Vice Media: New Yorkers Have a Duty: Be Rude to the Trumps

Yet even after he assumes office on January 20, Trump reportedly still wants to spend much of his time in the city, in his massive apartment in Trump Tower, even though he’s widely despised in Manhattan, and even though his presence there would lead to incredibly inconvenient street closures. No one can stop him from living in his home—it’s a free country, especially if you’re rich—but his neighbors can, and should, do everything in their power to make him and his family (who enable and support his noxious views) feel uncomfortable here.

Talking Points Memo: Kelly: Fox Exec Told Trump Team It Would Not ‘Help’ Him If She Was Killed

“Michael Cohen, who is Trump’s top lawyer and executive vice president with the Trump Organization had retweeted ‘let’s gut her,’ about me,” Kelly said. “At a time when the threat level was very high, which he knew. And Bill Shine, an executive vice president of Fox, called him up to say, ‘You got to stop this. We understand you are angry but she’s got three kids and is walking around New York.’”

“And he didn’t much care,” Kelly continued. “And what Bill Shine said to Michael Cohen was, ‘Let me put it to you in terms you can understand: If Megyn Kelly gets killed it is not going help your candidate.’”

The Daily Beast: President-Elect Donald Trump Gets to Work Betraying His Backers

Trump is now part of a global ring of ethno-nationalist leaders of far-right parties in thrall to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. National security experts are shuddering at the demeanor of the people surrounding the next president who are busy mounting what Republican leakers are calling a “Stalinesque purge” of the insufficiently loyal. With the transition team in chaos, and experienced hands reluctant to join such an administration, who knows what kind of bizarre cabinet he’ll wind up assembling.

BuzzFeed News: This Is How Facebook Is Radicalizing You

“Facebook doesn’t want to challenge you, they don’t want to upset you, because they know that if you’re challenged on their platform, you wouldn’t want to use it as much.”

Slate: I Can’t Stand to Think About Donald Trump

I’m terrified by Twitter. Facebook freaks me out. Every time I check my phone, the appalling facts from yesterday have devolved into today’s even more atrocious news. A climate-change denier may be in line to run the Environmental Protection Agency. A soft-drink lobbyist has the inside track for the Department of Agriculture. A man who doesn’t think there’s evidence for Darwinism could be in charge of education. A sheriff known for bringing back the chain gang might take the reins on national security. And now Steve Bannon, the publisher and propagandist beloved by white-power types, has been tapped to serve as one of Donald Trump’s top lieutenants.

Media Matters: NPR Lets Breitbart Editor Downplay His Site’s White Nationalist, Anti-LGBTQ Extremism

But the interview failed to contextualize the true extent of Breitbart’s extremism under Bannon’s leadership, evidenced by the site’s consistent role in peddling hate speech, promoting white nationalism, and furthering anti-LGBTQ extremism. Inskeep allowed Pollack to brush off Breitbart’s bigotry as “individual articles” and claim that Bannon’s hiring of openly gay, misogynistic, anti-Muslim, alt-right mouthpiece Milo Yiannopolous was evidence that Bannon couldn’t possibly be anti-gay, with no mention that Yiannopolous has regularly used Breitbart as a platform to attack transgender people.

Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart News heavily promoted white nationalist “alt-right” views. Since 2015, the site has been “publishing more overtly racist diatribes about Muslims and immigrants,” according to an April report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC report also noted that Breitbart has promulgated the “popular racist conspiracy theory” that “African-Americans are committing crimes against whites at alarming rates.” In addition to racist and nationalist themes, Breitbart regularly uses anti-LGBTQ slurs in headlines, features articles by anti-LGBTQ hate group leaders, and has published multiple articles pushing conspiracy theories about the hate-crime murder of gay teen Matthew Shepard.

New Republic: The Media Is Failing to Explain Trump’s Recklessness

Trump had traduced yet another vital norm, except instead of simply noting an objection to the violation, and assuming the importance of the broken protocol, reporters have been at pains to defend it. Pool duty isn’t the most glamorous assignment, but it is some of the most vital work political reporters do, because when someone is vested the power of the presidency, history is always at his fingertips. The public has a right to know what the president of the United States is doing, but so does history. As Yahoo! News chief Washington correspondent Olivier Knox explained Wednesday, “it’s designed to tell Americans, and the world, about the president’s whereabouts and well-being in the event of a crisis, and how the president is responding. At its grimmest, it’s sometimes called a ‘body watch,’ the bleak legacy of the assassination of JFK and the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan.”

Salon: How Jared Kushner, like Donald Trump, used his rich, privileged upbringing to get to the White House

Federal anti-nepotism law mandates, “A public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official.”

The Atlantic: It Pays to Be a Jerk, Bob Dylan Edition

Noble! Philosophical! Wonderful! There’s another way to see things, though, which is that Bob Dylan had simply been acting, if you’ll allow me to put it very poetically, like an enormous man-baby, initially refusing to acknowledge his being awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in the world in a way that manages to be both delightfully and astoundingly rude. Perhaps, sure, Dylan had done all this on principle. Perhaps he had been, with his preemptive ghosting, making a point. Or perhaps the man who has long had a variable relationship with the media and its fellow institutions simply hadn’t cared enough to reply.

The New Yorker: Donald Trump’s First, Alarming Week as President-Elect

one week since an unusually subdued Donald Trump gave his victory speech in Manhattan. “For those who have chosen not to support me in the past—of which there were a few people,” Trump said, eliciting laughter from the crowd of ecstatic supporters wearing red Make America Great Again hats, “I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.” After running a campaign defined more by whom and what he opposed, Trump’s remarks were out of character and welcome.

Wonkette: Breitbart Watch: Stop Blood Libeling Steve Bannon By Calling Him Anti-Semitic!

Ever since President-elect Donald Trump (vomit) announced that Bannon, the Breitbart head who swooped in this summer to run the Trump campaign, would be his chief strategist in the White House, rational people around the universe have been saying WHAT THE FUCK IS GODDAMN WRONG WITH YOU? They are saying this because Bannon is the man who proudly turned Breitbart into a haven for the absolute dregs of American society, the white supremacists and neo-Nazis (also known as just “Nazis”) who wish to rend the very fabric of America and reduce it to a pile of rubble. Bannon’s already reaching out to racist white nationalists like France’s Marine Le Pen, probably for completely innocent purposes, of course.

Wonkette: Nancy Pelosi Will Lead House Democrats Through Valley Of Shadow Of Death

It is no secret that we at Wonkette love Nancy Pelosi very much, as she is a badass liberal California womyn who drives Republicans up the god-dang wall, and also she knows how to whip the vote real good-like. So we are happy to report that Pelosi has offically tossed her hat in the ring to be the boss of House Democrats, and moreover, says in a letter that she already has the support to stay on as House Minority Leader: