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.”
“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.
“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.”
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“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
“A common thread weaves through many of Donald Trump’s picks for his incoming administration, a quality the president-elect values as highly as loyalty and perhaps even more than conventional qualifications: a flair for television,” CNN reports.
“He has plucked two Fox News stars from their airwaves – Sean Duffy for Transportation secretary and Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon. For the agency overseeing Medicare and Medicaid, Trump has turned to Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician known for his health show that aired for 13 seasons. His pick for the Department of Education, meanwhile, is Linda McMahon, who co-founded and built a professional wrestling and entertainment empire alongside her husband.”
“President-elect Donald Trump is considering tapping Richard Grenell, his former intelligence chief, to be a special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” USA Today reports.
“Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany and was acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s 2017-2021 term, would play a key role in Trump’s efforts to halt the war if he is ultimately selected for the post.”
Wall Street Journal: “Trump told friends shortly before the Bessent announcement that he trusted him to execute the administration’s policies more than any of the other contenders. Trump’s advisers also said that the president-elect, who is known to take appearance into account when hiring, felt that the gray-haired, bespectacled Bessent looked the part.”
“But Bessent’s glide path was upended by an 11th-hour play for the job by Cantor Fitzgerald Chief Executive Howard Lutnick, which culminated in Elon Musk signaling to his 200 million social media followers that he backed Lutnick and viewed Bessent as a ‘business-as-usual choice.’ As the deliberations dragged on, Trump at times expressed frustration with his options—and the many leaks about the process—prompting him to bring additional candidates into the mix.”
Axios: What to know about Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury pick.
Washington Post: “In any other presidential transition, such a showdown and physical confrontation between two top advisers to the president-elect would be a showstopping breakdown in decorum.”
“But in Trump’s freewheeling orbit, the incident was soon forgotten as his team has returned to the patterns of his first term in office — with shouting matches, expulsions from meetings and name-calling, all between the public celebrations and rocket-ship photo ops. As during Trump’s first term, competing factions have begun to run roughshod over each other, sometimes kicking up clouds of dust.”
New York Times: “While election polling has been around for more than a century, election forecasts have come to the forefront only in the past decade and a half. And while polls are intended to provide a snapshot in time, taking the pulse of how Americans are feeling about a race, forecasts go a step further, analyzing the polling and other data to make a prediction about who is most likely to win, and how likely.”
“But this year, with the polls already showing a razor-thin presidential race, the forecasts often indicated that the race was tied nationally or in swing states, or they gave one candidate or the other only a slight edge.”
“These results raise the question: What is the value of these election forecasts? Proponents say they help synthesize the available information and that more data is better than less. They also argue that the forecasts this year performed well, generally — capturing the uncertainty of a close race, while holding out for the possibility that Donald Trump could sweep the swing states, as he did.”
“But critics say forecasts add more noise than signal — and may even be doing harm.”
“For months, European business leaders have watched as Donald Trump paved a path back to the White House by doubling down on an “America First” economic policy, putting protectionism and business-friendly tax and regulatory pledges high on the agenda,” the New York Times reports.
“With the U.S. presidential inauguration less than two months away, they are now furiously lobbying policymakers in Brussels with an appeal of their own: Put Europe First.”
“Nothing has galvanized the European business community quite as urgently as the prospect of a second Trump presidency, this time with Mr. Trump wielding bolder promises to disrupt the global economic order in ways that threaten to leave Europe lagging even further behind.”
“Elon Musk’s net worth hit an all-time high of $347.8 billion on Friday, driven by Tesla Inc.’s ongoing stock rally and a new funding round valuing his artificial intelligence startup xAI at $50 billion,” Bloomberg reports.
“Musk’s numerous businesses have been surging in value since Donald Trump’s election victory propelled Musk, the so-called ‘first buddy,’ into the political spotlight.”
Abby Livingston: “While Republicans celebrate their inroads in suburban counties, an intraparty battle is brewing over a tax that disproportionately hits wealthy counties in blue states—the very places an emboldened G.O.P. wants to flip.”
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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