Donald J. Trump got his dander up because his vice president-elect, Mike Pence, got a few boos and jeers when he went to see the play “Hamilton.”
The president-elect has demanded an apology from the cast of “Hamilton.”
Well now.
The guy can dish it out, yes? He can denigrate a war hero, John McCain; he can insult women and Latinos; he can tell a Gold Star couple they have “no right” to criticize him; he can mock a reporter’s physical disability; he tell an Indiana-born judge he can’t preside over a fraud trial involving Trump University because “he’s a Mexican, OK?”; he perpetuated the lie about Barack Obama being born in Kenya and he questioned whether the president was in office legally.
Does this clown apologize for any of litany of insults he hurled while winning the presidency?
The president-elect had better toughen up in a big hurry. The criticism is just beginning.
Mike Pence went to a show last night and got greeted with a mixture of boos and cheers.
So what? The vice president-elect is about to assume a new post in the Trump administration in the wake of a hotly contested election. His side got fewer popular votes than the other side. The nation is deeply divided.
Does he expect to be greeted now with universal good cheer? Of course not!
What is even weirder, though, is that the president-elect has demanded an apology. From whom? The audience members who jeered Pence? Who, precisely, is supposed to issue such an apology?
This kind of thing goes with the territory. I am betting that Pence — who’s actually held public office for quite some time — gets it. He understands the give-and-take often leads to the rough-and-tumble and that feelings do get strained and hurt in the course of a difficult political battle.
So it is as the dust starts to settle on this highly improbable presidential election — and its stunning conclusion.
Mitt Romney once called it exactly right about Donald Trump.
He called the next president of the United States a “phony,” a “fraud.” Romney questioned whether Trump was hiding some potentially criminal activity by refusing to release his tax returns.
The 2012 Republican presidential nominee said some amazingly harsh things about the 45th president. Romney endeared himself so much to many Americans — me included — that we actually begin thinking kindly of him, wishing he were the GOP candidate instead of Trump.
Why, I even began referring to him by his first name, which actually is his middle name. Mitt this, Mitt that.
So, what in the world is Mitt doing by making himself available to be considered for secretary of state in the Trump administration?
Hey, Mitt’s a rich guy, too. He doesn’t need the money. Nor does he need to the embarrassment of representing Donald Trump’s world view to a world still reeling by the very thought of Trump becoming president of the greatest nation on Earth.
Doesn’t the next president recall what Mitt said in 2012 about Russia? I’ll remind him here. Mitt declared that Russia presented the “greatest global geopolitical threat” to the United States. Trump, meanwhile, is accepting high praise from Russian strongman/dictator/former spook Vladimir Putin. Which is it? Greatest threat or potential ally?
Frankly, Mitt’s assessment looks more accurate and prescient than anything Trump has said about Russia.
Then we have the nature of the criticism. The video I’ve attached to this blog post is quite revealing. It’s only 17 minutes long. But it’s a doozy.
Oh, and Trump’s response to it? He called Mitt a “loser” who “begged” Trump for his endorsement four years ago.
Say it won’t happen, Mitt. Tell us that you’re just stringing Trump along. While you’re at it, when you get him in that room in private at Trump Tower, please reiterate what you said about him on the campaign trail. It was all true then … and it’s true to this very day.
Donald Trump has vowed to “unify” the nation after a bitter campaign that elected him the next president of the United States.
Who, then, does he pick for his national security team?
Let’s see: retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who will lead the National Security Agency, says that fear of Muslims is “rational”; Kansas U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo, who will lead the CIA, believes Muslims contribute to the terror threat by refusing to repudiate terrorism; U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, whom Trump has nominated to be attorney general, was denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s because of allegedly racist comments he made as a U.S. attorney in Alabama.
Trump is making no apologies for targeting people of certain faiths and he is making no amends toward the African-American community by nominating someone with, um, a checkered civil-rights past to lead the Justice Department.
None of this should surprise anyone, I suppose. The president-elect is precisely who he says he is: a tough guy who vows to roll back many of the policies of the administration he will succeed.
According to the New York Times: “The reaction from Democrats was immediate and angry. ‘The president-elect has created a White House leadership that embodies the most divisive rhetoric of his campaign,’ Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said on Friday. ‘To the extent that these become policies or legislative proposals, I commit to stopping them.’”
Perhaps the most amazing view from this national security team came from Gen. Flynn, who supports a national registry of Muslims and compares such registration to the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. President Roosevelt overreacted grossly to a perceived threat from loyal Americans as the nation entered World War II and that overreaction has been universally condemned in the years since as a tragic mistake.
Oh yes. A new day is about to dawn in Washington, D.C. Let’s all get ready for some storm clouds that are beginning to boil up on the political horizon.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham has posited an interesting notion about who should be nominated to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.
He says his Republican Senate colleague, Ted Cruz of Texas, should get the call.
Cruz would be hailed by everyone in the Senate as the perfect choice by the new president, according to Graham — but not for reasons that have anything to do with Cruz’s credentials.
Most of Cruz’s Senate colleagues detest him. They would vote virtually unanimously to send him to the Supreme Court, said Graham, who once joked that “if you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”
Graham and Cruz, you must recall, once were GOP rivals for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016. Donald J. Trump ended up winning the presidency and now can nominate someone to fill the court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
Do I think Cruz would be a good choice? No. I don’t want the court to mess with a woman’s right to choose to end a pregnancy or to undo its ruling that legalized gay marriage.
Still, Sen. Cruz — or “Lyin’ Ted,” as Trump once labeled him — would be a most provocative selection for the court. He is a sharp lawyer, a former Texas solicitor general who has argued before the Supreme Court.
The new president might want to look to make a key appointment that would steer him away from difficult a Senate confirmation fight. In that context, Ted Cruz for the U.S. Supreme Court sounds like the right choice.
One might not expect Donald J. Trump to take much of what Sen. John McCain has to say all that seriously … even about things with which he is intimately familiar.
After all, Trump said McCain wasn’t “really a war hero” during the Vietnam War, adding that “I like people who weren’t captured, OK?”
McCain, though, offers a serious word of advice to the president-elect: Do not make nice with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to Politico: “Vladimir Putin has rejoined Bashar Assad in his barbaric war against the Syrian people with the resumption of large-scale Russian air and missile strikes in Idlib and Homs,” the Arizona senator who was the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, said in a statement. “Another brutal assault on the city of Aleppo could soon follow.”
“With the U.S. presidential transition underway, Vladimir Putin has said in recent days that he wants to improve relations with the United States,” McCain added. “We should place as much faith in such statements as any other made by a former KGB agent who has plunged his country into tyranny, murdered his political opponents, invaded his neighbors, threatened America’s allies and attempted to undermine America’s elections.”
And Trump wants to try to get Putin on our side? He wants to link arms with the Russians in a fight to the death against the Islamic State?
McCain is correct to underscore Putin’s one-time role as the head of the Soviet spy agency, the KGB.
I’m no fan of McCain, although I certainly honor his service during the Vietnam War. He’s a war hero, no matter what Trump has said about him. McCain also understands the world stage in a way that Trump hasn’t even begun to grasp.
I almost can hear Trump now: “Who is this guy McCain telling me how to conduct foreign policy. I mean, I won a presidential election. He’s a loser.”
Sure, McCain lost the 2008 election. He knows his way around the world stage. The new president would do well to heed this man’s advice.
Donald J. Trump’s so-called presidential election “mandate” is disappearing right before his eyes.
The president-elect has captured the Electoral College vote by a healthy — if not overwhelming — margin. He’ll finish with 306 electoral votes to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 232 votes. Of course, that assumes that all the electors earmarked for both candidates actually vote that way when they take the tally in December.
I’ll be intrigued, though, to hear whether Trump declares his election is a “mandate” to do all the things he wants to do: build the wall, ban Muslims, toss out trade agreements, “bomb the s*** out of ISIS,” you know … stuff like that.
Clinton’s popular vote margin has surpassed 1 million ballots, with the “lead” sure to grow as vote-counters tally up ballots in Clinton-friendly states such as California.
I don’t for a second doubt the legitimacy of Trump’s victory. He won where it counted. To be sure, Clinton will draw small comfort in knowing she collected more ballots nationally than the man who “defeated” her.
However, I think it’s worth stating that the winner needs to take some care — if he’s capable of demonstrating that trait — in crowing about whatever “mandate” he thinks he got from an election that clearly is sending mixed messages throughout the nation and around the world.
The mandate is shrinking each day.
***
Indeed, I cannot help but think of a friend of mine, the late Buddy Seewald of Amarillo, who once talked describe the local effort in the Texas Panhandle to “re-defeat” President Bush in 2004. Bush, then the Texas governor, won the presidency in 2000 in a manner similar to the way Trump was elected: He got the requisite number of electoral votes — with a major boost from the U.S. Supreme Court — while losing the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore.
Might that be the rallying cry if Donald Trump runs for re-election in 2020? It works for me.
I am not too proud to admit how wrong I was about the presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump.
So, I will do so here. I will admit to being totally off-base, out to lunch and out of touch with what was going on all around me here in the middle of Trump Country.
I’m still baffled by the idea of Trump being elected president of the United States. I accept the result of the election, that the first-time candidate for any public office won more electoral votes than his infinitely more qualified opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Every single warning sign went ignored.
* Trump called Mexican immigrants criminals; his fans didn’t care.
* He denigrated Sen. John McCain’s status as a war hero; pfftt!
* Trump mocked a reporter with a disability; B. F. D.
* Trump criticized a Gold Star family for speaking out against him; who cares?
* This guy boasts about groping women, grabbing them by their genitals; hey, boys will be boys who engage in “locker room talk.”
He got a pass on all of that. Imagine what would have happened had Clinton had said things such as that. Imagine hearing her brag about grabbing some dude by his, um, jewels; imagine the backlash if she had said any of the things that Trump said.
I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t foresee this know-nothing ever being nominated, let alone elected president over someone with the credentials that Clinton brought to this campaign.
I take small comfort — and that’s all it is — in realizing that few of us out here in the peanut gallery got it right. Trump steamrolled his way to his party’s nomination. Then he flipped several of the states that President Obama carried in two winning elections.
Bingo! He wins.
This election result is going to take some time to sink in.
Bear with me while I try to ponder how I got it so damn wrong.
Donald J. Trump boasted about his immense success in business, suggesting his business acumen was all he needed to take the reins of the federal government.
The president-elect might be learning that transitioning from private to public life is, um, quite a bit more complicated than he ever imagined.
Politico and other news outlets are reporting that Trump’s transition has turned into a “knife fight” among those closest to the president-elect.
Some questions have arisen about potential conflicts of interests involving his son-in-law Jaret Kushner, as well as his daughter Ivanka. He has hired a man believed to be a white supremacist as his chief political adviser.
Trump only today received his first full-scale national security briefing from the National Security Council.
The fellow he picked as his transition chief, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, has been pushed aside.
Rudy Giuliani, reported to be Trump’s top choice to become secretary of state, is now under investigation over work he did as a paid consultant for foreign governments, posing a tremendous potential conflict of interest. John Bolton — the neo-con who wanted to bomb Iran five years ago — is another possible secretary of state candidate who has drawn a threat from U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to filibuster his nomination if it comes to pass.
Oh, boy.
Some government experience ought to be considered an essential qualification for the president. Trump brought none of it into his winning campaign. He cited his business experience as Reason No. 1 to elect him.
I thought earlier today about another president who took office after having never been elected to another public position. I came up with Dwight Eisenhower. All he did, of course, was command Allied forces in the fight against the Nazis during World War II, which I surmise suffices as enough government experience to prepare him for the role of commander in chief.
The next president is now embarking on the steepest, most arduous learning curve imaginable as he prepares for this enormous challenge.
He’d better start figuring this out. In a major hurry.
