Willing to oppose Trump, some US Senate Republicans gain leverage. Source. I wouldn’t class this as solidly good news, because republicans and libertarians, but some of them appear to be developing a spine, which I’ll take as good news right now.
Indian-American congresswoman-elect plans to fight Trump on immigration. Source.
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel struggles to find anyone in Silicon Valley to serve in Trump brain trust. Source. Trump and brain trust do not belong in the same sentence.
Argentine President Macri: Ivanka Trump sat in on my call with her father. Source.
Trump Foundation admits to violating ban on ‘self-dealing,’ new filing to IRS shows. Source.
Trump recommends Farage for UK ambassador to US. Source. This speaks so many volumes, it’s a set of encyclopedias.
White supremacist ‘Christian Identity’ pastor begs Trump to crack down on Jews. Source. “All those comparisons to nazis, they are over the top!” Yeah, right.
Speaking of, we all need to be vigilant about the ongoing normalisation, it’s happening everywhere, and not enough people are speaking out about it:
RealClearPolitics writer Rebecca Berg noted that this is absolutely an important conversation to be having, however, that this is just a small share of Trump’s support base. “That’s an important point to make,” she said.
“We haven’t expected Barack Obama to come out as president every time one of his supporters says something hateful and address that,” Berg continued. “I’m not sure we can expect that of President-Elect Trump every time a room of a few dozen people says something hateful like this.”
Gergen, angered by the matter added, “Listen, I respect what Rebecca said — most of what she said. But the fact is, that Mr. Bannon represents and has sent out a lot of signals to people, as someone you should be scared of, as someone who supports policies that are going to represent this administration.”
“When the alt-right is taken as seriously as it is, and we begin to normalize this conversation, to say, ‘it’s all right to do Neo-Nazi kind of rhetoric and we’re just going to accept it, it’s part of who we are as Americans.’ No, it is not all right to be Neo-Nazi in this country.”
Gergen cautioned, “If we’re going to raise those spectres, just remember when people didn’t rise up against the Nazis.”
The UK has already signaled Farage-as-ambassador is absurd, Nigel Farage will not be ambassador to US, say No 10 and Foreign Office (“No 10” is code for the PM’s office, similar to the code “White House” in the States). I particularly liked this bit:
Don’t get too upset by the “sometimes … borderline racist” nonsense: This was in Parliament where such elliptical-speaking is both expected and understood; everyone knew he was really saying “is a flaming bigot”. The thing to get upset by is the UK hasn’t responded more robustly: “No 10 declined to criticise Trump’s call for Farage to become the ambassador […]”.
blf #1:
Oh I dunno. As a lover of irony, I quite liked:
Maggie Haberman, a NYT correspondent present at the Trump meeting today:
From Mother Jones: Breitbart News is “the platform for the alt-right,” boasts Stephen Bannon.