TRUMP REGIME

Axios - During job interviews at the Trump transition offices in West Palm Beach, some prospects for top Pentagon and intelligence jobs have been asked what they thought about Jan. 6 and whether the 2020 election was stolen, the N.Y. Times' David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman report. Loyalty questions have been asked in interviews across multiple agencies. President-elect Trump's team has researched what candidates said about him on the day of the Capitol riot and in the days following, sources told The Times...

The sense interviewees got "was that there was only one right answer to each question," The Times learned from nine people who interviewed for or were directly involved in the process. "Among those were applicants who said they gave what they intuited to be the wrong answer — either decrying the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying that President Biden won in 2020. Their answers were met with silence and the taking of notes. They didn't get the jobs."  More

New Republic -  Donald Trump is flooding the zone with so many terrible nominations that you may have missed that the president-elect recently picked former Representative Billy Long of Missouri to be the next commissioner of the IRS. Here’s another instance of choosing a fox to guard the chicken coop.

Trump shouldn’t be naming anybody IRS commissioner. The current one, Danny Werfel, was appointed in 2022 to a five-year term; like FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump wants to replace with Kash Patel, Werfel is supposed hold his job until 2027. Werfel’s presided over a revitalization of the IRS thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which pumped $80 billion into the underfunded agency ($20 billion of which House Republicans later clawed back ). Last summer the agency reported collecting more than $1 billion in past-due taxes from individuals earning $1 million or more. In October Geraldine Brooks documented in The Washington Post the important role that the IRS plays in the war on terror.

Don’t expect the good news to keep flowing. When Long was in Congress, he co-sponsored, in three consecutive sessions, a bill to abolish the IRS and replace the income tax, the payroll tax, the estate tax, and the gift tax with a 30 percent sales tax. This is a crackpot proposal that’s been kicking around since 1993, when the Church of Scientology dreamed it up to retaliate against the IRS’s refusal to recognize it as a religion. The Scientologists dropped the idea later that year ...