“I do regret sitting down and having a conversation with him, because it did give people concern.”
— Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in an interview on CNN, about her airport tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton during the election.
Washington Post: “Pressure on members of the electoral college to select someone other than Donald Trump has grown dramatically — and noisily — in recent weeks, causing some to waver but yielding little evidence that Trump will fall short when electors convene in most state capitals Monday to cast their votes. Carole Joyce of Arizona expected her role as a GOP elector to be pretty simple… But then came the mail and the emails and the phone calls — first hundreds, then thousands of voters worrying that Trump’s impulsive nature would lead the country into another war.”
Politico: Electors under siege.
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DNC chair Donna Brazile said Russian hackers persisted in trying to break into the organization’s computers “daily, hourly” until after the election — contradicting President Obama’s assertion that the hacking stopped in September after he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin to “cut it out,” ABC News reports.
Said Brazile: “They came after us absolutely every day until the end of the election. They tried to hack into our system repeatedly.”
Meanwhile, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta refused on NBC News to say it was a free and fair election: “I think it was distorted by the Russian intervention.”
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) renewed his call for the creation of a select committee to investigate possible Russian cyberattacks to influence the American election, the New York Times reports.
Said McCain: “The responsibilities for cyber is spread over about four different committees in the Senate, and each doing their own thing, frankly, is not going to be the most efficient way of arriving at a conclusion. This is serious business.”
A new Qualtrics survey shows a large fraction of Republicans — 52% — said Trump won the popular vote, compared with only 7% of Democrats and 24% of independents. Among Republicans without any college education, the share was even larger: 60%, compared with 37% of Republicans with a college degree.
In reality, Hillary Clinton won 2.8 million more votes than Trump.
“Presidents often are tested early, by unexpected crises or provocations by foreign adversaries. President-elect Donald Trump’s first test has come even before he is sworn in, and so far, he has responded with denial, equivocation and deflection,” the Washington Post reports.
“The test has come over Russia’s brazen intrusion into the U.S. election process through its hacking of the servers at the Democratic National Committee and the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.”
“Contrary to what Trump said last week, the Russian intrusion was known long before the election. The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported in June that the Russians had penetrated the DNC network. Then on Oct. 7, intelligence officials publicly stated that the hacking had occurred, that the Russians were behind it and that ‘only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.’ That was an obvious reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
New York Times: “In its final episode of 2016, ‘S.N.L.’, the sketch series and enduring thorn in Mr. Trump’s side, began with a cold open on Saturday that went hard at some sensitive spots for the president-elect: his relationship to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, his courtship of Melania Trump, and some of his recent gaffes and cabinet nominations. The show all but dared Mr. Trump to respond on his Twitter account, but he did not immediately do so.”
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that 68% of Americans believe Mr. Trump will change the way business is conducted in Washington. But one-third of that group—or about 20% of all adults—believe it will be the wrong kind of change.
Including the 32% who said business will continue as usual in Washington, more than half of Americans believe Mr. Trump will effect the wrong kind of change or none at all.
Rich Lowry: “Let me stipulate that I’m grateful for anything Republicans can do on Obamacare and we are light years away from where we would have been if Trump hadn’t won. But there are a couple of worries here: 1) the GOP is thinking of the Obamacare partial-repeal as a way to get an “early win,” but it may play very differently in political terms; 2) there will presumably be a score pointing out that the partial-repeal will cost millions of people their insurance and we have no idea how Trump will react to it–it’s possible that he distances himself from what Republicans are doing the first time he’s asked about it in an interview; 3) the root of the problem here is that Republicans don’t have 60 votes for a full repeal and replace.”
“A Republican senator told me the other day that he believes the difficulties that the party will have grappling with Obamacare will force the GOP to reconsider the filibuster altogether, although it’s hard to see senate Republicans getting a consensus among themselves for that.”
Paul Waldman: “This isn’t just hardball politics. This is a fundamentally anti-democratic approach to government, one that says that when we win, we get to implement our agenda, and when you win, you don’t.”
“To put this in context, perhaps nowhere in the country have Republicans moved more aggressively to solidify power by disenfranchising their opponents as they have in North Carolina.”
Mitt Romney wrote in the Salt Lake Tribune that his being in the running to be President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of state is a sign Trump is open to “alternative views and even to critics.”
Said Romney: “I was indeed very critical of Donald Trump during his campaign. But now he has been elected president and accordingly, if I could have helped shape foreign policy to protect the country I love, I would have been more than willing to do so.”
“This has been a difficult eight years.”
— Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), quoted by The Hill.
Donald Trump mocked the media at a rally last night saying they were in a “state of panic” on Election Night, The Hill reports.
Trump specifically targeted CNN’s John King: “Now they’re getting nervous on television, and you see these anchors they’re like sweating and crying and throwing up all over the place. All those months he’s saying there is no path to 270 for Donald Trump.”
He added: “He’s up with the red map, and he’s going and his hands start to shake, and he’s gasping for breath, he can’t breathe, he’s choking like a dog. And for months he’s been saying I have no path to victory and you know, the bad news is a lot of people probably believed him and they didn’t go out to vote. It’s called suppressing the vote.”
George Lakoff: “Without knowing it, many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media help Donald Trump every day. The way they help him is simple: they spread his message.”
“Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.”
“When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. You do this by spreading his message wide and far.”
“During the campaign, Donald Trump trashed the hawkish foreign policy of the second Bush White House. But now, he and his team are relying on the man most closely identified with that regime — Dick Cheney — to help ensure that Rex Tillerson is confirmed next year as Trump’s secretary of state,” Politico reports.
“It’s a scenario no one could have possibly foreseen: that one of the key architects of the Iraq War, which Trump slammed on the campaign trail, is now being enlisted as an emissary for a man Trump wants to help steer his ship of state.”
“The Obama administration didn’t respond more forcefully to Russian hacking before the presidential election because they didn’t want to appear to be interfering in the election and they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win and a potential cyber war with Russia wasn’t worth it,” multiple high-level government officials told NBC News.
Said one official: “They thought she was going to win, so they were willing to kick the can down the road.”
“The administration did take action in response to the hack prior to the election. In September, President Obama privately confronted Vladimir Putin about the hacks at the G-20 summit in China. He warned the Russian President of unspecified consequences if the hacks continued.”
President-elect Donald Trump is set to nominate Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) as his budget director, “which would place a fiscal conservative who has warned against larger deficits in charge of the White House Office of Management and Budget,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
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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