What the last 48 hours told us about Trump's next 4 years - CNN

What the last 48 hours told us about Trump's next 4 years

By Gregory Krieg, CNN

Updated 0650 GMT (1450 HKT) January 13, 2017

Trump: People don't care about my tax returns

NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 11: President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a news cenference at Trump Tower on January 11, 2017 in New York City. This is Trump's first official news conference since the November elections. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Trump's first presser as President-elect

NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 11: President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a news cenference at Trump Tower on January 11, 2017 in New York City. This is Trump's first official news conference since the November elections. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Trump pans intel claim, shouts down reporter

CNN: Why Trump's 'fake news' claim is wrong

Trump: Intel report is all 'fake news'

Trump Acosta split

Trump shuts down CNN reporter

President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, Wednesday, January 11, 2017.

Trump on hacking DNC: I think it was Russia

Trump: Pence getting approvals for wall

President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, Wednesday, January 11, 2017.

Trump describes Obamacare plan

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trump acosta split

CNN reporter: Spicer threatened to kick me out

Trump: People don't care about my tax returns

NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 11: President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a news cenference at Trump Tower on January 11, 2017 in New York City. This is Trump's first official news conference since the November elections. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Trump's first presser as President-elect

NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 11: President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a news cenference at Trump Tower on January 11, 2017 in New York City. This is Trump's first official news conference since the November elections. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Trump pans intel claim, shouts down reporter

CNN: Why Trump's 'fake news' claim is wrong

Trump: Intel report is all 'fake news'

(CNN)President-elect Donald Trump went nose-to-nose Wednesday with a press corps itching to cross-examine him after more than five months at arm's length, while his top nominees faced off with senators during a strategic crush of confirmation hearings.

The raucous 48 hours, beginning on Capitol Hill early Tuesday, represented an unofficial inauguration of the 45th president -- a whirlwind welcome to Trump's Washington, a chaotic and contentious place where graying norms seem destined to clash relentlessly with an idiosyncratic administration.

By Thursday morning, after a Senate vote-a-rama effectively paved the way for GOP efforts to dismember Obamacare, new information had emerged and old suspicions were affirmed, as the final countdown to the historic transition neared its end.

Here are seven lessons -- and the moments that defined them -- from the past two days:

1. The lesson: Trump escalates his conflicts with the media and other perceived enemies

The moment: At his news conference Wednesday, the President-elect refused to hear a question from CNN's Jim Acosta. Incoming press secretary Sean Spicer then threatened to throw Acosta out of the room if he persisted in asking.

"I have great respect for the news, great respect for freedom of the press and all that," Trump said during his long-delayed press conference Wednesday.

But the lovefest had its limits, as the President-elect ripped CNN and BuzzFeed over a pair of stories published the day before -- CNN's a carefully sourced report; BuzzFeed's a less scrupulous document dump -- and purposefully conflated the two in order to avoid answering serious questions about his and his staff and advisers' alleged ties to Russia.

Trump passed over Acosta during the news conference and Spicer threatened to eject him if he spoke up again. When ABC's Cecilia Vega pressed Trump on the matter, the President-elect spent nearly 90 seconds filibustering before heading for the elevators, where he eventually denied to reporters that he or anyone on his team had been in contact with the Russians during the campaign.

2. The lesson: Republican Russia hawks could emerge as Trump's most galvanizing opponents

The moment: Marco Rubio on Wednesday blitzed secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson over his connections to Russia and whether, in his opinion, Vladimir Putin was a "war criminal."

Unlike Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions a day earlier, Tillerson, the Exxon Mobil chief with extensive business ties to Moscow, was confronted with a blistering round of inquiries from the senators who will decide if his nomination vote goes to the full chamber. Rubio in particular pressed Tillerson with a categorical question.

"Is Vladimir Putin a war criminal?" the Florida senator asked.

Tillerson hedged, saying he "would not use that term" and required "much more information" before giving a clear answer.

Rex Tillerson grilled on foreign policy

Rex Tillerson grilled on foreign policy 03:33

Rubio pressed on, running off a laundry list of Russian aggression, from its actions in Aleppo to the murder of dissidents and journalists, but Tillerson didn't budge.

Further questions about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and the Philippines were met with similar demurrals.

By late Wednesday, Amnesty International USA had weighed in with their growing concerns.

"After a day of questioning, Tillerson's commitment to human rights in the US and abroad is in serious question," the group's executive director, Margaret Huang, said in an email. "He must use tomorrow's hearing to clarify today's troubling statements."

3. The lesson: A Justice Department led by Jeff Sessions will not vigorously police the police

The moment: Asked on Tuesday for his opinion on the Justice Department's use of consent decrees to oversee and reform police departments with records of abuse, Sessions expressed serious doubts.

During the tenures of Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, the Justice Department has been proactive in applying oversight measures to local law enforcement outfits found to have committed civil rights violations.

The department has used a tool called a consent decree -- a period of enforced reform, with terms agreed by municipal authorities and Justice Department officials as a means of avoiding federal court action. Ferguson, Missouri and Cleveland are among the wide range, in size and prominence, of cities to sign on after high-profile offenses.

"I think there is concern that good police officers and good departments can be sued by the Department of Justice when you just have individuals within a department that have done wrong," Sessions said when asked during the first day of his hearing. "These lawsuits undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness, and we need to be careful before we do that."

With an attorney general -- and Sessions is all but guaranteed to be confirmed -- so openly critical of the process, it's hard to imagine the Trump Justice Department will be initiating the reviews that became a hallmark of its predecessor.

4. The lesson: Protesters -- not a beleaguered Democratic minority -- are set to emerge as leaders in the anti-Trump resistance

The moment: The Sessions confirmation hearings, Day 1. While senators mostly treated Sessions with deference during what many had expected to be a fraught and tense confirmation hearing, Democrats were not nearly as vocal as the demonstrators that frequently interrupted the proceedings.

Protesters disrupt Sessions' AG hearing

Protesters disrupt Sessions' AG hearing 01:30

Protesters from a variety of grassroots progressive groups and larger liberal organizations were often the harshest voices in the room during Sessions' hearings. They rose at seemingly regular intervals to rail against the Alabama senator, who was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 amid allegations he made racist comments to a colleague. More recently, Sessions has emerged as a vocal backer of voter ID laws.

Activist Kai Newkirk, who was arrested during a sit-in at Sessions' office, told CNN Wednesday he was willing to be jailed because "Sessions' history and present positions make it undeniably clear that he cannot be entrusted to uphold equal justice, civil rights, or the right to vote."

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee panel were mostly restrained in their questioning, with Minnesota's Al Franken the rare Sessions colleague to confront him over his past record -- deliberately overstated, Franken suggested -- as a civil rights proponent.

With their party set to turn over the White House, and already nearly powerless in Congress, Democrats sitting on Capitol Hill could soon take a backseat to progressives and allied groups planning to stand up to Trump with mass protests and direct actions.

5. The lesson: Difficult conversations about race in policy clashes and political conflicts aren't going anywhere during the Trump era.

The moment: Both Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights hero, and Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, testified against Sessions on the second day of his confirmation hearings.

Booker to Sessions: 'Love all our citizens'

Booker to Sessions: 'Love all our citizens' 02:04

As their colleagues came under fire for offering what liberals saw as an overabundance of senatorial courtesy, Lewis, Booker and Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Rep. Cedric Richmond zeroed in on Sessions' history with a sharper edge.

"Those who are committed to equal justice in our society wonder whether Sen. Sessions' call for 'law and order' will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then," Lewis said during his testimony. "The rule of law was used to violate the human and civil rights of the poor, the dispossessed, people of color."

Booker, meanwhile, sought to channel the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., when he said, "The arc of the moral universe does not just naturally curve toward justice, we must bend it."

"America needs an attorney general who is resolute and determined to bend the arc," Booker testified. "Sen. Sessions' record does not speak to that desire, intention or will."

Booker's decision to so publicly oppose a Senate colleague -- he is the first to do so in a confirmation hearing -- shed light on the depth of the racial fault lines that figure to roil the new administration and its critics.

Difficult conversations are obviously not new in this country and they escalated during the course of the Obama administration, when Americans were focused at various times on Ferguson, Baltimore, Black Lives Matter and the very visceral fight over voting rights and the Confederate flag. Trump and his cabinet will bring a very different perspective than Obama and his. Partisan fights over race seem destined to escalate over the coming four years.

6. The lesson: The role of the FBI, in particular Director James Comey, in the 2016 campaign will remain a flashpoint in 2017

The moment: Democrats were alternately outraged and baffled when, in the course of a hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey refused to comment on whether the bureau was investigating links between President-elect Donald Trump's campaign and Russia.

The question came from Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat. He wanted to know whether the FBI had investigated potential contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The director, however, was not in a forthcoming mood and refused to comment.

Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, couldn't help himself.

"You didn't say one way or another whether even there was an investigation underway?" King asked again.

"Correct," Comey said. "I don't, especially in a public forum, we never confirm or deny a pending investigation."

"The irony of your making that statement here, I cannot avoid," King said, a clear reference to Comey's looser lips during the campaign, when he jolted the contest with a very late public revelation that his agents would renew their review of emails potentially tied to Hillary Clinton's private server.

Clinton was cleared, again, days later, but many Democrats believe the brouhaha cost her precious votes in a race that was ultimately decided by the narrowest of margins in a handful of states. Like Trump, their grudge is likely to endure.

7. The lesson: The leader of the Democratic Party is Barack Obama -- and no one else comes close

The moment: In his farewell address from Chicago on Tuesday night, the outgoing president delivered a stark warning about the challenges facing American democracy while, both in the speech and recent remarks, offering a more coherent path forward than anyone else in his party.

Obama said goodbye in much the same way he entered national politics -- with an appeal to a shared decency and common interests across the partisan divide. But a decade on from the beginning of his brief Senate stay, the twice-elected president addressed a country more openly at odds over race.

Watch President Obama's full farewell address

Watch President Obama's full farewell address 50:07

"After my election," Obama told supporters in McCormick Place, "there was talk of a post-racial America. Such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society."

Framing that divide as a "threat to our democracy," Obama pleaded with Americans to emerge from their digital bubbles and more openly engage with political opposites.

"If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet," he said to laughs, "try talking with one of them in real life."

But his appeal to economic solidarity -- which sounded a lot more like Bernie Sanders than his would-be successor Hillary Clinton -- struck hardest.

"If every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and an undeserving minority, then workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves," he said, while pointedly encouraging Democrats to engage "the middle-aged white guy."

Whether that adds up to a winning strategy remains to be seen, but for a night at least, the departing Obama towered over the Democrats he leaves behind to take on Trump.

What will the Republican Party do to Obama Care ? - New York Times

A Senate Vote-a-RamaPrimer, in Case You Plan to Sleep Tonight ( on Obama Care )

By THOMAS KAPLAN
JANUARY 11, 2017
WASHINGTON — The Senate is getting ready for a very late night.
As Republicans push forward with repealing the Affordable Care Act, lawmakers are about to undertake a grueling Senate tradition: the vote-a-rama, a marathon of rapid-fire votes that is likely to stretch on for hours.
Yes, that’s really what it’s called.
For at least some people in the Capitol, like those who enjoy sleeping when it is nighttime, the experience will be unpleasant. But there is a reason for the spectacle.
For Democrats, it provides an opportunity to draw a distinction between their views on health care and how Republicans are approaching the issue. For Republicans, the completion of the exercise clears the way for them to advance to the next step in their quest to gut the health care law.
In lieu of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, here is a primer on what to expect.
Will the health act be repealed while I sleep tonight?
No. Republicans have embarked on a fragile, multistep process to repeal major parts of the health care law, one that is on pace to at least take weeks, even without any big stumbles.
But an important step on the way to repealing the law could be taken soon, perhaps early Thursday. The Senate is close to approving a budget resolution that would set in motion the process of drawing up and ultimately passing legislation to repeal the act.
What’s a budget resolution?
Don’t be fooled by the name. In this case, Congress isn’t working on the federal budget.
Republicans are taking a series of steps to allow them to repeal the health care law without facing a Democratic filibuster. Passing the budget resolution will set in motion the process that, as drawn up by Republican leaders, will culminate in the passage of legislation repealing major parts of the act.
The resolution will direct House and Senate committees to come up with that legislation. (There is some disagreement about the deadline for the committees to finish their work; Republican leaders planned for Jan. 27, but this week a group of five Republican senators suggested extending that date by five weeks, until March 3.)
The legislation that the committees come up with will be packaged in what is called a reconciliation bill, which is not subject to a filibuster. That’s critical, because Republicans have a 52-seat majority, and overcoming a filibuster requires 60 votes.
Vote-a-what?
Special rules apply to budget resolutions. Senators can offer an unlimited number of amendments, and being generally crafty people, they like to take advantage of that opportunity.
The result is the spectacle known as the vote-a-rama. The Senate can consider dozens of amendments in quick succession, a task that can extend into the wee hours of the night.
None of the amendments hold the force of law: A budget resolution is essentially a blueprint for Congress, and the measure never goes to the president for a signature. But the amendments can be used to provide grist for campaign ads, giving each party the opportunity to force the opposing party’s members to take votes on politically delicate topics.
The lengthy undertaking, with minimal debate about the amendments being voted on, is not the ideal deliberative experience.
Former Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire and a past chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, once described the vote-a-rama as “the Senate’s equivalent to Chinese water torture.”
What happens tonight?
The Senate is expected to begin the vote-a-rama Wednesday evening. Not surprisingly, Senate Democrats are expected to focus on amendments relating to health care law, as part of their effort to denounce the Republican push to unwind it.
It remains to be seen how long the vote-a-rama drama will go on. Senate Democrats have already displayed their stamina once this week: They spoke on the floor in defense of the law until past midnight on Monday night.
Once the amendments have been dealt with, the Senate is expected to approve the budget resolution, a key step toward the Republicans’ goal of repealing the law.
Then what?
The House will take up the budget resolution, which it plans to do once the Senate gives its approval. The House vote could take place on Friday.
But some Republicans in the House have expressed unease with voting on the measure this week, because of uncertainty about when and how the health care law would be replaced.

New York Times

Will Trump slash civil servant pay to $1 using Armageddon Rule ？ - Guardian

Before he even won, Donald Trump had already threatened civil liberties and the central tenets of democracy when he said he wanted to jail his political opponent and sue the New York Times. Now Congress has made it possible for him to undermine something even bigger: government writ large.

An arcane procedural rule allowing lawmakers to slash the pay of specific federal workers down to as low as $1 was quietly revived as part of appropriations negotiations last week. The so-called Holman Rule, named for the congressman who dreamed it up in 1876, is just the latest sign the Trump administration might target members of the civil service – the nation’s single largest employer – for politically motivated reasons.

While such amendments would still have to be approved by majorities in the House and US Senate, with Republicans in control of both chambers and voting in unison, that’s not an implausible scenario. Take, for instance, the fact that all but three Republican members of the House ultimately voted for the passage of this rule as part of the spending package, despite early Republican grumblings behind closed doors.

It’s not just this newly revived rule that makes federal workers vulnerable. As Maureen Gilman, legislative director for the National Treasury Employees Union, told the Washington Post last week: “This is part of a very chilling theme that federal workers are seeing right now.”

We were ethics lawyers for Bush and Obama. Trump's cabinet hearings must be delayed
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The rule’s reinstatement follows a string of chilling moves by the Trump administration’s transition team, which already announced a freeze on federal hiring during Trump’s first 100 days, and a series of cabinet nominations that are antithetical to the agencies represented. (Consider, for starters, the climate denier who Trump would have lead the Environmental Protection Agency). Last week, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration, in a break with precedent, would be denying politically appointed ambassadors a grace period in vacating their posts.

That doesn’t begin to cover all the norms that may be violated, or federal benefits that may be at risk, under the new administration. Pension plans could be slashed and automatic raises eliminated; even the modest 2.1% raise President Obama awarded federal workers in January last year could be rolled back.

Regardless of whether any of that comes to pass, the implicit threat is clear.

And relatedly, even if the Holman rule is never once enacted, its chilling effect will be significant. Employees whose job description makes them politically vulnerable are already leaving government and there’s expected to be something of an exodus in the weeks and months ahead. As one federal worker told the writer Marin Cogan: “I have no doubt, that what we will see is the purge of good, committed, and competent talent out of federal service.”

For those who opt to stay, the pressure to self-censor in certain departments will be tremendous. Whether government employees admit this to themselves or not, the law of self-preservation dictates anyone working on potentially partisan issues, like women’s health or climate, will have a tremendous incentive to make their work politically palatable – or simply disappear.

Donald Trump didn't save the ethics committee. You did | Richard Wolffe
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It’s difficult to say with much precision which individuals or teams within agencies will be targeted using this provision. When asked this very question, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy refused to say. But last month many of those who work on climate change were quietly put on notice that their jobs are at risk.

This was the subtext of the Trump transition team’s demand that the EPA hand over a list of names for all the people in their agency working on international climate change treaty negotiations. That the department pointedly refused to cooperate doesn’t insulate employees from the knowledge that their names would have been on that list. It’s especially cold comfort given that their protection from the Trump administration will last, at this point, less than two more weeks.

Most insidious of all, perhaps, is the fact that there’s no way of knowing how pervasive this chilling effect will be – only that it will be pervasive. Sure, we can know how many federal employees opt to leave government, but there’s no way to measure how many of those who stay will submit to having their hands tied or accept being blindfolded to science in the interest of saving their jobs.

And that, perhaps, is the one silver lining to the resurfacing of what’s been called the “Armageddon rule”. It may spell the end of a politically insulated federal government – but if lawmakers use it, at least Trump and the Republican party’s witch-hunt will be visible to the public eye. Then, everyone will be able to see their bullying for what it is.

6 most moving farewell speeches by past US presidents - TIME

When President Barack Obama delivers his farewell address in Chicago on Tuesday, he will be only the 10th president in American history to present a formal goodbye as such, according to Gleaves Whitney, the author of American Presidents: Farewell Addresses to the Nation, 1796-2001. Though the practice has become much more common through the years, the vast majority of presidents have said their goodbyes during their final Annual Messages to Congress or State of the Union addresses.

By Whitney’s count, the other presidents to deliver a separate farewell have been George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. (Many historians also count George H.W. Bush’s West Point speech as a farewell address, but Bush himself did not identify it as such.)

For those presidents who have chosen to announce the ends of their careers in public service through a separate speech, a typical farewell address—which could take the form of a lengthy editorial in early years and more recently has been delivered to an audience—has involved not only thanking staff and supporters, but also reiterating an administration’s ideas about America’s national purpose. As a result, these speeches can also be a window into the unique challenges the country faced during a president’s term.

Here are some of the most memorable ones:

George Washington (1796): The first farewell address remains one of the most influential statements in American political history. In 32 handwritten pages, printed in Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser on Sept. 19, 1796, the first President laid out many ideas that continue to shape the nation. He announced he would not seek a third term, setting the precedent for two-term presidents. He warned that “factions” or political parties could become a threat to unity, a notion that resonates in today’s particularly polarized political climate. He also issued guidelines for U.S. foreign policy that are still commonly cited today, as proponents of American isolationism often look back to his warning to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” which was inspired by his efforts to keep the U.S. neutral when France and Britain faced off during the French Revolution. Concerned that getting entangled in European conflicts could destabilize the new, weak republic, he advised only getting involved in “temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”

Washington concluded by asking for forgiveness: “Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend…and that, after forty five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.”

Andrew Jackson (1837): In the first formal farewell address since Washington—ghostwritten in large part by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Roger Taney—Jackson harked back to that earlier version fondly as “paternal counsels…warning of us of the evil to come.” Now that the Constitution had turned 50, it was “no longer a doubtful experiment,” he said. But, though things had changed, Jackson did have some warnings of his own, speaking out against pork-barrel politics (it might turn Congress “into a scramble for personal and sectional advantages”) as well as a national banking system that he believed favored “money power” — a.k.a. East Coast manufacturers — over the “common man.” The speech illuminates its era’s shifting politics as, in the midst of westward expansion, more Americans were participating in national affairs. Because he was the first President who was not part of the founding elite, Whitney says, “the age of Jackson is considered a new era in American politics because now the so-called ‘common man’ could participate.”

Andrew Johnson (1869): When Johnson departed office, the North had won the Civil War, President Lincoln had been assassinated, citizenship was expanding and the nation was in the midst of a difficult Reconstruction period. At the same time, the first President to be impeached was trying to reconstruct his reputation. It didn’t work. Whitney ranks the farewell message that ran in the New York Times and other newspapers across the country as perhaps the least dignified farewell address in national history, because it reads less like an inspirational message and more like an attempt to settle scores and vindicate himself. He listed a so-called “catalog of crimes” committed by “pretended patriots” who strive “by every means, to keep open and exposed to the poisonous breath of party passion the terrible wounds of four-years’ war.” The New YorkHerald wrote that Johnson’s remarks “smell of chagrin, distrust, ill nature, and bad blood.” Johnson ended up sounding so “petty,” as Whitney puts it, that he may have given the idea of such a message a bad name — so bad a name that another formal farewell address would not be delivered for more than eight decades.

Harry S. Truman (1953): Truman revived the tradition of the farewell address, delivering the first such address to take the form of a speech broadcast from the Oval Office at 10:30 p.m. on Jan. 15, 1953. “Truman was at his best,” biographer David McCullough wrote in Truman. The speech remains an important reminder of how much the world had changed for Americans during his term and the years leading up to it, and how much that change had affected the role of the president. The country was still getting used to its top position in a new world order. It had overcome existential threats internally (the Great Depression) and externally (World War II) and “emerged as a superpower that, for the first time in her history, had responsibility for the entire free world. No previous presidents had faced such a global burden,” Whitney says. During the speech, Truman acknowledged that his decisions hadn’t always been the most popular — putting troops in Korea, dropping the atomic bomb — but asked the American people to put themselves in a president’s shoes: “I want all of you to realize how big a job, how hard a job, it is—not for my sake, because I am stepping out of it—but for the sake of my successor.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1961): In his farewell address, Truman’s successor discussed how being responsible for the entire free world posed “new and grave challenges to the U.S. foreign policy establishment,” as Whitney puts it. Though he expressed concern about a number of issues that remain relevant, like the need to preserve natural resources, one part of his speech stands out. The National Security Act of 1947 had created a unified military structure for the first time in American history, but that also meant the end of the balanced budget and the risk that American society would become militarized. As such, the former World War II general famously warned about the development of the military-industrial complex. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” he said. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” He also laid out his vision of what the country’s role in this new world order should be: “America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.”

Richard Nixon (1974): The President who resigned after the Watergate scandal insisted that he wasn’t really saying farewell in farewell remarks to the White House staff on Aug. 9, 1974: “You are here to say goodbye to us. And we don’t have a good word for it in English—the best is ‘au revoir,’ we’ll see you again.” But, though Nixon’s speech does not belong on the roster of formal presidential farewell addresses, no list of White House goodbyes would be complete without it.

Perhaps seeking some pity, he quipped, “I only wish that I were a wealthy man” he said. “At the present time, I have got to find a way to pay my taxes.” He regaled his tearful audience with stories about resilience in people he admired, like his father, a California streetcar motorman who went on to own the “poorest” lemon ranch in the state. “Never be petty” were the words of wisdom from the man who kept a so-called “enemies list”: “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

Trump threatens world trade - Financial Times

Like cats in popular folk wisdom, globalisation appears to have many lives. The integration of markets in goods, services and capital that accelerated in the 1990s with the fall of communism and the rise of China has been written off many times, notably during the global financial crisis. Yet it has survived.
This past year, its obituarists have had more material to work with than usual. The stalling of a number of high-profile trade deals has had the pre-emptive mourners out in force arguing that the engine of liberalisation has failed. Feeble growth in worldwide goods trade relative to the expansion of the global economy has raised fears that protectionism has taken its toll. And the election of Donald Trump, with his tirades against Chinese imports stealing jobs, and the appointment ofChina trade hawks like Peter Navarroto his administration, suggests that the era of liberalised trade is over.
Of these worries, only the last is convincing. Even allowing for the fact that rhetoric on the US presidential campaign trail tends to be far more blood-curdling than subsequent actions when in office, Mr Trump’s zero-sum worldview is deeply troubling.
A number of large trade pacts — usually dubbed “free-trade agreements” whether or not they succeed in liberalising commerce — have failed in recent years. But 2016 was notable for two particularly large ones hitting the buffers — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), involving the US and EU, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) of 12 Asia-Pacific economies. Moreover, the trade world was treated to some comic relief late in the year when the smaller pact between the EU and Canada was held up for a while by obstreperous Walloons, the government of Belgium’s francophone region objecting to various provisions therein.
That said, none of this was wildly surprising. TTIP, predictably for a large multi-stranded deal between two trading blocs used to acting as hegemons, has struggled since its launch. The TPP was opposed by both presidential candidates, even though Hillary Clinton had been intimately involved in its negotiation. It was always going to face an uphill passage through Congress. Under the radar, however, the EU moved closer to a deal with Japan, two of the world’s largest trading powers quietly getting on with business.
As for the decline in the growth of trade relative to gross domestic product, it seems more likely to be related to changes in the structure of supply chains than to protectionism. Previously disaggregated production lines are being pulled inside single economies, notably China.
The underlying forces against globalisation are often overstated. But Mr Trump’s election could change everything. Armed with a view of the world where China’s gain is America’s loss, and the powers available to any US president to tear up trade treaties and impose emergency tariffs, Mr Trump could do serious damage within a relatively short space of time.
He has already appointed two instinctive protectionists itching for trade confrontation with China, Wilbur Ross and Mr Navarro, to his trade team. It may be up to Congress to restrain the administration’s wilder protectionist impulses — which is a little like putting the toddlers in charge of a nursery.
Globalisation has survived many things, but the rise of mercantilist populism in the form of Mr Trump may be its biggest challenge for decades. The year of 2016 was not a disastrous one for international commerce, but it may prove to be an uneasy calm before the trade wars begin.

Putin ordered hack on Democratic Party database - Financial Times

Putin behind hacking of Democrates ' data base to sway election in Trump's favour -

Russian President Vladimir Putin personally approved Russian cyber attacks aimed at interfering with last year’s presidential election motivated by “a clear preference” for Donald Trump, according to a newly declassified study by the US intelligence community.

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In“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” the report concluded. “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”

The joint effort by the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency said the campaign was in keeping with Moscow’s traditional interest in weakening the US-led global order. But the use of purloined emails to hobble Democrat Hillary Clinton marked a “significant escalation” beyond traditional Russian espionage activities, it added, writes David Lynch in Washington.

All three agencies agreed that Russia “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances” by discrediting Clinton or contrasting her unfavorably to him. The CIA and FBI said they had “high confidence” in that judgment while NSA backed it with moderate confidence.

Russia took a flexible approach to executing a multi-faceted campaign involving cyber attacks, traditional propaganda, and “fake news” spread via social media “trolls.” When Mrs Clinton appeared likely to be elected, the campaign focused on “undermining her future presidency.”

Putin has nursed a grudge against Clinton for what he saw as her role in anti-government protests in Moscow in late 2011 and 2012, the report said. The Russian leader also “has had many positive experiences working with Western business leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia,” the report said, citing forme Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

On Election Day, Russian social media allies readied an effort to call into question the legitimacy of the vote through the twitter hashtag #DemocracyRIP, the report said

Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), responsible for overseas spying, likely began its cyber attacks against the Democratic national Committe computers in March of last year. By May, Russian hackers had extracted “large volumes of data from the DNC,” the report said.

Financial Times

Intelligence report says Putin ordered the computer hack to help Trump - Economist

Intelligence report says Putin ordered a campaign to help Trump

Jan 6th 2017, 22:40  by LEXINGTON | WASHINGTON, DC 

AMERICAN democracy has suffered a grave assault—yet political leaders from its two main parties cannot agree on how or even whether to investigate. In a move that is both astonishing and without precedent the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on December 6th issued a declassified version of a secret assessment earlier given to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. It found that the intelligence services of a foreign country hacked into the email accounts and computers of senior officials involved in the 2016 presidential campaign, notably at the Democratic National Committee, and released much of that stolen data to the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy website. The same hostile power also gained access to computer systems of several state and local electoral boards (though not systems involved in vote tallying) and used an array of front organisations, television channels and social media “trolls” to feed disinformation and propaganda to American audiences, in a bid to influence the result of the election and “undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.”

In language as blunt as it is startling, the assessment, written by the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency, declares that this crime is no whodunit. Though the declassified report does not make public its sources or supporting evidence, it declares the “high confidence” of American spy chiefs that they know the culprit. It finds that: “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign… to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Russia succeeded in swaying the election results, though leaks from government officials to the Washington Post reported on December 5th that American spooks picked up gleeful communications among senior Russian figures celebrating Mr Trump’s win. The saga is so alarming because political leaders and the two parties have failed to unite in defence of their country.

Mr Trump’s reaction has been the most troubling. To him the hacking of the DNC and such figures as John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton presidential campaign, is not so much a whodunit as a “who cares”? In a long string of scornful tweets over many days he has cast doubt on American intelligence agencies, suggesting that they are too incompetent to know whether Russia is to blame (he mentioned their failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction more than once). In an interview with the New York Times, shortly before being briefed on the DNI’s assessment, Mr Trump called the hacking probe “a political witch hunt” against him. He has urged America to “move on” rather than impose sanctions on Russia and in a statement after his briefing endeavoured to divert opinion away from Moscow. “Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations,” Mr Trump said, promising that as president he would appoint a team to come up with a plan to combat cyber-attacks, whose details would necessarily remain secret to avoid helping foes.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress have mostly refrained from trash-talking American intelligence agencies, but otherwise struggled to present a united front. Perhaps the best way to understand this confusing situation is to take a leaf from the world of criminal justice. When seeking to prove a crime, cops and prosecutors know that they must weigh three key elements.

The first involves proving that a suspect had the means to commit a crime. That is not a controversial question in this case. Hacking is all too common, and many countries have been credibly accused of carrying out cyber-spying.

The second element in a criminal prosecution involves opportunity. This is the point that unites Mr Trump with Republicans in Congress. The president-elect and his future colleagues on Capitol Hill may disagree on whether Russia is behind the hacking, with such party leaders as Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, saying that it is clear that Russia is to blame, and denouncing “any outside interference in our elections.”

But when it comes to explaining how hackers were able to steal emails with such ease, Mr Trump and senior Republicans have been happy to blame Democrats for allowing themselves to become victims.

To buttress that criticism Mr Trump has quoted the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. One Trump Tweet declared: “Julian Assange said "a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta" - why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”

The chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, Representative Ed Royce of California, joined many congressional colleagues in a formulation of sinuous elegance. In a statement Mr Royce condemned Russia for hacking the election, but then pivoted and blamed a weak Mr Obama for creating that opportunity for mischief.

“This report confirms what we already know: Vladimir Putin’s acts of aggression pose serious threats to vital US interests.  The Obama administration’s response to Putin’s propaganda machine was weak and ineffective in Eastern Europe, and now we’re paying the price here at home.” Mr Royce declared, adding for good measure that the report found no evidence that “Russian meddling impacted our voting and tallying process in any way.  Donald Trump won.”

But it is the third key element of a criminal prosecution that really divides the political classes: motive. All the rowing and squabbling about who did what among Republicans and between Republicans and Democrats boils down to this: lots of powerful figures in American politics cannot bear to contemplate a much more painful question: why the hacking was carried out.

The DNI’s report does not mince words. It finds that the motive of the Russian government was to help Mr Trump win. The declassified report says: “Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.”

In contrast, the DNI report finds, Mr Putin publicly praised Mr Trump’s willingness to work with Russia and “pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine. Putin publicly contrasted the President-elect’s approach to Russia with Secretary Clinton’s “aggressive rhetoric”.

There is more. Official Washington has seethed for months with rumours about various forms of leverage that Russia or Russian interests might have over Mr Trump. The DNI report does not shed any light directly on that question. But it does include the following striking paragraph: “Putin has had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia, such as former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.”

Mr Trump can hardly deny that he has called for closer and friendlier links with Russia. He has repeatedly praised Mr Putin as smart and strong. In July 2016 he publicly expressed hopes that Russian intelligence agencies had hacked into Mrs Clinton’s private email server and encouraged them to publish what they found.

But for other Republicans, the idea that a hostile Russia thinks of the Republican president-elect as an ally is too much to bear. So that motive cannot be confronted head-on. Mr Ryan’s statement after the publication of the DNI report sidesteps the question of whether Russia might have wanted Mr Trump to win. Instead it seems to question the motives of those drawing attention to that claim, saying: “We cannot allow partisans to exploit this report in an attempt to delegitimize the president-elect’s victory. Donald Trump won this election fair and square because he heard the voices of Americans who felt forgotten.”

Mr Ryan and other Republican leaders have every incentive to want this story to go away, and stop casting a shadow on the inauguration of Mr Trump on January 20th. Given the Republicans’ unified control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, do not expect very much from committee probes into the election hacking which have been announced.

This tawdry tale cannot be forgotten, though. In the weeks between his election victory and taking office Mr Trump has chosen to tear down public trust in intelligence services he will soon lead, telling his supporters, in effect, not to believe the very federal bodies tasked with keeping the country safe. Follow the trail of means, opportunity and motive, and all evidence suggests that Mr Trump has carried out his own assault on America’s body politic.

Economist

Trump makes it necessary to re-define the term " elite " - New York Times

Our new president is a private-jet-setting billionaire Ivy League graduate, a real estate tycoon, a TV star and a son of inherited wealth. But he is no longer, by his own calculations, a member of the “elite.” Nor are the men (and the few women) now joining his inner circle — 1-percenters and corporate executives, Harvard and Yale alumni, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Goldman Sachs bankers. The true elite apparently sits elsewhere, among those who, in Sarah Palin’s notable 2008 formulation, think “that they’re — I guess — better than anyone else.”
As an adjective, the word “elite” still conveys something positive, even aspirational: elite athlete, elite model, elite travel services. But as a noun, embodied by actual living people, it has become one of the nastiest epithets in American politics. “Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans,” complainsTrump’s adviser Steve Bannon (of Harvard, Goldman Sachs and Hollywood). In this formulation, elites are a destructive, condescending collective, plotting against the beleaguered masses outside their ranks.
And in these attacks, the president-elect and his team are deploying one of the most effective partisan political stereotypes of the modern age. For most of American history, anti-elite sentiment was a matter of up versus down, not left versus right. But about half a century ago, the conservative movement set out to claim anti-elite politics as its own. That meant redefining the term away from class and toward culture, where the “elite” could be identified by its liberal ideas, coastal real estate and highbrow consumer preferences. The right-wing Club for Growth captured this type in a famous 2004 attack ad, instructing the Democrat Howard Dean to “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs.”
Trump adjusted the formula for the hot topics of the 2016 campaign. “I was on the right side of that issue, as you know, with the people,” he boasted after Brexit, adding that “Hillary, as always, stood with the elites.” His complaints against “political correctness” conjure a world of absurdist campus politics, where overprivileged students squabble over gender pronouns and the fine points of racial victimization. “Media elites” come in for special attack, cordoned off in pens to be mocked and jeered at during rallies, labeled both liars and incompetents.
But Trump has also ventured beyond mere name-calling, turning the 2016 election into a competition between knowledge systems: the tell-it-like-it-is “people” versus the know-it-all “elites.” His campaign insisted for months that pollsters and technocrats and media would be proven wrong by his electoral success. The fact that he did win dealt a blow to an entire worldview, one in which empirical inquiry and truth-telling were supposed to triumph in the end. The question, now, is whether it’s possible to run an executive branch based on hostility toward experts and professionals of all political stripes — and how many billionaires and Ivy Leaguers Trump can appoint before this rhetorical pose begins to break down altogether.
The notion that distant elites might be conspiring against the people comes straight from the Founding Fathers, whose Declaration of Independence lamented the “long train of abuses and usurpations” inflicted upon ordinary Americans by an arrogant British king. From there on, United States history might be seen as a repeating cycle of anti-elite revolt. The Jacksonians rebelled against the Founders’ aristocratic pretensions. Northern “free labor” went to war against the oligarchical slavocracy. And the Populist revolts of the late 19th century adapted this story to modern capitalism, with farmers and laborers rebelling against robber barons, bankers, time-management experts and college-educated professionals.
The first historians to study those Populists described them as heroic crusaders, champions of the “people” against the “powers.” But by the middle of the 20th century, alarmed by the rise of fascism and homegrown demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy, a new generation of scholars took a more anxious view of the anti-elite spirit. In his 1955 book “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter dismissed the Populists as backward-looking, provincial anti-Semites, the latent fascists of their day. Eight years later, his “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” documented a dangerous suspicion of “the critical mind” that seemed to course through the national culture. From his perspective, the 1952 election captured everything wrong with American political life, with Dwight Eisenhower’s “philistinism” winning over Adlai Stevenson’s “intellect.”
Hofstadter did not usually describe his ideal intellectually minded citizens as members of an “elite.” That word conveyed something different — a ruling class that held direct political and economic power. The most famous articulation of this view came from the sociologist C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 assessment of America’s “power elite.” “They rule the big corporations,” Mills wrote. “They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment.” In Mills’s view, these people were tied together not by culture or ideology but by their positions at the helms of large, ever-more-complex institutions. As individuals, they might be Republicans or Democrats, and might live in Ohio or California. The point was that they were in charge of things.
But that vision never gained much traction in mainstream politics, where a more partisan, targeted definition was starting to emerge. William F. Buckley Jr. carved out some essentials in his first book, “God and Man at Yale,” drawing a neat distinction between respectable Ivy-educated men like himself and the socialistic eggheads of the professoriate. Ronald Reagan chose the term “elite” to bring it all together in his famed 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” delivered on behalf of the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. “This is the issue of this election,” he said: “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”
Lyndon Johnson won that election in a blowout, but Reagan’s vision of a smug and detached liberal elite helped spark the oncoming “culture wars,” pitting a supposedly indignant Middle America against the liberal snobs of the coasts. By the 1990s, with the rise of right-wing media stars like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, bashing the “liberal elite” had become a favorite blood sport of the American right.
Despite all the abuse hurled their way, some “liberal elites” have accepted at least part of their detractors’ critique, particularly on the progressive left. It was during Bill Clinton’s presidency that the social critic Christopher Lasch published “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” which mourned that “upper-middle-class liberals” had turned into “petulant, self-righteous, intolerant” scolds, thoroughly out of touch with the concerns of Middle America. Since then, the torch has passed to a younger generation of writers, including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, whose 2012 “Twilight of the Elites” called for rethinking the entire ethos of liberal “meritocracy” — a system, he argued, that tends to fuel self-congratulation and incompetence at the top while offering little but contempt and dim prospects for those at the bottom.
So as 2017 begins, we find ourselves in a strange and uncertain political moment. Antipathy toward a wealthy, preening managerial class seems to be gaining popularity across the political spectrum — and, oddly, to have helped elect a wealthy, preening incoming president. Meanwhile, both liberal and conservative “elites” are scrambling to figure out what happens if the president-elect continues to reject basic political norms and even routine intelligence briefings. Under a Trump presidency, such “elites” may have no choice but to attempt a radical redefinition of their role in American life. Otherwise, the man in the White House will do it for them.
Beverly Gage is a history professor at Yale. She last wrote for the magazine about Donald Trump’s Nixonian calls for ‘‘law and order.’’

New York Times