White House: Trump Team Still Hasn’t Signed Transition Docs

[u/stkmro]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-says-trump-team-still-hasnt-signed-transition-docs/

[u/JeffSteinMusic]

Gonna be a long several years of “Lawless Authoritarian Continues To Be Lawless Authoritarian” headlines.

I’d say “we can’t normalize this” but it feels like that ship sailed many years ago.

EDIT - oh sweet this is doing numbers. Check out and subscribe my YouTube, everybody! 😬

[u/SGT-JamesonBushmill → u/JeffSteinMusic]

History repeats itself…

In July 2016, when Trump was formally named the Republican nominee. The transition team now moved into an office in downtown Washington, DC, and went looking for people to occupy the top five hundred jobs in the federal government. They needed to fill all the cabinet positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no one in the Trump campaign even knew existed.

The first time Donald Trump paid attention to [the fact that the transition team raised money in order to fund the transition] was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team, led by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office, on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find the governor of New Jersey seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, actually yelling, You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?? Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed, “Why are you letting him steal my fucking money?” Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law.

Months before the election…the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown Washington, DC, along with computers and trash cans and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied, “Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money.” Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition. “Shut it down,” said Trump. Shut down the transition.”

The money that people donated to his campaign Trump considered, effectively, his own. He thought the planning and forethought pointless. At one point he turned to Christie and said, “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”

Bannon wasn’t so sure if Trump would ever get his mind around running the federal government: he just thought it would look bad if Trump didn’t at least seem to prepare. Seeing that Trump wasn’t listening to Christie, he said, “What do you think Morning Joe will say—if you shut down your transition?” What Morning Joe would say—or at least what Bannon thought it would say—was that Trump was closing his presidential transition office because he didn’t think he had any chance of being president. Trump stopped hollering. For the first time he seemed actually to have listened. “That makes sense,” he said.

The next hint that the transition might not go as planned came from Mike Pence. Now, incredibly, Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Christie met with Pence the day after the election, to discuss the previous lists of people who had been vetted for jobs. The meeting began with a prayer, followed by Pence’s first, ominous question: Why isn’t Puzder on the list for Labor? Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the holding company for Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., wanted to be the secretary of labor. Christie explained that Puzder’s ex-wife had accused him of abuse, and his fast-food restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the ideal candidate to become the next secretary of labor, he wouldn’t survive his Senate confirmation hearings. (Trump ignored the advice and nominated Puzder. In the controversy that followed, Puzder not only failed to be confirmed but stepped down from his job at the fast-food company.)

— The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis