Housekeeping note: Abbreviated Pundit Round-ups this holiday weekend and next (Sat-Mon) will post at 9 a.m.
Dana Milbank/WaPo:
A new solution for Trump and his team of billionaires: Ignore the law
Trump lieutenant Newt Gingrich this week proposed an elegant solution for all the conflicts of interest swirling around the president-elect and his team of billionaires: Ignore the law.
President-elect Donald Trump, Gingrich said, should let those in his administration do as they wish with their personal fortunes and business interests and pardon them if they are found to have violated laws against using public office for personal enrichment. “He could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers, I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules, period’,” Gingrich said on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” on Monday.
“Drain the Swamp” is so October.
In another NPR interview on Wednesday, Gingrich said Trump’s “swamp” campaign theme had been relegated to the marshlands of history, asserting that “he now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore.”
I get why Trump wants to push breaking/ignoring the law when it’s to his advantage. I don’t get people letting him get away with it. And I will never get voters who thought it acceptable to vote for a fellow who promised to do it.
He’s a horrible person who surrounds himself with horrible people. That’s not exactly draining the swamp.
EJ Dionne/WaPo on the electoral college:
It’s important for those who favor the popular election of our presidents to separate their arguments for direct democracy from the outcome of a particular contest.
My colleague George F. Will’s recent column in defense of the electoral college offers an excellent opportunity to make a case that has nothing to do with the election of Donald Trump.
After all, Will, admirably and eloquently, insisted that Trump was unworthy of nomination or election. So our disagreement relates entirely to his insistence that we should stick with an approach to choosing presidents that, twice in the past 16 years, overrode the wishes of Americans, as measured by the popular vote.
Will brushes aside these outcomes. “Two is 40 percent of five elections, which scandalizes only those who make a fetish of simpleminded majoritarianism.”
But when is a belief in majoritarian democracy a “fetish” or “simpleminded,” and when is it just a belief in democracy? The current system makes a fetish of majoritarianism (or, to coin an awkward but more accurate word, pluralitarianism) at the state level, but it’s held meaningless nationally. Who is fetishizing what?
Mediaite:
Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca faced off with Fox’s Tucker Carlsontonight in what became a mesmerizing and fierce back and forth about Ivanka Trump and various things that Duca has written.
Carlson challenged Duca for tweeting the following about Ivanka Trump shortly after she was confronted loudly on an airplane:
Duca told Carlson she thinks Ivanka Trump shouldn’t be confronted like that in public, especially with her kids present, but also said the incoming First Daughter is not immune from criticism.
WaPo:
A&E abruptly cancels KKK docu-series before it airs
Five days after A&E announced a documentary series about the Ku Klux Klan, the network has abruptly canceled the project.
In a statement released on Christmas Eve, an A&E spokesman said the network learned that the show’s producers — from a third-party production company — made cash payments to “facilitate access” to participants, which violates A&E policy. The eight-episode series, which was scheduled to air in January, was “intended to serve as a close look at anti-hate extractors focused on helping people leave the Ku Klux Klan — the racist hate group with a long history of violence against African Americans and others.”
“We had previously provided assurances to the public and to our core partners — including the Anti-Defamation League and Color of Change — that no payment was made to hate group members, and we believed that to be the case at the time,” the statement said. “We have now decided not to move forward with airing this project.”
Though some reality TV producers do pay their subjects, the network emphasized that it is against this practice for documentaries.
Cable news should have this policy for news and be against this practice with Trump supporters.
Clare Foran/Atlantic:
Donald Trump and the Triumph of Climate-Change Denial
The science of man-made global warming has only grown more conclusive. So why have Republicans become less convinced it’s real over the past decade and a half
Indeed, Trump’s election is a triumph of climate denial, and will elevate him to the top of a Republican Party where prominent elected officials have publicly rejected the climate consensus. It’s not that the presidential election was a referendum on global warming. Climate change barely came up during the presidential debates, and voters rated the environment as a far less pressing concern than issues like the economy, terrorism, and health care. But that relative lack of concern signals that voters have not prioritized action on climate change, if they want any action taken at all. Trump’s victory sends a message that failing to embrace climate science still isn’t disqualifying for a presidential candidate, even as scientists warn that the devastating consequences of global warming are under way and expected to intensify in the years ahead.
If Trump fails to take climate change seriously, the federal government may do little to address the threat of a warming planet in the next four years. A presidential administration hostile to climate science also threatens to deepen, or at the very least prolong, the skepticism that already exists in American political life. “If the Trump administration continues to push the false claim that global warming is a hoax, not happening, not human caused, or not a serious problem, I’d expect many conservative Republican voters to follow their lead,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communication.
Monkey Cage Blog/WaPo:
It’s impossible to identify all the reasons Donald Trump won the presidency. In a close election, virtually anything could have tipped the balance: small changes in turnout, Russian hacking, fake news, James B. Comey, mistaken campaign strategy, brilliant campaign strategy, a vulnerable opponent, email servers and so on.
A different, and perhaps more important, question is simply why a candidate such as Trump is appealing to so many Americans and yet deeply off-putting to so many others. In the long run, the sources of these deep and enduring political divisions is of greater consequence than any one election’s outcome.
A string of recent findings points to a key source of these divisions: people’s sensitivity to threat. Some people attend and respond more to potential dangers in the world and therefore are attracted to policies and candidates that they think will offer protection from threats.
Read this piece now, or I’ll...
CBS:
Give One Last Gift This Holiday Season With A Blood Donation
We are good people even if Trump isn’t. Never forget that.