Morning Report — Trump, GOP Congress aim for swift governing start

November 11, 2024

In today’s issue:

Trump, GOP aim for shock-and-awe start
Democrats dissect what happened
Presidential transition picks up pace
Trump to Putin: de-escalate in Ukraine

While the Democratic Party searches for its black box buried under an election crash site, Senate and House Republicans are celebrating with President-elect Trump and plotting rapid action to deliver on a historically conservative agenda.

Voters handed them a mandate, Trump says, and his party intends to deliver.

On Wednesday, President Biden will host Trump at the White House as part of the handoff between two men who have scant respect for one another. Each has run for president three times. One, who will be 82 in nine days, is exiting a lifetime in politics on Jan. 20 and could see his legacy initiatives reversed in brisk succession next year by Republicans who have the power.

Trump, 78, returns to the White House as a lame duck bolstered by GOP lawmakers who want to use their majorities to bury Democrats and their progressive ideas.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been working with Senate Republicans and Trump for months on bills they can enact with speed to show supporters they mean business. The list includes a basket of new and extended tax cuts and repeal of climate and energy provisions in the Democrat-passed Inflation Reduction Act.

The Senate will be under GOP control in January, and while there are still 18 House races to be called, Republicans feel confident they have enlarged their narrow House control.

“When we retake control of government, we’re going to roll back the Green New Deal regulations and put America back in a place of American energy dominance,” Johnson promised.

Other priorities the GOP has in mind next year: Funding for border security, including Trump’s unfinished wall, and conservative changes to schools and universities. “We can reform our education system by maximizing school choice for parents and holding woke university administrators accountable,” according to the Speaker.

Trump campaigned to stop migrants from entering the U.S. and deport an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants who are living and working in the country. The details of how the administration would round up and send millions of migrants to other nations remains unclear, especially if they have children born in the U.S.

“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Trump adviser Stephen Miller said a year ago. Former senior Trump officials helped write Project 2025, a detailed plan to overhaul federal agencies that includes more than 175 immigration actions. Trump as a candidate distanced himself from its 900 pages.

On Sunday, Trump announced his incoming deportation “border czar,” Tom Homan, who told Fox News “Sunday Morning Futures,” “It’s going to be a well-targeted, planned operation conducted by the men of [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. The men and women of ICE do this daily. They’re good at it,” adding, “When we go out there, we’re going to know who we’re looking for. We most likely know where they’re going to be, and it’s going to be done in a humane manner.”

The Hill’s Alexander Bolton points to a key player who has broad power under budget reconciliation rules to determine what GOP lawmakers can pass quickly with a simple majority vote. Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough has a record of ruling against adding immigration changes to budget reconciliation. That could trigger calls that she be replaced.

This week, Republican senators will vote privately for a colleague to lead their conference next year. The leadership contest has turned into a sharp-elbows race.

The endorsements have ricocheted into public view among candidates Sens. John Thune (S.D.), John Cornyn (Texas) and Rick Scott (Florida). The question is whether Trump will stay out of the leadership race, as Thune has recommended.

Scott, who touts his close ties with the president-elect, is endorsed by fellow Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Sens. Bill Hagerty (Tenn.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), Rand Paul (Ky.) and billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump ally(Fox News).

As GOP policy priorities come into sharper focus for the new year, attention turns to the anticipated chairs of key Senate committees who will serve as sherpas for Trump’s long list of campaign promises.

To enact tax code changes, Idaho Republican Mike Crapo is expected to take the lead as anticipated chair of theSenate Finance Committee next year(Law360 and Punchbowl News). GOP health policy initiatives will be a shared load in the Senate as Trump and conservatives take aim at Medicare and Medicaid and vow to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a popular law among voters after 14 years. The top Republican who may chair the Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee is Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a physician.

Cornyn is now the ranking Republican on the powerful Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and Border Security and may take the reins as a border state leader next year.

▪ The Hill: Trump’s GOP skeptics in Congress face a lonely path.

▪ The Hill: Sen. JD Vance of Ohio will give up his seat and be replaced when he’s sworn in as vice president in January. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) will fill that seat by appointment and the jockeying has begun. Jane Timken, the former Ohio GOP chair, is widely believed to be among leading early contenders.

BOB’S SMART TAKE

Agonized Democrats are going to have some uncomfortable moments over the next couple of months.

Biden will welcome Trump this week at the White House. On Jan. 6, Harris will formally preside as Congress counts the 2024 electoral votes. And then, as former President Obama, former President Clinton, Biden and Harris look on, Trump will be inaugurated as the nation’s 47th president. That is going to be Larry David-level awkwardness as Democrats struggle to comprehend what happened last week.

The worst part for Democrats will come next, as Trump and his trusted circle of advisers, including Donald Trump Jr., Musk and Miller, craft policies on the economy, energy and immigration over the next four years. It’s a dark time for Democrats, but just waiting for 2026 won’t cut it. Democrats need to change. They have a lot of work to do.

3 THINGS TO KNOW TODAY

▪ After Trump’s win, nearly 200 nations meeting at an annual United Nations climate summit this week must now consider how to avoid catastrophic climate change without help from the U.S.

▪ Genetic brushstrokes are slowly painting a truer picture for DNA-sleuthing scientists of how people lived and died in Pompeii in 79 AD.

▪ Strokes last year were the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. — and the majority could have been prevented. Here are updated federal guidelines for patients and doctors. Spoiler alert: A new class of weight loss drugs can be a big help.

LEADING THE DAY

THE DEMOCRATS’ SHELLACKING at the polls this week has triggered a feisty battle between the ideological wings of the party about what went wrong — and whether liberals or centrists bear the blame. Some liberals say the party didn’t tack far enough to the left to animate the base. Many centrists say it tacked too far to the left and scared away moderate voters in key battleground states. And Democratic leaders are now faced with the difficulty of working to ease the tensions between the feuding factions to form a unified front against Trump.

“It will be a big challenge,” said Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), former chair of the House Democratic Caucus.

In an attempt to explain Harris’s defeat, Democratic lawmakers (including some of those pictured above) joined analysts in blaming Biden’s lengthy decision making before withdrawing as nominee. Inside the party, pundits point to misinformation, the Gaza war, a toxic Democratic brand and the party’s approach to transgender issues as challenges with voters. The debate is hardly new. Democrats have repeatedly clashed over the party’s strategy after tough election cycles, and the battle lines are the same now as then, pitting liberals against moderates.

But this year the stakes were higher.

“We are out of touch with the crisis of meaning/purpose fueling MAGA,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Sunday in a thread on the social platform X. “We refuse to pick big fights. Our tent is too small.”

▪ The Hill: Biden should resign to allow Harris to be president briefly, former Harris aide Jamal Simmons suggested Sunday on CNN.

▪ NBC News: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), on Sunday supported Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, 70, who is candid about living with Type 1 diabetes and reportedly plans to remain on the bench. Some panicky Democrats reportedly discussed pressuring her to step down while Biden is in office to find a younger liberal replacement before Republicans control the Senate in January.

A NUMBERS GAME: Across every core Democratic bloc, voters didn’t turn out to the polls last week. And the electorate that did turn out shifted toward Trump. Party turnout dropped across the board, especially in non-battleground states, paving the way for the former president’s resurgence.

Of the roughly 146 million votes counted so far, Trump captured 74,851,166 votes to Harris’s 71,287,240 (50.4 percent to 48 percent). In 2020, Trump lost the election with 74,224,319 votes to Biden’s 81,284,666. While Trump didn’t gain a significant number of votes this election, Harris contended with a 4-million vote deficit compared to her predecessor.

“What really happened was a whole bunch of previous Democratic voters were upset with the Democratic Party,” John Aughenbaugh, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, told WTOP. “There were a number of subpopulations that typically vote Democratic that decided to stay home.”

▪ The Washington Post: How Trump built his victory, vote by vote.

▪ Foreign Policy: Six charts that explain the U.S. election.

MORE ELECTION NEWS

Were the polls wrong about Trump again? Trump outperformed expectations for his third straight presidential election, which will surely raise more questions about pollsters’ ability to gauge where elections stand.

Democratic governors are signaling their willingness to defy the new Trump administration, vowing to protect freedoms in their states and to wage legal and political battle if the president-elect follows through with controversial proposals.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is among the harshest Trump critics, and the former president on Friday attacked Newsom for trying to “Trump-proof” California.

The election gender gap was expected to be huge but was unremarkable. Age and educational status played a larger role in party divisions.

National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson (N.C.) is seeking a second term as head of the House GOP’s campaign arm.

WHERE AND WHEN

It’s Veterans Day!
The House will meet Tuesday at noon. The Senate will convene Tuesday at 3 p.m.
The president and first lady Jill Biden will host veterans and members of the military and veteran affiliated community in the East Room at 9 a.m. to commemorate Veterans Day. He will travel to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia to honor the military with a wreath-laying ceremony at 11 a.m. on the centennial anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He will speak at 11:15 a.m. The president and first lady will head to Wilmington, Del., on Veterans Day in the afternoon, and return to the White House.
Vice President Harris will attend the Veterans Day wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetery, joined by second gentleman Doug Emhoff. Both will attend Biden’s remarks at 11:15 a.m. at the Memorial Amphitheater.

ZOOM IN

TRANSITION WATCH: Trump’s presidential transition is well underway, but it’s running behind schedule. The transition team has not yet signed official legal documents with the General Services Administration and White House — which was supposed to happen by Oct. 1. Trump’s team said they are still negotiating the terms, and have privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, but those documents do not include language, required under the law, to explain how Trump himself will address conflicts of interest when in office.

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has identified more than 3,400 conflicts of interest tied to Trump during his first administration (NPR, WTOP and The New York Times).

▪ NBC News: Trump wants help from Senate Republicans to make recess appointments to his pending administration.

▪ Semafor: Inside the surprisingly “orderly” Trump transition.

▪ Politico: Trump’s transition will seek help from the federal government. Previous reports indicated that the transition was exploring not seeking support from the General Services Administration for its operations, a break from historical precedent.

CABINET: Trump has offered Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) the job of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (CNN).

Ruled out on Saturday by the president-elect for any position in his new administration: former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.Pompeo was mentioned as a possible Defense secretary; Trump ally Tucker Carlson is not a fan. Pompeo and Haley served in Trump’s first term and both backed U.S. support for Ukraine, while Trump and many of his allies have pushed to curtail American aid for allies and military involvement overseas (The New York Times).

NBC News: Homan, Trump’s incoming “border czar,” was previously the acting ICE director and backs Trump’s controversial “zero tolerance” policy. He will not require Senate confirmation in his White House post.

TAX POLICY: Republicans know they will run up against big hurdles with their proposed tax policy in the new administration. Outside budget experts estimate that extending the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts in 2025 and adding Trump’s proposed new tax benefits could further add to the nation’s $35 trillion federal debt.

The nation’s debt held by the public could nearly double over the next decade from $26 trillion at the end of last year, according to forecasts from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The extension of the 2017 tax cuts would add around $4.5 trillion to those projections. And Trump’s additional tax cut proposals added in could result in $7.5 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

But Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), interviewed on “Fox News Sunday,” suggested that dynamic scoring (a conservative yardstick applied to revenue effects based on rosy estimates of U.S. economic expansion) could counter advocacy group forecasts. And he said Republicans would seek to slash discretionary spending favored by Democrats, including environmental and climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The caveat: Proposed cuts in discretionary programs would be a small drop in the debt ocean, especially when Trump tax breaks, which reduce federal revenues, are factored in. A key hurdle for the new administration will likely be the reinstatement of the federal debt ceiling on Jan. 2, which was suspended in 2023 following protracted negotiations with Congress.

IMMIGRATION: Advocates are bracing for a new Trump administration, whose pledge of mass deportation is sending waves of panic and anger throughout the movement. Advocates also face an identity crisis after decades of relying on Latinos as their primary voting constituency and finding neither political party fully embracing their priorities.

“I think that part of the challenge … has been [that] the movement has been very insular,” said Marielena Hincapié, a scholar at Cornell University’s Immigration Law and Policy Program who formerly headed the National Immigration Law Center. “The movement has been focused on undocumented immigrants.”

CNBC: What Trump’s mass deportation plan would mean for immigrant workers and the economy.

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT: Here’s a closer look at those who could be in charge of the nation’s energy policy in the new administration.

PUBLIC HEALTH: Trump’s imminent return to power promises to upend the nation’s health policy landscape, especially with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appointed to an unspecified government role. Kennedy is most famous for his public questioning of vaccines. Mainstream health policy specialists believe there are institutional guardrails in place, but express concern that Kennedy could still have an outsized impact.

“I worry greatly for the future of public health, environment and science in the next four years,” said Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

The Hill: RFK Jr.’s political clout grows after Trump’s victory.

ELSEWHERE

UKRAINE: Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, their first phone conversation since Trump won the election, The Washington Post reports. During the call, Trump advised Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe. In his presidential campaign, Trump said he would bring an immediate end to the war in Ukraine, though he did not offer details about how he intended to do so.

Meanwhile, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CBS’s “Face The Nation” that Biden will continue to push Congress for aid for Ukraine and for a cease-fire in its ongoing war with Russia. Sullivan said Biden made it clear to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he would spend all of the resources passed by Congress “on time and in full.”

▪ The Hill: Ukraine attacked Moscow with 34 drones, the Russian Ministry of Defense said early Sunday morning.

▪ The New York Times: Ukrainian officials expect a counteroffensive in western Russia to begin in the coming days as North Korea’s troops train with Russian forces.

TRUMP AND THE WORLD: Trump is expected to deploy his trademark mix of belligerent threats and friendly relations with some of the world’s dictators as he seeks to break up the deepening partnerships between U.S. adversaries China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Whether that coheres into an effective policy — given Trump’s impulsive approach to global relations and contrasting views among his likely advisers — remains an open question, writes The Hill’s Laura Kelly.

The president-elect is antagonistic toward European allies and NATO, chastising them as relying too much on the U.S. for military support, and brags about his personal rapport with strongmen across the globe.

“Trump is approaching each of them bilaterally, and without the strong backing of our allies,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, senior fellow and director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. “Because they are in many ways acting as a collective — and we are more isolated and alone without our allies — then the balance of power really shifts to them.”

The New York Times: Smile, flatter and barter: How the world is prepping for Trump 2.0.

MIDDLE EAST: On his last day as Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant told family members of the Israeli hostages in Gaza that the military had achieved all of its objectives in the enclave and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was responsible for holding up a cease-fire deal that would end the war and get the remaining hostages home. Meanwhile, Qatar has suspended its key mediation efforts between Hamas and Israel, it said Saturday, after growing frustration with the lack of progress on a cease-fire deal.

Qatar told Israel and Hamas it can’t continue to mediate “as long as there is a refusal to negotiate a deal in good faith.”

The Hill: The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification issued a report Friday stating Northern Gaza’s citizens are threatened by an “imminent and substantial likelihood of extreme famine.”

OPINION

■ It can happen here, by David Remnick, commentary, The New Yorker.

■ Israel keeps attacking journalists. When will the U.S. intervene? by Kavitha Chekuru, guest essayist, The New York Times.

THE CLOSER

And finally … 🐵 It’s like herding monkeys. For real.

Still on the lam this morning are 18 of 43 opportunistic rhesus macaque monkeys, similar to the above photo. They escaped last week from a South Carolina research laboratory when an employee left a door open.

The humans sent to re-capture the primates with fruit-baited traps are, how shall we say, patient. Food disappears from the traps. Many monkeys, used for vaccine research, remain just outside the facility’s fencing while leaping through trees, apparently enjoying their freedom in Yemassee, S.C.

CBS News video is HERE.

The Humane Society of the United States and some Americans on social media are rooting for the end of primate use in research. Police advised local residents to call 911 if they noted wayward escapees. They are not dangerous.

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