The Times updated its TodayInTrump piece with the newest bad news: Trump’s horrible son-in-law will be senior adviser to his horrible father-in-law.

It has been expected for weeks. Now, Trump transition officials confirm that Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a major real estate developer in New York, will be named senior adviser to the president.

The rumored post has focused attention on Mr. Kushner’s myriad potential conflicts of interest, including a Chinese development deal that’s in the works. Then there’s the issue of whether a son-in-law in the West Wing violates antinepotism laws.

But the Trump team will muscle through — as it usually does.

Scum rises.… Read the rest

The Times is just pointing and laughing now.

■ Donald J. Trump, after an intelligence report concluded that Russia tried to help him get elected, is going after … Meryl Streep.

■ The president-elect takes credit for a $1 billion Fiat-Chrysler investment in the U.S.

■ Mr. Trump might want to save some ammunition. He has a big week ahead of him.

They share those tweets, including the one that calls Streep “a Hillary flunky who lost big,” and annotate with:

For the record, Mrs. Clinton did not lose big. She won the popular vote by nearly three million votes and lost the presidency by losing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by about the number of people who cheered

There was a Hollywood prize-giving event yesterday. Meryl Streep gave a short talk there. This is part of what she said:

They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It

TwitterTrumpToday:

Congratulation to Jane Timken on her major upset victory in becoming the Ohio Republican Party Chair. Jane is a loyal Trump supporter & star

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 7, 2017

Jane loves Trump. That’s all that matters.

I look very much forward to meeting Prime Minister Theresa May in Washington in the Spring. Britain, a longtime U.S. ally, is very special!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2017

Ohgodohgodohgod

“Britain is very special!” What are you, six??

Also, it’s not “I look very much forward” – that’s not the idiom.

Kellyanne Conway went to @MeetThePress this morning for an interview with @chucktodd. Dishonest media cut out 9 of her 10 minutes. Terrible!

— Donald

The Times did a stinging editorial on Trump’s egomaniacal disdain for the intelligence professionals the other day.

What plausible reason could Donald Trump have for trying so hard to discredit America’s intelligence agencies and their finding that Russia interfered in the presidential election? Maybe he just can’t stand anyone thinking he didn’t, or couldn’t, win the presidency on his own.

Regardless of his motives, the nation’s top intelligence officials were having none of his nonsense on Thursday.

But what a grotesque situation this is – a giant baby pitching fits at professional intelligence-gatherers, who have to pay attention because he’s the next president.

With his refusal to accept regular intelligence briefings on threats facing this country and his persistent denigration

Sinister news – the federal agency that reviews the backgrounds of Cabinet nominees says it’s overwhelmed by the workload. That’s not surprising: usually the Cabinet nominees are relatively “normal” – in the sense of not being loaded down with conflicts of interest or bad history or both.

In a letter to Democratic senators dated Saturday, the head of the Office of Government Ethics also warned that Republicans are trying to take the unprecedented step of holding hearings for Cabinet picks before they have completed requisite paperwork to ensure there are no ethical, financial or criminal concerns.

Walter M. Shaub Jr., the ethics director, said it is “of great concern to me” that several of Trump’s nominees have not completed

David Remnick at the New Yorker on Russia’s excellent adventure. He says the Duma cheered and applauded when Trump won.

In the days to come, there were more declarations of acid satisfaction among the Russian élite. Dmitri Kiselyov, the host of “News of the Week,” a popular current-affairs show on state-controlled television, gloated over Trump’s victory and Barack Obama’s inability to prevent it. Obama, he said, was a “eunuch.” Trump was an “alpha male”—and one who showed mercy to his vanquished rival. “Trump could have put the blonde in prison, as he’d threatened in the televised debates,” Kiselyov said on his show. “On the other hand, it’s nothing new. Trump has left blond women satisfied all his life.” Kiselyov

Trump continues to announce as fact – even in official statements that are obviously by written by someone else (who knows how to write) – things he doesn’t and can’t possibly know.

President-elect Donald J. Trump acknowledged the possibility on Friday that Russia had hacked a variety of American targets, including the Democratic National Committee, after an almost two-hour meeting with the nation’s top intelligence officials.

Mr. Trump asserted that the hacking had no effect on the outcome of the election.

That. He can’t know that.

If he weren’t so stupid, he would realize how stupid it makes him look to make such ridiculous claims. But he is, so he doesn’t.

In a statement issued after the president-elect was

Jeff Sharlet on Facebook:

I’d almost forgotten the time Dan Coats, Trump’s pick for National Intelligence Director — the man to whom 16 intelligence agencies report — called me an “enemy of Jesus.”

Well, I didn’t hear him do it, but the source seemed solid. It was, I think, 2004, and I’d been invited to speak at the University of Potsdam, near Berlin, in a series sponsored by the U.S. embassy. My subject was “the Family,” the secretive fundamentalist organization of which Coats, unbeknownst to me at the time, is a member. When I arrived, my German host told me there’d been a little problem: the ambassador — Dan Coats — had blocked funding for my talk. “He said,”

Trump talked to the Times on the phone this morning.

Mr. Trump spoke to The New York Times by telephone three hours before he was set to be briefed by the nation’s top intelligence and law enforcement officials about the Russian hacking of American political institutions. In the conversation, he repeatedly criticized the intense focus on Russia.

“China, relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names,” he said, referring to the breach of computers at the Office of Personnel Management in late 2014 and early 2015. “How come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch hunt.”

Ahhh yes, it’s a “political witch hunt,” because what valid reason could there possibly be to object to Russia’s meddling … Read the rest

Trump has been sneering and jeering at intelligence experts for days. This morning there was a hearing.

Senate Republicans and Democrats defended on Thursday the findings by the American intelligence community that Russia interfered in the United States election, during a spirited hearing before the Armed Services Committee just as President-elect Donald J. Trump has questioned foreign involvement.

Some highlights from the hearing:

■ Intelligence officials said Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, should not be given credibility.

■ In a comment aimed at Mr. Trump, the director of national intelligence said there was a difference between “skepticism” and “disparagement” of the findings.

That actually sums up the problem with Trump’s way of “thinking” in general: it’s all attitude and … Read the rest

Amy Davidson at the New Yorker explains why Trump failed to be enthusiastic about the Republicans’ move to kill the Office of Congressional Ethics.

The G.O.P. representatives were absolutely correct in thinking that the Trump years are shaping up to be a bitter farce, in terms of good government, and a tragedy in other ways—bereft, for example, of real efforts to improve the lives of the most vulnerable Americans. What they were confused about was the part that they are expected to play. This became clear on Monday night, as critics from all sides pelted the congressmen with their own absurdity, and, the next morning, when Trump began to tweet.

“With all that Congress has to work on, do