DONALD TRUMP

Peter Baker, NY Times - “It speaks to the moment we’re in,” said Norman L. Eisen, a former White House ethics counsel to President Barack Obama who has closely tracked Mr. Trump’s various legal cases and has founded a new organization aimed at defending democracy. “You have somebody who is an adjudicated felon 34 times over, but you also have a nation that is either so numb or so in shock that it does not know how to react.”

And so the nation will soon witness the paradox of a newly elected president putting his hand on a Bible to swear an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the supreme law of the land, barely a week after being sentenced for violating the law.

Denmark officials react to Trump's Greenland talk

Raw Story -  President-elect Donald Trump, set to move back to Washington in ten days after he is sworn in as the nation's 47th President, is reportedly in talks to buy back his former D.C. hotel, a source of constitutional concern during his first term, where foreign governments and dignitaries could spend lavishly....

According to a report in The Independent, the Trump International Hotel Washington D.C. took in more than $3.7 million from foreign governments during Trump's tenure as President. "This raises concerns about possible violations of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which says that Congress should approve any gifts to officeholders from foreign governments."  The U.S. Secret Service spent at least $1.4 million at his D.C. hotel as well, according to an ABC News report citing congressional documents.

"The Trump Organization on some occasions charged the Secret Service more than five times the government rate to stay at Donald Trump-owned properties while the agency was protecting him and his family," ABC News also reported.

Legal experts and a watchdog group are once again expressing concern. "Instead of mitigating conflicts of interest ahead of his inauguration, looks like Trump is doubling down on corruption by trying to get the lease on the DC hotel back," warned CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

New York Times' business investigations reporter David Enrich notes: "The Trumps are looking to reclaim their DC hotel, which is down the street from the White House and was a magnet for conflicts of interest in his first administration."

Axios - After Mark Zuckerberg's embrace of President-elect Trump, Silicon Valley is watching to see whether a whole row of tech dominoes is about to fall in the same direction...

Some early signs:

• Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have lined up to give $1 million each to the inauguration. (Apple's donation came personally from CEO Tim Cook.)
• Amazon put $40 million behind a Melania Trump documentary.

Zuckerberg, unlike his rival CEOs, has absolute voting control of his company. As he said in his three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan: "Because I control our company, I have the benefit of not having to convince the board not to fire me." None of the other members of tech's trillion-dollar club can move with the same speed or independence, even if they wanted to. Keep reading.

AP News - President-elect Donald Trump is preparing more than 100 executive orders starting Day 1 of the new White House, in what amounts to a shock-and-awe campaign on border security, deportations and a rush of other policy priorities.  Trump told Republican senators about the onslaught ahead during a private meeting on Capitol Hill. Many of the actions are expected to launch on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, when he takes office...

Allies of the president-elect have been preparing a stack of executive orders that Trump could sign quickly on a wide range of topics — from the U.S.-Mexico border clampdown to energy development to federal Schedule F workforce rules, school gender policies and vaccine mandates, among other Day 1 promises made during his campaign. 

Jen Psaki, MSNBC - We’ve seen this movie before. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly thrown out outrageous, headline-grabbing threats designed to consume the media’s attention — and ours. His latest targets? Greenland, the Panama Canal and most recently a financial annexation of Canada.

This week, I had the chance to speak with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and our conversation got me thinking. Maybe, as my colleague Rachel Maddow has repeatedly warned us, Trump is yanking our chain.

 

Trudeau confirmed that, yes, Trump had indeed floated the idea of making Canada America’s “51st state” during their recent meeting at Mar-a-Lago. But what Trump didn’t share in his comments was Trudeau’s response: “Maybe there could be a trade for Vermont or California for certain parts.” According to Trudeau, that suggestion “made Trump decide it was not that funny anymore, and we moved on to a different conversation.”

 

But what really stood out from my conversation with Trudeau is that he’s not focused on Trump’s theatrics. Instead, he’s preparing for what might actually happen. As he put it, “The focus has to be not on something that he’s talking about that will not ever happen, but more on something that might well happen … like if he does choose to go forward with tariffs that raise the cost of just about everything for American citizens.”

 

This is the thing about Trump’s political playbook: It hasn’t changed. His grandiose, blustery statements often serve as a distraction. In this case, Trump’s expansionist rhetoric is helping mask the bigger threats — punitive tariffs, mass deportations or something else entirely — that are quietly taking shape in the background.

 

So, the next time you see a headline about Trump’s annexation fantasies, ask yourself: What might he be hoping to distract us from? And where should we actually be looking?