Yesterday I posted about union leader Chuck Jones’s fact-checking of Trump’s claims about the Carrier jobs. From Danielle Paquette in the Washington Post two days ago:

Jones, president of the United Steelworkers 1999, which represents Carrier employees, felt optimistic when Trump announced last week that he’d reached a deal with the factory’s parent company, United Technologies, to preserve 1,100 of the Indianapolis jobs — until the union leader heard from Carrier that only 730 of the production jobs would stay and 550 of his members would lose their livelihoods, after all.

At the Dec. 1 meeting, where Trump was supposed to lay out the details, Jones hoped he would explain himself.

“But he got up there,” Jones said Tuesday, “and, for whatever reason, lied his ass off.”

Late last night Paquette reported a follow-up – another Trump on Twitter story:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/806660011904614408

Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!

If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2016

If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues

It’s fascinating, in a disquieting way, that the massive power imbalance doesn’t inhibit him.

Jones, a union leader in Indianapolis, represents the Carrier workers whose jobs Donald Trump has pledged to save. He said the sudden attention from the country’s next leader didn’t feel real.

“My first thought was, ‘Well, that’s not very nice,’ ” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday night. “Then, ‘Well, I might not sleep much tonight.’ “

Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999, told The Post on Tuesday that he believed Trump had lied to the Carrier workers last week when he visited the Indianapolis plant. On a makeshift stage in a conference room, Trump had applauded United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, for cutting a deal with him and agreeing to keep 1,100 jobs that were slated to move to Mexico in America’s heartland.

Jones said Trump got that figure wrong.

Carrier, he said, had agreed to preserve 800 production jobs in Indiana. (Carrier confirmed that number.) The union leader said Trump appeared to be taking credit for rescuing 350 engineering positions that were never scheduled to leave. Five hundred fifty of his members, he said, were still losing their jobs. And the company was still collecting millions of dollars in tax breaks.

And Trump finds it urgent to attack Jones on Twitter.

Half an hour after Trump tweeted about Jones on Wednesday, the union leader’s phone began to ring and kept ringing, he said. One voice asked: What kind of car do you drive? Another said: We’re coming for you.

He wasn’t sure how these people found his number.

“Nothing that says they’re gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids,” Jones said later on MSNBC. “We know what car you drive. Things along those lines.”

“I’ve been doing this job for 30 years, and I’ve heard everything from people who want to burn my house down or shoot me,” he added. “So I take it with a grain of salt and I don’t put a lot of faith in that, and I’m not concerned about it and I’m not getting anybody involved. I can deal with people that make stupid statements and move on.”

Brett Voorhies, president of the Indiana State AFL-CIO, called Jones after Trump’s tweet caught his eye. Jones, he said, had just left his office in Indianapolis, where he manages the needs of about 3,000 union members.

“This guy makes pennies for what he does,” Voorhies said. “What he has to put up with is just crazy. Now he’s just got the president-elect smearing him on Twitter.”

I dislike Donald Trump. I think he’s a very bad man.

Of course. Who better to run the Labor Department than the CEO of a fast food chain? CEOs are of course the people who are best placed to understand the needs of workers, and the least disposed to put profits ahead of workers’ need for a living wage. So well done, billionaire worker-cheating Donald Trump – you found such a CEO.

President-elect Donald J. Trump is expected to name Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of the company that operates the fast food outlets Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. and an outspoken critic of the worker protections enacted by the Obama administration, to be secretary of labor, people close to the transition said on Thursday.

Mr. Puzder has spent his career in the private sector and has opposed efforts to expand eligibility for overtime pay, arguing that large minimum wage increases hurt small businesses and lead to job loss among low-skilled workers.

That’s richpeoplespeak for “gives pay to workers that should be profits going to rich people.”

In selecting Mr. Puzder, Mr. Trump appears to be banking on the idea that he can replicate some of his own appeal. Mr. Puzder, too, is a successful businessman prone to making populist pronouncements — he complained that “big corporate interests” and “globalist companies” were supporting Hillary Clinton in the presidential election — and the occasional streak of political incorrectness.

The advertisements that Mr. Puzder’s companies runs to promote its restaurants frequently feature women wearing next to nothing while gesturing suggestively. “I like our ads,” he told the publication Entrepreneur. “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American.”

So workers’ wages will stagnate or fall under Trump, if he and Pudzer have anything to do with it, but that’s totally ok because there will be more sexist jokes to giggle at.

In a 2012 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Puzder’s company listed his base salary as over $1 million. “Annual base salaries should be competitive and create a measure of financial security for our executive officers,” the filing said.

But the peons at Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr don’t need no stinkin’ financial security.

More draining the swamp, by spurning people who know anything about climate or the environment for head of the EPA:

President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the E.P.A. itself.

Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”

So just go plowing ahead as if nothing were wrong. It won’t be his problem!

Mr. Pruitt has been in lock step with those views.

“Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” he wrote in National Review earlier this year. “That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.”

It’s not a debate topic. It’s a technical subject, which pools the scientific research of a vast number of scientists in different fields. It’s pointless for the public at large to “debate” it as if it were a purely political issue. It’s pointless and dangerous to promote the idea that it should be “debated” endlessly by people with no scientific knowledge or training.

“During the campaign, Mr. Trump regularly threatened to dismantle the E.P.A. and roll back many of the gains made to reduce Americans’ exposures to industrial pollution, and with Pruitt, the president-elect would make good on those threats,” said Ken Cook, head of the Environmental Working Group, a Washington research and advocacy organization.

“It’s a safe assumption that Pruitt could be the most hostile E.P.A. administrator toward clean air and safe drinking water in history,” he added.

Oh goody. Maybe he’ll send shipments of lead to Flint so that they can have even more of it in their water.

Mr. Pruitt, 48, is a hero to conservative activists, one of a group of Republican attorneys general who formed an alliance with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda. Fossil fuel interests greeted Mr. Trump’s selection with elation.

“Attorney General Scott Pruitt has long been a defender of states’ rights and a vocal opponent of the current administration’s overreaching E.P.A,” said Laura Sheehan, a spokeswoman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which works on behalf of the coal industry. “Mr. Pruitt will be a significant voice of reason when it comes to energy and environmental regulations.”

“Voice of reason” of course = don’t mess with our profits.

As Mr. Pruitt has sought to use legal tools to fight environmental regulations on the oil and gas companies that are a major part of his state’s economy, he has also worked with those companies. A 2014 investigation by The Times found that energy lobbyists drafted letters for Mr. Pruitt to send, on state stationery, to the E.P.A., the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget and even President Obama, outlining the economic hardship of the environmental rules.

So letters that appeared to be from the Oklahoma Attorney-General were actually from oil and gas lobbyists. How unethical.

As attorney general, Mr. Pruitt took the unusual step of jointly filing an antiregulatory lawsuit with industry players, such as Oklahoma Gas and Electric, the coal-burning electric utility, and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, a nonprofit group backed by major oil and gas executives, including Mr. Hamm.

Behind the scenes, he was taking campaign contributions from many of the industry players on his team, or helping deliver even larger sums of money to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which he became the chairman of.

Mr. Pruitt’s office also began to send letters to federal regulators — including the E.P.A. and even to President Obama — that documents obtained through open records requests show were written by energy industry lobbyists from companies including Devon Energy. Mr. Pruitt’s staff put these ghostwritten letters on state government stationery and then sent them to Washington, moves that the companies often then praised in their own news releases, without noting that they had actually drafted the letters in the first place.

This is how we drain the swamp.

Time’s choice of photo to illustrate its Person of the Year cover of Trump is interesting.

He…erm…usually doesn’t let it show.

But more seriously, what a surly bruiser he does look. He may be trying to look serious and grown up, but all he looks is hostile and belligerent. He’s making not duck-face but fascist-face.

Also notice the dig under his name.

Updating to add:

There are many valuable replies to Helen Rosner’s tweet, for instance pointing out the fiendish positioning of Trump’s head right under the M so that it makes horns. Rosner says the whole photo uses a very 1940s aesthetic.

Trump held another fascist rally yesterday.

President-elect Donald Trump continued his “Thank You” victory tour on Tuesday, making a stop in North Carolina to tout his national security agenda and formally introduce his pick for Defense Secretary, retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis.

Speaking in Fayetteville, N.C., Trump called Mattis the “living embodiment of the Marine Corps motto” — Semper Fidelis.

“Mad Dog plays no games, right?” Trump asked, invoking the general’s nickname, and added that the country was fortunate “that a man of this character and integrity will now be the civilian leader atop the Department of Defense.”

The “civilian” leader whose career was in the military, which is not really what is normally meant by civilian control of the military.

To do that though, Mattis will have to get a waiver from Congress to bypass a law that calls for a seven-year “cooling off” period before someone who served in uniform can take the civilian post; Mattis retired from the Marine Corps in 2013. Just before the rally began, GOP lawmakers announced that they would include a provision to fast-track such a waiver as part of the stop-gap funding bill they need to pass by Friday to keep the government open.

Yeah. Let’s streamline all this shit. Let’s mad dog it. Let’s arrange everything so that men at the top give orders, and everyone else obeys them. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it gets the job done. Semper fi.

Briefly taking the stage after the president-elect’s glowing praise, Mattis alluded to that necessary step, telling the crowd that, “I look forward to being the civilian leader as long as the Congress gives me the waiver and the Senate votes to consent.”

“If he didn’t get that waiver, there’d be a lot of angry people,” Trump warned. “Such a popular choice.”

Yep, that’s Trump – threatening, bullying, and illiterate.

The stop in the Tar Heel State to formally introduce Mattis wasn’t by accident — the state is home to a large military population and several military bases, including nearby Fort Bragg, one of the largest military installations in the world.

…

“All men and women in uniform will have the supplies, support and equipment to get the job done incredibly well and perfectly,” the president-elect said.

…

He couldn’t help but boast of his unlikely victories at times though, including his unexpected win in North Carolina and also in industrial Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin.

“We don’t talk about numbers, we bring people together, but boy, were those numbers good,” Trump said.

Except of course for the popular vote, which keeps inexorably rising.

And he brought up flag-burning and possible consequences a few times during his speech, hearkening back to a tweet last month that dredged up the 1980’s-era controversy that the Supreme Court has ruled is protected speech.

“We love our flag, and we don’t like it when we see people ripping up our flag and burning it, and we’ll see what we’re going to do about that, ok?” Trump said.

Ok, sure. Tear up the Constitution, what the hell – you’re the boss.

Again a major newspaper calls Trump a liar in the headline as well as the body.

Headline:

Carrier union boss: Donald Trump ‘lied his ass off’ about saving 1,100 jobs from moving to Mexico

They used asterisks in “ass” but not in “lied.”

Donald Trump lied about saving more than 1,100 Indianapolis manufacturing jobs from moving to Mexico, according to the boss of the company’s union.

Chuck Jones, leader of the United Steelworkers 1999 union who watched the president-elect give a speech at the air conditioning plant on 1 December, told the Washington Post that Mr Trump had inflated his victory.

He claimed to have “saved” over 1100, but it was really 800; the company confirmed that number.

In gratitude for keeping less than half the jobs in the US, Mr Trump promised the plant huge tax breaks and benefits, including nearly $7 million tax credits from Indiana, to be paid in installments of $700,000 every year for a decade. In return, Carrier said it would invest $16 million in its Indiana plant. It will still send 700 factory jobs south of the border to Monterrey, Mexico.

That’s a lot of bribery for 800 jobs.

Oh, so that’s why Ivanka Trump was in the room when Trump met with Shinzo Abe, while state department officials and reporters were excluded.

When Donald J. Trump hosted a foreign leader for the first time as president-elect, the guest list included a curious entry: Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who looked on last month while he and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan chatted on a white couch high above Manhattan.

Some 6,700 miles from Trump Tower, in Tokyo, another exclusive gathering was already underway: a two-day private viewing of Ivanka Trump products, teeming with Trump-branded treasures like a sample of the pale pink dress Ms. Trump wore to introduce her father at the Republican National Convention.

Ms. Trump is nearing a licensing deal with the Japanese apparel giant Sanei International, both parties told The New York Times. The largest shareholder of Sanei’s parent company is the Development Bank of Japan, which is wholly owned by the Japanese government.

Sleazy as fuck.

His current plan is still to hand the management of his business over to his three oldest children, as if that would do away with the many gross conflicts of interest. (Hint: he’s related to them. They’re related to him.)

Yet an examination of the professional histories of the three children — who also serve on the presidential transition team — shows how deeply the Trump family, Trump business and Trump politics are interwoven, raising significant doubts about how meaningful a wall can ever be erected between Mr. Trump and his heirs at the Trump Organization.

Translation: making it obvious that Trump will do nothing about the many gross conflicts of interest unless he’s forced to.

Already, complications abound.

The children each hold a stake in the lease that allows the organization to operate the Trump International Hotel out of the federal government’s Old Post Office Building in Washington. Mr. Trump, as president, will appoint the head of the General Services Administration, which manages the property, while his children oversee a hotel with millions of dollars in ties to the agency.

Trump says it’s all ok though, because he doesn’t care.

At times, the president-elect has grown incredulous when pressed on the specter of conflicts.

In an interview last month with The Times, he wondered aloud what harm might come from, say, taking a picture with business partners for a project his children were leading. He suggested some critics would prefer that he “never, ever see my daughter Ivanka again.”

He allowed, though, that his election had changed at least one thing.

“The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before,” he said. “I can’t help that, but I don’t care.”

Oh well then. What a relief.

So it’s now clear that Trump was lying when he said the phone call with Taiwan was just a friendly “congrats!” call from one president to another. It was carefully arranged, and one of the arrangers was a paid lobbyist and former Senator.

Former Senator Bob Dole, acting as a foreign agent for the government of Taiwan, worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff, an outreach effort that culminated last week in an unorthodox telephone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s president.

Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordinated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and the transition team to set up a series of meetings between Mr. Trump’s advisers and officials in Taiwan, according to disclosure documents filed last week with the Justice Department. Mr. Dole also assisted in successful efforts by Taiwan to include language favorable to it in the Republican Party platform, according to the documents.

Mr. Dole’s firm received $140,000 from May to October for the work, the forms said.

The disclosures suggest that President-elect Trump’s decision to take a call from the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was less a ham-handed diplomatic gaffe and more the result of a well-orchestrated plan by Taiwan to use the election of a new president to deepen its relationship with the United States — with an assist from a seasoned lobbyist well versed in the machinery of Washington.

I wonder when they were planning to tell us that – the rabble who make up the citizenry of this country. I do wish someone would explain to Trump that he’s not a dictator and does not have the powers of a dictator.

The phone call between Mr. Trump and Ms. Tsai was a striking break from nearly four decades of diplomatic practice and threatened to precipitate a major rift with China, which admonished Mr. Trump in a front-page editorial in the overseas edition of People’s Daily.

The disclosure documents were submitted before the call took place and made no mention of it. But Mr. Dole, 93, a former Senate majority leader from Kansas, said he had worked with transition officials to facilitate the conversation.

“It’s fair to say that we had some influence,” he said. “When you represent a client and they make requests, you’re supposed to respond.”

Yeah we understand about the client-lobbyist relationship, but that’s not the point. When a drug lord tells an enforcer to kill an enemy, the enforcer is “supposed to respond” according to the drug lord, but that “supposed to” has no force anywhere else. We get that Dole’s clients expect him to do what they ask, but that’s not our concern and it’s not the issue.

Did Trump cause Boeing’s stock to plummet in a fit of temper? Philip Bump at the Washington Post wonders.

The tweet was this morning.

Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2016

What inspired him this time?

CNN’s Jake Tapper noted on Twitter that shortly before the tweet (which was posted at 8:52 a.m. Eastern) the Chicago Tribune posted an article quoting the company’s CEO, Dennis Muilenberg. (The comments were made at a speech on Friday, not in an interview with the Tribune, as this article originally indicated.)

“Anyone who paid attention to the recent campaigns and the election results realizes that one of the overarching themes was apprehension about free and fair trade,” Muilenberg said at the Illinois Manufacturing Association last week, as noted by Tribune columnist Robert Reed. Fair trade has helped Boeing, which prides itself on being America’s largest manufacturing exporter.

“Last year, we delivered 495 737s from our factory in Renton, Wash., to customers around the world,” Muilenberg continued, noting that a third of the planes were sent to China. “This phenomenon would have been unimaginable when I started at the company in 1985.”

Those are pointed comments. It was Trump, of course, who robustly criticized free trade during the general election. And it is Trump who, this week, seemed to threaten a trade war with China.

In other words Muilenberg disrespected Donnie from Queens.

That story has a dateline of 7:30 Central time — 8:30 Eastern. Trump’s tweet came out a few minutes later.

We don’t know that Trump was responding to the Tribune story. We do know that the last time he tweeted an out-of-the-blue opinion, about flag-burning, it was immediately after a Fox News segment showing students burning flags.

We also know that Trump’s tweet tanked Boeing’s stock price, albeit only briefly.

Mature and responsible as always.

Dana Milbank has more on the pizzeria shootup and Trump’s fomenting of hatred and thus violence.

He got an email from a reader on Sunday.

“Rope, Tree, Journalist,” the man wrote. “Some assembly required.” To this slogan, made popular by T-shirts Donald Trump supporters wore at his rallies, my would-be hangman added his offer: “I will assemble for you.”

This bit of, er, gallows humor was the latest, though far from the worst, of the sort of correspondence my colleagues and I have been receiving lately.

There was a time when threats against journalists, like threats of any sort of political violence, were exceedingly rare. But in Trump’s America, such threats are neither rare nor idle.

The pizzeria shootup – in his neighborhood – is one example.

Jones has been whipping up a bogus and bizarre accusation that Comet is a front for a Hillary Clinton-affiliated pedophilia ring, and the resulting calls and messages threaten a “public lynching” of this nonexistent ring. “I pray someone comes to Comet pizza with automatic weapons and kills everyone inside,” wrote one. “I just may cut your throat. . . . I truly hope someone blows your brains all over Comet pizza.”

Comet’s owners asked the FBI for help but heard nothing in reply from James Comey’s agents. They heard instead from a North Carolina man, carrying an assault rifle, who walked into Comet and started shooting on Sunday afternoon — by coincidence, about the same time I got the email from the aspiring hangman. The man told police he had come to “self-investigate” the pedophilia conspiracy. Mercifully, nobody was hurt.

But next time, and the time after that, and into the future?

And the Flynns, father and son, have been promoting this conspiracy theory.

This would appear to be the new normal: Not only disagreeing with your opponent but accusing her of running a pedophilia ring, provoking such fury that somebody takes it upon himself to start shooting. Not only chafing when criticized in the press but stoking anti-media hysteria that leads some supporters to threaten to kill journalists.

After The Washington Post reported Sunday about the Comet gunman and the nonsense conspiracy theory that motivated him, the reporters received emails and tweets saying “I hope the next shooter targets you lying sacks of shit in the media,” “God has a plan better than death,” and “it would also be a shame if someone took a gun to” The Post.

Trump is not directly responsible for every violent word or action of his followers. But he foments violence. As The Post’s executive editor, Marty Baron, has noted, when Trump refers to journalists as “the lowest form of life,” “scum” and the enemy, “it is no wonder that some members of our staff [at The Post] and at other news organizations received vile insults and threats of personal harm so worrisome that extra security was required.”

The fact that Trump is not directly responsible is thus kind of beside the point. Working people up into a lather of rage at a particular set of people is dangerous to that particular set of people.

Trump, during the campaign, fantasized about Clinton and her judicial nominees being assassinated. He boasted that “I bring rage out” in people, and his violent rallies proved it. Since the election, Trump has falsely accused the media of inciting violence. At his speech in Ohio last week he denounced the “dishonest” media no fewer than six times.

He has also been encouraging Jones, leading publicist of the Comet-Clinton-pedophilia absurdity. Trump has praised Jones’s “amazing” reputation, called Jones after winning the presidency to thank him for his support, and has regularly parroted Jones’s conspiracy ideas.

And surprise surprise, he gets results.

If Trump were a different leader, he would declare that political violence is unacceptable in a free society. Perhaps he’d say it after eating a “Steel Wills” pie at Comet.

But instead he continues to fuel rage against his opponents and his critics. More and worse violence will inevitably follow.

Watch your back out there.