Outgoing Rep. Katie Porter is seeking a temporary restraining order against an ex-boyfriend, telling the court that his “persistent abuse and harassment,” including sending her and her family and staff more than 1,000 text messages and emails over three months, has caused “significant fear for her personal safety and well-being,” Politico reports.
Trump’s Modus Operandi
Jonathan Last: “He promises his base crazy shit. He then announces that he’s about to do the crazy shit. The media freaks out at the prospect of said crazy shit. Trump then wriggles out of doing the crazy shit and—this is the key part—his voters give him credit for the crazy shit anyway.”
Tariff Threat Is Straight From Trump’s Playbook
Bloomberg: “In a gambit familiar to adversaries and allies alike, Trump said in a social media post Monday evening he would slap 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada and additional 10% duties on China, unless they clamp down on migrants and illegal drugs coming to the US. Those three countries account for about 40% of all US trade.”
“It all had a familiar feel to a flurry of threats in his first term.”
CNN: Trump tries to force other countries to negotiating table on immigration and trade with promise to hike tariffs.
Trump Got More Votes Than He Did Four Years Ago
“It’s a daunting reality for Democrats: Republican Donald Trump’s support has grown broadly since he last sought the presidency,” the AP reports.
“In his defeat of Democrat Kamala Harris, Trump won a bigger percentage of the vote in each one of the 50 states, and Washington, D.C., than he did four years ago. He won more actual votes than in 2020 in 40 states.”
“Certainly, Harris’ more than 7 million vote decline from President Joe Biden’s 2020 total was a factor in her loss, especially in swing-state metropolitan areas that have been the party’s winning electoral strongholds.”
“But, despite national turnout that was lower than in the high-enthusiasm 2020 election, Trump received 2.5 million more votes than he did four years ago.”
Trump Finally Signs Transition Agreement
“President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday reached a required agreement with President Joe Biden’s White House to allow his transition staff to coordinate with the existing federal workforce before taking office on Jan. 20,” the AP reports.
“The congressionally mandated agreement allows transition aides to work with federal agencies and access non-public information and gives a green light to government workers to talk to the transition team.”
A Team of Skeptics
“Donald Trump entered the White House eight years ago with a Cabinet full of traditional conservative credentials, tapping some people he barely knew to help him learn his way around Washington,” the Washington Post reports.
“Now the president-elect has rapidly assembled a different kind of team for his second term — enlisting people deeply critical of the agencies they will lead, bucking conservative orthodoxy with some of his picks and, above all, rewarding his most loyal allies.”
Expect Higher Prices on Fruits and Vegetables
“The U.S. imports approximately 60% of its fresh fruit and 40% of its fresh vegetables,” NBC News reports.
“And among the countries of origin for those products, Mexico is the biggest contributor — meaning U.S. consumers could see higher prices for a range of grocery and produce items if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his latest threat to impose a 25% tariff on all items brought in across the southern border.”
Trump Picks Kevin Hassett as Top Economic Adviser
“President-elect Donald Trump is said to have selected Kevin Hassett to lead the National Economic Council, a role spearheading the new administration’s tax, trade and spending agenda,” Bloomberg reports.
“A fixture of conservative economic circles for two decades, Hassett previously served as a senior adviser to Trump and the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the president-elect’s first administration, and he vigorously defended the Republican’s signature tax policies. He also backs the Republican’s slate of tariff proposals.”
Wall Street Journal: “The expected decision comes after Trump made clear that he is serious about imposing steep tariffs on American allies and adversaries alike.”
Two Trump Insiders Jockey for Intelligence Post
“Two Trump transition insiders, Cliff Sims and Kash Patel, are angling to be deputy director of the CIA — and angering others who feel they’re using their roles on the transition to undermine any would-be contenders,” Political reports.
A More Chaotic Transition Than the Last Time
Tara Palmeri: “The breakneck speed with which Donald Trump filled out his cabinet may have looked deliberate, but I’ve learned that the process was even more freewheeling, complicated, and downright nasty than it was during Trump’s first transition to the presidency. Back then, of course, Trump had few experienced hands around him, beyond his family (Jared and Ivanka) and a handful of operatives (Reince, Bannon, Kellyanne…). The defining battles of that era, over who was and wasn’t a ‘globalist,’ seem quaint in retrospect. Incredibly, despite the anonymous sniping in the press (much of it powered by background-quote back-channeling), Trump ultimately assembled a mostly standard-issue Republican cabinet, with appointees who wouldn’t have been out of place in a Bush White House.”
“For Trump’s second tour of duty, a decidedly more chaotic process has taken place—fueled by the triumvirate of Susie Wiles, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump Jr. in his ear, with supporting characters like Boris Epshteyn and Howard Lutnick running up and down the sidelines.”
The Democrats’ Billionaire Mistake
Caitlin Flanagan: “The minute it became clear that Harris had lost, reporters and panelists began offering explanations—explanations so obvious that you had to wonder why they hadn’t seen the loss coming. Of course they were correct: The results proved that millions of people don’t want to see an apparently endless flow of undocumented immigrants entering the country; they loathe the way DEI absolutism empowered an army of bureaucrats to mete out mysterious punishments for ridiculous offenses. They don’t want to hear anyone’s pronouns; they don’t want to be told that crime is down when they’re busy getting carjacked; and they never, ever want to watch The View again.”
“These various social causes helped win Trump the election. His narrative didn’t pass most tests of logic or economic theory and yet it was constructed on a foundation of grievances that rang true to millions of Americans, and Democrats met it with no narrative at all. It was as though the party had spent a quarter century running a very large tab, and on Election Day, the whole thing finally came due.”
The Fight Against Misinformation Got Much Harder
Financial Times: “The incoming Trump administration’s vow to dismantle the leftwing ‘censorship cartel’ has thrown a shadow over the cottage industry of academics, non-profits and researchers that sprang up to combat a tide of digital misinformation — and threatens to disrupt the Big Tech companies behind the world’s most popular platforms.”
A Guide for the Politically Homeless
Eliot Cohen: “Those of us who first became politically homeless in 2016 have lately been in a quandary: We need to figure out who we are. If we are not to succumb to the Saruman trap—going along with populist authoritarians in the foolish hope of using them for higher purposes—then we had better establish what we stand for.”
“Labels matter in politics. They can also lose their meaning. There is, for example, nothing ‘conservative’ about the MAGA movement, which is, in large part, reactionary, looking for a return to an idealized past, when it is not merely a cult of personality. Today’s progressives are a long, long way from their predecessors of the early 20th century—just invoke Theodore Roosevelt’s name at a gathering of ‘the Squad’ and see what happens.”
“Even the terms left and right—derived, let us remember, from seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the early days of the French Revolution—no longer convey much. Attitudes toward government coercion of various kinds, deficit spending, the rule of law—neither party holds consistent views on these subjects.”
Trump Is a Weakling and That’s the Problem
Timothy Noah: “The pithiest summary of Donald Trump’s last presidency was by the comedian John Mulaney. He compared it to a horse being set loose in a hospital.”
Said Mulaney: “No one knows what the horse is gonna do next, least of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospital before!”
“The prevailing theory about Trump’s second term is that the horse now knows its way around the hospital. I have my doubts. Whatever practical knowledge Trump picked up in the first term is outweighed by the accelerating cognitive decline he displayed over the past year. He was a weak president before, and he may be an even weaker one this time.”
“In saying this, I don’t dispute that Trump’s instincts are dangerously authoritarian. Nor would I argue that a bumbling maximum leader is harmless—quite the opposite, in fact.”
Will Kamala Harris Run Again?
Jonathan Bernstein: “Of course normal people want nothing to do with the 2028 election, and won’t until a long time from now. Even most primary voters, who are already a fairly small subset of the electorate as a whole, are unlikely to really engage until the weeks just before their state votes in winter or spring of the election year.”
“But the even smaller group of party actors — the politicians, campaign and governing professionals, formal party officials and staff, volunteers and donors, and party-aligned interest groups and the partisan media who together are the party network?They’re already thinking about it. Not only do many of them care very much who wins the nomination, but they also take part in the even more important re-definition of the party that it goes through when it makes nominations. That includes potential changes in policy positions and priorities; it also includes questions about other ways that various party groups will be represented, and how central they all are to the party as a whole.”
“I do urge people to focus on those questions more than on which candidate winds up as the nominee. But I also know that people naturally do care about the nominee. And for a while now the biggest questions will be about Vice President Kamala Harris. Will she run? If so, how strong a nomination candidate will she be?”
Trump Will Grant Sweeping Security Clearances
“Donald Trump’s transition team is planning for all cabinet picks to receive sweeping security clearances from the president-elect and only face FBI background checks after the incoming administration takes over the bureau and its own officials are installed in key positions,” The Guardian reports.
“The move appears to mean that Trump’s team will continue to skirt FBI vetting and may not receive classified briefings until Trump is sworn in on 20 January and unilaterally grant sweeping security clearances across the administration.”
Senate Democrats Won’t Put Up Much of a Fight
“Senate Democrats don’t sound like they’re gearing up for a repeat of the ‘hell no’ approach to Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks that they adopted during his first term,” Semafor reports.
“Trump nominees like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard probably won’t get many Democratic votes, according to interviews with a half-dozen of the party’s senators, spanning the party’s ideological spectrum. But a repeat of the rage the party channeled in public eight years ago looks unlikely.”
Bonus Quote of the Day
“If you voted for Trump because you thought he was going to bring grocery prices down, I have some very bad news for you.”
— Catherine Rampell, on CNN.
