RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s transition seems to be emerging from its early turmoil, and on Friday he filled three important jobs with campaign loyalists. More encouraging is that he appears to be looking for figures of stature outside his inner circle.

The President-elect has a penchant for rewarding political loyalty, and that has paid off for Jeff Sessions as Mr. Trump’s choice for Attorney General. The Alabama Republican was the first sitting Senator to endorse Mr. Trump, and he and aide Stephen Miller refined the candidate’s populist message and defended him through the squalls.

If there’s any doubt that Mr. Trump will follow through on his immigration promises, the choice of Mr. Sessions puts that to rest. He opposes illegal and most legal immigration, including H-1B visas for high-skilled professionals. He’ll oversee the civil-rights division and immigration courts, and let’s hope Mr. Sessions’s governance will be more tolerant than his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Then again, Mr. Sessions is an accomplished lawyer who has served as a U.S. Attorney and state AG. His opposition to President Obama’s executive immigration orders were grounded in his separation-of-powers constitutionalism more than mere politics. He has also joined with Democrats in pursuing criminal-justice reform.

Progressives are nonetheless already smearing Mr. Sessions as a racist, but that’s what they say about every Southern Republican. In 1986 a Joe Biden-Ted Kennedy special derailed the young lawyer from Mobile for a federal judgeship with innuendo and hearsay. Modern liberals may be surprised to learn that Mr. Sessions helped to desegregate Alabama public schools as U.S. Attorney, and he won a death-penalty conviction for the head of the state KKK in a capital murder trial. The 1981 case broke the Klan in the heart of dixie.

The 2016 elections are finally over and America has chosen its next leader but the stench of hate emanating from the radical Left still lingers. A lethal mix of professional agitators, anarchists, illegal aliens and basement-dwelling social justice warriors, has taken to the streets to voice protest over the results. In actuality, they are protesting against the democratic process itself.

Some of the anti-Trump manifestations have become violent. In Redwood City, California a high school student was physically assaulted after she voiced support for Trump on social media. Her attacker, a fellow student, accused her of “hating Mexicans” and without provocation proceeded to punch, kick and throw her to the ground. The school said that it would discipline the perpetrator but failed to elaborate further.

In Chicago, a group of five thugs – three men and two women – brutally savaged 49-year old David Wilcox while screaming “You voted Trump” and “Don’t vote Trump.” One of the gang riled the others by taunting, “Yeah, it’s one of them white boy Trump guys.” Several days passed before the mainstream media gave the incident any attention while the website Snopes initially issued a sanitized account of what occurred, downplaying or burying outright, other aggravating factors. The New York Times, the paper that recently apologized to its subscribers for its slanted coverage of the election, dedicated a grand total of five short paragraphs to the story.

The attack on Wilcox commenced following a minor traffic accident. Another vehicle had sideswiped his car. Wilcox’s sole offense was to ask the other motorist is she had insurance. That was enough to trigger the unprovoked violent assault. He was thrown to the ground and repeatedly punched and kicked and then robbed of his personal belongings. Ultimately, one of the attackers managed to steal Wilcox’s car while Wilcox desperately clung to the side of the vehicle (and nearly died doing so). Chicago police said they were “investigating.”

In Sweden, a chef was set upon by a group of Muslim men because they said he looked like Trump. Two men grabbed Anders Vendel from behind while a third proceeded to pummel him. He eventually fell to the ground where the beating continued with a flurry of kicks and punches. Vendel sustained a fractured thumb, broken nose as well as other facial injuries.

Since the election of Donald Trump to be America’s next President, large groups of protestors and rioters have fanned out around the United States, smashing windows, damaging property and physically attacking other people to express their anger of Trump’s victory.

Their conduct in the aftermath of the election of a president is unprecedented but, given the riots launched by “Black Lives Matter” not a huge surprise.

The central theme of the anti-Trump demonstrators is to equate his calls for border security and effective immigration law enforcement with racism and bigotry.

Undoubtedly some of the demonstrators, particularly the non-violent demonstrators, are truly concerned about racism. However, they are grossly misinformed and are tragically being exploited and manipulated by the globalists and immigration anarchists, having been convinced by the decades of lies told about immigration by our politicians and pundits.

Our immigration laws as we will see, have absolutely nothing to do with xenophobia or racism.

During the first Republican presidential debate Fox News correspondent Bret Baier opened the debate by asking all of the Republican candidates on stage to raise their hand if they would not support any Republican candidate who would win the primaries and possibly run as a third party candidate.

Trump was the only candidate on stage to raise his hand. Trump’s reaction was reported on by news media across the country, typical of those reports was “Trump tells Republicans in 2016 debate he may not support GOP nominee.”

None of the reporters thought, however, to ask the Democratic candidates if they would support the Constitution of the United States if a Republican won the general election. Perhaps those reporters should have.

When is anti-Semitism not anti-Semitism? When it comes from the Left, of course.

President-elect Trump has enraged the establishment media by choosing Steven K. Bannon as his chief strategist, because Bannon, they claim on the flimsiest of evidence, is a white supremacist and an anti-Semite. Meanwhile, that same media is hailing Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) for announcing his candidacy for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee – despite Ellison’s very real links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, two groups that are outdone by no one in anti-Semitism.

“A chorus of critics took to Twitter,” said the New York Times, “to lament what they said was a frightening normalization of the fringe views that Mr. Bannon promoted as the chairman of Breitbart News. The site has for years given voice to anti-Semitic, racist and white nationalist ideology.”

The evidence? Slim to none. As David Horowitz pointed out Monday, the source for the claim that Bannon is anti-Semitic is “a one sentence claim from an angry ex-wife in divorce court no less, that Bannon didn’t want their kids to go to school with Jews.” Horowitz noted in response that Bannon had wanted to produce a Horowitz biopic: “I find that particularly amusing since Bannon wanted to make a film to celebrate this Jew’s life.”

Horowitz also noted that CNN hit Bannon over “a headline at Breitbart.com calling Bill Kristol a ‘renegade Jew.’” Surely that proves Bannon’s anti-Semitism, right? Wrong. Said Horowitz: “In fact, neither Breitbart nor Bannon is responsible for that statement. A Jew is. I wrote the article, which was neither requested nor commissioned by Breitbart. And I wrote the headline: ‘Bill Kristol, Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,’” because “Kristol and his friends betrayed the Republican Party, betrayed the American people, and betrayed the Jews when he set out to undermine Trump and elect the criminal Hillary Clinton. Obama and Hillary are supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that launched the Arab drive to destroy Israel and push its Jews into the sea (that was their slogan).”

Joel B. Pollak, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News and an Orthodox Jew, declared: “I have worked with Stephen K. Bannon, President-elect Donald Trump’s new chief strategist and senior counselor, for nearly six years at Breitbart News. I can say, without hesitation, that Steve is a friend of the Jewish people and a defender of Israel, as well as being a passionate American patriot and a great leader.”

Donald Trump’s success as President will depend on whether he can merge his populist instincts with the reform agenda of Republicans in Congress to form a united and effective government. His choices for his most senior White House aides suggest those two tendencies will compete in his Administration the way they did during the campaign.

Mr. Trump offered something for both camps Sunday with his announcement that Reince Priebus will be his chief of staff while Stephen Bannon will be chief strategist and senior counselor. Mr. Priebus is the head of the Republican National Committee who stuck with Mr. Trump despite the many valleys of the campaign and provided the get-out-the-vote operation that Mr. Trump lacked. Mr. Bannon is a former Goldman Sachs banker, Naval officer and Breitbart News executive who joined the campaign with Kellyanne Conway in August amid one of those valleys.
It’s hard to know whether this is will be a sublime union of yin and yang or “Survivor: Trump White House.” Typically the chief of staff runs the White House and is the President’s most trusted adviser. But it’s notable that the announcement from the Trump transition established no clear hierarchy between the two men. The transition statement said that “Bannon and Priebus will continue the effective leadership team they formed during the campaign, working as equal partners to transform the federal government, making it much more efficient, effective and productive.”

Equal partners? Rarely does any organization run well if there are dueling heads, and one reason the Obama Presidency suffered is that his early chiefs of staff were undermined by the competing influence of White House aide and Obama family friend Valerie Jarrett.

Mr. Trump has sometimes set up competing forces within the Trump Organization, as he did with his Atlantic City casinos. This arrangement can succeed if Messrs. Priebus and Bannon divide responsibilities cooperatively, but it will lead to a mess of leaking dysfunction if they divide into competing factions. Someone will have to be the final word on who gets to see the President and which issues require a presidential decision.

The two men certainly come with different instincts and constituencies. Mr. Priebus is an establishment operative who built the Wisconsin GOP into one of the country’s most effective state parties. He has close ties to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Republicans across the country. He brings knowledge about how Washington works that is essential if Mr. Trump is going to move fast to take advantage of whatever honeymoon he will get.

On Thursday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, held a conference call with devastated staffers that put the rosiest possible frame on a calamitous picture.

The message to the dozens of mostly young, sleep-deprived and shell-shocked aides: We did everything we could have. We wouldn’t have changed a thing. You should still be proud.

Inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which sits half a mile south of the U.S. Capitol, eyes rolled and heads shook in frustration and disbelief.

Clinton’s loss at the hands of Donald Trump amounted to the most surprising outcome in the history of modern electoral politics. Of course things could’ve been done differently. And ignoring that fact wasn’t going to make the searing defeat any easier.

“We are pissed at them and state parties are pissed at them because they lost due to arrogance,” a top DNC staffer tells U.S. News, sharing the candid sentiment suffusing the high levels of the committee in exchange for anonymity.

It’s no surprise that the hierarchy of the Clinton campaign leadership was insular and self-assured. But DNC staffers say the team’s presumptuous, know-it-all attitude caused it to ignore early warning signs of electoral trouble inside the states, and demoralized DNC staff who felt largely marginalized or altogether neglected for most of the campaign.

There is always some level of tension between the sprawling bureaucracy of the party committee and the nominee’s campaign apparatus. But in the wake of Clinton’s loss, when intraparty finger-pointing is inevitable, some DNC staffers describe the relationship between the two entities as uniquely ineffectual, even after the displacement of unpopular chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And they attribute it to one fundamental reason: Clinton’s campaign leaders always thought they knew best. The DNC was to do what it was told: Essentially, be seen and not heard.

On election night, DNC number crunchers’ first saw signs of trouble when tallies from Virginia began to roll in. Here was a state the Clinton camp expected to carry by nearly 10 points, and the early returns showed that wasn’t going to happen. She won it by 5, but the slimmer-than-expected margin made DNC staffers nervous, especially because they had warned the Clinton camp not to pull staff and resources from there. The campaign did anyway, slashing its advertising investment in August. Sure, they survived inside the commonwealth, but inside the DNC, the late call of Virginia for Clinton was a distressing warning of things to come.

If their projected margin in Virginia was cut in half, where else was their forecast wrong?

Florida was always expected to be a slog. But a shiver went down the DNC’s collective spine when a call came in from Scott Arceneaux, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party, saying, “We’ve got a problem.”

There’s a dark irony to the somewhat swirling media response to Trump’s victory. For months now, observers have been telling us that Trump’s army is motored more by feeling than reason. Trumpism is a movement based on ‘untrammelled emotion’ over ‘reason [and] empiricism’, said Andrew Sullivan. Trump makes ‘sly appeals to… human irrationality’, said Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon. Like all of history’s demagogues, Trump conjures ‘vivid images and intense emotions’, said a writer for the Conversation. Especially in relation to security: apparently he plays on people’s feelings of ‘uncertainty or instability’.

Yet now, as Trump’s victory shocks the world, or at least that portion of it that lives in its own echo chamber, who is it that’s exhibiting ‘untrammelled emotion’? Who’s conjuring up ‘vivid images’ and ‘intense emotions’, particularly with regard to security? It isn’t Trump’s supporters, most of whom went from the ballot box back to their everyday lives. It’s the anti-Trump set. It’s those who spent months claiming Trump supporters lack the mental and moral equipment necessary for ‘reasoned deliberation’. Many of these rather elitist politicos and observers are behaving in a way that makes even the most hot-headed Trump cheerer look perfectly rational in comparison.

The emotionalism of their response has been intense. ‘“I feel hated”, I tell my husband, sobbing in front of the TV in my yoga pants and Hillary sweatshirt’, said an American columnist in the Guardian. Former UK foreign secretary Margaret Beckett says Trump’s victory feels like ‘the end of the world’ (bit rich coming from a woman who voted for the Iraq War in 2003). Emotion over reason is widespread: the Washington Post reports that ‘mobs of tearful students’ are protesting against Trump’s win; some American universities are providing counselling for those ‘traumatised’ by Trump; celebs including Miley Cyrus and Perez Hilton have issued videos of themselves weeping over Trump’s victory, which have been shared hundreds of thousands of times by similarly frazzled Hillary backers.

Even worse than the emotionalism is the apocalypticism. Trump conjures up ‘vivid images’ to exploit people’s feelings of ‘uncertainty’? Yes, he does, but not as intensively as anti-Trump observers have been doing. British historian Simon Schama said Trump’s victory will ‘hearten fascists all over the world’ and is reminiscent of Hitler’s rise. Trump’s victory is the ‘greatest calamity to befall the West since World War II’, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones, clearly having never experienced the deprivations of 1970s recession or 1980s class conflict. Cheap, history-exploiting Hitler comparisons are rife: protesters hold up pictures of Trump with a Hitler moustache while celebs cry over America becoming like ‘Germany in the 1930s’.