Chairman of Senate Finance Committee is set to oversee confirmation of many cabinet nominees and approval of president-elect’s legislative agenda
.. Mr. Hatch was one of the first senators to endorse Mr. Trump for president.. The committee will handle several other priorities for Mr. Trump, including replacing President Barack Obama’s health-care law and overhauling the tax system... Mr. Trump doesn’t have close ties with many members of Congress, so Mr. Hatch has become an important middleman between Mr. Trump and the Senate. A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Hatch’s chief of staff, Robert Porter, to assist with his transition process... Mr. Hatch has also forged a close relationship beginning this summer with Reince Priebus, who has been chairman of the Republican National Committee and is Mr. Trump’s incoming chief of staff. Mr. Hatch donated a total of $75,000 from his political-action committee to the RNC and Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, one of the few senators to do so... Mr. Hatch endorsed Mr. Trump in May, when the nomination was all but sewn up. Still, he was among the first senators to do so... When Mr. Trump suggested a federal judge’s Mexican heritage should disqualify him from overseeing a case involving Trump University, the now defunct real-estate school, Mr. Hatch told the Los Angeles Times: “Be nice to him. He’s a poor first-time candidate.”.. At the summer’s Republican convention, Mr. Hatch sat in the Trump family’s box on occasion.. In October, after the release of a tape of Mr. Trump making lewd comments about groping women, Mr. Hatch was steadfast in his support, though he called Mr. Trump’s comments “offensive and disgusting.”.. Last month, the two had several conversations about potential nominees for secretary of state, including former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
History Tells Us What Will Happen Next With Brexit And Trump
Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death are that it had a positive impact in the long term. Well summed up here:
By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe,” …In addition, the Black Death significantly changed the social structure of some European regions. Tragic depopulation created the shortage of working people. This shortage caused wages to rise. Products prices fell too. Consequently, standards of living increased. For instance, people started to consume more food of higher quality.
.. During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a minor European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people.
My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50-100 year historical perspective they don’t see that it’s happening again.
.. Lead people to feel they have lost control of their country and destiny, people look for scapegoats, a charismatic leader captures the popular mood, and singles out that scapegoat. He talks in rhetoric that has no detail, and drums up anger and hatred.
.. Mugabe is a very good case in point. He whipped up national anger and hatred towards the land owning white minority (who happened to know how to run farms), and seized their land to redistribute to the people, in a great populist move which in the end unravelled the economy and farming industry and left the people in possession of land, but starving.
See also the famines created by the Soviet Union, and the one caused by the Chinese Communists last century in which 20-40 million people died. It seems inconceivable that people could create a situation in which tens of millions of people die without reason, but we do it again and again.
.. Brexit — a group of angry people winning a fight — easily inspires other groups of angry people to start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone can trigger chain reactions. A nuclear explosion is not caused by one atom splitting, but by the impact of the first atom that splits causing multiple other atoms near it to split, and they in turn causing multiple atoms to split.
.. With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country
.. Trump won against the other Republicans in debates by countering their claims by calling them names and dismissing them. It’s an easy route but the wrong one.
.. Ignoring and mocking the experts, as people are doing around Brexit and Trump’s campaign, is no different to ignoring a doctor who tells you to stop smoking, and then finding later you’ve developed incurable cancer.
Will Donald Trump be Herbert Hoover all over again?
Hoover took over in a time of general prosperity but stagnant wages and vast income inequality. Populists in Congress proposed dramatic increases in tariffs to help the struggling agricultural sector, the equivalent of today’s beleaguered blue-collar workers.
.. The proposal divided Republicans in Congress and Hoover before they produced the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, setting off retaliation, freezing international trade, contributing to the Great Depression and accelerating a ruinous cycle of nationalism around the world.
Hoover’s ghost should haunt the GOP right now. A populist, protectionist president has come to power at a time of long-depressed wages and vast inequality. He threatens to implement a 45 percent tariff against China and 35 percent against Mexico, and he’s about to collide with free-traders and pro-business interests in his own party.
If they jettison Trump’s agenda and proceed with business as usual, they risk inflaming Trump’s already furious followers. If they do what Trump has promised, there will be chaos as they pursue what amounts to a mission impossible: enacting a huge tax cut, making enormous spending increases on infrastructure and the military and cutting the debt in half — all without touching Social Security and Medicare.
And they’ll be without a mutual foil to unite them.
.. Giuliani said prosecuting Clinton would be “a presidential decision” — an extraordinary departure from the American tradition of removing the president from prosecutorial decisions, particularly since President Nixon tried to block the Justice Department’s Watergate probe in 1973.
.. Trump surrogate Omarosa Manigault told a conservative website that Trump is keeping an enemies list.
Is Donald Trump an American Hugo Chávez?
The video, with Spanish subtitles, comes from the Democratic National Committee and is aimed at a particular group of Latino voters: those who fled Mr. Chávez’s Venezuela and other authoritarian countries, like Cuba. It has a particular resonance in Florida, a battleground state and home to an increasing numbers of Venezuelans, especially in Doral, west of Miami, where Senator Marco Rubio has an office.
.. The debate has spread to Mexico, where politicians are comparing Mr. Trump to the leftist presidential hopeful Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As Mr. Trump has suggested he might do, Mr. López Obrador rejected the results of Mexico’s last two presidential elections, claiming he was robbed by fraud, and leading protests.
.. “It is not an ideology,” he writes, “but a political logic.” It pitches the idea of a noble section of the people against the idea of an utterly corrupt elite. The populist political strategy centers on this conflict in an emotive way, adapting to fit different contexts — anti-immigrant in the United States, anti-American in Venezuela.
.. While they have wildly different backgrounds and advocate different policies, they are united in posing as the enemy of the entrenched, corrupt elite, who make possible whatever ails the people, be it Muslim refugees or global capital.
.. As the establishment is held as corrupt, today’s populists blame it and its institutions — government, the media — for anything that goes wrong, even when it’s the populists themselves who are to blame. When newspapers report accusations of sexual assault by Mr. Trump, he blames a media conspiracy. When Venezuelans march to complain they have no food, the government denounces a plot by oligarchs and the media. Mr. Trump assailed a judge overseeing a lawsuit against him as being biased. Mr. Chávez jailed a judge who made a ruling he disagreed with.