Harry Reid condemns Steve Bannon appointment on Senate floor – as it happened

Trump has completed his dinner outing, according to the press pool:

Trump’s motorcade arrived back at Trump Tower at 9:41pm.

With that we’ll conclude our live-blog politics coverage for the day. See you tomorrow!

@realdonaldtrump is going to be president:

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16 Nov 201621.40 EST

Republicans refuse to criticize Steve Bannon hire after growing backlash

Sabrina Siddiqui

Republicans declined to criticize Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Steve Bannon as the chief strategist to his impending administration, despite the latter’s record of promoting white supremacy.

As lawmakers returned to Washington on Tuesday for the first time since Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, Democrats swiftly called on the president-elect to rescind his hiring of Bannon.

But Republicans said it was time to unify behind Trump and sidestepped questions on his promotion of antisemitic, anti-Muslim and misogynist content while overseeing the “alt-right” website Breitbart News.

“I don’t want to accuse a man of being antisemitic or racist whom I’ve never met,” said Lindsey Graham, a senator from South Carolina told reporters on Capitol Hill when asked about the Bannon appointment.

“I’ve never met him. I wouldn’t know him if he walked in the door,” he said, before adding of Breitbart: “The website in question was a friendly site to the alt-right. I don’t like them and they don’t like me and I’m glad.”

Marco Rubio said he had “no reaction” to the Bannon news, even though the former Breitbart chairman used his website to try and undermine the Florida senator’s political career.

“The president has a right to choose his own staff,” said Rubio, who ran unsuccessfully against Trump for the Republican nomination but was re-elected to a second term in the Senate last week.

Rubio also dismissed speculation that he might serve in Trump’s cabinet, saying he had not spoken with the president-elect’s transition team and would “prefer to be in the Senate”.

Read the full piece here:

Former House intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers has been replaced on Trump’s transition team by Islamophobic fantasist Frank Gaffney, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Rogers was ousted as a part of a purge of potential Chris Christie loyalists, the report says.

Related:

The Politico report says:

Republican foreign policy veterans are newly alarmed over the emerging shape of Donald Trump’s national security team, after signs that Trump is passing over well-regarded establishment figures in favor of controversial and less experienced political allies including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a likely secretary of state pick.

Read Haroon Moghul in the Guardian last March about Gaffney:

For those of you who don’t know him, Gaffney is a conspiracy theorist whose obsessive focus on Islam and Muslims is clear from his stated concerns about a “worrying pattern of official US submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah”. He believes the redesigned logo of the Missile Defense Agency, for example “appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo”.

It’s hard to find a better description of American decline: from the country that repeatedly put men on the moon to the country whose national security experts are searching for secret Islamic lunar motifs in government images.

From the longer- and longer-suffering press pool:

Donald Trump is currently at the 21 Club on West 52nd Street. The block is shut down and police are allowing a small group of reporters to stand outside the restaurant, but we will not be allowed inside.

I just talked to [Trump spokeswoman] Hope Hicks who said “I wasn’t aware of this movement” and she would never do anything to “leave the press in the dark.” She said that a protective pool has not yet been set up so she is unable to coordinate the press pool traveling with the president-elect. Once that is set up, she says reporters will have “all of the access that they have ever had under any president.”

That’s encouraging.

The long-suffering transition press pool picks up on this tweet, which appears to show Donald Trump, tonight, now-ish(?), at the 21 Club, three blocks south of Trump tower.

The press pool staked out in the lobby of Trump tower didn’t see him leave and weren’t informed he would.

The tweet says “Keene’s” but that’s not historic Keens on 36th:

The press pool is chasing after Trump.

Clinton’s popular vote lead ticks past 1.15m...

NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell reports that the Trump team has asked for top-secret security clearance for Jared Kushner, husband of Ivanka:

A 1967 anti-nepotism statute bars any public official from appointing a relative “to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control.”

16 Nov 201619.20 EST

Obama: 'guard against crude nationalism'

Helena Smith

Barack Obama used his last foreign tour as president to warn against the rise of divisive politics with the global ascent of what he described as coarse nationalism and tribalism, apparently referring to Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist.

In Athens, a city he repeatedly hailed as the birthplace of democracy, the outgoing leader spoke of the dangers posed by such politics with the stark reminder that not that long ago Europe had been turned into “a bloodbath” because of them.

“I do believe, separate and apart from any particular election or movement, that we are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude sort of nationalism or ethnic identity or tribalism that is built around an us and a them,” he said. “We all know what happens when Europeans start dividing themselves and emphasise their differences. The 20th century was a bloodbath.”

Addressing reporters after talks with Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, Obama sought to distance himself from the diplomatic language he has employed since the election last week of his successor.

Read the full piece:

Don’t miss the latest episode of the Keepin’ It 1600 podcast, hosted by former Obama speechwriters Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett and former Obama NSC spokesoman Tommy Vietor – and featuring the Guardian US’s very own Sabrina Siddiqui:

Bernie Sanders points out that Donald Trump’s plan to #DraintheSwamp in Washington is so far being trusted to lobbyists and banking insiders:

From the long-suffering Trump transition pool, a list of everyone sighted entering and exiting Trump tower today:

+ Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)
+ Jeff DeWit
+ Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA
+ Don Trump Jr.
+ Michael Glassner
+ Steven Mnuchin
+ Don McGahn
+ Bryan Lanza
+ Anthony Scaramucci
+ Mike Pence, his wife and daughter, Charlotte
+ Assorted Pence aides
+ Boris Epshteyn
+ Sean Spicer
+ Eli Miller
+ Peter Thiel (according to Lt Gen Keith Kellogg, who distracted reporters as Thiel arrived)
+ Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg
+ Ted Cruz (according to his staff)
+ Tommy Hilfiger (who has an office in Trump Tower and was likely headed there, not to see Trump)
+ Marla Maples
+ Brad Parscale
+ George Gigicos
+ Pam Bondi
+ Hope Hicks and Stephen Miller (according to fellow poolers who arrived especially early)

Marco Rubio is reactionless on the Bannon question:

From the long-suffering transition press pool, another Mike Pence sighting:

At 5:41pm, Mike Pence emerged from a backed elevator after spending more than six hours at Trump Tower. As cameras clicked and a huge crowd of gawkers watched, Pence and his wife quickly walked through the lobby, past reporters, through the Trump Bar and out to a waiting motorcade.

One reporter asked how the day went and Pence responded: “Great day.”

Another asked if the transition team is behind schedule. Pence didn’t seem to respond to that question and instead proclaimed for a second time: “Great day.”

Reuters reports that “billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer, who has spent more than $140 million on fighting climate change, said on Tuesday he will spend whatever it takes to fight President-elect Donald Trump’s pro-drilling and anti-regulation agenda”:

The former hedge fund manager from California is putting together a strategy that will “engage voters and citizens to fight back” once Trump takes the White House in January, he told Reuters in an interview. However, he stressed he was not planning to fight Trump through the courts.

Instead, he would focus on “trying to present an opposite point of view and trying to get that point of view expressed, and communicated to citizens.”

Steyer’s pledge to fight Trump suggests an intensifying battle for U.S. public opinion on global climate change, an issue that has already divided many Americans, lawmakers, and companies between those who consider it a major global threat and those who doubt its existence.

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Other U.S. environmental groups are also preparing to resist Trump’s agenda, with some vowing street protests and more established organizations that helped draft some of President Barack Obama’s environmental regulations preparing to defend them in court.

“We have always been willing to do whatever is necessary,” Steyer said, when asked how much money he was willing to spend to oppose Trump’s agenda.

Read the full piece here.