Weekend 2-in-1 thanks to a migraine…
Trump
Trump disregarded 40 years of foreign policy toward China by arranging a phone call with the president of Taiwan. For China’s leaders, “There was a sort of delusion based on overly optimistic ideas about Trump. That should stop.” He then tried to claim it was merely a congratulatory phone call he accepted, but really his campaign staff arranged it months in advance.
The Associated Press had to rotate its reporters out of the Trump campaign for their own safety due to threats.
Why did Ivanka Trump sit in on her father’s meeting with the Japanese PM? Because she was closing a licensing deal with a Japanese company, the largest shareholder of which is the Development Bank of Japan.
When Pelosi called Trump post-election and raised women issues/child care, Trump handed phone to Ivanka https://t.co/HuTFlgv2hv
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) December 3, 2016
Trump might not submit a budget to Congress next year, which would be one way to hide what he’s planning to do with the federal government.
Transition Team & Cabinet Appointees
Fake news, retweeted by Mike Flynn (among others), led a Trump supporter to fire an assault rifle in a crowded DC pizzeria.
Voting
The NYTimes Editorial Board has some things to say about Republican gerrymandering.
McCrory, still trying to scrape something out of his loss in the North Carolina governor’s race, is now calling a special legislative session, presumably to stack the state’s Supreme Court.
Protests
The US Commission on Civil Rights sends observers to Standing Rock:
“This is to me the closest thing to what we’ve done since the time that we would go down in the 1960s to the Jim Crow South,” the chairman of the US Commission on Civil Rights said.
North Dakota’s governor used a disaster relief law to call on police from ten different states to suppress the protests.
On November 2, North Dakota officials agreed to borrow $4 million to cover escalating policing costs and extend the state’s line of credit for emergency law enforcement to $10 million. (The state was already staring down a $1 billion revenue shortfall in 2016.)
Construction has now been halted by the Army Corps of Engineers.
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