"We recognize this is a threat not only to our democracy but to our dynamic, vibrant economy that remains the envy of the world"

 

The incoming Trump administration is working to put its agenda into place. Although experts on the National Security Council usually carry over from one administration to the next, Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller of the Associated Press today reported that incoming officials for the Trump administration are interviewing career senior officials on the National Security Council about their political contributions, how they voted in 2024, and whether they are loyal to Trump.

Most of them are on loan from the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency and, understanding that they are about to be fired, have packed up their desks to head back to their home agencies.

The National Security Council is the main forum for the president to hash out decisions in national security and foreign policy, and the people on it are picked for their expertise. But Trump’s expected pick to become his national security advisor—his primary advisor on all national security issues—Representative Mike Waltz (R-FL) told right-wing Breitbart News that he wants to staff the NSC with people who are “100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”

Ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) warned that the loyalty purge “threatens our national security and our ability to respond quickly and effectively to the ongoing and very real global threats in a dangerous world.”

But during Trump’s first term, it was Alexander Vindman, who was detailed to the NSC, and his twin Eugene Vindman, who was serving the NSC as an ethics lawyer, who reported concerns about Trump’s July 2019 call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to their superiors. This launched the investigation that became Trump’s first impeachment, and Trump appears anxious to make sure future NSC members will be fiercely loyal to him.

With extraordinarily slim majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans are talking about pushing through their entire agenda through Congress as a single bill in the process known as budget reconciliation.

Budget reconciliation, which deals with matters related to spending, revenue, and the debt limit, is one of the few things that cannot be filibustered, meaning that Republicans could get a reconciliation bill through the Senate with just 50 votes. If they can hold their conference together, they could get the package through despite Democratic opposition.

House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leaders have said that the House intends to pass a reconciliation bill that covers border security, defense spending, the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, spending cuts to social welfare programs, energy deregulation, and an increase in the national debt limit.

But Li Zhou of Vox points out that it’s not quite as simple as it sounds to get everything at once, because budget reconciliation measures are not supposed to include anything that doesn’t relate to the budget, and the Senate parliamentarian will advise stripping those things out.

In addition, the budget cuts Republicans are circulating include cuts to popular programs like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as Obamacare), the Inflation Reduction Act’s investment in combating climate change, and the supplemental nutrition programs formerly known as food stamps.

Still, a lot can be done under budget reconciliation. Democrats under Biden passed the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act under reconciliation, and Republicans under Trump passed the 2017 Trump tax cuts the same way.

A wrinkle in those plans is the Republicans’ hope to raise the national debt limit. As soon as they take control of Congress and the White House, Republicans will have to deal immediately with the treasury running up against the debt limit, a holdover from World War I that sets a limit on how much the country can borrow.

Although he has complained bitterly about spending under Biden, Trump has demanded that Congress either raise or abandon the debt ceiling because the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts he wants to extend will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years, and cost estimates for his deportation plans range from $88 billion to $315 billion a year.

Republicans are backing away from adding a debt increase to the budget reconciliation package out of concern that members of the far-right Freedom Caucus will kill the entire bill if they do. Those members want no part of raising the national debt and have demanded $2 trillion in budget cuts before they will consider it.

Tonight, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told Jordain Carney of Politico that Senate Republicans expect the debt limit to be stripped out of the budget reconciliation measure.

So Republicans are currently exploring the idea of leveraging aid to California for the deadly fires in order to get Democrats to sign on to raising the debt ceiling. Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Trump met with a group of influential House Republicans over dinner Sunday night at Mar-a-Lago to discuss tying aid for the wildfires to raising the debt ceiling. Today, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) confirmed to reporter Hill that this plan is under discussion.

Indeed, Republicans have been in the media suggesting that disaster aid to Democratic states should be tied to their adopting Republican policies. The Los Angeles fires have now claimed at least 24 lives. More than 15,000 firefighters are working to extinguish the wildfires, which have been driven by Santa Ana winds of up to 98 miles (158 km) an hour over ground scorched by high temperatures and low rainfall since last May, conditions caused by climate change.

On the Fox News Channel today, Representative Zach Nunn (R-IA) said: "We will certainly help those thousands of homes and families who have been devastated, but we also expect you to change bad behavior. We should look at the same for these blue states who have run away with a broken tax policy....

Those governors need to change their tune now.” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) blamed Democrats for the fires and said of federal disaster relief: “I certainly wouldn't vote for anything unless we see a dramatic change in how they're gonna be handling these things in the future.”

Aside from the morality of demanding concessions for disaster aid after President Joe Biden responded with full and unconditional support for regions hit by Hurricane Helene (although Tennessee governor Bill Lee is still lying that Biden delayed aid to his state, when in fact he delayed in asking for it, as required by law), there is a financial problem with this argument. As economist Paul Krugman noted today in his Krugman Wonks Out, California “is literally subsidizing the rest of the United States, red states in particular, through the federal budget.”

In 2022, the most recent year for which information is available, California paid $83 billion more to the federal government than it got back. Washington state also subsidized the rest of the country, as did most of the Northeast. That money flowed to Republican-dominated states, which contributed far less to the federal government than they received in return.

Krugman noted that “if West Virginia were a country, it would in effect be receiving foreign aid equal to more than 20 percent of its G[ross] D[omestic] P[roduct].” Krugman refers to the federal government as “an insurance company with an army,” and he notes that there is “nothing either the city or the state could have done to prevent” the wildfires.

“If the United States of America doesn’t take care of its own citizens, wherever they live and whatever their politics, we should drop “United” from our name,” he writes. “As it happens, however, California—a major driver of U.S. prosperity and power—definitely has earned the right to receive help during a crisis.”

Today, Biden announced student loan forgiveness for another 150,000 borrowers, bringing the total number of people relieved of student debt to more than 5 million borrowers, who have received $183.6 billion in relief. This has been achieved through making sure existing debt relief programs were followed, as they had not been in the past.

Establishment Republicans continue to fight MAGA Republicans, and MAGA fights among itself: former Trump ally Steve Bannon yesterday called Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk “truly evil” and vowed to “take this guy down.” But even as their enablers in the legacy media are normalizing Republican behavior, a reality-based media is stepping up to counter the disinformation.

Aside from the many independent outlets that have held MAGA Republicans to account, MSNBC today announced that progressive journalist Rachel Maddow will return to hosting a nightly one-hour show for the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.

And today journalist Jennifer Rubin joined her colleagues who have abandoned the Washington Post as it swung toward Trump. She resigned from the Washington Post with the announcement that she and former White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen have started a new media outlet called The Contrarian. Joining them is a gold-star list of journalists and commentators who have stood against the rise of Trump and the MAGA Republicans, many of whom have left publications as those outlets moved rightward.

“Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission—defending, protecting and advancing democracy,” Rubin wrote in her resignation announcement. In contrast, the new publication “will be a central hub for unvarnished, unbowed, and uncompromising reported opinion and analysis that exists in opposition to the authoritarian threat.”

“The urgency of the task before us cannot be overstated,” The Contrarian’s mission statement read. “We have already entered the era of oligarchy—rule by a narrow clique of powerful men (almost exclusively men). We have little doubt that billionaires will dominate the Trump regime, shape policy, engage in massive self-dealing, and seek to quash dissent and competition in government and the private sector. As believers in free markets subject to reasonable regulation and economic opportunity for all, we recognize this is a threat not only to our democracy but to our dynamic, vibrant economy that remains the envy of the world.”

In what appears to be a rebuke to media outlets that are cozying up to Trump, The Contrarian’s credo is “Not Owned by Anybody.”

—Heather Cox Richardson