Newt Gingrich told McClatchy that he will not serve in the Donald Trump administration in any official role.
Said Gingrich: “I will not be in the Cabinet. I intend to be focused on strategic planning.”
“He did not say whether the decision not to be in the new government was his or Trump’s. The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment.”
Gingrich to the Washington Post: “I want to be free to network across the whole system and look at what we have to do to succeed.”
President-elect Donald Trump will meet this weekend with one of his fiercest critics: 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, a senior Republican source told CNN.
The two men are set to meet this weekend to discuss “governing moving forward” and potentially a role for Romney in Trump’s Cabinet.
CNBC says Romney will discuss the secretary of state position with Trump.
Healthcare is the top issue Americans want Donald Trump to address during his first 100 days in the White House, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, an apparent rebuke of President Obama’s signature reform.
Some 21% of Americans want Trump to focus on the healthcare system when he enters the White House. Jobs took second place with 16% of Americans hoping it would be Trump’s first agenda item, while immigration came third – picked by 14% of Americans.
“David Petraeus – the former US army general and CIA director who was prosecuted for mishandling classified information – has entered the race to become Donald Trump’s secretary of state,” the Guardian reports.
“Petraeus resigned in November 2012 after the FBI discovered he had had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and had shared classified information with her. He eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for mishandling the information. People who have seen him recently say he is anxious to return to public life and has privately refused to rule out serving in a Trump administration.”
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) launched a long-shot challenge to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s reign atop the Democratic caucus, saying that last week’s elections were a call to “bring a new voice into leadership,” the Washington Post reports.
“The secret-ballot election, held Nov. 30, will test Pelosi’s public declaration of victory Thursday when she said at a news conference that she has more than two-thirds support in the Democratic caucus.”
Politico: Pelosi squirms as she awaits potential challenge
Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is talking with lawyers about how he can legally join the administration, the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Kushner has consulted with at least one lawyer and believes that by forgoing a salary and putting his investment fund, his newspaper (The New York Observer) and his real estate holdings into a blind trust that he would not be bound by federal anti-nepotism such rules.”
“Still, it is not clear that such an arrangement would be legal. Under federal statute, the president cannot accept voluntary services that are not permitted by law, and a separate statute bars public officials from employing family members in any capacity.”
Jonathan Chait: “Health-care coverage is a relatively straightforward problem of resource allocation. Tens of millions of Americans can’t pay for the health care they need, because they either have low incomes or expensive medical needs. There are many different ways to fill in the gap between what they need and what they can afford on their own. You can do it through straight taxes and spending. Or you can do it through regulation, forcing insurers to charge healthy customers more than they cost so they can charge the unhealthy ones less. Obamacare uses both of these methods. Republicans oppose both of them.”
“The Republican approach involves endless rhetoric about ‘choice,’ ‘competition,’ ‘markets,’ ‘patient-centric’ care, and so on. But none of these concepts has the magic power to conjure resources out of thin air. So when Republicans design alternative plans, and they have sketched out quite a few, inevitably they just provide fewer resources.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) said he will seek re-election in 2018 but will not run for president or vice president in 2020, the AP reports.
Said Kaine: “Period. Full stop.”
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Ultimately, what happened to Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party is what happens to most third-party candidates: They fade at the end. Johnson flirted with 10% national support for much of the race but ended up with just 3.3% of the national vote, while Stein got 1% despite reaching nearly 5% in the RealClearPolitics average in early summer.”
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress in the final days of the election helped Trump win the election, the Telegraph reports.
Said Lewandowski: “With eleven days to go, something amazing happened. The FBI’s director James Comey came out on a Friday and he said they may be reopening the investigation into Crooked Hillary’s emails. What that did was remind people that there are two different rules in Washington – those of the elites, and the privileged and those for everybody else.”
“Why would the Democrats stubbornly not have an economic message? Sixty-seven white papers don’t make an economic message. Thirty-seven bills you’re going to introduce in the first 100 days do not make an economic message. What we as Democrats really have to deal with is the fact that we didn’t have an economic message.”
— Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, quoted by the Washington Post.
Matt Bai: “Clinton’s campaign was effectively nothing but a giant turnout operation, crunching data on reliable Democratic voters while simultaneously keeping the candidate herself from saying anything remotely interesting. She ran on a database, rather than on an argument; the more Trump alienated and motivated her base, the less she felt the need to make any discernible case.”
“The bottom line for Democrats ought to be this: You can’t really count on winning elections without persuading anybody of anything they don’t already believe. You can’t be a truly national party if you need 90 percent of a single minority’s votes just to be competitive (any more than you can be a national party relying only on white voters) …Democrats should find a new story in the months ahead. Because demography by itself isn’t actually destiny, and disdain isn’t much of a strategy, either.”
Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith: “Donald Trump’s election as president startled many Americans. A number of observers commented that Trump’s campaign represented a set of illiberal values and policy positions far outside of the United States’ political traditions of individual rights, equality and democracy.”
“But in many ways, Trump represents a return to the historical norm. Such classical liberal values have often not predominated in the United States. In fact, they have always logically competed against — while being politically intertwined with — a set of commitments to hierarchies of race, nationality and religion, among others. Indeed for much of American history, these illiberal values held sway.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) won’t officially join the Democratic Party even though he was appointed to a leadership position within the Senate Democratic caucus this week, The Hill reports.
Said Sanders: “I was elected as an Independent and I will finish this term as an Independent.”
“I will tell you something I haven’t told anybody else. I’ve had some conversation with some other Republican senators and I’m not the only one with some misgivings over both Giuliani and Bolton. And I haven’t met a Democrat that’s for either one of them. But I’ve met several Republicans that aren’t.”
— Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), in an interview on Hardball, on who might be the next Secretary of State.
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Because the 2016 contest was far closer than either 2008 and 2012, the number of states decided by five points or less increased from four in 2012 to 11 in 2016… But the nation’s polarization is still obvious, and only six states flipped from Democratic to Republican (Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and probably Michigan) — and none in the opposite direction. At least we can say that the playing field was more broadly competitive, and especially so until the final GOP consolidation behind Trump in late October and early November.”
“For a while in the fall, Arizona, Georgia, Utah, and a few other states appeared to be tightly contested, and even on Election Day Arizona and Georgia ended up being less Republican than Iowa and Ohio. We may be at a time of transition in the Electoral College where the whiter Midwest gets redder and the more diverse Sun Belt gets bluer.”
The Washington Post interviews a guy who makes $120K a year writing fake news that gets shared on social media:
Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.
My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
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.