I’D LOVE THAT, BUT I’M NOT SURE IT’S IN HIS WHEELHOUSE: Dear Trump: Blow up the system with a focus on federalism. “For the first time in a very long time, someone entering the Oval Office isn’t beholden to anyone. That creates a real opportunity for significant change, in a good way. The Trump administration has a chance to roll back the bureaucracy and red tape that has strangled businesses, people and organizations for years — even if that means limiting opportunities to work in the administration. The president-elect can create something different, unique and successful.”

SAFE SPACE: Obama exudes calm about Trump as Democrats fret.

Each time Air Force One landed in another foreign capital, cellphones buzzed and White House officials’ faces fell as the latest news came in about Trump’s team-in-waiting: First, Steve Bannon, former head of the far-right outlet Breitbart News, as chief White House strategist, then retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has said Islam is a “cancer,” to be national security adviser.

And as Obama was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, flying to Lima, Trump picked immigration hard-liner Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general and national security hawk Rep. Mike Pompeo for CIA chief.

Taken together, the selections deflated the hopes in the White House that Trump, faced with the awesome duty of running the nation, might tone it down after the campaign.

Of all the Trump’s choices, White House officials said it was the selection of Flynn that felt like the most devastating blow, given the immense authority the national security adviser has over matters of war and peace.

As I wrote here last week, Flynn rankles all the right people.

HOW CAN WE MISS HIM IF HE WON’T GO AWAY? Obama: I’ll weigh in on Trump’s presidency if necessary.

WILL THESE EVENTS LEAD TO ANYONE BEING CALLED OUT FOR “HATEFUL RHETORIC” OR IS THAT ONLY FOR PEOPLE ON THE RIGHT? San Antonio police officer assassinated. Also, suspect who shot St. Louis cop dies in shootout: “He was being sought for questioning in the shooting of a St. Louis police sergeant about 7:30 p.m. Sunday near Hampton and Pernod avenues. A driver had pulled up next to the sergeant’s SUV and opened fire.”

2016, MAN: Monkey attack in Libya sparks tribal clashes that kill more than a dozen.

KYLE SMITH: Keep crying wolf about Trump, and no one will listen when there’s a real crisis.

It’s contrary to the laws of nature for a tabloid writer to tell the gentry media not to go berserk. It’s like a cat telling his owner to stop coughing up hairballs or Iron Man asking Captain America to be less arrogant. Here at The Post, our mission statement does not include understatement. We provide journalistic Red Bull, not Sominex.

Nevertheless, a word of neighborly advice to our more genteel media friends, the ones who sit at the high table in their pristine white dinner jackets and ball gowns. You’ve been barfing all over yourselves for a week and a half, and it’s revolting to watch.

For your own sake, and that of the republic for which you allegedly work, wipe off your chins and regain your composure. I didn’t vote for him either, but Trump won. Pull yourselves together and deal with it, if you ever want to be taken seriously again. . . . Hysteria is causing leading media organizations to mix up their news reporting with their editorializing like never before, but instead of mingling like chocolate and peanut butter the two are creating a taste that’s like brushing your teeth after drinking orange juice.

Plus:

Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds’ characterization of reporters as ‘Democratic operatives with bylines’ is taking root in the American mind. Among independents, according to Gallup in September, the media had an approval rating of 30 percent; among Republicans 14. Almost everyone but Democrats think the media are biased, and support for that view goes way back. . . . This fall WikiLeaks confirmed everything conservatives have been saying about the media for more than 20 years. CNN, you have been busted. You allowed Democratic Party operative Donna Brazile to get hold of town-hall questions in advance and help Hillary Clinton prep with them. . . . John Harwood, New York Times/CNBC reporter and Republican debate moderator, you have been busted. You asked John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair, for questions you could pose to Jeb Bush in an interview.

Dana Milbank, Washington Post columnist and longtime phony “nonpartisan” political reporter, you have been busted. You reached out to DNC flack Eric Walker and asked for help putting together a “Passover-themed 10 plagues of Trump” story.

Not only are you evidently an undercover Democratic Party operative who should be drawing checks from the DNC instead of from The WaPo, you’re a tired hack who can’t even come up with his own column ideas without assistance.

Ouch. The truth hurts.

THIS WON’T HURT HIM WITH VOTERS: Trump has a plan for government workers. They’re not going to like it. “Hiring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions — these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January.”

Well, we heard before the election that a whole lot of them were going to quit anyway if he won. Have they started turning in their resignations yet?

FRACKERS SMILE: Putin Optimistic About OPEC Deal, Russia Is Ready to Freeze.

If Russia or OPEC seriously believe that $100 oil is coming back, they ought to pay a visit to Texas or North Dakota.

JUDGE HINTS AT “POLITICAL MOTIVES:” Massachusetts AG Maura Healey Ordered To Defend Her Exxon Probe In Court.

HE HAS A PLANE AND A MEGAPHONE: Trump Would Relish Going After Dem Senators In Supreme Court Fight.

Schumer’s threat is real. During the debate on Alito, Harry Reid, who was then the Democratic leader of the House, and then-senator Barack Obama attempted a filibuster against him. But far from being intimidated, Donald Trump is likely to relish such a fight. During the annual meeting of the Federalist Society, the nation’s premier conservative and libertarian legal group, a group of its chapter presidents got an inside look at some of Trump’s thinking. Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society’s executive vice president and a leading adviser to Republicans on judicial nominees, told the group that Trump isn’t going to be dictated to.

Fresh from a meeting with Trump in New York last Wednesday, Leo said that Trump knows the importance of the Supreme Court to the voters who elected him. He noted that exit polls showed that 21 percent of Americans said the Supreme Court was “the most important factor” in their decision about which presidential candidate to support. By a ratio of three to two, such voters went for Trump over Hillary Clinton. “Mr. Trump has a plane and double-digit victories where Senate Democrats are up for reelection,” Leo told the group. “Obstructing his nominees will be a political loser.”

Indeed, Democrats have 25 of their 48 Senate seats up before voters in 2018. Many are from states Obama lost twice and Clinton once: Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia. Democrat Joe Donnelly of Indiana knows that his state rejected Obama in his reelection in 2012, voted against Hillary, and is home to Mike Pence, the newly elected vice president–elect.

Four other Democratic senators are from states Clinton lost: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The prospect of a President Trump visiting their states and holding rallies to whip up support for his Supreme Court nominee would make many Democratic senators uncomfortable, especially if Trump supplemented his efforts with TV and social-media campaigns.

One can imagine.

DEMOCRAT CONGRESSMAN TIM RYAN WANTS DEMOCRATS TO STOP BEING SIDETRACKED: “Ryan won his district, but so did Donald Trump, a fact that Ryan uses to promote himself as someone who understands the people who voted for Trump but can be brought ‘back into the fold.’ A ‘fold’ is an enclosure for sheep.”

THIS WILL END WELL: Obama loyalists plot Trump resistance: Alumni of the Obama White House spent days mourning Trump’s win. Now they’re ready to fight. “One attendee called the meetings ‘Obama Anonymous,’ and while they largely started as impromptu commiseration, they’ve shifted to mobilization. It’s an early sign that Obama can continue to command a formidable movement and potentially launch a serious defense of his legacy as a private citizen.”

Imagine if George W. Bush had done this in 2008.

MAD DUCK: Obama Seeks to Fortify Iran Nuclear Deal.

The Obama administration is considering new measures in its final months in office to strengthen the landmark nuclear agreement with Iran, senior U.S. officials said, with President-elect Donald Trump’s first appointments foreshadowing an increasingly rocky road for the controversial deal.

Action under consideration to buttress the pact includes steps to provide licenses for more American businesses to enter the Iranian market and the lifting of additional U.S. sanctions.

This deal keeps getting worse all the time.

“WASHINGTON WHISPERS” GIVES OBAMA A “D” FOR THE WEEK for inciting anti-Trump demonstrations. “With ‘mostly peaceful’ — i.e., partly violent — demonstrations/riots in several cities Obama was given the chance to call for peace after his meeting with Merkel. Instead, he incited the demonstrators by saying that they shouldn’t remain quiet.”

JAYVEE UPDATE: Iraq Shi’ite paramilitaries close to cutting Mosul supply route.

Six weeks into the U.S.-backed offensive on Mosul, Islamic State is fighting in the area of Tal Afar, 60 km (40 miles) to the west, against a coalition of Iranian-backed groups known as Popular Mobilisation.

Cutting the western road to Tal Afar would seal off Mosul as the city is already surrounded to the north, south and east by Iraqi government and Kurdish Peshmerga forces.

The government’s U.S.-trained Counter Terrorism Service unit breached Islamic State’s defenses at the end of October and is fighting to expand a foothold it gained on the eastern side of Mosul.

The road to Tal Afar is no longer safe, said a truck driver who used it two days ago to bring in fruit and vegetables from Raqqa, Islamic State’s Syrian stronghold.

Well, good.

TRUMP SHOULD RESPOND BY DEMANDING THAT THEY PROVIDE EQUAL PROTECTION TO CONSERVATIVE STUDENTS: 129 College Presidents Send Letter Asking President-Elect Trump To Condemn ‘Harassment, Hate And Acts Of Violence.’

Someone needs to protect conservative students from the hate.

UPDATE: Speaking of hate: ‘F*ck your wall, f*ck that puto’: Students’ vulgar walk out targets ‘hateful right wing forces’.

Plus: Hampshire College has decided not to fly any flags at all on campus after students lowered, then burned, an American flag hanging from a campus flagpole on the eve of Veterans Day.

JOEL KOTKIN: Here’s How Donald Trump Could End America’s New Feudalism.

One obvious, if little discussed, reason the progressive wave receded last week: The left’s increasingly unappealing economic agenda. In the past, progressives focused on improving conditions for working and middle class Americans through economic growth, home ownership and expansive infrastructure projects.

Today, notes former Bill Clinton aide William Galston, progressives rarely promote economic growth, having developed a particular hostility to many of the industries—energy manufacturing, transportation and agriculture—that offer economic opportunity to millions of Americans. This new environmental orientation has been less than enthusiastically embraced away from the coasts, where Trump, not coincidentally, triumphed.

In contrast to the old Democratic notions embraced by the likes of Harry Truman or the late California Governor Pat Brown, today’s progressives promote social control and the consolidation of a cognitively determined world order. Its promise amounts to forging a kind of high-tech middle ages in which the new aristocracy—techies, media grandees, financial moguls, academics, high-level bureaucrats—dominate while the middle class becomes increasingly serf-like.

In this new neo-feudalism, property ownership, like power, is concentrated in ever fewer hands.

The Trump victory tapped into a class rebellion among middle- and working-class voters who feel the most alienated and pessimistic about the future. The post-industrial, asset-inflated world so beneficial to the Apples, Googles, media stars and the trustifarians in glamour cities has been less kind to the middle and working class, whose incomes have dropped or stagnated over the past decade and a half.

Indeed. But what matters now is that he follows up with policies that will make things better.

HE’S NOT A LAME DUCK SO MUCH AS A MAD DUCK: Obama’s Last Dereliction.

HONESTLY, THE LEFT DOES SO MUCH PROJECTING THAT THE MOVIE THEATER WORKERS ARE COMPLAINING: Report on Scourge of Fake News Turns Out to Be Faked.

ARE THEY EVER GOING TO FIND THEIR MINDS AGAIN? The Post-Election Pauline Kael Award Goes to. . . . The Left.

AND THEY KNOW FROM FAKE NEWS:  All the News that’s Fit to Fake.

IT’S NOT LIKE WE DIDN’T WARN THEM: Washington Post Writer: ‘The Greatest Thing That Happened to the Republican Party Is Barack Obama’.

PROGNOSIS UNLIKELY:  Dear liberals: Start practicing the empathy you preach.

THE DOG FOOD IS GREAT WE JUST NEED TO ADVERTISE MORE: Have you ever noticed that whenever the Democrats lose it’s always that we must not have got the message?  They can never believe we hear them fine, we just don’t want what they’re selling.  Pelosi challenger: Dems ‘got off message’ in election.