President-elect Donald J. Trump denied Wednesday morning that his transition is in disarray, assailing news media reports about firings and infighting and insisting in an early-morning Twitter burst that everything is going “so smoothly.”
But legal and procedural delays by Mr. Trump’s transition team continued on Wednesday, all but freezing the traditional handoff of critical information from the current administration more than a week after Mr. Trump won the presidential election.
.. Of the transition effort, Mr. Trump wrote: “It is going so smoothly.”
John Bolton for Secretary of State
Newt Gingrich is a brilliant thinker and glib talker who would always be one slip of the tongue away from creating an international crisis
.. On top of all this, Bolton, who endorsed Trump soon after he clinched the Republican nomination in the spring, is respected by all factions of the party.
Watchdogs question Trump’s plans to keep his empire in the family
“This is as intricate a government ethics problem as has ever existed, and I hope he’ll be getting a bunch of experts into a room to figure out how to deal with this.”
.. McGehee said she would advise Trump to “appoint an ethics czar, right now, from the get go, whose job would be to recommend a series of policies that are meant to restore public faith. He ran, obviously, against Washington. So if he’s going to take the reins of power … [he should] have an ethics czar.”
McGehee and others say installing Trump’s adult children as caretakers doesn’t eliminate conflict questions, since he’d still know what his interests were, and he’d presumably still be in contact with his children. What’s more, foreign governments and lenders could seek favor with the president through sweetheart deals with his kids.
.. “Once you don’t sell the businesses — and Trump has given no indication that he’s going to do so — I don’t think he can separate himself. The idea that he’s going to have his family run the businesses and that will address his conflict-of-interest problems is a joke,”
.. The biggest check on potential conflicts, according to ethics lawyers, is a clause of the Constitution that bans U.S. government officials, including the president, from accepting gifts or money from foreign governments without the consent of Congress.
The Black Swan President: Best and Worst Cases
Donald Trump is the biggest unknown ever to take control of the White House. What’s the worst-case scenario? The best? As the country waits to find out, Politico Magazine asked 17 experts to game out a Trump presidency.
On one hand, Trump is a pragmatic businessman with a very flexible ideology and a desire to be seen in a positive light; on the other, he’s a ruthless and often improvisational dealmaker with no allegiance to the norms and institutions that set the boundaries for traditional political power.
.. Though he was elected in the end, he did not pursue this goal rationally but rather spent time attacking Miss Universe, the Khan family, etc. To get to the best-case scenario you have to take away his Twitter and force him not to chase his various demons, as was evidently done in the last week of the campaign. And then persuade him that allies are actually useful. This will require having a staff that understands the realities of the exercise of American power internationally, and rebuilding bridges to the foreign policy experts that were so alienated by his pronouncements during the campaign.
.. Worst case: President Trump encounters a foreign policy crisis. Lacking experience, he relies on his gut and makes a bad situation worse. His ego gets involved; he doubles down. The crisis escalates, leading to war (with Russia over the Baltics? China over Taiwan? North Korea? Iran?)
.. The chances of Trump avoiding major errors in security policy would be enhanced if the Congress, and especially the Senate, more effectively played its constitutional role as a check against excessive presidential power, in addition to challenging foolish ideas.
.. The worst-case scenario is that Republicans keep campaigning against real and imagined failures of the Democrats, and Democrats respond in kind. If the Trump administration leads with policies only Republicans can support, excludes Democrats from crafting proposals, and rams them through with gimmicky rule changes, we will be in for more Washington dysfunction and justifiable voter disgust.
.. Leading with hot button issues like defunding Planned Parenthood or rolling back environmental regulations would be a tactical mistake. Proposing big cuts in individual income taxes designed to benefit the wealthy would be a very bad start—not only because it would be fiscally irresponsible, but because it would betray Trump’s repeated promise to be the voice of those left behind.
.. The Department of Justice and FBI become Trump’s Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii (FSB). In short, America’s 70 year run as the world’s leader effectively ends.
.. The best-case scenario is that Trump’s zeal to “win” trumps ideology, and he governs only looking to cut deals where he can declare victory.
.. The best-case scenario is that he decides—correctly—that the best and probably only way to create lots of jobs in the industrial Midwest where he won his election is to build huge quantities of solar panels and wind turbines.
.. With a united Republican government, the worst-case scenario no longer comes from ongoing gridlock but from unrestrained power. The protective hand of the federal government has already been withdrawn from voting rights; without checks, that hand could become an iron fist, actively assaulting the civil rights of minorities, from immigration bans to mass deportations to the expansion of stop-and-frisk.
.. Democrats cannot be expected to partner with an administration that continues to target vulnerable groups or disrespects the constitutional structures of the American government.
.. It also requires legislators to think beyond partisan and ideological lines: the end of the Hastert rule, the end of power-enhancing but nation-damaging standoffs over fiscal cliffs and debt ceilings.
.. The problem won’t be if Donald J. Trump turns out to be a dissembler as president. It will be if he is not. The best modern presidents have been ones like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan who made an ostentatious show of ideological fidelity to their followers and then promptly zigged and zagged whenever it was necessary. The worst presidents have been fellows like Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter who tried to live up to their principles.
.. If Trump sticks with the unilateralist militarists that attached themselves to his campaign—New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, retired General Michael Flynn and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—alarm bells should start ringing. And if he adds the likes of John Bolton, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin to his cabinet, the rumbustious New York mogul could end up making Warren Harding look as though he were a paragon of statesmanship.
.. Trump also shows that he is a master of the art of the deal who deals artfully with America’s adversaries. He builds up the American military, but also engages in arms-control talks with China and Russia, thereby establishing newly cooperative relationships. Ukraine is Finlandized, becoming a united and neutral country. After lengthy and secret negotiations, Trump ends up opening an American embassy in Tehran. Any wars are kept to quick affairs along the lines of Grenada in 1983.
.. The worst-case: Trump tries to keep his promises, but discovers that many are illegal or impossible to implement. He really does ignite a trade war with China, try to deport huge numbers of illegal immigrants, tells Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to get nuclear weapons, undermines all confidence in the U.S. commitment to NATO at a time when America needs as many allies as possible. He faces pushback even from Republicans. He gets angry. He listens only to slavish loyalists. He looks to protect himself and vindicate his position with public messages that further divide an already divided country. He responds to a terrorist attack on Americans with a series of measures that exacerbate some problems without solving others.
.. How best to get to the best-case scenario: Top talent in the GOP (and maybe Democrats) honor Trump’s victory by pledging to work in his administration, and they work to ensure that Trump doesn’t become isolated or isolate himself.
.. A worst-case scenario is if: Trump runs a divisive administrative. He appoints an independent prosecutor to investigate the Clintons. He gets into a “war of words” with Fed Chair Janet Yellen, undermining international confidence in the integrity of the U.S. financial system. His administration abolishes Obamacare, but can’t agree on any replacement. He starts building the border wall without negotiating with Mexico or other Latin American countries on immigration. There is no effort at immigration reform. The Trump administration begins deporting illegals. Latino families are torn apart with parents having to leave their American-born children here. Trump doesn’t try to work with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. The corporate tax rate is lowered and firms repatriate their profits, but don’t invest because of a lack of confidence in Trump’s management of the economy. Consequently, the U.S. economy is thrown into a recession.
.. How to get to the best-case scenario: The key will be if he works with Congress and seeks to negotiate—rather than take unilateral steps—with allies and partners as well as China and Russia. In taking over the governing, he needs to avoid the erratic behavior that characterized some of his campaigning. He has a real opportunity to break the logjam in Congress and enact reform but will have to quickly switch out of campaign mode and use his businessman skills at negotiating deals.
.. The worst-case scenario for a Trump presidency involves ratcheting up domestic turmoil at home and international crises abroad. Domestically, Trump’s rhetoric of racial division, xenophobia—anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-women—can stoke further divisions, especially if he fulfills his pledge to repeal Obamacare. Trump has made explicit and implicit promises to white males, who overwhelmingly voted for him with an understanding that his presidency would be tantamount to a restoration of lost economic privileges and racial identity of the Eisenhower era.
.. The Republican Party’s Tea Party wing fails to comprehend compromises made by Reagan, settling into a winner takes all governing strategy that has caused the decaying of longstanding institutions, including the Supreme Court, which through GOP obstruction has become a naked site of partisanship.
.. External pressure from massive demonstrations could encourage a President Trump to rethink his rhetoric of division, but more likely would trigger his authoritarian tendencies and propel him to unleash further repression among already marginalized constituencies. Perhaps the best check on President Trump will be an organized Left, one capable of enough unity to prevent what could not be stopped on Election Day.
.. The point of this free-wheeling counterfactual is to suggest that the American creed of how “one man can make a difference” cuts both ways: This dark side of what is sometimes called American Exceptionalism suggests that if that one man who makes a difference these days were to be our new President-Elect Donald Trump, perhaps two years from now we‘ll find him shoring up shaky approval ratings by exacerbating tensions with China. The resulting shooting war could then rally frightened Americans, recalcitrant allies, as well as arms manufacturers and other business interests to his side.
.. After winning a second term by stimulating the economy with hugely inflated military budgets, President Trump might then initiate and support other boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgencies in an open-ended war on terror, leading to a spiral of domestic terrorist attacks and correspondingly violent reprisals, as well as ever-increasing curtailments of civil liberties at home, including rights of assembly, press, and use of social media. Taking a page from President Nixon’s playbook, an increasingly lengthy list of Trump “enemies” would find themselves under surveillance, under audit and harassed in other ways.
.. A truly worst-case scenario might be that in the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange with China, Trump suspends various provisions of the Constitution, perhaps indefinitely. He would then use the state of perpetual emergency he had created as justifying a third and even a fourth term, citing FDR as a precedent.
.. It’s still hard to fathom the costs to humanity that George W. Bush incurred by triggering a civil war in Iraq. What other U.S. president can be held responsible for so many deaths in a wholly unnecessary conflict? Donald Trump may fall to the same depths if he follows through on his trigger-happy rhetoric. But he could easily cause as many deaths and inflict as much hardship—perhaps not as visibly, but nonetheless—by reversing the world’s progress to combat climate change.
.. The way we focus on the better-case scenario is to not overreact.