As we’ve seen, in one of the least surprising “surprises” of the week Trump said hahaha I was just kidding, I’m not going to throw Crooked Hillary in jail.

The Washington Post reported this morning that Trump “has decided that his administration will not pursue criminal investigations related to former rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server or her family foundation.” We learned of the decision by way of Kellyanne Conway, who appeared on MSNBC earlier today.

…Conway said Trump now sees things differently. “I think when the president-elect, who’s also the head of your party, tells you before he’s even inaugurated that he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content” to

Hoo-boy. Trump changed his mind about having a tantrum at the NY Times, and they had their meeting after all.

(What can it be like having a meeting with him? A giant petulant baby with way too much power? It must be such a bizarre experience.)

The Times shares:

The strained relationship between Donald J. Trump and The New York Times took an odd path on Tuesday when a planned meeting between the president-elect and the newspaper was abruptly canceled by Mr. Trump and then quickly rescheduled.

After a morning of back-and-forth statements and Twitter posts, Mr. Trump arrived at midday for a meeting with Times representatives at the paper’s Midtown headquarters. Seated next to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger

Robin Lustig sees a dangerous world ahead.

What scares me most about Trump is not only that he is a deeply unpleasant man with deeply unpleasant views but also that he is grotesquely, frighteningly incompetent and woefully unprepared for the task ahead. His reputation as a successful businessman is as phony as everything else about him, and he is a man who has no experience whatsoever of politics even at the very lowest level, who apparently had no idea of what was involved in putting together a new White House team.

More than a week after his election, no one from his team had been in touch with either the State Department or the Pentagon, and when the Japanese

Trump’s national security guy is a conspiracy-monger. Business Insider reports:

The retired general whom President-elect Donald Trump tapped to advise him on matters of national security has promoted stories involving conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn shared two thinly sourced articles on his Twitter account alleging that Clinton was involved in everything from “money laundering” to “sex crimes with children” just days before the election.

On November 2, the general tweeted a link to a website called True Pundit, which claimed to have spoken with “NYPD sources” involved in the investigation of Anthony Weiner. Flynn called it a “must read” — which many supporters likely did, since it was favorited and retweeted more than 12,000

The Times reports on how President Pussygrabber is adjusting to his new job. The first sentence is not a confidence-builder.

Donald J. Trump sits high in Trump Tower in New York, spending hours on the phone with friends, television personalities and donors to ask if they know people to recommend for his cabinet.

Very deadpan. ARE YOU SERIOUS? The man is asking tv personalities to recommend people for the cabinet???

Jesus h fucking christ.

He does a transition meeting early but then he goes back to his morning routine of reading the NY Times and Post and watching “Morning Joe” on the television machine.

He gets angry when members of his inner circle get too much of the spotlight,

I never got to that Times story yesterday that sent furious Trump to Twitter again. It says the Trump team is making a hash of things, to the surprise of no one.

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition was in disarray on Tuesday, marked by firings, infighting and revelations that American allies were blindly dialing in to Trump Tower to try to reach the soon-to-be-leader of the free world.

One week after Mr. Trump scored an upset victory that took him by surprise, his team was improvising the most basic traditions of assuming power. That included working without official State Department briefing materials in his first conversations with foreign leaders.

Well, briefings. He would have had to read those…and … Read the rest

The New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos was on Fresh Air yesterday to talk about what President Pussygrabber will likely do.

Toward the end Dave Davies raised the issue of temperament. He did it much too timidly and normalizingly, but he did it.

DAVIES: When you wrote about Donald Trump and his policies towards the military and towards foreign affairs, the issue of temperament comes up. This is a loaded word. He hated being criticized for his temperament. But you have – you found a quote from his book “Think Like A Billionaire.” It can be smart to be shallow, that he has a penchant for making big decisions quickly, that he trusts his gut. Share what – some of what

We have to resist the urge to normalize. Brian Beutler at the New Republic points out the media normalization around the Obama-Trump meeting, and how sucky it is.

The political media has relished all of it: the pageantry, the symbolism, the implication that our system of government is sturdy enough to persevere through the ugliest election in modern history and withstand the transfer of control between two men who hate each other.

…

This all sounds very soothing, and Obama in particular must feel obligated to lead the transition with grace and dignity, irrespective of the horribly racist way that Trump—a leading proponent of birtherism—has treated him for the last several years.

But it is all extremely delusional—Obama’s sanguinity,

More Clown Show. Ben Carson declines a cabinet job because he doesn’t have the relevant experience. And yet…he ran for president.

Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a top ally of President-elect Donald Trump, is not interested in serving as the secretary of health and human services, The Hill reported Tuesday.

Armstrong Williams, Carson’s business manager and confidant, told The Hill that Carson won’t join the administration and will instead be an unofficial adviser.

It was reported earlier Tuesday that Carson had been offered the position of HHS secretary.

“Dr. Carson was never offered a specific position, but everything was open to him,” Williams told The Hill. “Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience; he’s never run a federal agency.

And so their incompetence has caused a breakdown already. Surprise surprise.

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition operation plunged into disarray on Tuesday with the abrupt resignation of Mike Rogers, who had handled national security matters, the second shake-up in a week on a team that has not yet begun to execute the daunting task of taking over the government.

Imagine how the fur will fly when they actually have to do things!

Mr. Pence took the helm of the effort on Friday after Mr. Trump unceremoniously removed Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who had been preparing with Obama administration officials for months to put the complex transition process into motion. Now the effort is frozen, senior White

When President Pussygrabber met with Obama last week he was surprised to learn that the job is an actual job, with a large amount of hard work involved. His surprise was apparently not of the pleased and delighted variety. Talking Points Memo quotes the WSJ:

During their private White House meeting on Thursday, Mr. Obama walked his successor through the duties of running the country, and Mr. Trump seemed surprised by the scope, said people familiar with the meeting. Trump aides were described by those people as unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr. Obama’s term.

After meeting with Mr. Trump, the only person to be

The deportations.

In a “60 Minutes” interview scheduled to air Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump said he planned to immediately deport two to three million undocumented immigrants after his inauguration next January.

“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” Trump told 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, according to a preview of the interview released by CBS. “But we’re getting them out of our country. They’re here illegally.”

Stahl had pressed Trump about his campaign pledge to

Ashley Feinberg has all the sympathy for Trump’s plight.

Donald Trump does not want to be the president.

Donald Trump likes going to rallies. He likes hearing people scream his name in ecstasy while calling for the imprisonment and death of his enemies. He likes going on TV. He likes hearing about how high the ratings were after he goes on TV. He likes grabbing women by the pussy and moving on them “like a bitch.”

What Donald Trump does not like, however, is keeping his promises, sitting still for more than five minutes at a time, or doing any kind of work whatsoever, tedious or otherwise. It’s probably why so many of his business ventures were spectacular, blistering

The Post patiently explains to Trump why he can’t keep “the good parts” of Obamacare while throwing out the icky parts. It’s obvious, plus it was discussed endlessly, but the Post knows that Trump didn’t pay attention and is not quick on the uptake.

After reiterating his promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, President-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he may keep two of the law’s most popular provisions. One is straightforward enough — children up to the age of 26 being allowed to stay on their parents’ plan. The other — preventing insurance companies from denying coverage because of preexisting conditions — offers a perfect illustration of why Trump and most of the other Republicans critics

Uh oh, poor President Pussygrabber, he’s realized that he’s taken on an actual job, one with a lot of work attached, and he doesn’t want to. He wanted to win the prize, he didn’t want no stinkin’ job.

Plus he wants to go on living in the tower. He’s got it just the way he likes it.

Mr. Trump, a homebody who often flew several hours late at night during the campaign so he could wake up in his own bed in Trump Tower, is talking with his advisers about how many nights a week he will spend in the White House. He has told them he would like to do what he is used to, which is