Trump's early administration
So much for President-elect Donald Trump's talk about being a president for everyone.
Consider his first three picks for his administration - Steve Bannon as chief strategist, Jeff Sessions for attorney general, Michael Flynn for the National Security Adviser. All are of the scorched-earth mentality that drove the rhetoric of Trump's most divisive campaigning.
The other two are Reince Priebus for chief of staff - widely thought to be the nice face of a joint adviser position with Bannon, and Mike Pompeo to head the CIA.
Five first names and positions and five white guys. What a shock. Establishment Republicans found room to breathe with Priebus and Pompeo. But Democrats, women and minorities looking for conciliatory gestures were left gazing.
Politico, however, posits that Trump's first five staff picks provide plenty of fodder for those determined to find opportunities for Trump resistance and opposition.
Former Breitbart Editor Bannon is the re-packager of white supremacist thinking into a new label called alt-right. Republican National Committee Chairman Priebus is the safe bet for putting out fires.
Alabama Sen. Sessions has so much racism baggage that he couldn't pass a Senate confirmation 30 years ago.
Former Gen. Flynn was fired by President Obama and promptly went to work as an adviser for Russia and Turkey.
Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and West Point graduate, has been a stanch opponent of the Iran nuclear deal.
It's not a pretty start.
Emails, press pools and tax promises
Remember that long-ago chant to "lock her up" over Hillary Clinton's use of a private email account and server to do America's business? The outraged cry was that she played loose with confidential and top-secret information, and that she thwarted transparency.
Enter President-elect Donald Trump, who for 12 days now has talked and texted and emailed with foreign heads of state on his private phone and private server without so much as a nudge to the U.S. Department of State.
He's also refused to allow the presidential press pool to follow him - slipping out to dinner at a posh New York restaurant (hamburgers there are $36). But one enterprising national news reporter who covered Trump's campaign and has come to know his habits pretty well made a reservation at the restaurant and shot a camera video of Trump assuring other restaurant patrons that he'd get them their tax break soon.
That transparency aside, however, Trump later met - sans state department representatives and reporters - with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
No one knows what they talked about. No one, that is, except Trump's daughter Ivanka (in charge theoretically of Trump's so-called "blind" trust) and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who's now considering a formal White House role despite concerns of nepotism).
Imagine what the hue and cry would have been had that been Hillary and Chelsea and Bill in an official state meeting with the Japanese prime minister in the Clinton household with no attendant oversight. Imagine the Republican feathers that would be flying if Bill was seeking legal opinions about his own formal White House advisory role.
Hello, America. What have we done?
Autopsy time for Democrats
Regardless of whether House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., survives a leadership challenge from Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, she and other Democrats have to acknowledge that Ryan has a point: The party has lost touch with middle America, and the way to regain it is not with the status quo attitudes of East Coast and West Coast party thinking.
"I love Nancy Pelosi," Ryan said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Friday, " but we have to talk about how we move forward. We've lost 68 House races since 2010. We have the smallest majority since 1929 in our caucus. If you take state, federal officials, we have the smallest numbers since Reconstruction. If that's not a call for doing something differently, I don't know what is."
Maybe. Or maybe Democrats do what the GOP did after its "autopsy" some years ago.
Nothing.
Nothing except obstruct and investigate and filibuster and spread doubt.
No. The playbook for the GOP is not the playbook for Democrats. Ryan and Pelosi can work it out and find a better way.