What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[FunkMonk]

Hey FunkMonk you were right, sorta. 

Linda McMahon will be nominated to serve as the next head of the Small Business Administration, the Trump transition team announced Wednesday.

McMahon, the former CEO of the World Wrestling Entertainment and wife of promoter Vince McMahon, ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate from Connecticut in 2010 and 2012.

http://nypost.com/2016/12/07/trump-picks-wrestling-magnate-linda-mcmahon-to-head-sba/

I got a notification on my phone about that and I had to laugh out loud.

All the gifs. All of them.

[CountDeMoney]

For a guy who knows more than the generals do, he sure appoints a lot of them.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2016/12/trump_names_marine_gen_john_allen_to_head_the_department_of_homeland_security.html#correx

Because he wants the opportunity to fire them all.  Seriously. 

"These men will stay here: Mattis, Kelly, Flynn and TBA."

It's a demagoguery thing, you wouldn't understand.

[Caliga]

"These men will stay here: Mattis, Kelly, Flynn and TBA."

[11B4V]

http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/07/news/economy/obamacare-insurers-repeal/index.html

Glad the insurers have our best interest at heart. I was worried there for a moment.

[CountDeMoney]

http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/07/news/economy/obamacare-insurers-repeal/index.html

Glad the insurers have our best interest at heart. I was worried there for a moment.

Don't worry, man.  My federal taxes have your healthcare covered.  I got your back. 

[11B4V]

http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/07/news/economy/obamacare-insurers-repeal/index.html

Glad the insurers have our best interest at heart. I was worried there for a moment.

Don't worry, man.  My federal taxes have your healthcare covered.  I got your back. 

I'm not, my annual prem. is 560.00

[CountDeMoney]

I'm not, my annual prem. is 560.00

LOL, annual, he says.

[jimmy olsen]

A view of the Trump cabinent from the right.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/trumps-cabinet/

I was working on a run-down of Trump's appointments so far, when I saw that Robert Verbruggen did an exemplary job of it already. So I'll just add my two cents to his.

On foreign policy, right now, there are two important players and two bit players. It is very hard for me to imagine that Nikki Haley will have any influence as U.N. Ambassador, and I suspect that Mike Pompeo, like Governor Haley, was chosen primarily for political reasons; he'll be in charge of preparing intelligence briefings that Trump refuses to read. So right now it's Mike Flynn at the NSC, who strikes me as a deeply disturbing crank, versus James Mattis at Defense, who I find reassuring on multiple levels.

The balance depends on who Trump picks as Secretary of State, and whether that appointee tips the scales in favor of extremism or in favor of sobriety. Bolton or Giuliani would tip it decisively in the former direction. Corker would be somewhere in the middle, but I suspect might prove to be a weak player. The main risk with Romney is that he will prove a pure opportunist; since he has neither background in foreign policy nor the trust of the President-elect, his influence will depend on being able to undermine other players, which is a terrible dynamic. So there are a lot of bad choices, but they are not all bad in the same way. I am trying not to get too hopeful about rumors that Trump is expanding the circle of inquiry, and specifically considering John Huntsman, who would make an excellent choice for the job.

On economic policy, Wilbur Ross is a known quantity and promises to be among the most influential Commerce Department heads in history. I expect whoever Trump picks as Trade Representative to be a similarly forceful character. But the big question is what Steve Mnuchin wants, or believes, which is something nobody really knows. If the answer is "nothing much" — which is very possible — then we can expect a Trump administration to rubber-stamp whatever Paul Ryan delivers him. But it's also possible that Mnuchin has actual views on subjects like tax policy, budgeting, and monetary policy. At this point, it's a mystery.

It is worth noting in this regard that Mnuchin is somewhat different from Wall Street corporate honchos (and Goldman alumni) Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson in one important respect. Mnuchin made his initial pile at Goldman, but then left to pursue his own entrepreneurial ventures, whereas Rubin and Paulson climbed the greasy pole to the top. Mnuchin never rose to the level where his core concerns were the kind of macro policymaking issues that Treasury Secretaries deal with — but he's also played the finance game outside of an investment banking context, with his own capital, which is what real businesses have to do. I will be interested to learn how these differences affect his perspective on Federal policy towards the financial system, if they do at all. I will also be very interested to learn whether he reaches out to people who actually know what they are talking about on subjects where he is a novice — which is most subjects under his purview. I'm not holding my breath — but I am watching.

As for the rest of domestic policy, Trump's appointments are entirely unsurprising and reflect the campaign that Trump ran. Do I think Ben Carson will be a good head of HUD? No — I think he'll be completely ineffectual. But I also had no reason, based on the campaign, to think that a Trump administration would have any particular plans for HUD. By contrast, it was clear from the campaign that Trump intended to spend a bunch of money on infrastructure, and it turns out Trump appointed someone for Transportation who is eminently qualified for the position. Appointing Betsy DeVos to Education is an indication that Trump has no particular plans for that department, and is happy for it to become a conservative ideological playground, whereas appointing Jeff Sessions as Attorney General is an indication that he intends to follow through as much as possible on a purely law-and-order approach to questions of policing, immigration enforcement, etc. Verbruggen describes this as Trump choosing by issue whether to tack in a movement-conservative or populist direction; I'd say he's picked people who matter for departments he cares about, and for departments he doesn't care about he's chosen people who don't matter.

The big domestic policy question mark is whether Trump intends to keep his respective promises to repeal Obamacare and to protect Medicare and Social Security from cuts. Paul Ryan wants to help him keep the first promise and break the second. By appointing Tom Price, Trump has put Ryan in a position where he has no basis for complaining about lack of support for doing exactly what he wants. Which, I think, means that Ryan owns both questions, and owns whatever backlash comes of getting either issue wrong, either by cutting popular programs or failing to act expeditiously on his promised agenda. I suspect Ryan will come to rue the invitation to jump into that particular briar patch. But we'll see, won't we?

[Berkut]

I wish I could believe Trump gave anything like the amount of thought necessary to make that analysis meaningful.

[jimmy olsen]

I wish I could believe Trump gave anything like the amount of thought necessary to make that analysis meaningful.

The article he references at the start of his, makes the argument he's at least choosing specific policies to go populist in, and others to go mainstream GOP

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/donald-trumps-populist-conservative-melting-pot/

Trump was not exactly a model of clarity during the campaign. He was certainly consistent on his core issues—primarily immigration and trade—but he kept everyone guessing as to what his other priorities would be. At last, though, his cabinet and staff selections are giving us some major hints as to what he'll try to accomplish.

My TAC colleague Daniel Larison has closely monitored Trump's foreign-policy picks, wondering if Trump's "bomb the sh** out of 'em" hawkishness or his "stay out of Syria and other countries that hate us" non-interventionism will win out in the end. There's a similar question on the domestic front: will Trump govern as a populist or a boring old mainstream conservative?

The answer appears to be both. The populists will win on some issues and the conservatives will win on others, creating a fascinating mix of the two approaches that might or might not work on any number of levels. Trump may keep everyone happy at once, or he may stoke feuds within his own administration, alienate the GOP Congress, and fall out with the working-class voters who were so crucial to his election.

Immigration is a good place to start. Certainly, Trump won't try to enact the literal content of every offhand comment he made about the subject during the campaign—but his attorney-general pick of Sen. Jeff Sessions, a strong restrictionist, suggests he really is an immigration hawk. The true test, though, may come with his choice for the Department of Homeland Security. The squishy Rep. Michael McCaul is in the running, but Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is advising the transition team and has been rumored as a possibility as well. Kobach was an architect of George W. Bush's attempt to track immigrants from high-risk countries (the so-called "Muslim registry"), and also of Arizona's law requiring cops to check suspects' immigration status whenever there's "reasonable suspicion" they're in the country illegally.

Trade is another issue on which Trump was so clear during the campaign that he could hardly change direction now. The financier Wilbur Ross, Trump's future commerce secretary, has said the administration will use "all available means," including tariffs, to keep manufacturing jobs here. The landing team for the next trade representative, meanwhile, is led by former steel CEO Dan DiMicco and trade attorney Robert Lighthizer; they are, shall we say, not well-liked among the free-trade crowd. (Rep. Charles Boustany, playing up his support for strict trade enforcement—though downplaying his support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—is reportedly making a bid for that position.)

Infrastructure is another populist win. Trump has chosen Steve Bannon, a strong advocate of the president-elect's trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, as his chief strategist and senior counselor. And Elaine Chao, Trump's choice for transportation secretary, has a little-remembered record of supporting rail projects. (Today she's best known as George W. Bush's despised-by-unions labor secretary. Incidentally, she's married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.)

Ideally, boosting infrastructure spending will create construction jobs, stimulate the economy, and facilitate future growth, though some experts have doubts. The plan could merely dole out tax breaks to investors and contractors for projects that would have taken place anyway, or focus on unnecessary new projects without maintaining our current infrastructure, for example.

On other issues, though, Trump takes a stereotypical Republican tack. This is most in tension with his populist image on the subject of tax cuts. I complained numerous times in this space that, despite Trump's protests to the contrary, his campaign's tax plan was essentially an unpaid-for gift to the rich, according to both liberal and conservative think tanks. His treasury pick: Steve Mnuchin, a second-generation Goldman Sachs vet who similarly insists that Trump and Congress will hammer out tax reforms that don't benefit the wealthy. Given Republicans' control of Congress and the substance of Trump's previous ideas, I'm not optimistic that anyone will force the administration to stick to this claim.

Then there's health care, where Trump will face the tense reality that while Obamacare is unpopular and unstable, it also provides insurance to lots of people and contains numerous popular provisions. To head the Department of Health and Human Services he has selected Rep. Tom Price, a Republican surgeon who's actually drafted an Obamacare replacement plan. As Robert Pear, the New York Times' excellent health-care reporter, spelled out last week, Price's replacement is considerably more market-oriented—and considerably less generous—than the original law. Price, a surgeon, also has a track record of promoting doctor-friendly legislation; his bill would make it more difficult to win medical-malpractice lawsuits, for instance, an entirely defensible idea that nonetheless gives a whiff of cronyism coming from him.

Also noteworthy: Trump went with Betsy DeVos, a passionate supporter of school vouchers, to head the Department of Education. There isn't necessarily a "populist" position on education reform, but DeVos most certainly is in agreement with mainstream conservatives on this one.

So how does this add up in the end? Trump seems to be compartmentalizing his issues—rather than trying to strike a populist/conservative balance on each one, he's going in a specific direction with conviction. The treasury secretary will promote huge tax cuts while free-trade deals are being fed through a shredder, and everyone's heads will explode at the Wall Street Journal.

At the very center of his administration, though, there may be conflict. As James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out last week, both economic nationalists like Steve Bannon and traditional conservatives like Mike Pence will be providing Trump advice on the overall direction of his presidency, and their priorities are likely to diverge. A wild bit of speculation: the conservatives will have the upper hand while Republicans control Congress, but the populists will find more common ground with Democrats—who if history is any guide will gain seats in 2018. The executive branch can do a lot on its own, but major policy shifts will require bills from the legislature.

And in 2020, of course, what will matter is whether Trump's policies have meaningfully improved the lives of the people who elected him. That will depend on how these ideas are implemented, not to mention how they interact with economic conditions, each other, and the Fed's monetary policy. On that, only time will tell.

[CountDeMoney]

He's rage-tweeting against the Carrier union president now

Donald J. Trump – Verifiied
@realDonaldTrump

If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues
5:56 PM - 7 Dec 2016[/

Oh man 

[CountDeMoney]

Donald J. Trump – Verified
@realDonaldTrump

Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!
4:41 PM - 7 Dec 2016

Way to go, America: you elected the 8th grade Mean Girl

[CountDeMoney]

And just think--he only has Twitter right now.  Wait until he's got the Justice Department to play with.

[CountDeMoney]

The Washington Post
Opinions
Thank you, Trump voters, for this wonderful joke

By Garrison Keillor
December 6 at 7:53 PM

He promised the swamp would be drained,

Was elected, said "Rain!" and it rained

And the old crocodiles

Wore flesh-eating smiles

And the turtles were well entertained.

It's a wonderful satire right out of Twain or Thurber. A minority of the electorate goes for the loosest and least knowledgeable candidate, certain that he will lose and their votes will be only harmless protest, a middle finger to Washington, and then — whoa. The joke comes true. You put a whoopee cushion on your father's chair and he sits down and it barks and he has a massive coronary. You wanted to get a rise out of him and instead he falls down dead. Very funny.

Thank you, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for this wonderful joke. Voters in high dudgeon against Wall Street manipulators and the Washington aristocracy vote for the billionaire populist who puts tycoons in power and the Republican hierarchy who owned the logjam that the voters voted against. If Billy the Kid had been smart, he'd've run for sheriff.

And now we sit and watch in disbelief as the victor drops one piece of china after another, spits in the soup, sticks his fist through a painting and gobbles up the chocolates. Not satisfied with the usual election night victory speech, he stages a post-election victory tour and gloatfest, a series of rallies in arenas where he can waggle his thumbs and smirk and holler and point out the journalists in their pen for the mob to boo and shake their fists at. He puts the Secret Service through their paces, highways are closed, planes diverted, cities disrupted, just so the man can say how much fun it was to defeat Hillary Clinton and confound the experts.

I stood in an airport last Thursday and watched live cable news coverage of his first stop in Indiana where he toured a factory whose owner had been promised a $7 million tax break in return for not laying off 800 workers. In November, 178,000 jobs were created and unemployment fell, and here was a platoon of journalists in Indiana trailing a big galoot with a red tie who offered a corporation $7 million not to lose 800 workers. No gain, simply a non-loss. It was a classic TV moment, extensive live coverage of essentially nothing whatsoever and we all stood in a stupor and watched, like people mesmerized by drops of rain sliding down a windowpane.

Eighty thousand Trump voters in three states gave us this man, which goes to show you how much damage a few people can do. It takes 12 million to provide health care, 3 million to run the public schools, but 19 men with box cutters can turn the country upside down and empower the paranoid right and create the pretense for wars that will cost billions and kill a million people and give us a permanent army of blue uniforms yelling at us to take off our shoes and put our laptops into plastic trays.

He is a showman, and oddity has paid off for him, as it did for Lady Gaga and Gorgeous George and Liberace. But the public demands new tricks. Today, railing at the journalists who slavishly cover him is, like bear-baiting or lion-taming, entertainment enough, but by next fall he will need to pull canaries out of his ears, and by 2018 he'll be diving on horseback from a high tower into a pool of water while playing "Malagueña" on a trumpet. Meanwhile, the Democrats wander in the woods, walking into trees. A wealthy San Francisco liberal is reelected as minority leader in the House, having flung millions into the wind and gotten skunked in 2014 and drubbed this fall, and a lackluster black Muslim congressman from Minneapolis is a leading candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee, the person who will need to connect with disaffected workers in Youngstown and Pittsburgh. Why not a ballet dancer or a Buddhist monk?

Meanwhile, the emperor-elect parades in the nude while his congressional courtiers admire him and the nation drifts toward the rapids. The one bright spot is the old draft-dodger's newfound fondness for generals, including the one who talked him out of the idea of torturing prisoners of war. Military experience does encourage a certain respect for reality. There is hope that if the showman should decide late one night to incinerate Iran or North Korea and get it over with, someone might say, "Hold on. Let's think this through."

[Syt]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/07/trump-scott-pruitt-environmental-protection-agency

Climate change sceptic Scott Pruitt to lead Environmental Protection Agency

Donald Trump's latest cabinet pick is a clear signal of Republicans' desire to dismantle Obama's climate legacy

Scott Pruitt, attorney general of Oklahoma and a sceptic of climate science, has been chosen by Donald Trump as the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Pruitt, a Republican, has been picked at a time when he is part of legal action waged by 28 states against the EPA to halt the Clean Power Plan, an effort by Barack Obama's administration to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. His nomination is a clear signal of Republicans' desire to dismantle Obama's climate legacy.

"We're very accustomed to the naysayers and the critics," said Trump aide Kellyanne Conway. "Attorney General Pruitt has great qualifications and a good record as AG of Oklahoma and there were a number of qualified candidates for that particular position that the president-elect interviewed. We look forward to the confirmation hearings."

Pruitt has called the EPA's rule "unlawful and overreaching" and has cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific evidence that human activity is causing the planet to warm. "That debate is far from settled," he said in May. "Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind."

Environmental groups said that Pruitt was a "puppet" of the fossil fuel industry, pointing to his intervention in 2014 to push back against air pollution standards by using a three-page letter penned by Devon Energy, one of Oklahoma's largest oil and gas companies.

"Having Scott Pruitt in charge of the US Environmental Protection Agency is like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires," said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. "He is a climate science denier who, as attorney general for the state of Oklahoma, regularly conspired with the fossil fuel industry to attack EPA regulations. Nothing less than our children's health is at stake."

Trip Van Noppen, president of Earthjustice, which has joined in defence of the Clean Power Plan in court, said "every American should be appalled" by Pruitt's nomination.

"The head of the Environmental Protection Agency should be making sure that our air is clean to breathe and our water is safe to drink, not working to make sure polluters make more money," he said.

Van Noppen added: "Pruitt has cast doubt about whether global warming is related to human activity. Anyone who doesn't believe in scientific research is completely unqualified to lead the primary federal agency tasked with addressing this issue."

Eric T Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, said Pruitt was a "dangerous and unqualified choice" who had acted as an "agent of the oil and gas industry".

"The science is clear: climate change and the existential threat it poses to all Americans is real," he said. "Yet as attorney general, Mr Pruitt not only denied the existence of climate change, but took steps to accelerate its devastating effects on Americans.

"If the EPA under Scott Pruitt fails to uphold our nation's environmental laws, I stand ready to use the full power of my office to compel their enforcement by the agency."

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senate leader, said Pruitt's positions on climate change and public health meant that he would "have to answer many tough questions throughout the nomination process".

A key ally of the energy industry, Pruitt has sided with Exxon Mobil, which is the subject of an investigation by attorneys general in Massachusetts and New York over claims that it misled investors by covering up its knowledge of climate change.

If confirmed, he will probably aid the effort to demolish the Clean Power Plan, although this will not be a simple task as it is underpinned by the Clean Air Act of 1970. Pruitt could choose to not defend it in court or fail to implement its rules, however. The plan is currently on hold pending the legal action.

This year is set to be the warmest on record, following a trend of rising temperates over the past century. Scientists have warned that the US faces unprecedented coastline inundation, extreme weather events, drought and displacement of people should climate change not be addressed.

(Trip Van Noppen is an awesome name, though)