Newt Gingrich, who backs Rudy Giuliani for secretary of state, told the Wall Street Journal that the search for the nation’s top diplomat is playing out a bit like Donald Trump’s longtime reality show, The Apprentice, as he publicly mulls the candidates’ skill sets and invites “audience participation.”
Said Gingrich: “It’s the only place so far that we have seen him trying to do an open apprenticeship, if you will.”
“Just wanted you to know that I am thinking of you and wishing the best. For what it’s worth, I thought the move you pulled was kind of badass.”
— Jared Kushner, in a 2013 email to David Wildstein obtained by the Washington Post, amid growing evidence that Wildstein had ordered the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge to payback Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) political enemies.
Two sources at the top of the trump transition team confirm to MSNBC that Donald Trump was furious at Kellyanne Conway’s comments on Sunday suggesting Trump betrayed his supporters by even considering Mitt Romney for a position in his cabinet.
Said one: “Kellyanne went rogue at Donald Trump’s expense at the worst possible time.”
“Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus have reportedly been growing frustrated by Kellyanne Conway’s failure to become a team player in a transition process where the top players are forming a tight knit group around the president-elect.”
Conway pushed back telling The Hill the reporting was “sexist” and said she could have any job she wants.
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First Read: “Think about it: Every time Trump claims, without substantiation, that millions voted illegally, and every time the news media call him out for it, that only delegitimizes the media among Trump’s supporters. And then when the same media write and cover Trump’s conflicts of interests (or policy proposals or anything else), those same supporters won’t believe a word of it. Will the media be alone in this challenge? Or will members of BOTH parties decide that what’s happening to two key institutions — the press and the vote — is worth fighting for?”
Paul Krugman: “Remember all the news reports suggesting, without evidence, that the Clinton Foundation’s fund-raising created conflicts of interest? Well, now the man who benefited from all that innuendo is on his way to the White House. And he’s already giving us an object lesson in what real conflicts of interest look like, as authoritarian governments around the world shower favors on his business empire.”
“Of course, Donald Trump could be rejecting these favors and separating himself and his family from his hotels and so on. But he isn’t. In fact, he’s openly using his position to drum up business. And his early appointments suggest that he won’t be the only player using political power to build personal wealth. Self-dealing will be the norm throughout this administration. America has just entered an era of unprecedented corruption at the top.”
“If we’re given the White House and both houses of Congress and we don’t deliver, I think there will be pitchforks and torches in the streets. And I think quite rightly. I think people are so fed up with Washington. This election was a mandate with change, and the most catastrophic thing Republicans could do is go back to business as usual.”
— Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), quoted by the Daily Beast.
New York Review of Books: “The announcement predictably played right into the hands of Trump, who immediately took the occasion to repeat his charge that Clinton should be locked up. None of this should have happened; under long-standing Justice Department practice, Comey should have kept silent about the fact of further investigation, especially so close to an election.”
“Whether Comey’s imprudent intervention changed the outcome of the presidential election, the damage to the integrity of both the political and criminal processes has been done. The criminal process has been politicized, and the political process has been tainted by misuse of official power. The question that remains is what should happen now. At a minimum, the Justice Department policies that Comey violated must be strengthened and formalized to ensure that this never happens again.”
Donald Trump tweeted without evidence that millions of people voted illegally in November’s presidential election, Politico reports.
Said Trump: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Ezra Klein: “This tweet is an example of one of Trump’s other dangerous qualities: his tendency to believe what he wants to believe about the world, facts be damned. Trump lost the popular vote, and he lost it by a wide margin — more than 2 million votes and counting. A wise man would take that information seriously and think about how to staff his White House, set priorities, and moderate his message to win over a majority of the public. Instead, Trump appears to have told himself the vote count was riddled with fraud and that he really did win a majority of the legitimate vote — and thus he doesn’t need to consider what it means that most voters didn’t want him to win the presidency.”
“We’re not even a national party. We’re a coastal party.”
— Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), quoted by the Washington Examiner.
Peggy Noonan: “I don’t know if there’s anyone around him who can convince him that the attitude with which he’s operated for 50 years must end, and something wholly new and different begin.”
“But whoever does must be aware of this: The press, which wants to kill him, is going to zero in on his biggest weak spot: money, profit, the deal. Democrats too will watch like hawks. And this is understandable! Presidents shouldn’t ever give the impression things aren’t on the up and up. And Mr. Trump campaigned saying he’d dismantle the rigged system, drain the swamp, fight the racket.”
“The press does not believe, not for a second, and Democrats do not believe, not for a second, that Mr. Trump will be able to change the habits of a lifetime. They are relying on it.”
President-elect Donald Trump and President Obama have been in regular communication, CNN reports.
Said Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway: “I can tell you from President-Elect Trump’s side that he very much enjoys speaking with President Obama, talking about the serious issues that face this country and the world. They get along nicely. They disagree on many things. That’s not going to change.”
Appointing Mitt Romney as secretary of state would be viewed by many supporters of President-elect Donald Trump as a major betrayal, former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told CNN.
Said Conway: “It’s just breathtaking in scope and intensity.”
She added: “I’m all for party unity, but I’m not sure we have to pay for that with secretary of state position.”
Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, told the Associated Press that President-elect Donald Trump offered him the job of Secretary of Education last week during a meeting in New York.
He said he declined the job but that Trump wanted a four- to six-year commitment and said he couldn’t leave Liberty for more than two years.
“While much of the attention in Washington is on who will fill the Trump cabinet, it is already clear who some of the most important people will be when it comes to fulfilling the Trump agenda,” the New York Times reports.
“One group will be particularly well positioned to either accommodate or infuriate Donald Trump: a handful of independent-minded Republican senators who have shown a willingness to break with the president-elect and have readily split with their own party on issues in the past.”
“Given the narrower divide in the Senate after the election, these senators must be kept on board if Mr. Trump and the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate want to advance legislation and nominations in the face of Democratic opposition. Some are already making known their readiness to take on the new administration.”
The Hill: GOP senators wary of nuking filibuster
“Donald Trump swore at his staff, boasted about destroying people’s homes, and stuffed cash into a worker’s pocket during a trip to Scotland in 2010,” footage obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals.
“In an episode of the short-lived Golf Channel show Donald Trump’s Fabulous World Of Golf, which the channel refused to release before the U.S. election, Trump talked about getting rid of the ‘ugly’ homes surrounding his golf course and told a member of staff to ‘use his fucking brain’ or he’d be fired.”
The Washington Post reports many women “are responding to Hillary Clinton’s defeat with a new sense of obligation to seek political power. After years of never imagining a career in the public eye or only vaguely entertaining the idea of working in politics, these women are determined to run for elected office.”
“They don’t speak for all women, many of whom voted for Trump — 42 percent of them, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research. Notably, a majority of white women favored the Republican. But Clinton still benefited from an overall gender gap, and young women supported her by a margin of 32 percentage points.”
New York Times: “The globe is dotted with such potential conflicts. Mr. Trump’s companies have business operations in at least 20 countries, with a particular focus on the developing world, including outposts in nations like India, Indonesia and Uruguay, according to a New York Times analysis of his presidential campaign financial disclosures. What’s more, the true extent of Mr. Trump’s global financial entanglements is unclear, since he has refused to release his tax returns and has not made public a list of his lenders.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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