Furthermore, the relationship between Donnie from Queens and the intelligence professionals is tanking. That could be a problem.

The simmering distrust between Donald Trump and U.S. intelligence agencies escalated into open antagonism Saturday after the president-elect mocked a CIA report that Russian operatives had intervened in the U.S. presidential election to help him win.

The growing tensions set up a potential showdown between Trump and the nation’s top intelligence officials during what some of those officials describe as the most complex threat environment in decades.

…

Trump’s reaction will probably deepen an existing rift between Trump and the agencies and raised questions about how the government’s 16 spying agencies will function in his administration on matters such as counterterrorism

It’s disconcerting for the Republicans to have Trump jeering at the intelligence agencies.

Though Mr. Trump has wasted no time in antagonizing the agencies, to carry out priorities like combating terrorism and deterring cyberattacks he will have to rely on them for the sort of espionage activities and analysis that they spend more than $70 billion a year to perform.

At this point in a transition, a president-elect is usually delving into intelligence he has never before seen and learning about C.I.A. and National Security Agency abilities. But Mr. Trump, who has taken intelligence briefings only sporadically, is questioning not only analytic conclusions, but also their underlying facts.

“To have the president-elect of the United States simply reject the

So, yeah, apparently it is the case that we have this rampaging idiot monster preparing to destroy everything because Putin put his elbow on the scale.

American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

In the months before the election, it was

John Glenn didn’t agree with Trump on the flag:

John Glenn played a key role in the U.S. Senate helping to defeat an amendment making the "descrecration" of the American flag a crime. pic.twitter.com/rgcyNH4Ayz

— ACLU (@ACLU) December 9, 2016

 … Read the rest

News in Trump from the Times:

Rex W. Tillerson, the president and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, is the leading candidate to be Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, according to a person with direct knowledge of the search process.

Mr. Tillerson went to Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday to meet with Mr. Trump, who is said to be close to making a decision. Mr. Tillerson has been strongly recommended by a number of business leaders.

What does running an oil company have to do with being the country’s foreign minister?

And then there’s this questionnaire.

President-elect Trump’s transition team has circulated an unusual 74-point questionnaire that requests the names of all employees and contractors who have attended

Goldman Sachs. Clinton’s $200k fees for chatting to them over dinner probably cost her a good few votes, and certainly gave Donnie from Queens useful talking points, but now…well now is now, and all is transformed.

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name a top Goldman Sachs executive, Gary Cohn, to lead the National Economic Council, handing the Wall Street veteran significant sway over his administration’s economic policy.

The council includes the heads of various departments and agencies and works within the administration to coordinate economic policy. As director, Cohn would be in position to advise Trump as he attempts to fulfill some of his chief campaign promises, including lowering corporate taxes and rethinking U.S. trade policy.

And generally … Read the rest

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,

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

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

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.

… Read the rest

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 … Read the rest

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

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

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