TRUMP TRANSITION WATCH: “Person of the Year”
No big surprise here. Donald Trump is TIME’s Person of the Year.
“President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday officially announced plans to nominate retired Marine Gen. James Mattis as Defense Secretary, touting him as a man who "plays no games,’” writes NBC’s Alex Jaffe.
From NBC’s Frank Thorp: “House Republicans Tuesday released a short-term spending bill to keep the government funded through April 28, 2017, a measure that needs to be passed before Friday, December 9th to avoid a government shutdown. Included in the legislation is language that would allow Gen. James Mattis to bypass the requirement that a service member be retired for at least seven years before serving as secretary of defense.”
And then there’s this: “The son of the top national security adviser to President-elect Donald Trump was removed from the new administration’s transition team on Tuesday after backing a bogus conspiracy theory that inspired a shooting incident in Washington, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Hundreds of people protested a speech Tuesday by alt-right leader Richard Spencer at the University of Texas A&M.
From the New York Times: “Former Senator Bob Dole, acting as a foreign agent for the government of Taiwan, worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff, an outreach effort that culminated last week in an unorthodox telephone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s president.”
The latest from the Thank You tour, via the AP: “President-elect Donald Trump promised to "heal our divisions and unify our country" as he prepares to meet with some of the victims of last week's car-and-knife attack at Ohio State University… The Republican businessman largely stuck to the script — and, in a change, even stopped the crowd when it started to boo the media — and avoided some of the score-settling and scorched-earth rhetoric that defined his campaign and was present again last week in Cincinnati.”
POLITICO notes some of the similarities between Obama’s early style and Trump’s.
TRUMP AGENDA: A time for choosing
From Bloomberg: “Two-thirds of U.S. adults think Donald Trump needs to choose between being president or a businessman, but slightly more -- 69 percent -- believe it goes too far to force him and his family to sell their business empire to avoid conflicts of interest.The first Bloomberg National Poll since the election shows 51 percent of those surveyed are very or mostly confident the billionaire businessman will put the nation’s best interests ahead of his family’s finances when he deals with foreign leaders.”
The Washington Post writes that Trump’s “style, including his opaque personal financial dealings and his sudden shots at certain companies, has helped unnerve a corporate America that traditionally craves stability. Some business leaders and economists have worried whether executives can speak their minds about the president-elect or his policies without fear of facing Trump’s rage.”
POLITICO: “After meeting with Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Tuesday to hash out plans to repeal Obamacare, top Senate Republicans are no closer to resolving an issue that’s splintering the GOP heading into the start of Donald Trump’s presidency: how long to give themselves to replace the law.”
“The nation’s hospital industry warned President-elect Trump and congressional leaders on Tuesday that repealing the Affordable Care Act could cost hospitals $165 billion by the middle of the next decade and trigger “an unprecedented public health crisis,’” writes the Washington Post.
The New York Times looks at five most difficult and the five easiest campaign promises for Trump to keep.