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 The W-4 forms employers must use this year are out of date.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