People don’t really know about these Cabinet picks because average Americans just aren’t as read-in to the news as they once were. They watch the news on their phones in 30-second snippets. If they read, it’s headlines and social media posts, maybe. So they know, probably, that Trump nominated Dr. Oz to something or other. But do they know that he has a roughly $30 million financial stake in companies that will be doing business with the very Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that he is probably going to lead? I very much doubt it.
Let me make two points here. First, I don’t think there was some golden age when every citizen, or even most citizens, read all they could about such matters. That’s ridiculous. The concept of the informed citizenry on which democracy depends has always been a challenge. Second, this is not a blame-the-idiot-people column. People are busy. They have lives and kids and bills and passions and hobbies, and they don’t make a lot of time for politics. That’s life.
Robert Tait, Guardian - They seem an unlikely, almost motley, crew of emissaries.For the Bahamas, there is Herschel Walker, a former NFL star whose fledgling Senate campaign was undone by a string of personal embarrassments but who now is named to be the next US ambassador to the small Caribbean island.
To the plum diplomatic posting of Paris goes Charles Kushner, father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and a man the president-elect once pardoned for a felony conviction that the former Republican New Jersey governor Chris Christie, an ex-federal prosecutor, called “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he ever prosecuted.
And to Greece, once a preserve of seasoned career diplomats, goes Kimberly Guilfoyle, until recently, the romantic partner of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and a woman known more for her rumbustious media profile but than her diplomatic acumen.
The trio are among a flurry of ambassadorial nominees rolled out by Trump in recent weeks as he rushes to fill his administration at breakneck speed with envoys who will project his “America First” ideology abroad. Their lack of credentials has prompted one experienced foreign policy analyst to label them a “diplomatic clown car” – and a deliberate affront to the countries hosting them.
Since last month’s election triumph, the president-elect has nominated ambassadors at a rate not recalled in recent memory – including five in a single day this week. Some appear conspicuously unschooled in the diplomatic arts; others have business links which experts say risks conflicts of interest.
Daily Kos - Many of President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters, who
believed his promise to “Make America Great Again,” are about to face an
inconvenient truth: tariffs will hurt them more than they anticipated.
New data
from Global Strategist Group show that three in five Americans view
tariffs unfavorably, oppose Trump’s tariffs, and believe that they’ll
increase costs. This comes as Google search trends
showed a sharp increase in the search results for “what is a tariff”
and “will tariffs raise costs” in the days after Trump's win.
No comments:
Post a Comment