Pete Hegseth might end up in charge of the Pentagon after all. One of the senators expected to block him, Republican Joni Ernst of Iowa, has reportedly caved after threats from Trump. From the New York Times:

Mr. Trump’s hard-line backers paid for ads in Ms. Ernst’s home state, questioned her Republican bona fides on social media and even threatened to launch primary challenges against her in 2026 to push her toward supporting Mr. Hegseth as the nominee.

Some prominent Trump activists, including Charlie Kirk and Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing strategist, pushed to recruit Kari Lake, the former Republican candidate for governor of Arizona who grew up in Iowa, as a potential challenger to Ms. Ernst.

The onslaught of pressure put Ms. Ernst in a bind. Over two terms in the Senate, she has built a reputation for being a principled leader on matters of sexual assault and the military. As a combat veteran, she also holds strong views on the role of women in the military that clash significantly with those of Mr. Hegseth, who has said women should not serve in combat roles.

Sen. Ernst has not explicitly said she would approve Hegseth’s nomination, but it looks like she’s moving in that direction.

And then there’s this, from David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:

Heritage Action is launching a pressure campaign against these GOP senators to support Trump’s nominees. It’s small, mostly nothingburger effort to allow Heritage Action to tout its pro-Trump bona fides, but it’s a reasonably good proxy for the list of GOP senators to keep an eye on:

• • Senate Majority Leader John Thune (SD)
  • Mitch McConnell (KY)
  • Lisa Murkowski (AK)
  • Susan Collins (ME)
  • Joni Ernst (IA)
  • Bill Cassidy (LA)
  • Thom Tillis (NC)
  • Todd Young (IN)
  • John Curtis (UT)

Mitch McConnell is 82 and intends to stay in the Senate until his term ends in January 2027, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he bails out sooner.

Republicans in Congress might have noticed yesterday’s report that during Trump’s first term, Bill Barr’s Justice Department was helping itself to congressional staff records looking for sources of leaked information.

Investigators also sought congressional staff members’ records to try to find the sources for a number of Washington Post articles. They included one about a secret surveillance court order against the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, others about a Russian ambassador’s conversations with senior Trump advisers, and another about the Obama administration’s efforts to fight Russian election interference. …

… Two Democratic members of Congress and 43 congressional staff members at the time of the 2017 articles had their communications records subpoenaed by the Justice Department. Of the staff members, 21 were Democrats, 20 were Republicans, and two held nonpartisan jobs in Congress. 

Just being a Republican won’t save you over the next four years.

Stuff to read: This is a big one — You Should Be More Worried About Trump’s Planned Military Purge by Don Moynihan. Trump is going to destroy the U.S. military as we know it if he isn’t stopped.

It appears the guy who assasinated the health insurance CEO has been apprehended. (Note to self: If I ever have to assasinate somebody, leave the country right away when it’s done.)

Here’s a transript of Trump’s Meet the Press interview. I haven’t gotten through it all yet. I got stuck in the tariff section. This is Trump:

I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you look at my — just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. And I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars and we had no inflation. In fact, when I handed it over, they didn’t have inflation for a year and a half. They went almost two years just based on what I had created. And then they created inflation with energy and with spending too much. So I think we will — I’m a big believer in tariffs. I think tariffs are the most beautiful word. I think they’re beautiful. It’s going to make us rich. We’re subsidizing Canada to the tune over $100 billion a year. We’re subsidizing Mexico for almost $300 billion. We shouldn’t be — why are we subsidizing these countries? If we’re going to subsidize them, let them become a state. We’re subsidizing Mexico and we’re subsidizing Canada and we’re subsidizing many countries all over the world. And all I want to do is I want to have a level, fast, but fair playing field.

Now, that makes no sense at all. I’m not sure what he’s calling “subsidies.” Trade deficits, maybe? And “It’s going to make us rich?” I think he genuinely believes this.

So then Kristen Welker said, “Sir, your previous tariffs during your first administration cost Americans some $80 billion, and now you have major companies from Walmart, Black & Decker, AutoZone, saying that any tariffs are going to force them to drive up prices for their consumers. How do you make sure that these CEOs, that these companies don’t, in fact, pass on the cost of tariffs to their consumers?” And Trump said,

They cost Americans nothing. They made a great economy for us. They also solve another problem. If we were going to have problems having to do with wars and having to do with other things, tariffs — I have stopped wars with tariffs by saying, “You guys want to fight, it’s great. But both of you are going to pay tariffs to the United States at 100%.” And — they have many purposes, tariffs, if properly used. I don’t say you use them like a madman. I say properly used. But it didn’t cost this country anything. It made this country money. And we never really got the chance to go all out because we had to fight Covid in the last part, and we did it very successfully. And when I handed it over to Biden, the stock market was higher than what it was just previous to Covid coming in. It was actually higher. Tariffs are a — properly used, are a very powerful tool, not only economically, but also for getting other things outside of economics.

He stopped wars with tariffs? WTF? Does anyone want to guess where in his mis-wired brain he thinks he stopped a war with tariffs?

An even bigger worry is foreign policy. We got lucky in Trump’s first term. See Michael Tomasky, The World Is on Fire. And Trump’s About to Be President. Feel Better? at The New Republic.

The main question here for Americans concerns the fact that in six weeks, Donald Trump is going to be the president of the United States. The surprising events in Syria serve as a harrowing reminder that there’s a big, complicated world out there and, pretty soon, Trump is going to be the single most powerful person in it—the “horse in a hospital” that comedian John Mulaney likened him to, though horses are far less corrupt. And the weird, and worrying, thing is that even though Trump was president before, we don’t really know all that much about his foreign policy instincts because he was never really tested on foreign policy in his first term.

Think about it. There were no major crises during Trump’s term. There were no 9/11 attacks, obviously, but even beyond that, there weren’t any major wars; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came after he lost reelection. There was no big uprising like the 2014 Maidan Revolution, or the Tahrir Square and Arab Spring revolts of 2011. The Middle East was comparatively quiet, especially to those of us who recall the fraught part of 2006 or the past year’s conflagration that followed in the wake of Hamas’s attacks in Israel. Assad’s butchery was an ongoing affair, but that’s not the same as a new broad regional conflict kicking off, which forces an American president to decide what moral face the United States is going to present to the world. Compared to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Trump had it pretty easy—it even fell to Biden to keep the commitments to wind down the war in Afghanistan and honor the hideous commitments Trump made to the Taliban, much to Biden’s detriment in public opinion polling.

Trump may honestly believe that the world behaved itself during his first term just because he was President. But the world isn’t afraid of him. The world thinks he’s a malleable buffoon. And Trump won’t have anyone around him with more sense than he does, as he did during his first term.

This is going to be a damn mess.

In another part of the interview, Trump said he was going to end birthright citizenship “on day one” with an executive action. Which, of course, he doesn’t have the authority to do because it’s written into the Constitution. Welker drilled him on this, and he wouldn’t back down. I don’t believe he understands the amending the Constitution thing.

Josh Marshall commented,

I’ve pointed out repeatedly that Donald Trump cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order. It’s right there in the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment and that clear meaning has been confirmed and buttressed by 150 years of case law and attestations by the United States government. It’s very important to state these realities confidently and right in his face. The guy is constantly operating within the territory of his boasts and trash talk and it’s his opponents who end up letting him.

This doesn’t mean he won’t try to do this or that he won’t find judges who will back him up.

Yes, it needs to be said to his face. But there’s no one in his orbit now who will do that.  Naturally, some guy on Fox News is calling birthright citizenship a “loophole.”

Did I mention this is going to be a mess? I believe I did.

I guess the Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria is over. Tulsi Gabbard must be so disappointed.

I don’t pretend to be expert in the Middle East, Let me just direct you to Juan Cole’s analysis at Informed Comment. For another perspective, see Eliot A. Cohen at The Atlantic.

If you missed Chris Hayes on Friday, be sure to watch this bit from the beginning of his program on the heist-in-progress that will be the next Trump Administration.

Much conversation today about Trump’s interview on Meet the Press. I did not watch, but I understand he wants to change the Constitution and end birthright citizenship by executive order (?) and is still talking about mass deportations. Oh, and he wants everyone who was on the J6 House committee in prison. I may look into this tomorrow.

Trump has nominated Billy Long, a former U.S. Representative from Missouri, to head the IRS. I saw the name “Billy Long” and alarms went off. Sure enough, I’ve mentioned him before. This is from 2022, in a post about the specimens who were running to take over retiring Senator Roy Blunt’s seat: “Billy Long is the fellow who resembles a talking potato and who believes abortion rights are the leading cause of mass shooting.”

I’ll come back to Long’s theory connecting mass shootings to abortion. The more pressing issue is that he’s already pressured the IRS to strip the Humane Society of its tax-exempt status.

In 2011, Long signed a letter pushing the IRS to launch a probe of the tax-exempt status of the Humane Society of the United States, a nonprofit that focuses on animal welfare and opposes animal cruelty. The letter followed the Humane Society’s support of a successful Missouri ballot measure strengthening regulations on dog breeders.

The dog breeders in this case were unregulated puppy mills. This has been a contentious issue in Missouri going back years. These puppy mills keep female dogs in tiny, dirty cages so they can produce one litter after another. Often the puppies get sold through legitimate pet stores for a hefty profit. Here are the regulations that Missouri voters approved in 2011:

New regulations pushed by animal advocates, approved by voters and ultimately modified by the legislature limited the number of dogs a breeder could have at any given time. It also banned the stacked cages with wire floors that proved so damaging to paws, required breeders to offer sufficient space for dogs to move in their enclosures and mandated dogs get adequate rest between breeding cycles.

The puppy mills had been an issue going back years, as I remember, but the legislature resisted regulating them. The puppy mill owners had some clout in Jefferson City, and some of the legislators from rural counties didn’t think The Gubmint should be telling folks what to do with their animals. And, unfortunately, the state is still ground zero for puppy mills. Here’s a 2024 report from a St, Louis television station. I take it the laws aren’t really being enforced. And some in the legislature want to weaken the 2011 law.

Anyway, closing down puppy mills and seeing to it dogs are treated humanely is a major focus of the Humane Society. Billy Long thinks this is political extremism that needs to be shut down. Long also signed a separate letter in 2015 demanding the IRS investigate the tax status of the Clinton Foundation.

It’s clear Long won’t be shy about using the IRS to punish nonprofits he doesn’t like, which no doubt is why Trump nominated him. And there’s a pending House-passed bill that would give the Trump administration new powers to rescind the tax status of groups it deems “terrorist supporting organizations,” I’m sure Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Sierra Club will be labeled terrorist and denied tax-exempt status. This is serious.

Back to Billy Long’s issues with abortion — if you can’t access the Vanity Fair article I linked in 2022, here’s a Newsweek article for you.

Rep. Billy Long, who serves Missouri, made the startling claims on Columbia radio station 93.9 The Eagle. The 66-year-old said: “It’s a systemic problem. When I was growing up in Springfield, you had one or two murders a year. Now, we have two, three, four a week in Springfield, Missouri, so something has happened to our society, and I go back to abortion. When we decided it was OK to murder kids in their mother’s wombs, life has no value to a lot of these folks.”

Billy Long was born in 1955, Wikipedia says. If you want to check out the homicide rate in Springfield, Missouri, in the 1950s and 1960s compared to now, be my guest. I do know I’ve read that ownership of semiautomatic “assault” weapons was unusual before 1970 or so. It’s also the case that the homicide rate in Missouri has climbed since tne nutjob state legislature voted to eliminate any gun control law they could find. I don’t believe there’s another state that has laxer gun laws than Missouri. They tried to nullify federal gun laws, you might remember, but the courts eventually slapped that down.

So now it’s Pete Hegseth circling the drain, as it were. Along with being utterly unqualified to head the Department of Defense, turns out Pete has a serious and ongoing problem with alcohol that’s been confirmed — off the record — by Fox News employees. Someone also found an old video of Pete trashing Donald Trump. And while no GOP senator is on the record as being absolutely opposed to Hegseth, several are signaling as hard as they can that Hegseth doesn’t have the votes. It appears he has several interviews scheduled with senators today, which may not go well.

Even better, according to several reports, Trump is now consideirng replacing Hegseth with … Ron DeSantis? Seriously?

Mr. Trump is openly discussing other people for the job, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom he defeated in the Republican presidential primaries and with whom he has had a contentious relationship. Mr. Trump likes the story of bringing on someone he dominated publicly, and he talked about it with Mr. DeSantis on Tuesday at a service honoring three Florida sheriff’s deputies who were killed in a car crash.

According to Wikipedia, Ron was in the Navy, where he achieved the rank of Lieutenant. He appears to have mostly done legal work for the Navy. He does have executive experience as a governor, which makes him more qualified than Hegseth. But of all people. The issue, of course, is that Trump’s candidate list consists of people he can control or dominate. Ron has two more years to be governor of Florida, but then he’s term-limited from running again. So he might be tempted to take the job, if it’s offered.

Oh, and Trump announced today he’s putting a cryptocurrency guy in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Of course.

At Salon, Heather Digy Parton predicts that in this coming term Trump will get over his shyness about cutting Medicare and Social Security. Trump has a history going back to 2015 of promising to not cut Medicare and Social Security. But his proposed budgets cut the programs every year he was in office, a detail that got through to very few voters, I’m sure. Digby continues,

That last budget was put together by the man Trump is bringing back as his Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and one of the principal authors of Project 2025, Russell Vought. It’s highly questionable whether Vought will be as circumspect about the plans to cut the programs this time or whether Trump will care because all of that was predicated on Trump’s need to run for office again. Without that hanging over their heads they have no need to hold back. Republicans have wanted to do away with those programs since they were first passed. This may be their chance to finally get it done.

See also Nicole Lafond at TPM, House Republican Wants Party To Boldly Own Plans To Gut The Social Safety Net.

Predictably, as soon as it became clear that Trump had secured a right-wing trifecta, whispers of “reform” to the programs returned, the language Republicans like to use to put a positive spin on their interest in slashing programs that benefit America’s most vulnerable, perhaps in order to justify tax cuts for the wealthy or, perhaps, for no real reason at all.

It started with reports of chopping-block conversations among congressional Republicans as they looked for ways to subsidize the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which primarily benefit those making $400,000 or more a year and are set to expire in 2025. Republicans began making noise about “reforms” to Medicaid and Food Stamps programs, which, of course, serve low-income Americans who need health insurance and can’t afford basic, nutritious food. 

So, yeah, they’re going to try.

To catch up on what’s been going on in South Korea over the past couple of days, see South Korean Leader Will Face Impeachment Vote Over Martial Law Declaration at the New York Times. Note also there’s something hinky going on in France. See No-confidence vote topples French government, plunges country into chaos at the Washington Post.

Regarding the Hunter Biden pardon — I can’t criticize Joe for this, and those throwing fits need to calm down and consider what sort of lower life forms are about to take over the Justice Department. It’s a sweeping pardon to protect Hunter from future political harassment and worse from the humanoid MAGA worms, or whatever they are. See also Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money and also Jasmine Crockett Has Blistering Message For GOP Pearl-Clutching Over Hunter Biden Pardon by Ben Blanchet at Huffpost.

Speaking of humanoid MAGA worm Pete Hegseth, Jane Mayer reports at the New Yorker that

Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. 

Yes, this is just the guy we need in charge of the Department of Defense. See also David Kurtz at TPM.

Many are still hyperventilating at the thought of Kash Patel as head of FBI. And it’s also a scandal that Trump intends to fire Christopher Wray just to replace him with a loyalist. As explained by David Frum at the Atlantic,

For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics. A new president might choose a political ally as attorney general, but the FBI director was different. An FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s choice remained on the job deep into Reagan’s second term, when Reagan moved him to head the CIA. Reagan’s FBI appointee served through the George H. W. Bush presidency and into the Bill Clinton administration. Clinton fired the inherited official—the first time a president ever fired an FBI director—only because the outgoing Bush administration had left behind a Department of Justice report accusing the director of ethical lapses. (Clinton tried to coax the tainted director into resigning of his own volition. Only after the coaxing failed did Clinton act.)

And so it continued into the 21st century. Except in a single case of serious scandal, Senate-confirmed FBI directors stayed in their post until they quit or until their 10-year term expired. Never, never, never was a Senate-confirmed FBI director fired so that the president could replace him with a loyalist. Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that there must be no return to the days when J. Edgar Hoover did special favors for presidents who perpetuated his power.

Trump fired James Comey to try to shut down the investigation into his ties to Russia, but he was persuaded there would be blowback. So his people gave the excuse that Comey was being fired because he mishandled Hillary Clinton’s investigation. Not that anyone bellieved that was why he was fired, of course. But now Trump isn’t even bothering with an excuse. Wray has two years to go in his ten-year term.

Also note that the same party that has been using “defund the police” against Democratics for way too long are about to completely gut the criminal justice system at the federal level.

And do read Tom Nichols, The Kash Patel Principle, at The Atlantic. No paywall.

In my last post I recommended a piece by Greg Sargent at The New Republic, Mexican President’s Harsh Takedown of Trump Exposes an Ugly MAGA Scam. You might want to review that before reading further.

A couple of days ago Trump posted on Truth Social,

Just had a wonderful conversation with the new President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. She has agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border. We also talked about what can be done to stop the massive drug inflow into the United States, and also, U.S. consumption of these drugs. It was a very productive conversation!

If you’ve read the Greg Sargent piece, you already know this is bullshit. Here is how President Sheinbaum responded:

En nuestra conversación con el presidente Trump, le expuse la estrategia integral que ha seguido México para atender el fenómeno migratorio, respetando los derechos humanos. Gracias a ello se atiende a las personas migrantes y a las caravanas previo a que lleguen a la frontera.…

— Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (@Claudiashein) November 28, 2024

Translation:

“In our conversation with President Trump, I explained to him the comprehensive strategy that Mexico has followed to address the migration phenomenon, respecting human rights,” Sheinbaum wrote in a statement on X, formerly Twitter. “Thanks to this, migrants and caravans are assisted before they reach the border. We reiterate that Mexico’s position is not to close borders but to build bridges between governments and between peoples.”

Katie Herchenroeder wrote at Vanity Fair,

Earlier on Wednesday, before Trump posted his statement on Truth Social, his social media site, Sheinbaum said they “had an excellent conversation.”

“We discussed Mexico’s strategy on the migration phenomenon, and I shared that caravans are not arriving at the northern border because they are being taken care of in Mexico,” she wrote on X. “We also discussed strengthening collaboration on security issues within the framework of our sovereignty and the campaign we are carrying out in the country to prevent the consumption of fentanyl.”

She must realize now what a snake Trump is.

The two presidents’ call comes days after Trump announced he would impose, via an executive order on the first day of his presidency, 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada. “This Tariff,” he began, “will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”

Avocados, tequila, and beers like Modelo are some of the products that would likely see price hikes should Trump follow through.

In a letter responding to Trump’s tariff threat, Sheinbaum said her government would retaliate if he moved forward with this stated plan. “For every tariff, there will be a response in kind,” Sheinbaum wrote, according to a statement released by the Mexican Embassy Tuesday morning. “Among Mexico’s main exporters to the United States are General Motors, Stellantis, and Ford Motor Company, which arrived in Mexico 80 years ago. Why impose a tariff that would jeopardize them? Such a measure would be unacceptable and would lead to inflation and job losses in both the United States and Mexico,” she added.

Plus, as was spelled out in the Greg Sargent piece, Mexico has been taking extraordinary measures to apprehend most of the migrants traveling through Mexico and stop them from reaching the United States. “During the campaign, Trump simply pretended none of that was happening.” Sargent writes. “It’s one of MAGA’s biggest deceptions, and his latest scam carries it forward.”  (Why the Biden Administration wasn’t broadcasting the facts about the border from every loudspeaker in the country all year long is another question.)

I don’t know if Trump and Scheinbaum talked about tariffs, but we do know he talked about tariffs to Justin Trudeau. The Canadian Prime Minister traveled to Mar-a-Lago to try to talk sense to Trump and came away unsatisfied.

Today we learned that Trump has named Charles Kushner, Jared’s ex-felon daddy, ambassador to France. Was this a slap back at Emmanuel Macron? 

And we learned that Pete Hegseth’s mother sent him an email accusing him of abusing many women for many years. Your own Mama, Pete. Take it to heart.

Update: Holy bleep — Trump wants Kash Patel to run the FBI.

Your reading assignment today is by Greg Sargent at The New Republic, Mexican President’s Harsh Takedown of Trump Exposes an Ugly MAGA Scam. Very briefly, Trump is threatening Mexico with a 25 percent tariff on all goods imported from Mexico. This is to “force” Mexico to do something about the migrants and fentanyl from “pouring” into the United States. However, Mexico has already done quite a bit to reduce such border crossings, which is why the apprehensions are way down.

During the campaign, Trump simply pretended none of that was happening. It’s one of MAGA’s biggest deceptions, and his latest scam carries it forward. The very idea that Mexico must be bullied with tariffs into cracking down on migrants is designed to imply that it’s doing nothing right now—it’s taking advantage of us, Trump might say—and only his fearsome threats can force it into submission. …

… All this paves the way for larger deceptions later. Bank on it: The moment Trump takes office, the lower apprehension numbers will magically become real metrics. Fox News will start trumpeting them, and Trump will start claiming the border has achieved pacification due to his strength. Indeed, Trump very well may credit his current threat of tariffs with “forcing” Mexico to make the lower numbers of border crossings a reality.

Trump’s greatest talent, other than self-promotion, is his skill at taking credit for other people’s work. Media let him get away with it, of course. Do read the whole Greg Sarget piece.

Along those lines, see Trump team says Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire deal brokered by Biden is actually Trump’s win.

You probably heard that Jack Smith requested the J6 and documents cases be dismissed. Barbara McQuade says,

In fact, this move could be an effort to keep the cases alive in the long term. An interesting tell in each motion is Smith’s request to dismiss the cases “without prejudice.” That means that the cases can be filed again. By dismissing the cases now on his own terms, Smith blocks Trump’s attorney general from dismissing the cases for all time.

In addition, by filing his motions pre-emptively, Smith was able to explain his reasons for dismissing the case, rather than allowing Trump’s future AG to mischaracterize them. According to Smith, he was dismissing the case not because of the merits or strength of the cases, but because he had to. As Smith explains, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose opinions are “binding” on the special counsel, has concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or criminally prosecuted under the Constitution. OLC reasoned that criminal charges would make it impossible for a president to carry out his constitutional duties in light of the distraction of preparing a criminal defense, the public stigma that would hamper his leadership role and the obstacles prison would impose on his ability to perform his duties.

But Smith was careful to note that this relief from criminal prosecution is “temporary,” and ends when the president leaves office. Smith cites OLC as concluding that this form of immunity for a sitting president “would generally result in the delay, but not the forbearance, of any criminal trial” That is, Trump gets a reprieve, but only during his term in office.

Trump will be lucky if he’s still alive in four years, considering he must be a massive cardio-vascular event waiting to happen.

In transition news, see Trump team signs some, but not all, critical transition documents. In brief, Trump is keeping the sources for his transition funding secret — we know Trump isn’t paying for this out of his own pocket — and also is refusing to request FBI checks of appointees. Trump wants the background checks to wait until he’s inaugurated, so he can control them, apparently.

Try to have a happy Thanksgiving, and put the catastrophe out of your mind for a bit. It’s going to be a long four years.

I’ve noticed a lot of talk about 2004. After G.W. Bush won re-election he talked expansively about his “political capital” and how he was going to spend it. And he spent it promoting his stupid scheme to privatize Social Security, which flopped miserably and set the stage for a huge Dem win in the 2006 midterms. Many fingers are now being crossed the next couple of years will be a similar story.

The two headlines that stood out for me today were both at WaPo. One is Trump is coming for the executive branch. Does he know what he’s doing? by Dan Balz. The subhead is “The president-elect has signaled he will be destructive, but he seems motivated by retribution rather than saving money.” Seems?  A WaPo headline from yesterday said Trump plans to fire Jack Smith’s team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election. I understand Smith is dismantling his team and plans to leave before Trump is sworn in, so Trump may not get to fire him. The subhead to that story is “The plans show how president-elect Donald Trump wants to use the Justice Department to address his own personal grievances.”

I don’t doubt he intends to use massive amounts of government resources trying to prove the 2020 election was stolen from him. That brings me to the other headline from today, Pam Bondi, Trump’s AG pick, said ‘prosecutors will be prosecuted.’

Bondi said the Justice Department’s special counsel investigation into whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian interference in the 2016 election needed to be dissolved. She declared that the 45th president’s first impeachment in 2019 was a “sham.” And when Trump was indicted four times after leaving office, Bondi was blunt about who deserved legal scrutiny — and it wasn’t the former president.

“The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Bondi declared on Fox News in 2023, soon after Trump’s fourth set of criminal charges. “The investigators will be investigated.”

You might recall that the 2020 election was already investigated up the wazoo. But maybe now Trump has found people who will fabricate new evidence. Whether this will turn out to be Privatization 2.0 probably depends on how it gets covered by the media, however. In other words, don’t count on it.

Here’s a rather alarming story I’ve seen only in Rolling Stone, for example — Trump Refuses to Disclose Who Is Funding His Transition, by Peter Wade. I knew about some of this, but not all of it.

True to character, Donald Trump is already flouting ethics laws and norms even before he takes office as president in 2025. The president-elect is accepting secret donations to fund his transition while refusing to sign ethics pledges or deliver an ethics plan mandated by the Presidential Transitions Act. The transition also has not signed an agreement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that would allow the agency to do background checks on Trump nominees.

The transition has missed deadlines in September and October despite transition team leaders Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon promising to sign memorandums of understanding with the Biden White House that would facilitate the outgoing administration’s collaboration with Trump’s transition team. According to The New York Times, the Trump transition has privately created an ethics code and conflict-of-interest guidance for transition staff, but those documents do not include a legal requirement — a statement regarding how Trump will handle conflicts of interest while in office. ,,,

… Historically, presidential transitions — including Trump’s 2016 transition — have signed an agreement to receive financial assistance from the General Services Administration, which is responsible for monitoring the transition process. By accepting the funds and signing the agreement, transitions are agreeing to abide by certain conditions that would limit individual donations to $5,000 and mandate transparency regarding donors. Without disclosing donors, foreign influence is also a concern since there are no restrictions on international donations to transitions, unlike presidential campaigns. …

… Instead of allowing the F.B.I. to investigate Trump administration nominees’ backgrounds, the transition is conducting private background checks. According to CNN, Trump and his acolytes believe that the F.B.I.’s process is too slow and could get in the way of the work Trump wants to do to implement his agenda. Sources told CNN that behind closed doors, Trump has questioned whether background checks are necessary.

Are we alarmed yet?

And then there are the DOGE boys, Musk and Ramaswamy, who are supposed to be in charge of “government efficiency.” See Matt Ford at The New Republic, The More You Learn About Elon Musk’s DOGE, the Less Sense It Makes. They’re merrily taking a sledgehammer to government bureaucracy. Right now they’re working on smashing muc of the regulatory system and firing the workers maintaining that system. I understand their long-term plans include gutting things like housing assistance (which might put me out of my home) and Medicaid, which among other things pays for most old folks in long-term care facilities. How that goes over with the public may depend on how widely the pain is spread. A lot of the damage done might not be evident right away.

The mass deportations could get very ugly and messy and could cause concern among the not-deported. And the anticipated hit on the economy, especially food prices, should be noted. The bleeping Trump had damn well better notice. And we’ll see how much damage he does with tariffs.

Today’s reading assignmen — Adam Serwer, The Trump-Trumpist Divide at The Atlantic. It makes the point that most Trump voters were either unaware of or did not take seriously his authoritarian, anti-democratic plans. Their reasons for supporting him went from the stupid to the delusional, and they either didn’t hear or refused to believe the warnings about how dangerous he was.

So Matt Gaetz is out as the AG nominee, and Pam Bondi is in. Bondi has been mentioned in this blog before. Back in 2012 while attorney general of Florida she was on the list of speakers for the RNC National Convention. In 2016 it was noted that she dropped a planned investigation into Trump University after receiving a $25,000 campaign donation from Trump. (The donation came from the Trump Foundation, which was a scandal in itself.) And I wrote this in 2018:

… recently Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Republican and knee-jerk Trump supporter, needed a police escort to leave a movie theater in Tampa because members of the audience were harassing her. (The film was Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which makes this story even better.)

After leaving the AG office in 2019 she chaired Trump’s America First Policy Institute and also was on Trump’s legal team in his first impeachment.  Anyway, the point is that she has long-standing right-wing credentials, she’s open to corruption, and she’s tied herself to Trump. Unlike Gaetz and most of the rest of Trump’s appointees, she does have some experience for the job, so I suspect she’ll have no trouble getting confirmed.

I seriously hope Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard are nixed also. Hegseth was an obviously inappropriate appointee when his name was first announced. Since then, more information has come out that suggests he not only should not be given a job in government; he probably needs to be kept under right surveillance.

Senator Tammy Duckworth explains some of the problems with Hegseth’s appointment here.

And this is from The Guardian:

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, has written in a book that he could imagine a scenario in which the US armed forces would be used violently in American domestic politics.

Hegseth, a former elite soldier turned rightwing Fox television personality, is Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon which controls the gigantic American military – by far the largest armed force in the world.

In one of his five published books he wrote that in the event of a Democratic election victory in the US there would be a “national divorce” in which “The military and police … will be forced to make a choice” and “Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”

Hegseth’s 2020 book exhorts conservatives to undertake “an AMERICAN CRUSADE”, to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents”, to “attack first” in response to a left he identifies with “sedition”, and he writes that the book “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies”.

And of course there’s also the little matter of sexual assault allegations. This guy is pure poison. See also Donald Trump’s Most Dangerous Cabinet Pick by Jonathan Chait and What Pete Hegseth’s Nomination Is Really About by Hanna Rosin at The Atlantic.