Last Week in Trump, 12/11–12/17

After a successful test run last week I decided to launch a beta version of my weekly wrap-up digest of national news about Trump. This is the last time that I’ll cross-post it to Medium; in the future it’ll come out solely as an email every Sunday morning (note that I’m planning on taking a two-week hiatus for Christmas and New Year’s and then returning with another full edition on January 8th). If you’d like to sign up to get the email, click here.

News

The FBI, NSA, and CIA all agree that Russia intervened in the election for multiple different reasons, one of which was to help Trump win; and it looks like Putin was personally involved in the efforts. BuzzFeed did a deep dive on “Fancy Bear,” the U.S. code name for the group of state-sponsored Russian hackers were responsible for stealing the DNC emails and that have been interfering in democratic elections in Europe since 2009; and the New York Times had a good in-depth look at Russia’s cyber warfare tactics leading up to November’s vote. Given Trump’s fawning praise of Putin and the number of pro-Russia cabinet appointees he’s announced so far, Russia’s foreign policy vision looks to be ascendant on the world stage — which is very bad news, since the massacre that accompanied the fall of Aleppo is a direct outcome of Russia’s increased engagement in the Syrian civil war on the side of Bashar al-Assad.

While virtually every intelligence professional in America agrees that Russia directly influenced our election, there’s no evidence that they were able to directly hack any of the voting machines or other pieces of voting infrastructure. The final results of the Wisconsin recount, the only one that was actually completed, was almost identical to the pre-recount outcome; Trump’s lead actually increased by 131 votes in the end.

The Electoral College meets tomorrow to formally elect Trump as the next President of the United States of America. There have been intense efforts underway to convince Republican electors to join forces and deny him the presidency; Harvard professor and pro-democracy activist Larry Lessig thinks those efforts may have a shot, but the Associated Press (which has a great Electoral College explainer here) doesn’t think it’s going to happen based on talking to more than 330 of the 538 electors across the country.

Trump, several of his adult children, and Mike Pence held a tech summit for the CEOs of major tech companies (Kara Swisher at Recode has the blow-by-blow); Elon Musk and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick signed up as formal advisers to the President-Elect; and a number of companies that are otherwise engaging with Trump, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Uber, signed a pledge saying that they wouldn’t help in any way with the creation of a Muslim registry if the federal government decides to try to create one.

Trump’s pick for Secretary of State turned out to be Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, on whom Vladimir Putin personally bestowed Russia’s Order of Friendship in 2013; and for the next head of the Department of Energy he chose former Texas governor Rick Perry, who famously said in a primary debate in 2012 that he doesn’t think the agency should exist.

In two signs of potential civil servant disobedience to come, staffers at the Department of Energy refused to comply with a request by the transition team to help them identify key personnel who have worked on their anti-climate-change agenda; and scientists across North America are frantically backing up public data sets from government websites to guard against the possibility that they may be deleted or misrepresented by the incoming administration.

As if to highlight the potential consequences of Trump’s new stance towards Taiwan, on Thursday China announced that it had installed defensive weapons on a disputed chain of islands in the South China Sea, and on Friday a Chinese warship seized an American underwater research drone in the same area, which they agreed to release yesterday.

Continuing his practice of avoiding press conferences (it’s been 144 days since his last one) and communicating primarily through Twitter instead, Trump at the last minute canceled a planned press conference to talk about his numerous conflicts of interest, which already appear to be real issues in his interactions with world leaders. He tweeted instead that he plans to hand over the business to his two adult sons while he’s in office — both of whom were at his tech roundtable earlier in the week, and one of whom was reportedly heavily involved in picking the new Secretary of the Interior.

Facebook, bowing to public pressure, announced a new system for flagging “fake news” in the Newsfeed, which will rely on users to flag stories for review by third-party accredited fact-checking organizations such as The Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Snopes, and PolitiFact.

As Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress systematically begin to dismantle as much of the federal government as they can, the role of the states in policymaking is only going to become more important…and that fact isn’t lost on state legislatures and governors. Last week North Carolina’s Republican-controlled state legislature and its outgoing Republican governor took the unprecedented measure of teaming up to limit the power of the office of the governor in order to weaken the newly elected Democratic governor; Ohio Republican Governor John Kasich vetoed a bill that would have outlawed abortions after roughly 6 weeks but signed into law one that outlaws them after 20 weeks; and California Governor Jerry Brown promised that California will continue the fight on climate change even if the federal government abandons it.

Analysis

ProPublica put together a fantastic interactive tool with links to “accountability reporting” on Trump’s appointees thus far, which they’re updating as new names are announced (the New York Times has a great version of the same thing is here).

Trump hasn’t been to Washington, D.C. since his meeting with Obama on November 10th; his VP Mike Pence, an experienced politician with good connections in D.C., has been his man on the ground and will apparently be playing a large role in the new administration.

Some security analysts are concerned that the threat of a state or non-state actor using nuclear weapons is on the rise, and may be even higher than it was in the Cold War, due to the recent sharp increase in Russian aggression.

And Ta-Nehisi Coates took a long look back on Barack Obama’s time in the White House.

Visiting the Other Bubble

With the importance of states’ rights on the rise, National Review made the conservative case for supporting transgender rights.

RedState argued that Governor Kasich’s decisions on the two abortion bills that made it to his desk (vetoing the more extreme one and signing the more moderate one) represented the kind of compromise for which the new Republican administration should strive.

They also don’t think Rick Perry is qualified to lead the Department of Energy.

Reason looked at “How Trump Endangers Global Peace.”

And conservatives generally reacted with skepticism to Facebook’s new measures to combat “fake news,” which many of them have come to see as shorthand for anything that comes from their bubble instead of ours.

Action

The New Yorker published a list of “Nine Ways to Oppose Donald Trump.”

A group of Congressional staffers put together a Google doc called “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.”

And the “Creative Majority PAC” launched a website called Daily Action to make it easier to make targeted phone calls to legislators.

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