Comment on DealBook: Facebook May Hire Robert Gibbs, Former Obama Aide

“Defense officials are getting anxious about the possibility of the incoming Trump administration firing or not renewing the term of Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C. Q. Brown, due to perceptions that he is out of step with the president-elect on the Pentagon’s diversity and inclusion programs,” Politico reports. “The Trump administration’s DOD transition team — led by former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie — has yet to officially set foot in the Pentagon since the election was called, owing to the transition team’s refusal so far to accept assistance from the federal government.” “But concern is beginning to bubble up that Brown, who spoke publicly about the challenges of rising through the military as a Black man as Donald Trump urged the Defense Department to crack down on the George Floyd protests in 2020, could be swept out by a president-elect who has promised to make the Pentagon less ‘woke.'”

“Stocks rose on Friday, capping the market’s best week in over a year and extending a rally that came as President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive election win put an end to months of uncertainty for investors,” the New York Times reports.

“Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers,” CNN reports. “Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.”

“We have a challenge. We have our own kind of ‘childless cat ladies’ situation: ‘Bros.’ People refer to these young guys as bros, and clearly that’s not a positive term. They’re described as dopes, or gullible, or brutes. People were really shocked when the whole childless cat ladies thing dropped, and it is dumb.

“Senate Democrats are weighing a major push in the coming weeks to confirm as many of President Biden’s judicial nominees as they can in the lame-duck session of Congress, before their power to reshape the federal courts ends with the Republican takeover of the White House and the Senate in January,” the New York Times reports. “About 30 nominees are currently in the confirmation pipeline.”