Jeff's Lunchbreak

This is my semi-regular feature to post links to articles about Donald Trump along with excerpts from those articles. Trump has the potential to cause so much damage to our country and the world that it's every citizen's responsibility to keep pressure on him and our other elected officials to try to minimize the damage. To read previous entries in this series and other Trump related posts, check out my Trump archives.

This isn't a particularly long roundup this week, but I figured I'd post it in 'honor' of the inauguration. Here are today's links:

Slate - Stop Underestimating Donald Trump

"At every turn, pundits and political scientists underestimated Donald Trump. When he announced he was running to be president of the United States, they laughed. When he led the polls for the GOP nomination, they predicted his popularity would be short-lived. When he became the Republican nominee, they celebrated. Against a Rubio or even a Christie, Clinton might have lost. But against Trump? / We've underestimated Trump over and over and over again. And over and over and over again, we've all paid a heavy price. And yet, many of the same pundits and political scientists who confidently predicted that Trump would never be president are now confidently predicting that his presidency will soon be tanked by incompetence and unpopularity." ... "That Trump isn't sure to fail does not mean that he's certain to succeed. It's perfectly possible that he'll crash and burn. But to figure out how to beat Trump, we must start by taking him--and the danger he poses--seriously."

MIT Technology Review - Climate Data Preservation Efforts Mount as Trump Takes Office

"Friday's hackathon follows a series of grassroots data preservation efforts in recent weeks, amid increasing concerns the new administration is filling agencies with climate deniers likely eager to cut off access to scientific data that undermine their policy views. Those worries only grew earlier this week, when Inside EPA reported that the Environmental Protection Agency transition team plans to scrub climate data from the agency's website, citing a source familiar with the team. [emphasis mine]" ... "To be clear, the Trump camp hasn't publicly declared plans to erase or eliminate access to the databases. But there is certainly precedent for state and federal governments editing, removing, or downplaying scientific information that doesn't conform to their political views." ... "an extensive Congressional investigation concluded in a 2007 report that the Bush Administration 'engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.' "

Industrial Equipment News - Trump's CEO Meetings Raise Ethics Questions

"President-elect Donald Trump's meetings with CEOs seeking federal approval for major mergers are raising red flags for ethics lawyers concerned about the possible erosion of a firewall between the incoming White House and regulators reviewing those billion-dollar deals." ... "Presidents typically keep their distance from such reviews, so as not to appear to be exerting political influence on a regulatory process intended to evaluate the impact a merger could have on competition and consumers. Trump's private sessions suggest he may be less worried with appearing to be close to pending deals that require government approval."

Industrial Equipment News - Trump's Mexico Strategy a 'Dagger at Ohio'

"President-elect Donald Trump's threats to firms using Mexico as a manufacturing base will be counterproductive and could eventually cost thousands of American jobs, Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary, warned Wednesday." ... " 'That decline in the peso is a dagger at Ohio; it is a major change in the relative attractiveness of locating production activity in Mexico versus locating it in the American heartland,' Summers told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. / 'And the consequence of that is measured not in the dozens or hundreds but in the thousands, or ten thousands or even hundreds of thousands of jobs.' / The lesson of history, he added, is that 'classic populism is invariably counterproductive for those in whose name it is offered as a policy regime.' "

Slate - Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

[Written during the primaries, but still relevant.]
"There are certainly some echoes of fascism, but there are also very profound differences." ... "First of all, there are the kinds of themes Trump uses. The use of ethnic stereotypes and exploitation of fear of foreigners is directly out of a fascist's recipe book. 'Making the country great again' sounds exactly like the fascist movements. Concern about national decline, that was one of the most prominent emotional states evoked in fascist discourse, and Trump is using that full-blast, quite illegitimately, because the country isn't in serious decline, but he's able to persuade them that it is. That is a fascist stroke. An aggressive foreign policy to arrest the supposed decline. That's another one. Then, there's a second level, which is a level of style and technique. He even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out, and also the bluster, the skill at sensing the mood of the crowd, the skillful use of media." ... "And the capacity of Trump to enlist working-class voters against the left is exactly what Hitler and Mussolini were able to do. There are definitely echoes."