Archives for August 2017

A new Pew Research survey finds that just 31% of Republican voters say they agree with President Trump on all or nearly all issues, while an additional 38% agree with him on many, but not all, issues.

In contrast, 77% of Democrats report virtually no agreement with Trump on issues.

In views of Trump’s conduct as president, 46% of Republicans express mixed feelings, while 19% say they do not like his conduct; 34% say they like the way he conducts himself as president. Among Democrats, 89% have a negative view of Trump’s conduct.

Overall, Trump’s approval rate is a dismal 36% to 63%.

Lawfare: “The evidence of criminality on Trump’s part is little clearer today than it was a day, a week, or a month ago. But no conscientious member of the House of Representatives can at this stage fail to share McConnell’s doubts about Trump’s fundamental fitness for office. As the Trump presidency enters its eighth month, those members of Congress who are serious about their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution” must confront a question. It’s not, in the first instance, whether the President should be removed from office, or even whether he should be impeached. It is merely this: whether given everything Trump has done, said, tweeted and indeed been since his inauguration, the House has a duty, as a body, to think about its obligations under the impeachment clauses of the Constitution—that is, whether the House needs to authorize the Judiciary Committee to open a formal inquiry into possible impeachment.”

“It’s not a hard question. Indeed, merely to ask it plainly is also to answer it.”

Bloomberg: “Donald Trump was in a bad mood before he emerged for a confrontational speech in Arizona last week. TV and social media coverage showed that the site of his campaign rally, the Phoenix Convention Center, was less than full. Backstage, waiting in a room with a television monitor, Trump was displeased… TV optics and crowd sizes are extremely important to the president.”

“As his surrogates warmed up the audience, the expanse of shiny concrete eventually filled in with cheering Trump fans. But it was too late for a longtime Trump aide, George Gigicos, the former White House director of advance who had organized the event as a contractor to the Republican National Committee. Trump later had his top security aide, Keith Schiller, inform Gigicos that he’d never manage a Trump rally again.”

President Trump “is not happy with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, for publicly criticizing his response to violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. But it appears there is little he is planning to do about it, according to people who have spoken to him,” Politico reports.

“The unusually direct challenges from a Cabinet secretary and senior administration official seemed to make little more than a surface ripple in the swirling melodrama of the Trump White House, even as the president fumed privately about it.”