Month: January 2018

In a meeting with congressional republicans and democrats, Trump suggested he is open to a deal on immigration and approving DACA. But mostly this was an opportunity for the White House to showcase Trump in action to push back on the media narrative that he is mentally incapable for the job. The meeting was televised for 55 minutes, and showed that Trump does not have a strong grasp of the particular policy implications around immigration.

Here is a list of most striking moments from the meeting, with video clips. Most interesting is when Trump agrees to the democratic plan for a clean DACA bill, only to be corrected by Kevin McCarthy.

Here is David Grahm on the three times this week when Trump has publicly contradicted his own White House’s policies: on DACA, FISIA and Infrastructure.

David Brooks splashes cold water on the Fire and Fury hubub with the “inconvenient observations” that the Trump White House is becoming more functional not less, and quietly enacting its agenda under the cover of all of Trump’s drama. It’s an antidote to the comforting illusion that Trump is unraveling or will soon be undone.

This was becoming a popular counter-narrative in moderate punditry, a attempt to push back against the Fire and Fury narrative that Trump is so far gone as to be out of his mind. While a helpful push for fervent anti-Trumpers not to get complacent, this counter-narrative did not survive Thursday’s Oval Office meeting…

In a Thursday meeting with Durbin and Grahm, among a handful of immigration hardliners, to hash out details of a bipartisan immigration deal Trump said: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Reports came out of the White House that on Thursday night Trump was calling people excited about how his comments would resonate with his base. But by Friday morning, he wrote a tweet that denied he used those words.

The IRS is rushing to implement the new tax law so that taxpayers can reap some benefit this year, but there is a worry that people will underpay in 2018 and have to pay some back in 2019. The W-4 forms employers must use this year are out of date. An internal report says that the IRS is not prepared to correctly implement the tax law this year.

The Trump Administration will now allow waivers for states who want to make their Medicaid recipients work or do volunteer service. There are many caveats: “The Trump administration said that states imposing work requirements must have plans to help people meet those requirements and should help arrange job training, child care and transportation as needed. But, it said, states cannot use federal Medicaid funds to pay for such “supportive services.”

Trump’s average Approval Rating: 39.1

On Monday Trump responded to overtures North Korea made to South Korea by tweeting that he has a “nuclear button” on his desk and it is bigger than Kim Jong Un’s button.

VOX does something that is always interesting. They ask Republican senators a simple Trump-related question and record their response. This was done a few months ago over what was in their health care bill. This week VOX asked what they thought about Trump’s “nuclear button” threat to North Korea. They were unfazed.

A book called Fire and Fury with unfavorable quotes from people in Trump world broke into the media this week, including quotes from Steve Banon about the Trump sons. Trump responded by releasing a statement that made a full break with Banon, saying that he had “lost his mind.”

Trump dissolved his voter fraud commission: “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action.”

Three interesting things happened this week that are signs of how the GOP is trying to push back against the Meuller investigation and/or protect Trump from its conclusions. First, FBI director Wray and Rosenstein met with Paul Ryan over Devin Nunes request for information about how the FBI and the DOJ have used Steele Dossier. The FBI had been unwilling to provide this information, but agreed to this week.

Second, we learn that the FBI re-opened an investigation of the Clinton Foundation several “about a year ago.” Some speculate that this is happening as a kind of bone thrown to the Trump administration or to be perceived of as being even-handed.

Third, on Friday Chuck Grassley and Lindsay Grahm sent a letter to the DOJ suggesting that criminal charges may be filed against Steele for lying to the FBI. Currently no evidence exists that he did, and we are left to speculate: Do these two senators have knowledge of such a lie, or are they trying to level a partisan attack on the FBI over the Steele Dossier, or are THEY trying to throw Trump a bone.

David French writes, “it would be reckless to the point of corrupt to refer a man for investigation absent compelling evidence of wrongdoing.” But overall argues that no one in the media has access to the classified information that the senators are using to make their recommendation. Time will tell.

Here is another take by the Washington Post’s Arron Blake: “There is an increasing effort among Republicans and the conservative-leaning media to question the legitimacy of the Russia investigation. Increasingly prominent in that effort are attempts to use the Steele dossier as the basis for a deep-state conspiracy against the president.”

Finally, on Saturday morning Trump responded to the Fire and Fury quotes of his staff and supporters who say he is stupid by tweeting that he is a “stable genius”

David Frum summed it up this way: “Michael Wolff’s scathing new book about the Trump White House has sent President Trump spiraling into the most publicly visible meltdown of his presidency.

Trump’s averaged Approval Rating: 38.8

Trump caused a stir by giving a 30 minute on the record interview to a New York Times reporter. He expressed some curious ideas, but not any one statement resulted in a scandal. Reading the transcript has inspired some in the media, mostly liberals to again question his mental state.

A good Washington Post report on how the New York Times interview happened without his staff knowing, and hoe Trump enjoys much fewer constraints in Mar-A-Lago than in the White House.

On the last day of 2017, the New York Times published a story about how the FBI investigation onto the Trump campaign began: in May 2016, Papadopoulos was drinking in a bar with an Australian diplomat and revealed that he had been told the Russians have email dirt on Clinton. Two months later the Australians notified the FBI, which sparked the investigation. This was not known until the Times reported it, and it reveals that it was not the Steele dossier that started the investigation, which Trump applies have been using as an excuse to discredit the investigation.

Here is a list of 10 news items that the Trump administration released in the “news dumps” just before Christmas and New Year’s Eve, they include rolls backs of environmental regulations and the DOJ’s request to alter the census to include questions about citizenship.

Here is Pew’s summary of trends they notice in 2017. One shows how “the average gap between the views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents across 10 political values has increased from 15 percentage points in 1994 to 36 points today.”

New York Times reports of a national increase in hate crimes  where Trump’s name is being used as a racial taunt of minorities.

Border patrol separated an El Salvador man from his one year old son as they tried request asylum in the United States. The Trump administration is considering separating children from parents to dissuade boarder crossings.

The New York Times reported that in a June meeting on immigration he ranted that Haitians coming into the the country all had AIDS, and that Nigerians all lived in huts.

Saturday afternoon Axios reported that Meuller’s team has acquired tends of thousands of emails from the Trump transition team.

Trump’s lawyers immediately sent a letter to Congress claiming that the emails were illegally obtained, but shortly after midnight Sunday the Meuller spokesman put out a statement that all emails were obtained legally through “the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process.”

David Frum writes about the attack this week of a conservative Trump agnostic lashing out at a conservative Trump critic. His analysis is that the agnostics are wrong to think conservatism will snap back after Trump leaves office, but that political ideology is reshaped by the actual people who lead it and follow it: meaning conservatism is being transformed into support of Trump and his policies. Interesting tidbit: only six of the 21 conservative writers in the Spring 2016 “Against Trump” National Review issue are still actively speaking out against the President. Three of them are Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz.

Similarly, Mathew Yglesias writes about how the passage of the tax bill is further evidence of the dissolution of long held political norms–like being honest about what your legislation does and using an open process to enact it; at least attempting to heed public opinion. He equates this moment to when social breakdowns like power outages temporarily suspend social norms and looting breaks out.

Trump signed the tax bill into law on Friday in the Oval Office, a rushed and unceremonious signing because he did not want to be criticized for not signing it before he went on Christmas vacation in Florida.

Trump made two claims about how the tax bill was sold to the public that may come back to haunt Republicans: that the biggest part of it is the corporate tax cut, and that he told congress not to talk about ending the Obamacare mandate during the run up the the final vote, but now that the voting is done they are all able to crow about it.

Here is a good summary of how GOP consultants plan to try to make the tax bill more popular. Current polling is 24% approval. The expectation is that the GOP will spend a lot of ad dollars to sell the bill in the coming weeks and months. They will want to shape public perception before their opponents do.

Tax experts say the Trump family will personally benefit from many provisions of the tax bill.

The Affordable Care Act enrollment for 2018 was on par with 2017, despite Trump administration attempts to curtail sign ups.

FBI stories:

New York Times reporting on FBI Director Wray trying to navigate leading his agents while avoiding angering the president.

On Saturday night reports came out that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe will retire in the spring, bowing to political pressure from Republicans that he is biased in favor of Democrats and against Trump. CNN reported that McCabe in congressional testimony backed up Commey’s claim that Trump asked for his loyalty.

In a controversial report by Politico, House Republicans are investigating whether FBI General Counsel James Baker leaked the Steele Dossier. Many journalists and bloggers have come to Baker’s defense saying he was not the leaker, and would not leak. Reports came out this week that he was reassigned within the bureau, and this was widely perceived as either punishment or giving in to Republican demands.