Kellyane Conway warns Harry Reid his comments on President-Elect Trump are “beyond the pale” and warns him to “careful” in the “legal sense.”
A simple point: Apart from all the other things people are rightly worried about, the Trump administration is going to be mind-bogglingly, often cartoonishly and comically corrupt.
All administration’s have venal corruption. A US presidential administration is large enough and has sufficient power that it is simply a matter of human nature. Indeed, even administrations run by presidents who are not themselves corrupt are often filled with corruption. Ulysses Grant and Harry Truman are good historical examples. But the break with the immediate past is going to be unusually sharp because the out-going Obama administration has been historically clean. We’ve been living in the Obama era for long enough that this historically anomalous record has started to seem like the norm. But it’s not. This is something we need to recognize both to give credit where it is due and remind ourselves that it is not the historical norm.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer …
Villanova University’s Department of Public Safety is investigating a reported incident in which a black female student was assaulted by white males as they ran toward her yelling, “Trump, Trump, Trump!”
TPM Reader ER just flagged this to me. From The New York Times …
Chants of “lock her up” became a frequent rallying cry at Trump campaign events, and Mr. Trump told Mrs. Clinton at the second presidential debate that if elected, he would instruct his attorney general “to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.”
A TPM Reader who is a member of the Democratic National Committee chimes in on who leads next …
I am a DNC Member from [REDACTED] and I will be voting on the next DNC Chair. I am responding to your recent post suggesting that Keith Ellison is a “done deal” as the next DNC Chair. I believe that this is a much more difficult choice than what you suggest.
Give this a read …
My good friend and award-winning journalist, Hannah Allam received this message from a… https://t.co/rncN5lwkSD pic.twitter.com/Tqh0x2IskQ
— Ayman Mohyeldin (@AymanM) November 12, 2016
Two things to note: Donald Trump has now delegated key policy decisions to Mike Pence (for the moment, heading the transition means that) and signaled he may not even live in Washington on the weekends.
I read an article last night by an American correspondent for one of the major British papers arguing, in so many words, that the entire global order is about to be upended as the US, which is the progenitor of the global trade regime, abandons that regime and also ends or vastly diminishes the NATO alliance and its analogue alliances in East Asia. These outcomes are profoundly ominous, not because any of these are sacrosanct or above reform but because any upending of the global order by its long time guarantor is the kind of jagged and chaotic change which leads to instability, global depressions and wars – and not just the kinds of wars that brutalize people in places far away from the United States. Perhaps my mindset is still too guided by the first half of the 20th century and its mix of economic autarky, revisionist states, rising and falling powers and the absence of the kind of international institutions the US created after World War II, but that is simply not a world you want you and your children to live in. Not in the least.
But there’s a big ‘but’.
We’ve had a recurring question from a number of existing Prime members over the last few days. Let me try to answer it.