“Donald Trump’s victory promised an electoral realignment as he made heavy gains among Latinos and peeled off some Black men. His Cabinet, however, ultimately reflects the staying power of white men in Washington,” Politico reports.
“After a flurry of selections last week, the president-elect winds up with just three people of color in secretary roles, matching his first Cabinet.”
“Some of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees were harassed by bomb threats and hoax phone calls,” Bloomberg reports.
“Every president is going to come in and try to do as much as they can by executive action as possible. Congress, in some cases, is going to be the entity that sometimes will have to put the brakes on.”
— Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), quoted by Vanity Fair.
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Mexico said that Donald Trump’s threat of 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada would cost the US economy as many as 400,000 jobs and increase prices for American consumers, Bloomberg reports.
“In the weeks after Election Day, one of the biggest donors in the Democratic Party, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has considered what would once have been unthinkable for a billionaire who often talks about his patriotism,” the New York Times reports.
“Leaving the United States.”
“Mr. Hoffman, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on politics over the last few years, has told friends and allies that he is weighing a move overseas…”
“While Mr. Hoffman’s reaction is dramatic — and it’s unclear how much moving abroad would protect him or his assets from Mr. Trump’s wrath — he is hardly alone in a liberal big-money world still stunned by Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat.”
“Rep. Seth Moulton drew swift condemnation from local Democratic leaders and LGBTQ+ advocates for comments he made about transgender youth in sports in the wake of Democrats’ defeats earlier this month,” Politico reports.
“But will the discontent translate to real competition next cycle? It’s early, but some potential challengers are already beginning to stir.”
“Congress is feuding over a new farm bill, making lawmakers likely to punt the matter for another year and leave American farmers and families on food assistance without an update to the legislation that controls how much federal support they receive,” the New York Times reports.
“MSNBC’s audience has tanked since the election,” the Daily Beast reports.
“The liberal network’s viewership is down by 47 percent overall since Nov. 5 and by 52 percent during primetime, the latest Nielsen ratings show.”
Joe Rogan marveled at Democrats purportedly “scrambling” to create their own equivalent of his show to counter a perceived right-wing man-o-sphere, saying he was once “on their side,” the Daily Beast reports.
Said Rogan: “I’m sure they’re scrambling to try to create their own version of this show. This is one thing that keeps coming up: ‘We need our own Joe Rogan.’ But they had me. I was on their side.”
“Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, will learn in March whether she faces a ban from running in the nation’s next presidential race,” Bloomberg reports.
“As the Paris embezzlement trial of Le Pen and her party wrapped up on Wednesday, Paris judge Bénédicte de Perthuis announced that she plans to make a ruling on March 31.”
“President-elect Donald Trump is poised to pull the plug on President Joe Biden’s yearslong push to cancel student debt for tens of millions of people as Republicans sweep into power in the coming months,” Politico reports.
Jim Geraghty: “After the 2016 election, Trump foes launched a serious last-ditch effort to convince the presidential electors to become ‘faithless‘ and change their votes, preventing Trump from becoming president. Celebrities and actors from The West Wing and Will and Grace appeared in commercials, urging electors to not vote for President-elect Trump. So far this year, there’s nothing like that. Democrats in and out of office are trudging in acquiescence toward Inauguration Day; Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman said he expects to vote to confirm Rubio as secretary of state, and he said he is open to voting to put his former rival, Mehmet Oz, in charge of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.”
“Trump won the second-highest number of votes for president ever cast, no one’s questioning the legitimacy of his victory, Democrats in the Senate are signing off on some of his cabinet picks, and he starts his second term with at least an initially high approval rating. Trump may not be normal, but he’s starting to look normalized.”
“Elon Musk called for eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, highlighting the renewed threat under President-elect Donald Trump to a regulatory agency that has long been a target of Republicans and business advocacy groups,” Bloomberg reports.
Benjamin Mazer: “They’re angry at the public-health establishment. Now they’re in control of it.”
Bill Kristol: “There’ve been a few spectacularly bad nominees, picked to lead key departments where they would do real and dramatic damage to the nation. One of these, Matt Gaetz, nominated for attorney general, has already withdrawn. The three others—Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Pete Hegseth at Defense, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Heath and Human Services—should not be confirmed. And who knows—maybe they won’t be.”
“But the challenge we face over the next four years—and it is a real and difficult challenge—isn’t posed by the spectacularly bad nominees. The challenge is all the routinely bad nominees.”
“There’s plenty to say against many of these picks. They don’t know much, they’re mediocre, they’re mostly election deniers, and so on. But the core problem is they’re weak. They’ll do what Trump wants, and they’ll do it unquestioningly.”
Jonathan Chait: “Before this month’s elections, when Democratic candidates were being attacked for letting transgender athletes compete in girls’ sports, trans-rights activists and their allies had a confident answer: They had nothing to fear, because anti-trans themes were a consistent loser for Republicans. That position became impossible to maintain after the elections, when detailed research showed that the issue had done tremendous damage to Kamala Harris and other Democrats. In fact, the third-most-common reason swing voters and late deciders in one survey gave for opposing Harris was that she ‘is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class,’ an impression these voters no doubt got from endless ads showing her endorsing free gender-transition surgery for prisoners and detained migrants.”
“Now some of the very people who pushed Democrats into adopting these politically toxic positions have shifted to a new line: Abandoning any element of the trans-rights agenda would be morally unthinkable…”
“Refusing to accommodate the electorate is a legitimate choice when politicians believe they are defending a principle so foundational that defeat is preferable to compromise. But in this case, the no-compromise stance is premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of the options on the table. Democrats do not, in fact, face a choice between championing trans rights and abandoning them. They can and should continue to defend trans people against major moral, legal, and cultural threats. All they need to do to reduce their political exposure is repudiate the movement’s marginal and intellectually shaky demands.”
David Graham: “Four years ago, the long-running Fox News juggernaut suddenly looked precarious. The 2020 elections proved a major threat, as viewers abandoned the network and huge lawsuits threatened its coffers.”
“Today, Donald Trump is headed back to the White House, and he’s bringing a brigade of former Fox talent with him—a symbolic expression of the Murdoch-owned channel’s astonishing comeback.”
“I was at the bottom of my class. I started doing heroin, and I went to the top of my class. Suddenly I could sit still, and I could read and I could concentrate. I could listen to what people were saying.”
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr., quoted by the Daily Beast.
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.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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