Michael Isikoff takes a close look at the man who will become national security advisor:
Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has reportedly been offered the role of national security adviser in Donald Trump’s White House, began receiving classified national security briefings last summer while he was also running a private consulting firm that offered “all-source intelligence support” to international clients.
Flynn’s relationship with his overseas clients is coming in for new scrutiny amid recent disclosures that two months ago, during the height of the presidential campaign, his consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group, registered to lobby for a Dutch company owned by a wealthy Turkish businessman close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
Margaret Hartmann:
Flynn has said Islam is a “political ideology based on a religion,” which he believes “the American Founding Fathers wanted nothing to do with,” and he’s even called it a cancer.Trump and Flynn both believe that the U.S. needs to work more closely with Russia to defeat the threat of radical Islam, despite Russian President Vlaimir Putin’s human rights abuses and aggressive action in Ukraine. Last year Flynn was paid to give a speech in Moscow and appear at a gala for the TV network RT, where he was seated next to Putin. Flynn said he sees no difference between the Kremlin-funded outlet and U.S. media organizations like CNN.
Binyamin Appelbaum explains how Trump is already lying about saving American jobs:
President-elect Donald J. Trump claimed credit on Thursday night for persuading Ford to keep an automaking plant in Kentucky rather than moving it to Mexico. The only wrinkle: Ford was not actually planning to move the plant. [...]But Ford had not planned to close the Louisville factory. Instead, it had planned to expand production of another vehicle made in Louisville, the Ford Escape. And the change had not been expected to result in any job losses.
On the possible appointment of Rudy Giuliani, here’s Alex Vitale’s piece on Giuliani’s unconstitutional policies:
Time and again Giuliani attempted to restrict protests, artistic expression, and public behavior that he found distasteful or politically threatening. All of which is a clear violation of the core precepts of the First Amendment.
In April 1999, Giuliani earned the first “Lifetime Muzzle Award,” from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression because of his attacks on the First Amendment. According to the Center, “He has stifled speech and press to so unprecedented a degree, and in so many and varied forms, that simply keeping up with the city’s censorious activity has proved a challenge for defenders of free expression.”
The New York Times looks at Trump’s plan to “purge the nation”:
President-elect Donald Trump says he will move immediately to deport or imprison two million, maybe three million, unauthorized-immigrant criminals. “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers,” he said on Sunday on “60 Minutes.”
Like many of his proposals, this one sounds tough and straightforward, but makes no sense under scrutiny and is frightening to think about. [...]
The threat of Mr. Trump chasing that number right off the bat is the reason immigrant communities are so terrified. But the damage won’t be immediate: He can’t just load two million people onto buses and planes and ship them out. He’ll first have to stuff them into the bottleneck of the immigration courts, where there are too few judges and lawyers for a swollen caseload, and fill detention cells to bursting. Mr. Trump may be unaware of due process, or in denial about it, but it exists.
All the while he would be snatching workers from their jobs, workers who keep the economy humming. Then there is the policing problem — indiscriminate roundups in immigrant communities cause crime victims to fear and avoid the police, and crime to fester.
Paul Waldman calls out the “Tweeter-in-chief”:
In the week after he was elected president of the United States, Donald Trump sent 22 tweets, six of which were attacks on The New York Times over stories that he found insufficiently complimentary. [...]
Every president believes that the coverage they get in the media is overly critical and fails to present the full picture of their well-intentioned efforts to improve the lives of all Americans. But Trump may be the first president to arrive in office having spent over 30 years obsessing over his image in the press.
Don’t miss David Remnick’s profile of President Obama:
The morning after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Barack Obama summoned staff members to the Oval Office. Some were fairly junior and had never been in the room before. They were sombre, hollowed out, some fighting tears, humiliated by the defeat, fearful of autocracy’s moving vans pulling up to the door. Although Obama and his people admit that the election results caught them completely by surprise—“We had no plan for this,” one told me—the President sought to be reassuring.
“This is not the apocalypse,” Obama said. History does not move in straight lines; sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward. A couple of days later, when I asked the President about that consolation, he offered this: “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”
And we end with Eugene Robsinon’s take on the future of the Democratic Party:
The Democratic Party cannot just wait for the next Barack Obama to come along. The president is a unique political talent of the kind that appears only once in a great while, when the stars magically align. Instead, Democrats need to do what Republicans did, which is to build from the ground up and start winning state and local elections.
A Democratic rebound has to begin with the basics: getting people who agree with you to vote. Less than 60 percent of those eligible to cast ballots in last week’s election bothered to do so. Conservatives who say this is “a center-right nation” may be right in terms of who votes, but they’re wrong in terms of who could vote. Polls show that the country favors Democratic over Republican positions on most issues.
The Democratic Party should put its energy and money into connecting with potential voters at the grass-roots level. Trump made a bunch of pie-in-the-sky promises he can never keep. Democrats need a hopeful but realistic message recognizing that while most big cities prosper in today’s globalized economy, much of the rest of the country suffers.