TRUMP REGIME

The Guardian - Donald Trump will come in to power with a “trifecta” of governmental control after his Republican party won the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency in the 2024 US election.Control of both chambers of Congress is not uncommon for US presidents. Trump achieved a trifecta in his first term, as did Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.But Trump has an unusual edge over his predecessors: six of the nine members of the US supreme court are appointees of Republican presidents.

Since the second world war, only two other presidents have assumed office with overall control of both houses as well as a supreme court “super majority” of two-thirds or more. Supreme court justices owe no official loyalty to a party or president, but a majority of conservative-leaning justices will work to Trump’s advantage.

AP -  Incoming senior Trump administration officials have begun questioning career civil servants who work on the White House National Security Council about who they voted for in the 2024 election, their political contributions and whether they have made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by President-elect Donald Trump’s team, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.

At least some of these nonpolitical employees have begun packing up their belongings since being asked about their loyalty to Trump — after they had earlier been given indications that they would be asked to stay on at the NSC in the new administration, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

Mediaite - Steve Bannon unloaded on Elon Musk, calling him a “truly evil guy” who must be run out of the MAGA movement.  Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help return President-elect Donald Trump to the White House. The billionaire Tesla CEO and owner of X has been a fixture at Mar-a-Lago ever since, with some reports indicating Musk’s near-constant presence is wearing on Trump. “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser, told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in an interview published on Wednesday. The article was flagged on Saturday by Bannon’s former employer, Breitbart, which published excerpts in English.

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon said. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”

Bannon again took issue with H-1B visas, which Musk supports. Those visas allow companies to sponsor skilled professionals from other countries to work in the United States. Critics say the program harms American workers because businesses use H-1Bs to bring in cheaper labor from other countries instead of hiring domestically.

“This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords,  use it to their advantage, the people are furious,” Bannon said.

Axios - Trump could declare a national economic emergency, which gives the president wide latitude over international economic policy. Then he could move quickly on tariffs. But he'd face blowback in the form of higher consumer prices, a slumping stock market, angry CEOs and congressional Republicans, retaliation from trade partners, and legal challenges.... "Markets would freak and I think the real world would freak," said Scott Lincicome, a trade scholar at the Cato Institute. "You're talking about substantial price increases that would show up quite quickly."

"It strikes me as politically fraught for a president who won because of inflation to suddenly be sitting on top of Trumpflation 30 days into his presidency," he adds." the president tariffing guacamole right before the Super Bowl," Lincicome said. (MosI can't imaginet U.S. avocados are imported from Latin America.)

The president-elect could also go back to Trump 1.0, when he relied on legal authorities that required months-long investigations and comment periods before the administration could impose double-digit tariffs on imports from China and elsewhere.The process allowed corporations to seek carve-outs, other countries to negotiate for changes — and, at a minimum, time for all parties to prepare.

Wall Street Journal - To serve as economic adviser to the president-elect, it helps to share his belief that tariffs make the U.S. richer. Not many economists meet that criterion, but Stephen Miran has made just that case. Nominated to chair Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, he has written that the U.S. could be better off with average tariffs of around 20% and as high as 50%, compared with the current 2%. 

NBC News -  Executives are bending policies — and bending a proverbial knee — by abandoning their social and environmental agendas in manners that could appeal to Trump. Leaders of multiple major media platforms appear to be reorienting their coverage to be less antagonistic. And Democrats, without much of an active resistance to underpin them, have taken a wait-and-see approach to a new president with whom they already have eight years of experience.

“We should treat him like a normal president,” a senior aide to a Democratic senator said. “Because this is what normal presidents look like in America now.”

The shift is due in no small part to how Trump won last fall. Whereas in 2016 many saw a fluke, Trump this time swept the swing states and won the popular vote. His victory came after episodes like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and his criminal indictments — headwinds many believed were insurmountable.

What’s more, much of his opposition, at least for now, appears to be drained after having fought him for nearly a decade. Now, Democrats feel they must pick their spots better.

“My mission: be purposeful,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., whose profile soared as a leading Trump adversary during the president-elect’s first term, wrote to NBC News. “Don’t chase the crazy. Bring it all back to ‘how does that (ahem, invading Greenland) lower the cost of eggs?’”

In turn, Trump is basking in a relatively warm embrace. His inaugural committee has raised so much money that it has run out of perks to give donors, The New York Times reported. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which banned Trump from those social media platforms after the 2021 attack on the Capitol, has donated $1 million to his inaugural fund. So has Amazon, which this week announced it will release a Melania Trump documentary through its Amazon Prime platform. The incoming first lady is listed as an executive producer of the project, which Amazon licensed for $40 million, Puck News reported....

“Maybe I’m overthinking it, but it is a little concerning that everybody sort of just said, ‘We've got to give this guy what he wants,’ right?” a Pennsylvania Democrat said. “I just don’t know where the backstop is here.”

Trump views the dynamic more charitably.  “Everybody wants to be my friend,” he said in December.

The Guardian - Newt Gingrich, the former US House speaker and presidential hopeful, said a section of his own Republican party was “rabid” over immigration and predicted Donald Trump’s suggestion that he could deport documented people as well as millions of undocumented people will not come to pass.

“I’d be very surprised if you see any significant effort to change the game for people who are here legally,” Gingrich said, weeks before Trump’s return to the White House. “I just think there’s a very small faction of the party that’s rabid about this.”

He also warned that public support for mass deportations would “collapse” if stories began to come out “about mothers or babies or children being deported” ...

Amid widespread predictions of chaos and protest, Gingrich said he was “passionately in favor of trying to help find a path to create legality for the Dreamers”, a position that may put him less at odds with Trump, given Trump’s suggestion he might accept a deal on the matter.

Gingrich continued: “It’s nonsense to say somebody who came here when they were two, only speaks English, graduated as a high school valedictorian and is currently a nurse or a doctor should be deported. We’re going to deport them and they don’t speak the language of whatever country their parents came from, and they’ve earned the right to be Americans?

“ … I think [the Trump administration has to] to realize that there are gradations here that we’re dealing with, and try to think through, how do you both meet the long-term identity and national security interests of the country and meet the human concerns. And I think it’s a real challenge.”