We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times on the selection of white nationalist and extremist Steve Bannon as chief White House strategist:
In an ominous sign of what the Trump presidency will actually look like, the president-elect on Sunday appointed Stephen Bannon as his chief White House strategist and senior counselor, an enormously influential post. [...]
A few conservatives have spoken out against Mr. Bannon. Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart News editor who resigned in protest last spring, said Mr. Bannon was a “vindictive, nasty figure.” Glenn Beck called him a “nightmare” and a “terrifying man.”
But most Republican officeholders have so far remained silent. Some have dismissed fears about Mr. Bannon. Other Republicans have praised him, like Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, whom Mr. Trump announced as his chief of staff on Sunday, and who said Mr. Bannon could not be such a bad guy because he served in the Navy and went to Harvard Business School. Some saw the pick of Mr. Priebus as evidence that Mr. Trump would not be leaning so much on Mr. Bannon. But don’t be fooled by Mr. Priebus’s elevated title; in the press release announcing both hires, Mr. Bannon’s name appeared above Mr. Priebus’s. In a little more than two months Mr. Bannon, and his toxic ideology, will be sitting down the hall from the Oval Office.
John Nichols at The Nation has a roundup of the Democratic responses:
The swift response of watchdog groups, religious activists, and progressives to the Bannon announcement offered a powerful and needed indication that, though they may have been shocked by last week’s election results, the opponents of Trump and Trumpism are up for this fight.
Senate minority leader Harry Reid’s office announced that the Bannon appointment “signals that White Supremacists will be represented at the highest levels in Trump’s White House.” Reid promised to raise the issue on the floor of the Senate.
At Rolling Stone, Tessa Stuart analyzes more of Trump’s horrific administration staffing choices:
Chris Christie, who performed a mock trial of Hillary Clinton in an RNC speech that, depending on your perspective, was either rousing or "an open rejection of ethical norms for lawyers that disqualifies him to be a prosecutor of any kind, let alone the nation's top one," is reportedly in the running for attorney general. His competition for the job is Clinton health conspiracy theorist Rudy Giuliani.
Outspoken climate change denier Myron Ebell is leading the EPA transition, and is a top pick to replace Gina McCarthy as the agency's administrator. But if President Trump follows through on his campaign promises, there may not be much left for Ebell to administrate – Trump said in March he was going to "get rid of [the EPA] in almost every form. We are going to have little tidbits left but we are going to take a tremendous amount out."
Sarah "Drill, Baby, Drill" Palin is being floated for secretary of the interior – the official in charge of oil, coal and gas exploration.
Lt. General Michael Flynn, a fierce defender (and occasional dinner guest) of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been mentioned as a possible defense secretary and national security adviser. He has called President Obama a "liar" and led "Lock her up!" chants about Hillary Clinton.
Margaret Hartmann dives deeper into each potential cabinet pick:
On Monday rumors swirled about who Trump would name to several top national security positions, and each has the potential to rile people from across the political spectrum – if they don’t kill each other first. A source described the disagreements within the Trump transition team as a “knife fight,” according to CNN.
While liberals have been bracing themselves for the possibility that Rudy Giuliani could be attorney general, now reports claim he’s the frontrunner for secretary of State. Trump is also said to be considering former U.N. ambassador John Bolton for State, and Senator Jeff Sessions for the top spots at the Justice Department, the Defense Department, or the Department of Homeland Security.
Let’s also talk about Trumps yuuge conflict of interest problem. Sheelah Kolhatkar reports:
Trump and his offspring had already been treating the Presidential campaign like a world-spanning, high-stakes branding opportunity for Trump-related businesses. [...] It turns out that there is no legal requirement that a President divest himself or herself of private business interests or investments while in office. Nor is there a requirement that he place investments or companies he controls in a blind trust, by which an independent third party manages the assets while he serves in government. There are federal ethics rules that prohibit members of Congress and Cabinet members from accepting gifts from anyone who has business before their agency, as well as requiring that they recuse themselves from governmental affairs that affect their financial interests.[...]
“It’s a tremendous problem when it’s completely obvious how someone seeking governmental action from the United States can provide substantial benefit to its chief executive,” Arlo Devlin-Brown, a partner at Covington and Burling, who oversaw the Silver and Skelos prosecutions as the chief of the public-corruption unit at the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, said. A foreign or domestic company could choose to license the Trump name for a real-estate development or for marketing a line of Trump edible-fruit arrangements, to take one simple example; the company would know that it was benefitting the President no matter who was managing the Trump Organization, and President Trump would know it, too. “The problem here is that everything is going to look bad—every single company is trying to get something from the executive branch,” Devlin-Brown said.
And about putting the kids in charge, well, there’s this:
Donald Trump is reportedly looking for top-secret clearances for his children, a sign that rather than entering the Oval Office with an eye for avoiding conflicts of interest he’s preparing to rush headlong into a minefield of them. [...] “This is why we created the nepotism law in the first place. Huge conflicts of interest. You can’t have your kids being advisers. It has to be properly qualified officials who are experts in the fields,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer specializing in security-clearance law, told The Daily Beast. “It’s an issue of comfort for the President-elect because he’s relied on his children so much. But I don’t foresee a viable legal or ethical loophole or exception.” [...]
But a former Obama administration official said Trump could simply be asking for them to be cleared so they can have unescorted access to parts of the West Wing. [...] CBS, however, reports that Trump wants his kids to be able to see top secret information, defined as information that could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” if released.
If the Trump children ran the Trump Organization while also serving as high-level, informal advisers, their suggested dual roles would invite an unprecedented conflict of interest.
Elise Viebeck and Lisa Rein have more:
[L]et’s consider the possibility that Trump will award his children roles in the administration.
Limitations on employing relatives in the federal government are laid out in 5 U.S.C. 3110, which states that a public official may not “appoint, employ, advance, or advocate for” relatives in “the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control.”
That would seem to preclude Trump from hiring family members for any job in the federal government. But, of course, there are exceptions — particularly if the president-elect wants to push the legal envelope. [...]
[M]ost likely of all is Trump’s option of keeping family members close by, treating them as advisers and informally involving them in presidential business. It’s hard to imagine Trump’s children won’t be frequent guests at the White House. If they’re in the building, there’s little to prevent them from joining the action, even if they’re running the Trump Organization at the same time.
There are few ways to stop this outcome.
On a final note, here’s Eugene Robinson’s latest piece:
If a normal Republican had been elected, I could say the polite and socially acceptable thing, something like “I didn’t support So-and-So, but he will be my president, too, and I wish him success.” But I cannot wish Trump success in rounding up and deporting millions of people or banning Muslims from entering the country or reinstituting torture as an instrument of U.S. policy. In these and other divisive, cruel, unwise initiatives, I wish him failure.
I do hope he succeeds in avoiding some kind of amateurish foreign policy blunder that puts American lives or vital national interests at risk. And let me be clear that I am not questioning his legitimacy as president. When the results are certified and the electoral college casts its votes, Trump will be the nation’s duly chosen leader, ridiculous though that may be.
But he has not earned our trust or hope. Rather, he has earned the demonstrations that have erupted in cities across the country. He has earned relentless scrutiny by journalists, whom he shamelessly made into scapegoats during the campaign, and he has earned the constant vigilance of the public he now must serve.