Just dropped · Trial Balloon · Ep. 194
What Just Happened?
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Richard Brookhiser: “My instinct about Mr. Trump’s instincts is that he will want bold strokes soon. Start building a fence, if not a wall. Talk up infrastructure, even if no plans are in place yet. Nominate a surprising Supreme Court justice (Ted Cruz?). Make splashy, friendly trips to Israel, to Britain (in need of friends post-Brexit) and, if not to Russia, to some in-between rendezvous with Vladimir Putin, for a possible deal: You take Ukraine, the West keeps the Baltics, and together we’ll bomb Islamic State.”
“Mr. Trump’s first hundred days are harder to predict than any other president’s because he is unprecedented. Every previous president had held a position of public responsibility, either as a politician or a general. Donald Trump, uniquely, has no experience of leadership, and we have no experience of him leading. He doesn’t yet know what he is doing, and we have no way of knowing what he might do.”
“Cheer up—after the first hundred days, there are only 1,361 left.”
Politico: “Ted Cruz met with Donald Trump exactly one week after Election Day. As it turned out, Cruz’s tete-a-tete with the president-elect he had spurned from the stage of the Republican National Convention just months before wasn’t the most consequential meeting he would have that day. After his talk with Trump, the Texas senator and his chief of staff, David Polyansky, then sat down with his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, who sounded him out about his interest in filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by the late Antonin Scalia. Cruz – widely considered one of the best Supreme Court litigators of his generation – swatted down the idea, according to four people to whom he has relayed the conversation.”
“Handing Cruz a lifetime appointment to the high court would have been a political masterstroke. It would have simultaneously eliminated Trump’s chief adversary within the Republican Party and elated conservatives. That may not happen, but the conversations Cruz had that day with Trump and several of his aides touched off a congenial and cooperative relationship between the onetime rivals. Though Cruz may have been one of Trump’s most vocal critics during the campaign, as Inauguration Day nears, he has become perhaps the president-elect’s most important – and most unexpected – ally in the Senate.”
“Many prominent Democrats and Republicans who opposed Donald Trump are fleeing Washington for the inauguration, heading far from the capital to plot anti-Trump strategy or simply avoid the pain of witnessing inauguration celebrations,” Politico reports.
“Inauguration departures by operatives on the losing side of an election are common every four years, but they’re taking on a different tone this time after an unusually ugly election season. Many Democrats are in no mood to see the swearing in of a man they consider a unique threat to the nation.”
President-elect Donald Trump returned fire on a top Democrat who said he was not a “legitimate president,” The Hill reports.
Said Trump: “Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk – no action or results. Sad!”
According to a senior U.S. government official, incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking, the Washington Post reports.
“What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.”
Former Miss Hungary Kata Sarka says that she was once courted by Donald Trump, BuzzFeed reports.
She first made the claim in May 2016 during an episode of Kasza Taxi, a Hungarian interview show.
Said Sarka: “He gave me his business card with his private number, and he told me in which hotel, which room he was staying in, and that his name is Donald Trump.”
“The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the claim. But Trump indeed was in Moscow for the pageant, whose managing company he owned from 1996 to 2015, a fact that he tweeted about at the time.”
Playbook: “President-elect Donald Trump, who has mostly been holed up in a well-fortified Trump Tower for the last two months, is planning lots of socializing with members of Congress at the White House, according to people familiar with his plans. Think barbecues and other gatherings to allow Trump to develop personal relationships with elected officials. Trump likes human interaction — hence the parade of everyone from high-level CEOs to media figures and friends to the Tower.”
“There are 241 members of the House Republican Conference, 52 GOP senators and a smattering of Democrats willing to do business with Trump, so he’ll be busy. To state the obvious, love from the White House will breed loyalty. Expect this to start soon after Trump arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania.”
A new Gallup poll finds 51% of Americans disapproving of Donald Trump he is handling the presidential transition with 44% approving.
“Behind closed doors, Chris Christie — unceremoniously sent packing from Donald Trump’s transition headquarters in Washington two months ago — is telegraphing a message to his confidants: I’ll be back,” Politico reports.
“The hard-charging New Jersey governor is playing the long game, betting that Trump’s senior aides and cabinet nominees, nearly all of whom lack governing experience, will face unexpected challenges when they settle into the West Wing. Christie turned down several offers to join the Trump administration when he was denied the attorney general post, but he has told associates he expects Trump to turn people like him — seasoned lawmakers and political hands — if and when the neophytes begin to flounder.”
“Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees, in their first round of confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill, have one after another contradicted the president-elect on key issues, promising to trim back or disregard some of the signature promises on which he campaigned,” the Washington Post reports.
“The discordant notes that Cabinet nominees have struck as they have been questioned by senators suggests that a reality check may lie ahead for Trump. It may be that the grandiosity and disregard for convention that got Trump elected were inevitably bound for a collision with the practical and legal limitations of governing.”
Wall Street Journal: Nominees diverge on Russia, security issues
“Anthony Scaramucci, a prominent New York financier and confidant to President-elect Donald Trump, has accepted a top position on the incoming White House staff, where he will coordinate the administration’s engagement with the U.S. business and political community,” the Washington Post reports.
“Scaramucci’s position, which is expected to be formally announced this week, is described inside the Trump team as akin to the job held by one of President Obama’s most powerful advisers, Valerie Jarrett, who directs the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs.”
Hamilton Nolan: “These things are not normal. These things are not okay. These are actions that flout well-established ethical and civil norms. Admittedly, there is something thrilling about watching him do this. What will he do next? It always keeps us tuning in, in the same way that a violent alcoholic father will always keep his children on his toes. But we should not fool ourselves about what is happening in front of our eyes. We are all coming to realize that our civil society institutions may not be strong enough to protect the flawed but fundamentally solid democracy that we thought we had. We are witnessing the rise to power of a leader who does not care about norms. Since these norms were created to prevent political, social, economic, and cultural disasters, we do not need to wonder how this will end. It will end poorly.”
Politico: “The Florida senator produced quite a fireworks show this week with his grilling of a seemingly rattled Tillerson at his confirmation hearing for secretary of state. But opposing Tillerson on the Senate floor — and antagonizing Trump, whom Rubio was dismissing as a “con man” around this time a year ago, before eventually endorsing him — is another thing entirely.”
“Intentionally or not, Rubio is out on a limb after demanding denunciations of Russia and other authoritarian countries that Tillerson refused to offer. GOP leaders believe the former ExxonMobil CEO remains a solid bet for confirmation with or without Rubio’s support, but the Florida senator is being watched especially closely because he’s seen as a proxy for other GOP hawks.”
For members: Did Rex Tillerson Lie Under Oath?
Ben Carson would not answer whether President-elect Donald Trump could benefit from Department of Housing and Urban Develop loans during a fierce line of questioning from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) at his confirmation hearing, NBC News reports.
Said Carson: “If there happens to be an extraordinarily good program that’s working for millions of people and it turns out that someone that you’re targeting is going to gain, you know, $10 from it, am I going to say ‘No’?”
Warren responded: “The reason you can’t assure us of that is because the president-elect is hiding his family’s business interests from you, from me, from the rest of America.”
Jeffrey Toobin: “It is well within the realm of possibility that the Trump Administration will kill this investigation before it even begins. The President-elect clearly believes that all the recent attention paid to the hacking of the Clinton campaign’s e-mails, apparently by Russian forces, was contrived to deprive him of the legitimacy he so craves. It’s easy to imagine that he will view the investigation of Comey the same way, since so many people have attributed Trump’s election to that last-minute development, rather than to his campaign. The only thing standing in the way of his firing the inspector general is a political norm, and Trump has shown gleeful disdain for such standards. In a similar vein, Sessions (or his deputy) could decide to prohibit the inspector general from conducting this inquiry.”
James Hohmann: “For the first time in American history, both the president and the nation’s chief diplomat are poised to have no prior government, military or legislative experience. This is a recipe for trouble. Rex Tillerson’s shaky performance yesterday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee underscored why.”
“The world was already a tinderbox, and Donald Trump has only contributed to the instability in the two months since he won the election. Russia, which got the outcome it wanted, is emboldened. China is on the march. Democracy is in retreat. The already-wobbly western alliance is in danger.”
Rick Klein: “‘He’s a chaos candidate,’ Jeb Bush said of Donald Trump 13 months ago. ‘And he’d be a chaos president.’ Even Jeb couldn’t have conjured a day as wild and unconventional as Wednesday. Trump used a rambling news conference to equate the intelligence community to the Nazis and pronounced himself a germaphobe; men in dinosaur outfits roamed the hallways outside rocky hearings for Trump’s secretary of state pick; the president-elect’s promise of a ‘blind trust’ for his assets was announced to be neither blind nor a trust; and the Senate started to repeal Obamacare, in the middle of the night.”
“It was a dizzying day, though it’s worth noting that the Trump team seemed to control the terms of the chaos – sometimes literally. Trump’s declaration that news organizations – specifically, Buzzfeed and CNN – are ‘fake news’ is an appropriation of that term for his own means. It’s in league with a Trump marketing style that’s morphing into a Trump governing style. When the distractions are intentional, they are part of the strategy. That might not be chaos at all.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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