Politico: “Russian tanks may not be rolling into Poland or Estonia, but Moscow’s aggression is getting harder to dismiss… While some governments — especially in Nordic and Baltic countries — have tried to raise the alarm, the collective response from the EU and NATO has so far been notably tame.”
Washington Curtails Intel’s Chip Grant After Stumbles
“The Biden administration plans to reduce Intel’s preliminary $8.5 billion federal CHIPS grant, a move that follows the California-based company’s investment delays and broader business struggles,” the New York Times reports.
“Intel, the biggest recipient of money under the CHIPS Act, will see its funding drop to less than $8 billion from the $8.5 billion that was announced earlier this year.”
Semafor: Biden administration rushes to distribute final chips program funding.
Trump Considers Defense Financiers for Top Pentagon Spot
“Two financiers are in the running to be the deputy secretary of defense, a competition that pits a publicity-averse private-equity investor against an outspoken venture capitalist,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Trae Stephens, a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund venture-capital firm, is under consideration by President-elect Donald Trump to become the deputy secretary of defense. Billionaire investor Stephen Feinberg, who led the president’s intelligence advisory board in the first Trump administration, is also in the running.”
“The selection of either investor could come as welcome news for the hundreds of new defense startups that have entered the military market in recent years.”
Trump Adviser Agrees About ‘Our Adversaries’
“Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) said Sunday that he has met with President Joe Biden’s National Security adviser Jake Sullivan — and that the two administrations are working collaboratively on national security issues during the transition,” Politico reports.
Said Waltz: “Jake Sullivan and I have had discussions, we’ve met. For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity, that they can play one administration off the other — they are wrong.”
The Right Has a Bluesky Problem
The Atlantic: “Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all. Maybe they’d post some about how X has gotten worse to use, how it harbors white supremacists, how it pushes right-wing posts into their feed, or how distasteful they find the fact that Musk has cozied up to Donald Trump. Then they’d leave. Or at least some of them did. For the most part, X has held up as the closest thing to a central platform for political and cultural discourse.”
“But that may have changed. After Trump’s election victory, more people appear to have gotten serious about leaving… Many of these users have fled to Bluesky: The Twitter-like microblogging platform has added about 10 million new accounts since October.”
Follow Political Wire on Bluesky @politicalwire.com.
GOP Senator Says No One Cares About Background Checks
Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a prominent ally of Donald Trump, said voters don’t care who conducts background checks into the president-elect’s Cabinet picks and that Trump would fire members of his administration who don’t follow the policy he sets out, ABC News reports.
Sherrod Brown May Run Again
Sen. Sherrod Brown, who was defeated Nov. 5 in his reelection bid, said he won’t rule out running for the Senate again or for governor of Ohio in 2026, Politico reports.
Trump Starts Transition on Positive Note
A new CBS News poll finds President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration starts off with mostly good will from the public: a majority of Americans overall are either happy or at least satisfied that he won and are either excited or optimistic about what he’ll do as president.
The Resistance Goes Quiet
Axios: “While President-elect Trump’s 2016 win sparked shock, outrage and massive protests, the response to his 2024 victory has been more muted.”
“2016 birthed The Resistance, a political movement to protest Trumpism online and in the streets. There’s still plenty of resistance to Trump across the country, but little mass mobilization.”
“That could change as Trump moves to implement his agenda. But experts and activists expect the renewed resistance to come in different forms.”
Flashback Quote of the Day
“The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated.”
— Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi, quoted by the Washington Post in 2023.
Trump Is Running His Transition on Secret Money
“President-elect Donald Trump is keeping secret the names of the donors who are funding his transition effort, a break from tradition that could make it impossible to see what interest groups, businesses or wealthy people are helping launch his second term,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Trump has so far declined to sign an agreement with the Biden administration that imposes strict limits on that fund-raising in exchange for up to $7.2 million in federal funds earmarked for the transition. By dodging the agreement, Mr. Trump can raise unlimited amounts of money from unknown donors to pay for the staff, travel and office space involved in preparing to take over the government.”
“Mr. Trump is the first president-elect to sidestep the restrictions, provoking alarm among ethics experts.”
Biden’s Chief Economist Processes the Election
“Since the election, Jared Bernstein, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has often found himself in a down mood — dealing, he says, with ‘confusion, guilt’ and ‘cognitive dissonance,’” the New York Times reports.
“President-elect Donald Trump’s sweeping victory was fueled in part by lousy consumer sentiment and working-class Americans’ frustration with the underlying state of the economy. That is a big blow to the idea of ‘Bidenomics,’ of which Mr. Bernstein was a leading evangelist and architect.”
Trump’s Choices for Health Agencies Suggest a Shake-Up
“President-elect Donald Trump’s eclectic roster of figures to lead federal health agencies is almost complete — and with it, his vision for a sweeping overhaul is coming into focus,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Trump’s choices have varying backgrounds and public health views. But they have all pushed back against Covid policies or supported ideas that are outside the medical mainstream, including an opposition to vaccines. Together, they are a clear repudiation of business as usual.”
Trump’s Trade Agenda Could Benefit Friends
“The sweeping tariffs that President-elect Donald Trump imposed in his first term on foreign metals, machinery, clothing and other products were intended to have maximum impact around the world. They sought to shutter foreign factories, rework international supply chains and force companies to make big investments in the United States,” the New York Times reports.
“But for many businesses, the most important consequences of the tariffs, enacted in 2018 and 2019, unfolded just a few blocks from the White House.”
“In the face of pushback from companies reliant on foreign products, the Trump administration set up a process that allowed them to apply for special exemptions. The stakes were high: An exemption could relieve a company of tariffs as high as 25 percent, potentially giving it a big advantage over competitors.”
“That ignited a swift and often successful lobbying effort, especially from Washington’s high-priced K Street law firms, which ended up applying for hundreds of thousands of tariff exemptions.”
Little Ideological Consistency in Trump’s Cabinet
Axios: “Lost in the noise of Trump’s most controversial picks is the simple, undebatable fact that this might be the most ideologically diverse cabinet of modern times.”
Trump Picks Brooke Rollins for Agriculture
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to select Brooke Rollins, a former Trump administration policy adviser, to lead the Agriculture Department, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Rollins is the president of the America First Policy Institute, a group led by former Trump administration officials that spent months planning for a potential second term. An ally of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, Rollins was once considered a contender to be White House chief of staff.”
Trump’s Team of Randos
Playbook: “In a flurry of Truth Social posts last night, President-elect Donald Trump made a furious pre-holiday-week dent in his list of Cabinet and key sub-Cabinet nominations — naming nine picks in the span of about 70 minutes and ruining happy hour for all the reporters who suddenly had to freshen their pre-writes.”
“Whether by design or by compulsion, the volume and timing of the announcements had the immediate effect of diffusing the scrutiny that might have been trained on any individual nominee. But together they cemented a picture of Trump’s governing echelon as a menagerie of Fox News personalities, ultra-wealthy GOP patrons and MAGA true-believers, with a few genuine surprises sprinkled in. Call it the team of randos.”
Where Kamala Harris Lost the Election
Politico: “Blue cities represent the core of the Democratic base… But this year, the major cities accounted for smaller shares of the votes cast in the battleground states than four years ago — effectively ceding political power to suburban and rural voters who are, in aggregate, more conservative.”
