According to this report Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) and John Bolton are both under consideration for Secretary of State under Donald Trump. I think this is first of many of such choices we’re going to see. Corker is a knowledge, sensible, temperate person, albeit someone who I disagree with on most issues. Bolton is a wild far-right ideologue, basically the Michele Bachmann of the foreign policy world. That might understate who he is. We’re going to see many instances like this where Trump is choosing between reasonably qualified people and extremists. It will be a bumpy ride.
As I try to pore over the details and not just be shocked by the result, I’m struck by one thing about last night’s results. We know the national popular vote can diverge from the electoral college. It happened as recently as 2000. Last night it happened again. But what’s surprising is the degree of the divergence. It now looks like Trump will win the electoral college 306 to 232. That’s not final but that’s pretty sure to be the result. But he will likely lose the popular vote by as much as 1 to 2 percentage points – perhaps two or three times the size of Gore’s margin. (At the moment it’s only about 200,000+ votes. But it will certainly grow as lots of additional votes on the West Coast get counted.)
#BREAKING: Police respond to swastika painted on building in South Philly: https://t.co/RidblnTIlV pic.twitter.com/ljFbiqy5Xe
— PhillyVoice (@thephillyvoice) November 9, 2016
I know many of you came to TPM last night to see live election results. As many of you saw in real time, a short while after we started reporting results we had a major tech failure which required us to take down the scoreboard. We ended up not being able to fix it before the results were close to done. Obviously, by mid-evening this mortifying and very disappointing development was being overshadowed by the … let’s just say, shattering election results.
I take full responsibility. I’m sorry we let you down.
A bit after 3:30 am the three of us, the three remaining members of the editorial team in New York, closed up our New York office and headed home. As I was walking up 6th Avenue a man with an iPhone and a headset came up to me asking me, pointing at his iPhone, asking some question. I was bewildered enough by the events of the evening that I had a hard time making sense of anything. He was an immigrant from some African country, not a native English speaker and speaking broken but mainly understandable English.
From a longtime cherished reader …
Now we get to test if the press is really free and if American institutions are truly robust. I’m starting to organize today to put in my bit to help retake the House or the Senate in two years. I am going to finally get my US citizenship as an act of defiance and resistance. I have refused to get it so far – I have lived here 20 years. I have even entertained leaving. But no. I do not have the luxury of bailing out, or of despairing. My kid is growing up here. This is where I live. These are my friends. I care about my community. So I will become a US citizen.
Hillary Clinton has conceded the presidential race to Donald Trump.
CNN has just reported that Clinton called Trump a short while ago.
A very telling, interesting conversation right now on CNN between Corey Lewandowski, Jeffrey Lord, Van Jones and David Axelrod. I think it’s a close call whether or not Clinton should concede tonight. It’s very hard to see any viable path to victory. That said, it’s hardly unprecedented for this to happen. It happened just a dozen years ago, in 2004 – the last time we had a really close election, one that went super late into the night. It was pretty clear that John Kerry had lost in the early morning the day after the election. But he waited until the morning to concede. But here you have Lewandowski railing against Clinton for not conceding immediately while Axelrod says in so many words to him and to Trump: You won. Start acting like it. Don’t relive every slight and anger from the election. What’s worrisome about Trump, in addition to his being Trump, is that he’s got very, very few steadying people around him. That’s very worrisome.
Let’s accept what looks very likely: Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. This doesn’t just change key policy choices like taxes, Obamacare, environment and climate policy. Those would be a bummer. This is quite a bit more. I really wish all the talk about Trump being temperamentally unfit to be president was just talk. It wasn’t. This is not someone who has the steadiness, knowledge, emotional maturity to be president. The markets are clearly figuring this in. But a big part of what they’re figuring in is dramatic changes in global trade policy.