Daily Archives
33 posts · Friday
This is quite the anecdote from the Washington Post:
Trump’s demeaning of Priebus came through in other ways, too. At one point, during a meeting in the Oval Office, a fly began buzzing overhead, distracting the president. As the fly continued to circle, Trump summoned his chief of staff and tasked him with killing the insect, according to someone familiar with the incident.
Michael Grunwald: “Forty-nine Republican senators voted for legislation that many of them admitted was substantively flawed and procedurally absurd—legislation that only 17 percent of the public supported and every major medical interest group opposed; that had been shredded by a bipartisan coalition of governors, the Congressional Budget Office and their own hand-picked parliamentarian.”
“After Trump promised to expand coverage, lower costs and block any cuts to Medicaid, he almost got to sign a bill that the CBO warned would do exactly the opposite, leading to a massive expansion of the insured rolls, higher premiums and deductibles for the old and the sick, and hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Medicaid cuts.”
“After attacking Democrats for ramming Obamacare into law with only 60 votes after insufficient hearings, insufficient bipartisan outreach, and insufficient transparency, Republican senators nearly passed Trumpcare with only 50 votes after no hearings, no bipartisan outreach, and so little transparency that even most of them had no idea what would be in it until a few hours before their middle-of-the-night roll call.”
“President Trump plans to sign a bill passed by Congress that increases sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea,” the Washington Post reports.
“The decision comes despite strong reservations among Trump advisers over a provision that binds his hands when it comes to altering sanctions policy against Moscow.”
Jonathan Swan: “Reince Priebus told CNN he resigned on Thursday. If that’s true, today he sure wasn’t acting like someone who had quit, according to sources with direct knowledge.”
“Priebus was seeing subtle assurances from colleagues about his future, accompanied Trump on Air Force One to New York, and was telling colleagues that the president didn’t like Mooch’s comments to the New Yorker and saying that he was going to work hard and keep his head down during the current turmoil.”
President Trump fired Reince Priebus as his chief of staff, “a move that completes a purge of Washington insiders from Trump’s inner circle and virtually ensures an even harder turn into his outsider rhetoric and approach,” CNN reports.
“The Priebus firing proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Trump’s attempts to merge his New York and family worlds with the staider environment of official Washington had failed miserably — and that he has clearly sided with those urging him to be more himself over those who had hoped to bend him somewhat to the ways of the nation’s capital.”
Washington Post: “With every staff move, Trump seems to be moving ever further away from the Republican establishment and building a much more insular team that fits his narrow worldview. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Priebus-Kelly switch.”
“Anthony Scaramucci, the White House’s potty-mouthed new communications director, has been dumped by his beautiful blond wife because of his ‘naked political ambition,'” multiple sources exclusively tell Page Six.
President Trump on Friday tweeted that John Kelly would take over as White House chief of staff, a role that had been held by Reince Priebus.
The HuffPost has the details:
While preparing for his move into government, Scaramucci struck a deal — which is still under regulatory scrutiny — to sell his stake in his hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, to Chinese conglomerate HNA Group and another company. He assumed that he’d be put in charge of the public liaison office, a job that Valerie Jarrett held in the Obama administration. He had it all mapped out, according to the White House adviser. He identified 2,500 influential business leaders across the United States and had come up with a clever name for them: Trump Team 2,500. He believed these people would help pressure Congress into supporting the president’s agenda.
But Scaramucci’s plans were foiled in early January. That’s when Priebus, according to a confidant of both Scaramucci and the president, told Trump, “He played you.”
This report from Channel 4 in London is absolutely priceless.
Andrew Sullivan: “We have become, at this point, inured to having an irrational president in an increasingly post-rational America. We’ve also come to tell ourselves that somehow (a) this isn’t really happening, (b) by some miracle, it will be over soon, or (c) at some point the Republican Party will have to acknowledge what they are abetting, and cut their losses. And yet with each particular breach of decency, stability, and constitutionality, no breaking point seems to have arrived, even as the tribalism has deepened, the president’s madness has metastasized, and the norms of liberal democracy are hanging on by a thread.”
“But surely this week must mark some kind of moment in this vertiginous descent, some point at which the manifest unfitness of this president to continue in office becomes impossible to deny.”
Daily Beast: “In addition to being the White House Communications Director, a hedge fund manager, a conference-thrower, a Harvard Law graduate, a Fox Business talking head, a Goldman Sachs alum, and a fancy gesticulator, Scaramucci is the author of three self-help books. You might say he wears many hats, if the hats weren’t so guaranteed to mess up his architectural hair.”
“Scaramucci’s writings are the sort of tepid airport business reads that are so aggressively meaningless and derivative that they make the reader worse at writing, and possibly worse at thinking. They invoke the feeling of being in an apartment that has been occupied by the same tenant for a year but remains decorated only with a Scarface poster over a lumpy black futon. But a perusal of two of his three published works gives an amusing look into what sort of person Scaramucci would like people to think that he is.”
David Remnick: “Scaramucci, who was endorsed by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, seems to have been installed to carry out Trump’s form of personnel management—to help demean and get rid of retainers who have proved disappointing or threatening to his interests. Sean Spicer. Reince Priebus. Steve Bannon. Jeff Sessions. And, ultimately, Robert Mueller.”
“In other words, the Mooch matters because the Mooch helps to clarify what matters most to the President and his family. What matters most is Trump’s grip on his base voters and his survival in office. Everything else—a sane health-care policy, the dignity of the transgender people who have volunteered to serve their country, a rational environmental policy, a foreign policy that serves basic democratic values, rule of law—is of tertiary interest.”
“Trump’s focus is not impossible to divine. He is increasingly anxious that Mueller and congressional investigators are exploring the details of his business transactions and financial holdings, and how they might have exposed him to being targeted by the Russian government.”
The firm paid to make ads for Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) — such as one that used audio from the recent congressional shooting — was part of the crew behind such low-budget “classics” such as Thong Girl 3: Revenge of the Dark Widow, a 2007 video notorious for partially filming in the office of Mayor Don Wright, of Gallatin, Tennessee, Alabama Today reports.
“Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was murdered in Washington, DC on the eve of a planned meeting with the U.S. Justice Department, according to two FBI agents whose assertions cast new doubts on the US government’s official explanation of his death,” BuzzFeed reports.
“Mikhail Lesin’s battered body was discovered in his Dupont Circle hotel room on the morning of November 5, 2015 with blunt-force injuries to the head, neck, and torso. After an almost year-long ‘comprehensive investigation,’ a federal prosecutor announced last October that Lesin died alone in his room due to a series of drunken falls ‘after days of excessive consumption of alcohol.’ His death was ruled an ‘accident,’ and prosecutors closed the case.”
I’ve explained several times why I moved Political Wire to a membership model but the basic reason is that the digital ad market has collapsed.
Here’s more proof from the Wall Street Journal:
Procter & Gamble said that its move to cut more than $100 million in digital marketing spend in the June quarter had little impact on its business, proving that those digital ads were largely ineffective.
News publishers just can’t rely on advertising anymore. It doesn’t work for advertisers and it creates a terrible experience for readers.
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USA Today: “Rubio’s office maintains a spreadsheet of hundreds of political prisoners or human rights victims from more than 30 countries… The senator himself adds to the list when he comes across news accounts of particularly moving examples. He directs his office to advocate for some of them using back-channel communications with the State Department. More prominent dissidents might be strategically featured in hearings or floor speeches, often timed to coincide with a prominent anniversary, or the president’s trip to a country with a documented pattern of human rights abuses. On occasion, he’s had the opportunity to make his case directly to Trump and other world leaders.”
David Leonhardt: “The capitulation of McConnell and Ryan has created an impression — especially among many liberals — that congressional Republicans stand behind the president. McConnell and Ryan, after all, are the leaders of Congress, and they continue to push for the legislation Trump wants and to permit his kleptocratic governing.”
“But don’t be fooled: Republican support for the president has started to crack.”
“Below the leadership level, Republicans are defying Trump more often, and McConnell and Ryan aren’t always standing in their way. You can see this defiance in the bipartisan Senate investigation of the Russia scandal. You can see it in the deal on Russian sanctions. And you can see it in the Senate’s failure… to pass a health care bill.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.