Trump47 Cabinet Picks & First 100 Days Agenda

[superrific]

Super said something about him being a tariff guy. I assumed Trump would pick someone who likes tariffs, but do we know what Bessent really thinks about them?

Here's his op-ed piece published a week ago. Tariffs are the greatest thing, even Hamilton loved them!

SCOTT BESSENT: Let's talk tariffs. It's time to revitalize Alexander Hamilton's favorite tool

Prior to the 16th Amendment, which authorized the individual income tax, tariffs had been one of the federal government’s chief sources of funding.

www.foxnews.com

 

[superrific]

Bolton puts his ideology over his country. I don’t think he cares about the Republican Party. He’s committed to American imperialism. If that means young men and women need to die in a war against Iran, so be it.

What are you arguing here? I don't think there's a single person on this thread who wants Bolton as part of the Dem coalition. Pubs can keep him.

The thing about him is that he's a straight shooter. Like, he gives you an honest assessment of what he thinks. That's what made him a really shitty ambassador, but it is useful as a commentator. Of course, a lot of what he thinks is messed up, but unusually for the GOP, he doesn't bullshit. He says, "this is what I think we should do" without all that much regard for whether people will like it.

That said, I can't imagine we really disagree about him in any meaningful way. I do think he should get props for shutting down Trump's Ukraine bullshit. Who else in Trump's administration would stand up to Trump like that. It's not nearly enough to make up for what he did in decades prior. And maybe he did it for bad reasons, but he still did it.

 

[donbosco]

Seb Gorka's wife is a UNC grad. She was a St. A. Class of ''82 I believe. She was part of the crowd that I hung out with back in those days. I can't say that we were friends though.

Katharine Cornell.

 

[nycfan]

 

[nycfan]

 

[DiehardHeelFan]

This.

 

[nycfan]

 

[CRHeel94]

Here's his op-ed piece published a week ago. Tariffs are the greatest thing, even Hamilton loved them!

SCOTT BESSENT: Let's talk tariffs. It's time to revitalize Alexander Hamilton's favorite tool

Prior to the 16th Amendment, which authorized the individual income tax, tariffs had been one of the federal government’s chief sources of funding.

www.foxnews.com

Reading that was hurtful to my Economist heart.

I'm glad no one has pointed out that the tariff disarmament of the past 50 years has benefitted the US as much if not more than any other nation.

 

[CRHeel94]

Trump and Trumpism didn’t happen because John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Condi Rice and others trumped up invading Iraq in 2003.

The MAGAts, including Trump, supported, overwhelmingly supported, invading Iraq in 2003 and trying to orchestrate nation-change (on the cheap) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Saxby Chambliss didn’t beat Max Cleland in the 2002 US Senate race in Georgia because Saxby opposed invading Iraq.

John Kerry wasn’t “Swift-boated” in 2004 because he was proposing escalating the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

IIRC, Trump was sort of for the Iraq War early on, but became a critic pretty early on (by the second Bush term?). Think he got called out for lying (what a surprise) that he was opposed to it from early on. Don't think most MAGAts were against the war back then...though obviously now all parrot Trump's position.

 

[DiehardHeelFan]

Trump's plans to change healthcare could slash insurance for some low-income Americans and retirees

Really??

 

[superrific]

Reading that was hurtful to my Economist heart.

I'm glad no one has pointed out that the tariff disarmament of the past 50 years has benefitted the US as much if not more than any other nation.

Longer than 50 years. GATT is almost 80 years old. The big tariff reductions of the Kennedy round are 60. There are few Americans who have any memory of a world without multilateral institutions pressing free trade.

This is another area where the zombies have had incredible resilience. I had thought the issue of free trade to have been settled two decades ago. I mean, it was among serious people. There are targeted uses of tariffs that are relatively unproblematic (in part because they don't have much effect overall), and that's fine. But surely, I thought, we'd all realize that Peronism was an economic catastrophe, that tariffs never created prosperity, etc.

And it's even worse than that. Trump wasn't talking about tariffs that much until he got shot. Then he came out with his "only the greatest presidents get shot" obsession, made inconvenient by the shootings of McKinley and Harrison. So of course McKinley had to become a great president. The greatest! The US economy was the best ever under William f'n McKinley because Trump got shot in the ear.

This government-by-whim is familiar to people in many places of the world, and they might be chucking at me right now. It is shocking for it to happen here. The chuckling is justified, though it's more tragic than anything.

 

[superrific]

IIRC, Trump was sort of for the Iraq War early on, but became a critic pretty early on (by the second Bush term?). Think he got called out for lying (what a surprise) that he was opposed to it from early on. Don't think most MAGAts were against the war back then...though obviously now all parrot Trump's position.

Yes, there was a whole exchange in the first debate of 2016 when Trump was confronted with evidence that he had loved the Iraq War from the beginning. He said, no he was against it despite those tapes of him enthusiastically cheerleading for it, and if you don't believe him, ask Sean Hannity. Ah, the days in which Trump thought it necessary to at least try to provide some evidence for his totally made-up bullshit.

 

[nycfan]

FCC chair nominee

 

[Mulberry Heel]

FCC chair nominee

It'll be classic Russian mob boss government administration - kowtow to the current administration or face severe consequences. And I have no doubt that the vast majority of our current media will indeed cave. The WaPo already seems to be doing so, as is MSNBC with Scarborough seeing Trump personally in a kind of preemptive surrender. Somehow I think that right-leaning media will fare just fine in the coming regime, though.

 

[Geisterfahrer]

It'll be classic Russian mob boss government administration - kowtow to the current administration or face severe consequences. And I have no doubt that the vast majority of our current media will indeed cave. The WaPo already seems to be doing so, as is MSNBC with Scarborough seeing Trump personally in a kind of preemptive surrender. Somehow I think that right-leaning media will fare just fine in the coming regime, though.

We should hope that’s all it is. That language has an older lineage.

 

[JCTarheel82]

FCC chair nominee

Well that's certainly foreboding. If applied in good faith, Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, etc. would be first in line to face consequences for violations of the Communications Act but we all know that's not how this administration will operate.

 

[superrific]

Well that's certainly foreboding. If applied in good faith, Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, etc. would be first in line to face consequences for violations of the Communications Act but we all know that's not how this administration will operate.

Only broadcast licenses. ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS. I don't even know how much difference the broadcast licenses even make these days.

 

[JCTarheel82]

Only broadcast licenses. ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS. I don't even know how much difference the broadcast licenses even make these days.

Thanks. Just took a couple minutes to better understand what these licenses are and yeah they obviously don't apply to the conservative disinformation networks I mentioned.

 

[gregh1]

government-by-whim

Did you coin that? That's pretty good if so.

 

[nycfan]

Heritage Foundation Staffers Flood Federal Agencies With Thousands of Information Requests​

The conservative think tank’s requests are clogging the pipeline at federal agencies in an apparent attempt to find employees a potential Trump administration would want to purge.​

Heritage Foundation Staffers Flood Federal Agencies With Thousands of Information Requests

The conservative think tank’s requests are clogging the pipeline at federal agencies in an apparent attempt to find employees a potential Trump administration would want to purge.

www.propublica.org

“… Among the documents they’ve sought are lists of agency personnel and messages sent by individual government workers that mention, among other things, “climate equity,” “voting” or “SOGIE,” an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.

…
An analysis of more than 2,000 public-records requests submitted by Aamot, Howell and Jankowski to more than two dozen federal offices and agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission, shows an intense focus on hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.

Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell told ProPublica in an interview. Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project, estimated that his group had submitted more than 50,000 information requests over the past two years. He described the project as “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”

… Among 744 requests that Aamot, Jankowski and Howell submitted to the Department of the Interior over the past year are 161 that seek civil servants’ emails and texts as well as Slack and Microsoft Teams messages that contained terms including “climate change”; “DEI,” or diversity, equity and inclusion; and “GOTV,” an acronym for get out the vote. Many of these FOIAs request the messages of individual employees by name.

Hundreds of the requests asked for government employees’ communications with civil rights and voting rights groups, including the ACLU; the Native American Rights Fund; Rock the Vote; and Fair Count, an organization founded by Democratic politician and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams. Still other FOIAs sought communications that mention “Trump” and “Reduction in Force,” a term that refers to layoffs.

Several requests, including some sent to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, focus on personnel. Some ask for “all employees who entered into a position at the agency as a Political Appointee since January 20, 2021,” the first day of the Biden administration. Others target career employees. Still other FOIAs seek agencies’ “hierarchy charts.” …”