This president will have a lot of legal authority, which must be respected. But beyond that, nothing: he doesn’t deserve deference, he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
And when, as you know will happen, the administration begins treating criticism as unpatriotic, the answer should be: You have to be kidding. Mr. Trump is, by all indications, the Siberian candidate, installed with the help of and remarkably deferential to a hostile foreign power. And his critics are the people who lack patriotism?
.. Remember, many, though not all, of the things Mr. Trump will try to do can be blocked by just three Republican senators.
.. Everything we’ve seen so far says that Mr. Trump is going to utterly betray the interests of the white working-class voters who were his most enthusiastic supporters, stripping them of health care and retirement security, and this betrayal should be highlighted.
Trump’s Brazen Dodge To Avoid Dealing With His Conflicts of Interest
just as we knew that Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, was the favorite to be Trump’s choice as Energy Secretary. (This despite the fact that, in 2012, when Perry ran for President, he wanted to abolish the department.)
.. If he had come out on Thursday and announced that, in spite of these warnings, he is going to retain ownership of his businesses, which is clearly what he intends to do, there could have been another political firestorm.
.. By postponing the event, Trump insured that the Electoral College will have already cast its votes when he announces that he intends to tell the ethics lawyers to go and jump in the Potomac. In a pair of tweets on Monday night, he confirmed that the most he is willing to do is hand day-to-day management of the Trump Organization over to his two eldest sons, Donald, Jr., and Eric, while still retaining ownership control.
.. Trump appears to have made a deal, at least an implicit one, with the Republican leaders in which they get their way on many of the big policy issues—taxes, education, the environment, regulation of finance and the labor market—and he gets to keep hold of his businesses, and his personal brand, the value of which, as he freely admitted a few weeks ago, has been greatly enhanced by his election victory.
.. the stock and pension rights that Tillerson accumulated at Exxon are worth about two hundred and ninety million dollars. And Bloomberg reckons that Gary Cohn, whom Trump has picked to head his National Economic Council, owns stock in Goldman Sachs, the investment bank where he is currently president and chief operating officer, worth more than two hundred million dollars.
.. Would he be willing to put that business at risk, by, for example, recommending to Trump that the U.S. government maintain, or even strengthen, its sanctions on Russia? (In 2014, Tillerson gave a speech opposing these sanctions.)
..
Cohn, as Trump’s top economic adviser, will be tasked with, among other things, helping to decide which of the financial regulations that were introduced after the financial crash of 2008 should be cast onto the Republican bonfire. In anticipation of a big rollback in federal oversight, stock in Goldman and other Wall Street firms has risen sharply since the election. Can Cohn, a big beneficiary of that rise, provide objective advice on this issue?
Trump creates conditions in which dissent is not welcome
It’s an eerily familiar pattern: Trump sees criticism, Trump resents criticism, and Trump lashes out at those responsible for the criticism. In this case, Vanity Fair published a piece late yesterday with unkind words about the restaurant at Trump Tower, leading the president-elect to put aside the work he’s supposed to be doing, fire up Twitter, and announce his contempt for the publication that’s slighted him.
This obviously isn’t how U.S. leaders are supposed to conduct themselves – especially in public – and it’s not how Trump should be spending his time. But even more jarring is the frequency of these incidents.
.. The common thread isn’t subtle: those who cross Trump should expect to face consequences.
.. The less tangible threat … is to the willingness of dissidents to criticize the Trump government, out of fear that Trump will harm their businesses, or that his unhinged supporters will harm their families.
If Donald Trump Is So Upset About Iraq WMD Lies, Why Would He Want to Hire John Bolton?
DONALD TRUMP’S REACTION to news that some U.S. intelligence agencies believe Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf was to fire back: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
He might have had a point — were it not for the fact that he was being so obviously and ludicrously insincere. Case in point: Trump is said to be on the brink of appointing John Bolton as deputy secretary of state. He is arguably the man most responsible for hiding the truth about Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs.
.. The Bush administration, with Bolton as undersecretary of state for arms control, arrived in Washington, D.C., in 2001 with the goal of invading Iraq. They weren’t motivated by whatever WMDs Iraq might or might not have, but, as a senior administration official later explained, by the simple and highly galling fact of Saddam Hussein’s “defiance” of the U.S.
.. When the September 11 terrorist attacks gave them the opportunity, the administration’s conservative wing, including Bolton, had no interest in sending inspectors to Iraq to see if Hussein had WMD. They wanted to simply use WMD as “justification you can jump on” to invade — without bothering to check whether Iraq actually had anything.
.. Iraq had informed the OPCW in late 2001 that it wanted to sign the treaty. This would require Iraq to provide the organization with a list of any chemical weapons stockpiles it possessed — and submit to intrusive OPCW inspections.
.. This set off loud alarm bells in the Bush administration, since inspections could not just delay their desired war, but undermine the case for it in the first place. As Bustani put it years later, his willingness to consider inspecting Iraq “caused an uproar in Washington,” and it quickly “became evident that the Americans were serious about getting rid of me.”
According to Bustani, “Everybody knew there weren’t any [banned chemical weapons]. An inspection would make it obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade.”
.. Bolton took the lead in ousting Bustani and replacing him with someone more pliable. After the Bush administration failed to win a March 2002 no-confidence vote from OPCW’s executive committee, it threatened to cut off its funding of the OPCW, which accounted for 22 percent of its budget.
.. they were unable to prevent later inspections of Iraq under the auspices of the U.N. Those inspectors then failed to find anything — since Iraq did not actually possess any banned weapons — and the U.S. and its allies went ahead and invaded anyway in March 2003.
.. If Bolton becomes part of the Trump administration, he’ll be an extremely loud voice for war with Iran. In November, he said that overthrowing Iran’s government is the “only long-term solution” to the country’s supposed threat to the U.S.