NYT: Trump Signals a 'Seismic Shift,' Shocking the Washington Establishment
The president-elect’s early transition moves amount to a generational test of a system as he seeks to rewrite the balance of power and install lieutenants to blow up key parts of government.
By Peter Baker
Reporting from Washington
Nov. 17, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET
Somehow disruption doesn’t begin to cover it. Upheaval might be closer. Revolution maybe. In less than two weeks since being elected again, Donald J. Trump has embarked on a new campaign to shatter the institutions of Washington as no incoming president has in his lifetime.
He has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it. Suffice it to say, so far there have been more of the former than the latter. Mr. Trump has said that “real power” is the ability to engender fear, and he seems to have achieved that.
Mr. Trump’s early transition moves amount to a generational stress test for the system. If Republicans bow to his demand to recess the Senate so that he can install appointees without confirmation, it would rewrite the balance of power established by the founders more than two centuries ago. And if he gets his way on selections for some of the most important posts in government, he would put in place loyalists intent on blowing up the very departments they would lead.
He has chosen a bomb-throwing backbench congressman who has spent his career attacking fellow Republicans and fending off sex-and-drugs allegations to run the same Justice Department that investigated him, though it did not charge him, on suspicion of trafficking underage girls. He has chosen a conspiracy theorist with no medical training who disparages the foundations of conventional health care to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
He has chosen a weekend morning television host with a history of defending convicted war criminals while sporting a Christian Crusader tattoo that has been adopted as a symbol by the far right to run the most powerful armed forces in the history of the world. He has chosen a former congresswoman who has defended Middle East dictators and echoed positions favored by Russia to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies.
Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is. In the past, none of those selections would have passed muster in Washington, where a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny used to be enough to disqualify a cabinet nominee. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has bulled past the old red lines, opting for nominees who are so provocative that even fellow Republicans wondered whether he is trolling them.
/snip
@rgoodlaw.bsky.social
"Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in the national popular vote will be one of the smallest in history. Since 1888, only two other presidents who won both the Electoral College and the popular vote had smaller margins of victory."
www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/u...
November 17, 2024 at 9:02 AM
https://bsky.app/profile/rgoodlaw.bsky.social/post/3lb5l2zcdis2b
= new reply since forum marked as read
Who reads the below and thinks: "Oh, they just want to get rid of waste in the govt. Make it run more efficiently!"
Um. NO.
"sending shockwaves through the system" and "Manhattan Project" means DESTRUCTION. Not "efficiency".
My MAGAt relatives - my sister specifically - responded in this way to Trump's announcement.
Shitler, Republicans, Musk, and Bannon have been saying FOR NINE YEARS that they want to destroy the US government.
People either:
Weren't listening
Didn't belive it
Didn't care.
AND THEY ARE GOING TO REGRET IT. Unfortunately, the rest of us will suffer mightily along with them.
STUPID jackasses.
...and I guess what we deserve, in the year 2024. And we also have essentially two VPs, Eloon and Vance, except that we never hear from the real VP anymore, because Eloon is too busy shooting off his mouth.
By the way, Eloon has been a big fan of this moronic meme "culture" for a long time now, particularly when it comes to Pepes, Apus, and other Nazi frog memes. He is notorious for posting memes plagiarized from the banned subreddit r/Frenworld. Some old-timers here may remember that shitshow. 
https://democraticunderground.com/100219698947#post13
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218128416#post64
“We never could have known….”
“It’s all the Democrats’ fault!”
“Well the other side did/didn’t …. Blah.”
“Well we need to be a dictatorship! Nothing else worked!”
“Well we were already a dictatorship! You’re just mad because it’s not your party in power now!”
...that idea already. I can just see it now: Eloon's op-ed in the WSJ, "Dump the Dollar for Dogecoin!".
Don't get Maggie Haberman's take in this article. 
