via Vanderleun: Trump looking serious, just prior to his acceptance speech on election night.

Glenn Reynolds looks at Trump’s performance so far, very early, and contends that there is much for conservatives to like, and that even (#4) the part conservatives will not like was really smart politics.

(1) Killed off dynastic politics, at least for now. If Hillary had won, 4 of the last 5 presidents would have come from two families. That’s not healthy.

(2) Kept Hillary out of the White House. She’s amazingly crooked even by DC standards, and amazingly inept even by DC standards as well. Debacles galore have been prevented by keeping her out. Plus, a Clinton presidency would have allowed the completion of the Obama Administration’s weaponization of the federal government and possibly ensured one-party rule for decades. And at the very least, it would have allowed the sorry gang that Obama and Clinton brought in (go read the Podesta emails!) to bore in for four to eight more years.

Those two reasons were reason enough to back Trump. But now let’s look at what’s happened since election night:

(3) The Mattis appointment. In one swoop, a big start toward fixing the military that Obama turned from warriors into social-justice warriors. Plus, a big blow to PC culture in general.

(4) The Carrier deal. Sure, everybody hates it — except for the voters. But it’s a promise kept, and one that makes American working-class folks feel like, finally, somebody cares. And it’s rich to see people who didn’t bat an eye at Solyndra going ballistic about $7 million over 10 years.

(5) Crushing the media’s sense of self-importance: They thought they were going to hand this election to Hillary. Now they’re realizing just how few people like or trust them, while Trump bypasses them using Twitter and YouTube. As I’ve said before, in the post-World War II era, the press has enjoyed certain institutional privileges based on two assumptions: (1) That it’s very powerful; and (2) That it will exercise that power responsibly, for the most part. Both assumptions have been proven false in this election cycle. Like many of the postwar institutional accommodations, this one will be renegotiated under Trump. It’s past time. After getting spanked in 2004 over RatherGate, the press realized with Katrina that if they all converged on the same lies they could still move the needle. Now they can’t.

(6) China. Obama’s foreign policy has been disastrous. Trump has served notice to China that we’re not abandoning our allies on the Pacific Rim. That will be noticed elsewhere, too.

(7) The transition. It was supposed to be “chaos,” but it’s been smooth and obviously well-planned. This bodes well and, among those willing to pay attention beyond SNL sketches, is changing minds.

Don’t get cocky, because he could still blow it and the press will be looking for anything they can use to destroy him, as they do with every Republican president. But for a guy less than 4 weeks out from the election, he’s doing awfully well.

Glenn’s right. Trump’s cabinet picks have been praiseworthy, in one case: outstanding. If Trump had announced that he would make Mattis Secretary of Defense before the election, I’d have voted for him.

Trump has displayed magnanimity. He told the press he would not prosecute Hillary, and he has been very seriously considering Mitt Romney for Secretary of State, despite Romney’s strong attack during the campaign and withholding of support.

Trump displayed good judgement, too, in dumping Chris Christie, who reeks of Tri-State Area sleaze.

Trump’s appointments, his organization of the transition team, and the Taiwan phone call as message to China have all demonstrated intelligence and good organizational and strategic ability.

Donald Trump has been “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” There was no evidence in his entire previous life of any party or ideological commitment whatsoever. Trump donated generously to every major liberal democrat, and golfed and hobnobbed with them happily. In the course of his campaign, he took positions, changed his mind, and contradicted himself. It seemed impossible to rely on Trump’s promises of conservative judicial appointments, tax cuts, and other conservative policies. But he has been elected, and the conservative appointments and policy promises are still coming.

I still fear that Trump is going to disappoint badly before all this is over, but so far so good. He is demonstrating a lot more seriousness and a better character than I ever would have expected, and I find myself obliged to admit that I’ve been wrong: Trump has got real political strategic ability and he does know what he is doing.

Donald Trump doesn’t know how to wear a suit or tie a necktie properly. He is a terrible speaker. He is a tonsorial disaster area. But, Scott Adams may be right about Trump possessing his own unique kind of political genius. His use of Twitter, for instance, is un-presidential, informal, inaccurate, careless, and frequently embarrassing, but he has tens of millions of followers who receive his messages directly, and every time he tweets he drives the establishment media crazy.

Gerard Van der Leun identified the process:

Since the election, Trump has continued to Tweet away. He’s called for Hamilton to be boycotted and flag-burning to be criminalised, and every time the same 10-part pattern unfolds and the whole thing starts again.

Each episode followed a familiar 10-part pattern:

1) Trump posts an inflammatory, highly opinionated tweet.

2) The media goes nuts.

3) Trump’s tweet then dominates the news all day.

4) The media demands he stops tweeting because it’s ‘un-presidential.’

5) Trump ignores them.

6) Conventional politicians demand he stops tweeting because it’s un-presidential.’

7) Trump ignores them too.

8) Trump wakes up next morning to every paper and cable news show talking about his tweet.

9) Trump chuckles to himself.

10) Trump tweets again.

Repeat.

While he was still running for president in October of 1860, Abraham Lincoln received a letter from eleven-year-old Grace Bedell advising him to improve his appearance by growing a beard. Lincoln took the little girl’s advice and won the presidency.

It seems a pity that Grace Bedell wasn’t around this year to tell Donald Trump to get rid of the groundhog, quit dyeing his remaining hair yellow, and stop using the tanning makeup. But Gerard Van der Leun stepped up in her absence, and has offered a Photoshop makeover of The Donald, demonstrating that he could look pretty respectable.

Trump should hire Gerard to supervise his personal grooming.

—————————————————

It would also help the President-Elect look better and more presidential to get better suits from a better tailor, to wear grey flannel, pin-stripe, and occasionally glen plaid and not only always the same Navy Blue.

Someone needs to explain to Mr. Trump that a gentleman looks best wearing his suit coat buttoned (one button only) when standing up.

An older, gravitationally-challenged fellow might also look better wearing a vested suit.

Mr. Trump really needs a letter from Grace Bedell pointing out to him that he ties his neckties too long. One’s necktie ought to end in the middle of one’s beltline. Mr. Trump’s ties are invariably tied with the front dangling down far too long. The above photo demonstrates that Trump ties his neckties so long in front that the rear portion of the tie is too short to be reliably contained by the loop. Poor Donald has reduced himself to having to scotchtape his tie together in back. Jesus wept!

Scotchtaped Tie Revealed!

Thomas Lifson argues that Trump intends to drain the swamp of bed-wetting, GOP-policy-obstructing liberals at Fogg Bottom, and has concluded (for some unknown reason) that Mitt Romney is the man for the job.

Donald Trump has a plan that eludes his critics, who can’t help thinking about politics the way it has always been played and still do not grasp his thinking nor the range of new tools he brings to the presidency.

The Department of State is badly broken and desperately needs to be fixed. State requires fundamental restructuring as well as the departure of many entrenched figures whose goals and beliefs are antagonistic to realistic confrontation with Islamic jihad and the generations-long efforts of Muslim states to “wipe Israel off the map.” The State Department is full of people called “Arabists,” who instinctively blame Israel when it is attacked and defends itself and who presume that the U.S. should attend to the prejudices of hundreds of millions of Arab Muslims because they are so populous, and because they have oil and have funded an amazing number of sinecures for retired bureaucrats with generous compensation and few demands (other than reflexive support whenever an issue arises).

This is just a start on enumerating the problems, for the Middle East is not the only problem ahead, merely the oldest. There are serious issues with Russia, China, North Korea, and Venezuela, among major problems for U.S. diplomacy.

Read the whole thing.

I think a lot of people are busy projecting their favorite personal fantasies on the blank page that is Donald Trump.

I’m skeptical myself that Trump has been secretly a hard-core Republican hawk all these years, kicking his gold-plated furniture every time he has to listen to the like of Colin Powell.

I would guess that Donald Trump is familiar with the way Mitt Romney straightened out the Winter Olympics mess and perceives Romney as highly competent manager and negotiator. Trump’s primary policy interests are probably new trade deals favoring US interests and a grand renegotiation of the NATO Alliance which extracts larger financial contributions from America’s strategic partners.

It is easy enough to see why Trump would like Mitt Romney’s combination personal distinction, professional competence, and geniality working on his behalf out of State.

Beyond Mitt Romney’s particularly desirable combination of personal characteristics and skill set, getting his strongest GOP Establishment critic to accept his leadership and come on board would go a long way toward reuniting the entire Republican Party behind Donald Trump, and would be a strong public demonstration of The Donald’s own skills at negotiation and persuasion.

Joan C. Williams, in Harvard Business Review, explains to the national elite why white working class men went overwhelmingly for Trump.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.

Manly dignity is a big deal for working-class men, and they’re not feeling that they have it. Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and women knew their place. It’s comfort food for high-school-educated guys who could have been my father-in-law if they’d been born 30 years earlier. Today they feel like losers — or did until they met Trump.

Read the whole thing.

North Raleigh Community Church Pastor John Pavlovitz says that when you voted for Trump, you were making more than a political choice:

I don’t think you understand us right now.

I think you think this is about politics.

I think you believe this is all just sour grapes; the crocodile tears of the losing locker room with the scoreboard going against us at the buzzer.

I can only tell you that you’re wrong. This is not about losing an election. This isn’t about not winning a contest. This is about two very different ways of seeing the world.

Hillary spoke about a diverse America; one where religion or skin color or sexual orientation or place of birth aren’t liabilities or deficiencies or moral defects. Her campaign was one of inclusion and connection and interdependency. It was about building bridges and breaking ceilings. It was about going high.

Trump imagined a very selective America; one that is largely white and straight and Christian, and the voting verified this. Donald Trump has never made any assertions otherwise. He ran a campaign of fear and exclusion and isolation—and that’s the vision of the world those who voted for him have endorsed.

They have aligned with the wall-builder and the professed p*ssy-grabber, and they have co-signed his body of work, regardless of the reasons they give for their vote:

Every horrible thing Donald Trump ever said about women or Muslims or people of color has now been validated.
Every profanity-laced press conference and every call to bully protestors and every ignorant diatribe has been endorsed.
Every piece of anti-LGBTQ legislation Mike Pence has championed has been signed-off on.

Half of our country has declared these things acceptable, noble, American.

This is the disconnect and the source of our grief today. It isn’t a political defeat that we’re lamenting, it’s a defeat for Humanity.

We’re not angry that our candidate lost. We’re angry because our candidate’s losing means this country will be less safe, less kind, and less available to a huge segment of its population, and that’s just the truth.

Those who have always felt vulnerable are now left more so. Those whose voices have been silenced will be further quieted. Those who always felt marginalized will be pushed further to the periphery. Those who feared they were seen as inferior now have confirmation in actual percentages.

Whole thing.

Personally, I think this sanctimonious lunatic crap is Pavlovitz’s own problem and nobody else’s.

Marni Morse

Paul Mirengoff forwards poignant excerpts from a student letter to the Daily Princetonian.

. . .I crawled into bed and cried for reasons I still [can’t] quite put into words, falling asleep before the election was called.

In the morning, I woke up to a New York Times news alert and social media feeds filled with disappointment. The United States had democratically elected a man who, among so many other despicable qualities and policies, is accused of and boasts about committing sexual assault.

As a woman passionate about gender equality, women’s leadership, and ending sexual violence; as someone dedicated to the Clinton campaign and ready to make history; and, quite frankly, as a human being, I didn’t know how to process this.

I still don’t. I felt for my friends and anyone who feels that this result puts their safety and their loved ones’ safety at risk, acknowledging that I am not the person this outcome will affect the most.

I didn’t leave my room Wednesday morning. I sat and sobbed and I still have the tissues all over my floor to prove it. When I absolutely had to get up for class, I put on my “Dare to say the F-word: Feminism” t-shirt and my “A woman belongs in the House and the Senate” sweatshirt to make myself feel stronger. Still crying, I left my room.

Ironically, she titled her letter “Stronger Together.”

You knew that Lena Dunham was going to compete.

Actress and Hillary Clinton campaign surrogate Lena Dunham has broken her silence after the Democratic presidential candidate’s loss to Republican Donald Trump earlier this week, describing in a blog post the agony of being at Clinton’s election night party in New York City and insisting that she “never truly believed” that Trump could win.

The 30-year-old Girls actress, who had hit the campaign trail repeatedly for Clinton for months leading up to the election, described waking up on Election Day feeling “rosy” and “thrilled,” only to see the good feelings evaporate hours later at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan, when the election returns came flooding in.

“At a certain point it became clear something had gone horribly wrong. Celebrants’ faces turned. The modeling had been incorrect,” Dunham wrote in an essay for her Lenny Letter blog. “Watching the numbers in Florida, I touched my face and realized I was crying. ‘Can we please go home?’ I said to my boyfriend. I could tell he was having trouble breathing, and I could feel my chin breaking into hives.”

Dunham said she left the party early and was informed of Clinton’s loss when a friend called and told her.

The actress wrote that as a result of her support for Clinton throughout her campaign, she received “threats and abuse” at a level she could never have imagined. However, she remained hopeful that her detractors represented “the dying moans of the dragon known as the patriarchy being stabbed again and again in the stomach.”

Dunham continued:

We believed that on November 9, they’d be licking their wounds while we celebrated. It is painful on a cellular level knowing those men got what they wanted, just as it’s painful to know you are hated for daring to ask for what is yours. It’s painful to know that white women, so unable to see the unity of female identity, so unable to look past their violent privilege, and so inoculated with hate for themselves, showed up to the polls for him, too. My voice was literally lost when I woke up, squeaky and raw, and I ached in the places that make me a woman [Emphasis added], the places where I’ve been grabbed so carelessly, the places we are struggling to call our own.

Whole story.

Myron Ebell

Scientific American sounded bitter this morning.

Donald Trump has selected one of the best-known climate skeptics to lead his U.S. EPA transition team, according to two sources close to the campaign.

Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, is spearheading Trump’s transition plans for EPA, the sources said. …

Ebell is a well-known and polarizing figure in the energy and environment realm. His participation in the EPA transition signals that the Trump team is looking to drastically reshape the climate policies the agency has pursued under the Obama administration. Ebell’s role is likely to infuriate environmentalists and Democrats but buoy critics of Obama’s climate rules.

Ebell, who was dubbed an “elegant nerd” and a “policy wonk” by Vanity Fair, is known for his prolific writings that question what he calls climate change “alarmism.” He appears frequently in the media and before Congress. He’s also chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of nonprofits that “question global warming alarmism and oppose energy-rationing policies.”

Ebell appears to relish criticism from the left.

In a biography submitted when he testified before Congress, he listed among his recognitions that he had been featured in a Greenpeace “Field Guide to Climate Criminals,” dubbed a “misleader” on global warming by Rolling Stone and was the subject of a motion to censure in the British House of Commons after Ebell criticized the United Kingdom’s chief scientific adviser for his views on global warming.

More recently, Ebell has called the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan for greenhouse gases illegal and said that Obama joining the Paris climate treaty “is clearly an unconstitutional usurpation of the Senate’s authority.”

He told Vanity Fair in 2007, “There has been a little bit of warming … but it’s been very modest and well within the range for natural variability, and whether it’s caused by human beings or not, it’s nothing to worry about.”

Ebell’s views appear to square with Trump’s when it comes to EPA’s agenda. Trump has called global warming “bullshit” and he has said he would “cancel” the Paris global warming accord and roll back President Obama’s executive actions on climate change (ClimateWire, May 27).

Read the whole thing.

Trump gets serious points with me for this one.

(Some .gif files just do not work properly when saved. This was one of them. Unfortunately, I do not currently know how to fix that problem.)

See? I even found a flattering photo (you can hardly even see the groundhog on top).

I thought Donald Trump was a disgraceful candidate for the presidency, unqualified with respect to experience, character, and intelligence. I obviously had no intention of ever supporting, or voting for, Hillary, but I was inclined to believe that both of these unfortunate candidates were destined to be failures in office and the winner, whichever won, would bring disrepute on his or her respective party, and deliver a “one free presidency” ticket to the opposition.

The sober and mature side of my brain concluded that we’d be better off taking our medicine now, losing to Hillary this time, and coming back with a qualified, legitimate candidate next go round. Obviously, things did not work out that way.

I will reluctantly admit that, election night, sitting there, watching Fox News, alcoholic beverage in hand, the irresponsible side of my brain began taking over, and I found myself turning into Mr. Hyde. The worse version of me was in my heart of hearts hankering for Trump to win. Schadenfreude is so much fun. And the prospect of a Trump presidency would simply be so much more fun and entertaining than looking forward to four years of Hillary, a female US president played by some unlucky children’s high school principal. The very thought of seeing Hillary on TV for four years is enough to make any right-thinking American start itching to jump on that raft and head down the Mississippi, hoping to escape to the territories.

I then sat around for roughly 24 hours feeling guilty and ashamed of myself. I kept seeing, in my mind’s eye, General Washington, in Valhalla, cursing Trump and Trump’s supporters (and me), as he did General Charles Lee at Monmouth, “until the leaves shook on the trees.”

But Trump has been behaving decently. He won fair and square, according to the system. And, though I have every confidence that he didn’t write his proposed agenda himself, a lot of the Trump’s proposed first steps are absolutely wonderful. If Trump repeals Obamacare, and wipes out Caliban’s legacy, I will be tickled pink. If Trump abolishes, or at least neuters, the EPA, I promise to drink his health. If he really reduces taxes and regulations in the way he’s talking about, hell, I might vote for him for a second term.

I’ll grant my Trumpkin opponents this one: in his capacity as disgrace, Donald Trump really and truly got himself elected as a revolutionary Agent of Change. A real legitimate conservative would very likely have felt himself inhibited by mere propriety from undertaking really extreme changes, like actually abolishing major federal agencies & departments. Trump has no obligation to be respectable, because he never was respectable. Trump can break all the crockery, throw all the bombs he feels like. The crazed insurrectionary Trumpkins will support him, the scheming Republican insiders will support him, and, yes, Virginia! #NeverTrump conservatives like me are going to give Trump the honeymoon he is entitled to. I’ll support him and defend him against the Left on every conservative thing he does, and I’ll even refrain from delivering more than mild dissents in the areas where I most disagree with the Trump platform, for a while, until at least, he does something really horrible. Fair is fair. He has got a mandate, at least up to a point.