Salon:
It turns out that President-elect Donald Trump’s spontaneous call to Taiwan wasn’t so spontaneous at all.
According to a report by The Washington Post on Sunday, Trump’s phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan was deliberately planned in order to demonstrate that Trump intends on breaking with decades of foreign policy tradition. The Post cites sources “involved in the planning” of the call who claim that, despite the Trump team’s initial claim that it was a spontaneous congratulatory call, Trump’s foreign policy advisers knew that this was the first communication between the leaders of America and Taiwan since 1979 and prepared it in advance as part of his strategy for engagement even before he officially won the Republican presidential nomination.
This proves once again that nothing in politics is ever "unplanned".
On the other hand:
Much of the concerns about Trump’s foreign policy toward Taiwan prior to this phone call involved the possible harm he could do, rather than the idea that he would take a major diplomatic risk to show support. As Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute wrote in The Wall Street Journal in July, Trump’s isolationist position on the Pacific Rim — including the argument that America should withdraw its military bases from Japan and South Korea so that those nations can defend themselves —- posed a serious threat to Taiwan’s independence from mainland China.
“Absent bases in Japan, the U.S. cannot realistically deter Chinese military attacks on Taiwan,” O’Hanlon wrote. “This reality could lead China to contemplate the use of force with much less hesitation than it has shown to date.”The MSM used to accuse Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush of being "mavericks", but this takes maverick to a whole new level.
Perhaps this is best explained by the following:
Wall Street Journal:
If President Barack Obama sought to usher America into a postracial era, it is increasingly apparent that President-elect Donald Trump is opening the door to the postideological era.The editorial goes on to point out some of the conflicting things Trump has done.
In fact, it’s nearly impossible to identify a clear ideological bent in the incoming president’s early moves. It’s probably a mistake to try, because the definitions of left and right, liberal and conservative, are being scrambled right before our eyes.
Some Trump moves so far track with his populist outsider campaign image. Others are moves a conventional conservative could make. Some on his team would have been comfortable picks by any standard-issue Republican; some could as easily have been made by a Democratic president-elect.
But the real worry here is what "shuffling the ideological deck" means. Is he just showing us some weird new ideology that we just haven't figured out yet? Is there a method to this madness, or is it just madness?
At least the Republicans won't stand in his way:
Washington Post:
We’ve never had a president whose business created as many potential conflicts of interest as Donald Trump, and at the same time we’ve never had a president who cared less about conflicts of interest as Donald Trump. Indeed, he and his children are making it quite clear that they will use the presidency as a tool to make as much money as they can.
And Republicans, particularly members of Congress, have apparently decided that if Trump does it, it’s okay.While this editorial is concerned with Trump's conflicts of interest between being a worldwide businessman and being president, the memory of how the Republicans dealt with George W. Bush is still fresh.
During the Bush administration, the Republican-controlled Congress had a quid pro quo deal with Bush: Give us what we want and we will give you what you want. Sadly, when the Democrats took over Congress, that quid pro quo didn't go out the door. It just leaned a little more to the Left.
As long as the Republicans think that Trump is good for their "brand", he will get carte blanche from them. But if he challenges them without public opinion on his side, or even without the Republican base on his side, don't be surprised to see a Republican revolt.
On to other government news...
Washington Post:
The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.To put this in perspective, that money could build a company the size of Kellogg Company (the cereal maker) every year, for 5 years. That is roughly 165,000 productive jobs, lost to military waste.
Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.
The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.
Finally, one last post-election analysis (I hope):
Huffington Post:
Hillary Clinton’s top aides would like the world to know they are morally superior to Donald Trump and his staff, who ran an ugly campaign courting white nationalists. The Clinton crew is right. And it doesn’t matter.
At a vicious Harvard University post-mortem seminar on the 2016 election, Clinton field marshals excoriated Team Trump. “If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri declared. “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.”
There are three possible choices to be made in the logical universe in which a political party is running a fascist campaign. People can 1) join the fascists, 2) lose to the fascists or 3) defeat the fascists. The Clinton campaign wants credit for not choosing door No. 1. Their job was to make option three a reality. History will remember them for number two.
Clinton ran against the single most unpopular candidate in the history of American presidential polling, and lost. Was this because Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee? Because FBI Director James Comey recklessly interfered? Because a tiny fraction of the electorate voted for Jill Stein? Because Clinton didn’t really bother to campaign in the Rust Belt? Why, yes! In an election decided by 110,000 votes, just about every factor can be considered decisive.
But Clintonia’s (persuasive) defense of its own righteousness helps explain why the election was close to begin with. Trump ran a deeply bigoted campaign that whipped up and played off of white resentment. But his dominant performance among white working-class voters wasn’t due to his campaign message alone. Much of Clinton’s poor performance resulted from her campaign’s strategic decision to not even contest the demographic. A good chunk of the Democratic Party intelligentsia applauded Clinton for taking the moral high ground, declaring the entire white working class to be a deplorable racist swamp. The notion that economic issues played literally no role ― zero ― in Trump’s appeal became a common Democratic talking point. Democrats were Good People, and anyone even considering voting for Trump was a Bad Person.Who would have guessed self-righteousness doesn't win elections?
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