Huffpo found another. During his November 9th congratulatory call with Turkish President Erdogan, Donald Trump talked up his Turkish business partner who now seems primed to be a key intermediary between the two heads of state. This new revelation follows the pattern I mentioned a couple days ago: we’re only finding out about this because it bubbled up in the pres of the country in question. That’s how we learned about Trump’s transition meeting with his Indian business partners, his alleged discussion of building permits with the President of Argentina, the UK wind farms and Nigel Farage.
We’re going to be putting out formal job listings probably just after Thanksgiving. But I want to put out the word now that we are currently looking to hire two newswriters in New York, one editor in New York and one reporter in DC. I am/we are particularly interested in hearing from people with interest in the editor and reporter positions. These are both critical slots for our expanding news gathering efforts going into next year. If you have experience relevant to these two positions and want to do big things next year, let us hear from you.
You’ve heard that Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos is from the billionaire DeVos family, heirs of the Amway fortune. She’s a big supporter of ‘school choice’, charter schools, vouchers, etc. But this doesn’t quite capture who the DeVoses are. In terms of scale of wealth and intergenerational devotion to laissez-faire conservative ideology that are right up there with the Kochs – with activism ranging from breaking unions to opposing LGBT equality on basically every front. In fact, Betsy DeVos and her family are parts of the network of conservative donors the Kochs have assembled in recent years.
There’s a lot of chatter this morning about a group of election lawyers and cybersecurity experts who believe they’ve found evidence of or at least statistical anomalies suggesting that the voting results may have been hacked in the three critical states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Note that these are the three states where Clinton lost the election. Ohio, North Carolina and Florida were huge too. But Trump was always likely to win Ohio and North Carolina and Florida were always toss-ups, although Florida seemed pretty promising.
So here’s my take.
Kellyanne Conway got asked about Paul Ryan’s Medicare Phaseout plan on the NewsHour last night. She started with vague comments about being “open to hearing” Ryan’s ideas about alternatives to Medicare. (You can see her at length quotes here.) But the give away is in the precise language she uses. Note here with emphasis added: “In this case, he will go ahead and look at alternatives, Judy, as long as it does not interfere with what he has said, his commitment to keep the promises to those currently relying on them.”
“Currently” is the whole story here.
For the Thanksgiving edition of my podcast I’m answering your questions. Got a question? Send it to our main comments email at talk (at) talkingpointsmemo (dot) com – the election, TPM, the Trump administration, the Democrats, whatever you want. Put the subject line: Podcast Question. I’ll be recording the next episode tomorrow. So get them in today and I’ll do my best to answer.
We’re seeing yesterday and today that Donald Trump and his advisors are signaling that he doesn’t plan to seek the prosecution of Hillary Clinton. “I don’t want to hurt them,” he told 60 Minutes earlier this month.
It turns out there’s even more behind the story of last week’s call between Donald Trump and Argentine President Mauricio Macri, separate from a report on Argentine television that Trump asked Macri for help getting approval for a planned Trump-branded office tower in Buenos Aires. Both parties denied Monday that the two leaders discussed the project on that call.
However, the Argentine press also reported that Macri was able to get through to the President-elect in the first place because Trump’s partner in the Buenos Aires project facilitated their connection. That detail was surfaced last night by Susan Simpson, a lawyer who specializes in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and went on a tweetstorm about the Trump project in the capital.
Another day, another failure by Trump to navigate even the rudiments of logistics, scheduling and communications. Organizing an international summit conference or bilateral talks? Please. Team Trump is struggling to pull off a meeting with the New York Times.
Note this reassuring gem from the Times’ own report on this morning’s bumbling:
Given the events of two weeks ago and what has transpired since, we are contemplating increasing the number of new editorial hires we are going to make entering 2017. We think the need is apparent, immediate and increasing. We’ve been pleasantly surprised at the rush of new sign-ups since the election. We are now in shooting distance of our goal of having a total of 20,000 subscribers by the end of 2016. If you’d like the join us, if you think the work we do is important, please take a moment to sign up.