would stay and 550 of his members would lose their livelihoods, after all.

At the Dec. 1 meeting, where Trump was supposed to lay out the details, Jones hoped he would explain himself.

“But he got up there,” Jones said Tuesday, “and, for whatever reason, lied his ass off.”

Late last night Paquette reported a follow-up – another Trump on Twitter story:

Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2016

Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!

If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2016

If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues

It’s fascinating, in a disquieting way, that the massive power imbalance doesn’t inhibit him.

Jones, a union leader in Indianapolis, represents the Carrier workers whose jobs Donald Trump has pledged to save. He said the sudden attention from the country’s next leader didn’t feel real.

“My first thought was, ‘Well, that’s not very nice,’ ” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday night. “Then, ‘Well, I might not sleep much tonight.’ ”

Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999, told The Post on Tuesday that he believed Trump had lied to the Carrier workers last week when he visited the Indianapolis plant. On a makeshift stage in a conference room, Trump had applauded United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, for cutting a deal with him and agreeing to keep 1,100 jobs that were slated to move to Mexico in America’s heartland.

Jones said Trump got that figure wrong.

Carrier, he said, had agreed to preserve 800 production jobs in Indiana. (Carrier confirmed that number.) The union leader said Trump appeared to be taking credit for rescuing 350 engineering positions that were never scheduled to leave. Five hundred fifty of his members, he said, were still losing their jobs. And the company was still collecting millions of dollars in tax breaks.

And Trump finds it urgent to attack Jones on Twitter.

Half an hour after Trump tweeted about Jones on Wednesday, the union leader’s phone began to ring and kept ringing, he said. One voice asked: What kind of car do you drive? Another said: We’re coming for you.

He wasn’t sure how these people found his number.

“Nothing that says they’re gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids,” Jones said later on MSNBC. “We know what car you drive. Things along those lines.”

“I’ve been doing this job for 30 years, and I’ve heard everything from people who want to burn my house down or shoot me,” he added. “So I take it with a grain of salt and I don’t put a lot of faith in that, and I’m not concerned about it and I’m not getting anybody involved. I can deal with people that make stupid statements and move on.”

Brett Voorhies, president of the Indiana State AFL-CIO, called Jones after Trump’s tweet caught his eye. Jones, he said, had just left his office in Indianapolis, where he manages the needs of about 3,000 union members.

“This guy makes pennies for what he does,” Voorhies said. “What he has to put up with is just crazy. Now he’s just got the president-elect smearing him on Twitter.”

I dislike Donald Trump. I think he’s a very bad man.

Of course. Who better to run the Labor Department than the CEO of a fast food chain? CEOs are of course the people who are best placed to understand the needs of workers, and the least disposed to put profits ahead of workers’ need for a living wage. So well done, billionaire worker-cheating Donald Trump – you found such a CEO.

President-elect Donald J. Trump is expected to name Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of the company that operates the fast food outlets Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. and an outspoken critic of the worker protections enacted by the Obama administration, to be secretary of labor, people close to the transition said on Thursday.

Mr. Puzder has spent his career in the private sector and has opposed efforts to expand eligibility for overtime pay, arguing that large minimum wage increases hurt small businesses and lead to job loss among low-skilled workers.

That’s richpeoplespeak for “gives pay to workers that should be profits going to rich people.”

In selecting Mr. Puzder, Mr. Trump appears to be banking on the idea that he can replicate some of his own appeal. Mr. Puzder, too, is a successful businessman prone to making populist pronouncements — he complained that “big corporate interests” and “globalist companies” were supporting Hillary Clinton in the presidential election — and the occasional streak of political incorrectness.

The advertisements that Mr. Puzder’s companies runs to promote its restaurants frequently feature women wearing next to nothing while gesturing suggestively. “I like our ads,” he told the publication Entrepreneur. “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American.”

So workers’ wages will stagnate or fall under Trump, if he and Pudzer have anything to do with it, but that’s totally ok because there will be more sexist jokes to giggle at.

In a 2012 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Puzder’s company listed his base salary as over $1 million. “Annual base salaries should be competitive and create a measure of financial security for our executive officers,” the filing said.

But the peons at Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr don’t need no stinkin’ financial security.

More draining the swamp, by spurning people who know anything about climate or the environment for head of the EPA:

President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the E.P.A. itself.

Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”

So just go plowing ahead as if nothing were wrong. It won’t be his problem!

Mr. Pruitt has been in lock step with those views.

“Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” he wrote in National Review earlier this year. “That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.”

It’s not a debate topic. It’s a technical subject, which pools the scientific research of a vast number of scientists in different fields. It’s pointless for the public at large to “debate” it as if it were a purely political issue. It’s pointless and dangerous to promote the idea that it should be “debated” endlessly by people with no scientific knowledge or training.

“During the campaign, Mr. Trump regularly threatened to dismantle the E.P.A. and roll back many of the gains made to reduce Americans’ exposures to industrial pollution, and with Pruitt, the president-elect would make good on those threats,” said Ken Cook, head of the Environmental Working Group, a Washington research and advocacy organization.

“It’s a safe assumption that Pruitt could be the most hostile E.P.A. administrator toward clean air and safe drinking water in history,” he added.

Oh goody. Maybe he’ll send shipments of lead to Flint so that they can have even more of it in their water.

Mr. Pruitt, 48, is a hero to conservative activists, one of a group of Republican attorneys general who formed an alliance with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda. Fossil fuel interests greeted Mr. Trump’s selection with elation.

“Attorney General Scott Pruitt has long been a defender of states’ rights and a vocal opponent of the current administration’s overreaching E.P.A,” said Laura Sheehan, a spokeswoman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which works on behalf of the coal industry. “Mr. Pruitt will be a significant voice of reason when it comes to energy and environmental regulations.”

“Voice of reason” of course = don’t mess with our profits.

As Mr. Pruitt has sought to use legal tools to fight environmental regulations on the oil and gas companies that are a major part of his state’s economy, he has also worked with those companies. A 2014 investigation by The Times found that energy lobbyists drafted letters for Mr. Pruitt to send, on state stationery, to the E.P.A., the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget and even President Obama, outlining the economic hardship of the environmental rules.

So letters that appeared to be from the Oklahoma Attorney-General were actually from oil and gas lobbyists. How unethical.

As attorney general, Mr. Pruitt took the unusual step of jointly filing an antiregulatory lawsuit with industry players, such as Oklahoma Gas and Electric, the coal-burning electric utility, and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, a nonprofit group backed by major oil and gas executives, including Mr. Hamm.

Behind the scenes, he was taking campaign contributions from many of the industry players on his team, or helping deliver even larger sums of money to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which he became the chairman of.

Mr. Pruitt’s office also began to send letters to federal regulators — including the E.P.A. and even to President Obama — that documents obtained through open records requests show were written by energy industry lobbyists from companies including Devon Energy. Mr. Pruitt’s staff put these ghostwritten letters on state government stationery and then sent them to Washington, moves that the companies often then praised in their own news releases, without noting that they had actually drafted the letters in the first place.

This is how we drain the swamp.

Time’s choice of photo to illustrate its Person of the Year cover of Trump is interesting.

He…erm…usually doesn’t let it show.

But more seriously, what a surly bruiser he does look. He may be trying to look serious and grown up, but all he looks is hostile and belligerent. He’s making not duck-face but fascist-face.

Also notice the dig under his name.

Updating to add:

There are many valuable replies to Helen Rosner’s tweet, for instance pointing out the fiendish positioning of Trump’s head right under the M so that it makes horns. Rosner says the whole photo uses a very 1940s aesthetic.

Trump held another fascist rally yesterday.

President-elect Donald Trump continued his “Thank You” victory tour on Tuesday, making a stop in North Carolina to tout his national security agenda and formally introduce his pick for Defense Secretary, retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis.

Speaking in Fayetteville, N.C., Trump called Mattis the “living embodiment of the Marine Corps motto” — Semper Fidelis.

“Mad Dog plays no games, right?” Trump asked, invoking the general’s nickname, and added that the country was fortunate “that a man of this character and integrity will now be the civilian leader atop the Department of Defense.”

The “civilian” leader whose career was in the military, which is not really what is normally meant by civilian control of the military.

To do that though, Mattis will have to get a waiver from Congress to bypass a law that calls for a seven-year “cooling off” period before someone who served in uniform can take the civilian post; Mattis retired from the Marine Corps in 2013. Just before the rally began, GOP lawmakers announced that they would include a provision to fast-track such a waiver as part of the stop-gap funding bill they need to pass by Friday to keep the government open.

Yeah. Let’s streamline all this shit. Let’s mad dog it. Let’s arrange everything so that men at the top give orders, and everyone else obeys them. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it gets the job done. Semper fi.

Briefly taking the stage after the president-elect’s glowing praise, Mattis alluded to that necessary step, telling the crowd that, “I look forward to being the civilian leader as long as the Congress gives me the waiver and the Senate votes to consent.”

“If he didn’t get that waiver, there’d be a lot of angry people,” Trump warned. “Such a popular choice.”

Yep, that’s Trump – threatening, bullying, and illiterate.

The stop in the Tar Heel State to formally introduce Mattis wasn’t by accident — the state is home to a large military population and several military bases, including nearby Fort Bragg, one of the largest military installations in the world.

…

“All men and women in uniform will have the supplies, support and equipment to get the job done incredibly well and perfectly,” the president-elect said.

…

He couldn’t help but boast of his unlikely victories at times though, including his unexpected win in North Carolina and also in industrial Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin.

“We don’t talk about numbers, we bring people together, but boy, were those numbers good,” Trump said.

Except of course for the popular vote, which keeps inexorably rising.

And he brought up flag-burning and possible consequences a few times during his speech, hearkening back to a tweet last month that dredged up the 1980’s-era controversy that the Supreme Court has ruled is protected speech.

“We love our flag, and we don’t like it when we see people ripping up our flag and burning it, and we’ll see what we’re going to do about that, ok?” Trump said.

Ok, sure. Tear up the Constitution, what the hell – you’re the boss.

Again a major newspaper calls Trump a liar in the headline as well as the body.

Headline:

Carrier union boss: Donald Trump ‘lied his ass off’ about saving 1,100 jobs from moving to Mexico

They used asterisks in “ass” but not in “lied.”

Donald Trump lied about saving more than 1,100 Indianapolis manufacturing jobs from moving to Mexico, according to the boss of the company’s union.

Chuck Jones, leader of the United Steelworkers 1999 union who watched the president-elect give a speech at the air conditioning plant on 1 December, told the Washington Post that Mr Trump had inflated his victory.

He claimed to have “saved” over 1100, but it was really 800; the company confirmed that number.

In gratitude for keeping less than half the jobs in the US, Mr Trump promised the plant huge tax breaks and benefits, including nearly $7 million tax credits from Indiana, to be paid in installments of $700,000 every year for a decade. In return, Carrier said it would invest $16 million in its Indiana plant. It will still send 700 factory jobs south of the border to Monterrey, Mexico.

That’s a lot of bribery for 800 jobs.

Oh, so that’s why Ivanka Trump was in the room when Trump met with Shinzo Abe, while state department officials and reporters were excluded.

When Donald J. Trump hosted a foreign leader for the first time as president-elect, the guest list included a curious entry: Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who looked on last month while he and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan chatted on a white couch high above Manhattan.

Some 6,700 miles from Trump Tower, in Tokyo, another exclusive gathering was already underway: a two-day private viewing of Ivanka Trump products, teeming with Trump-branded treasures like a sample of the pale pink dress Ms. Trump wore to introduce her father at the Republican National Convention.

Ms. Trump is nearing a licensing deal with the Japanese apparel giant Sanei International, both parties told The New York Times. The largest shareholder of Sanei’s parent company is the Development Bank of Japan, which is wholly owned by the Japanese government.

Sleazy as fuck.

His current plan is still to hand the management of his business over to his three oldest children, as if that would do away with the many gross conflicts of interest. (Hint: he’s related to them. They’re related to him.)

Yet an examination of the professional histories of the three children — who also serve on the presidential transition team — shows how deeply the Trump family, Trump business and Trump politics are interwoven, raising significant doubts about how meaningful a wall can ever be erected between Mr. Trump and his heirs at the Trump Organization.

Translation: making it obvious that Trump will do nothing about the many gross conflicts of interest unless he’s forced to.

Already, complications abound.

The children each hold a stake in the lease that allows the organization to operate the Trump International Hotel out of the federal government’s Old Post Office Building in Washington. Mr. Trump, as president, will appoint the head of the General Services Administration, which manages the property, while his children oversee a hotel with millions of dollars in ties to the agency.

Trump says it’s all ok though, because he doesn’t care.

At times, the president-elect has grown incredulous when pressed on the specter of conflicts.

In an interview last month with The Times, he wondered aloud what harm might come from, say, taking a picture with business partners for a project his children were leading. He suggested some critics would prefer that he “never, ever see my daughter Ivanka again.”

He allowed, though, that his election had changed at least one thing.

“The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before,” he said. “I can’t help that, but I don’t care.”

Oh well then. What a relief.

So it’s now clear that Trump was lying when he said the phone call with Taiwan was just a friendly “congrats!” call from one president to another. It was carefully arranged, and one of the arrangers was a paid lobbyist and former Senator.

Former Senator Bob Dole, acting as a foreign agent for the government of Taiwan, worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff, an outreach effort that culminated last week in an unorthodox telephone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s president.

Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordinated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and the transition team to set up a series of meetings between Mr. Trump’s advisers and officials in Taiwan, according to disclosure documents filed last week with the Justice Department. Mr. Dole also assisted in successful efforts by Taiwan to include language favorable to it in the Republican Party platform, according to the documents.

Mr. Dole’s firm received $140,000 from May to October for the work, the forms said.

The disclosures suggest that President-elect Trump’s decision to take a call from the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was less a ham-handed diplomatic gaffe and more the result of a well-orchestrated plan by Taiwan to use the election of a new president to deepen its relationship with the United States — with an assist from a seasoned lobbyist well versed in the machinery of Washington.

I wonder when they were planning to tell us that – the rabble who make up the citizenry of this country. I do wish someone would explain to Trump that he’s not a dictator and does not have the powers of a dictator.

The phone call between Mr. Trump and Ms. Tsai was a striking break from nearly four decades of diplomatic practice and threatened to precipitate a major rift with China, which admonished Mr. Trump in a front-page editorial in the overseas edition of People’s Daily.

The disclosure documents were submitted before the call took place and made no mention of it. But Mr. Dole, 93, a former Senate majority leader from Kansas, said he had worked with transition officials to facilitate the conversation.

“It’s fair to say that we had some influence,” he said. “When you represent a client and they make requests, you’re supposed to respond.”

Yeah we understand about the client-lobbyist relationship, but that’s not the point. When a drug lord tells an enforcer to kill an enemy, the enforcer is “supposed to respond” according to the drug lord, but that “supposed to” has no force anywhere else. We get that Dole’s clients expect him to do what they ask, but that’s not our concern and it’s not the issue.