This One -- ... will be most controversial: Trump has named Rep. Matt Gaetz as his attorney general.
UPDATE -- Senate Republicans have chosen John Thune of South Dakota as majority leader. Thune replaces Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-GA), who steps down as minority leader this year.
Majority Leader Day – Republican senators are set to choose the next majority leader Wednesday, with GOP whip John Thune of South Dakota, and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas the lead candidates. Dark horse is President-elect Trump’s preference, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida (U.S. News & World Report).
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DOGE Style – The tech bro couple of MAGA dreams, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are tipped to lead President-elect Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency – yes, DOGE, for The Elon’s favored bitcoin product – according to The Wall Street Journal. DOGE’s mandate is to streamline government bureaucracy, Trump said. Good news for the world’s richest man and leader of SpaceX, X, Tesla and Starlink is that DOGE will operate outside of government – so no need for Elon to divest, even regarding NASA contracts with SpaceX.
More picks for All the Best People 2.0 … Peter Hegseth, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and host of Fox & Friends Weekend will be Trump’s defense secretary, The New York Times reports, adding that he’s “outside the norm of the traditional defense secretary.” Which, if you haven’t been paying attention, is the point. … Mike Huckabee, talk show host on the religious network TBN, former governor of Arkansas and father of the current governor of Arkansas is Trump’s choice to be ambassador to Isreal. Huckabee has “long called himself a Zionist,” the AP notes. So, no two-state solution. Nah.
--TL
TUESDAY 11/12/24
Noem to Homeland Security – President-elect Trump has chosen South Dakota Gov. and Uber-Trumper™ Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, The Wall Street Journal reports. The department is key to Trump’s mass deportation plans. Noem was on the short-list to become Trump’s running mate last summer.
Gallego Beats Lake – Arizona was the seventh and final swing state to swing for Donald J. Trump in Sunday’s final count, but the president-elect’s coattails were not long enough to drag along uber-Trumper Kari Lake, who has lost her US Senate bid to Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego. With 95% of the vote counted, challenger Lake had 47.8% of the vote to Gallego’s 50%, The Wall Street Journal reports. Final count for the next Senate is 53 Republicans to 47 Democrats.
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Trump Appointments – President-elect Donald J. Trump has revealed a number of appointments the past few days, beginning last Thursday with his campaign chair, Susan Wiles, for chief of staff. Meanwhile …
Secretary of State: Marco Rubio, as first reported on CNN’s The Source With Kaitlan Collins. Yes, that’s right, ‘Little Marco,’ though since that ca. 2016 Trump insult, the neocon senator from Florida, a hardliner on China, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, according to The New York Times, has come around to the Trumpian belief the Ukraine “conflict” has reached a stalemate, and “needs to be brought to a conclusion.”
UN ambassador: Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York. Stefanik was a Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan trad-conservative Republican when she first ran for her House seat in 2014, at age 30, (per NPR’s All Things Considered), but pivoted to support Trump during his first administration. By 2021, she replaced Rep. Liz Cheney (WY) as House Republican Conference Chair after Cheney’s colleagues ousted her over her repudiation of Trump’s involvement in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol.
EPA administrator: Lee Zeldin, another New York Republican, will be in charge of dismantling President Biden’s climate change regulations (Politico). Zeldin was a loyal supporter of the president-elect when he served as a congress member during the first Trump administration.
Border czar: Thomas Homan was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for part of the first Trump administration (ibid). He will not need Senate confirmation to become border czar, an unofficial title the Trump/Vance campaign misleadingly attached to Kamala Harris to attack her record as vice president. Homan says Trump 2.0 will crank up workplace raids, telling Fox & Friends’ Steve Doocy; “Where do we find most victims of sex trafficking and forced labor trafficking? At worksites.”
Deputy chief of staff: Stephen Miller, the 39-year-old senior advisor to Trump during his first administration (ibid) is considered perhaps the most extreme of hardliners on immigration reform.
Speaking of … Susan Wiles, Trump’s pick as his chief of staff and the first woman to be so-named, told a private crowd that Trump will “move quickly” to reinstate orders from his first administration that President Biden then revoked, The New York Timesreports. Wiles did not specify which orders will be reinstated.
Uninvited … Niki Haley and Mike Pompeo. Haley, who once had Stefanik’s future job reportedly patched things up with Trump after her attempt to beat him to the GOP nomination this year, but he did not take her up on her offer to campaign for him. Trump ruled out Haley and his former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, for any future in his next White House. Pompeo, a pro-Ukraine hawk, reassured Fortune’s Global Forum in New York City Monday that Trump “is not going to let Vladimir Putin run through Ukraine.”
--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa
Is Project 2025 On?
MONDAY 11/11/24
By Todd Lassa
Do you fear The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025? Or do you hope to see the incoming Trump White House quickly execute it?
President-elect Donald J. Trump spent the vs. Harris portion of his campaign disavowing any significant knowledge of the sweeping, 900-some-page blueprint titled Mandate for Leadership – The Conservative Promise, which includes provisions to fire thousands of federal public employees and replace them with the president’s loyalists, make the nation safer for Christian nationalism, eliminate the Education Department and cut or privatize Social Security and Medicare.
On that first point, specifically, Project 2025 proposes that the next conservative president reinstate Schedule F, which Trump signed at the end of his first administration, to “dispatch at will” federal employees who are in the position to make or advocate policy, says the special interest website, Federal News Network. President Biden rescinded Schedule F on the third day of his administration.
The Harris/Walz campaign tried to tie Trump/Vance to Project 2025 and tried to tell voters it is authoritarianism hiding in plain sight.
The Harris/Walz campaign’s warning didn’t work, convincing only voters who already were supporters.
Trump denied knowing much, if anything, about Project 2025, though “at least” 140 people who worked on it had also worked in the Trump administration, according to an investigative report by CNN.
Before JD Vance became Trump’s running mate, he wrote the forward to a new book by Heritage Foundation chief and lead architect on Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, originally titled Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America (a title whose second half seems to evoke what many Trump supporters attempted on January 6, 2021). The book was original scheduled for publication by HarperCollins on September 24, but the controversy raised by the Harris/Walz campaign prompted Roberts to call for its release date to be delayed until November, according to RealClearPolitics.
In his early-Wednesday morning acceptance speech last week, Donald J. Trump said he has an “unprecedented mandate.” Trump has since won all seven battleground states, and has even won the American popular vote, a claim he could not make eight years earlier.
Meanwhile, the GOP has a 53-46 Senate majority (with one race yet to be called) and a 213-203 House majority likely to remain Republican when all the ballots are counted.
Since his election victory, Trump has reiterated plans to close the southern border and start deporting undocumented aliens – at least, those deemed “criminals,” at first. He will end the Russian-Ukraine war in 24 hours, much to the dismay of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and to the delight of Vladimir Putin.
Trump will keep his tax-cut promise, which means making the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 – set to expire next year – permanent, while also lowering the corporate tax for certain corporations to 17%, from 21% (which itself was a TCJA reduction from 35%).
Our president-elect finds “tariff” to be the most beautiful word in the English language and has promised 10% across the board one for virtually all incoming imports.
Conservative and liberal economists alike warn that his plans for tariff hikes and mass deportations will re-ignite inflation, so Trump might want to consider instead slow-walking these promises and take the Bidenomics gains of 2.4% current inflation and 4.1% unemployment, along with decent economic growth, as his own win.
Which gets us back to Project 2025: Will Trump pivot back to The Heritage Foundation’s radical conservative blueprint? Will he implement a few of the less-radical policy initiatives? Or will he move toward full implementation without naming it?
Your opinion on these questions matter. Email editors@thehustings.news with your civil comments and please, indicate your political leanings in the subject line. [You’ll note a right-column commentary on this question by Pundit-at-Large Stephen Macaulay, who is a never-Trump conservative. We welcome comments from both never-Trump and pro-MAGA conservatives, as well as liberal readers from the various degrees along the left-spectrum.]