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35 posts · Wednesday
From a new Democracy Fund poll:
“Among all Trump voters, the president’s approval rating remains high: The vast majority, 88%, approved of the job he is doing as president. But there is erosion among voters who backed Barack Obama in 2012 but switched to Trump in 2016. Only 70% of those Obama-Trump voters approved of the job the president is doing. And 22% disapproved — a rate more than twice the 9% of all Trump voters who disapproved.”
Jonathan Swan: “Senate Republican leadership is privately contemplating a bold maneuver: attaching the government funding bill (CR) to the debt ceiling and emergency funding aid for Hurricane Harvey.”
“They stressed nothing has been decided and the move would be highly risky, with a strong chance of a conservative revolt. It’s especially unclear whether such a vehicle could move through the House — given the Freedom Caucus and other conservative members are already angry about the plans to use the Harvey funding to raise the debt ceiling without spending cuts.”
“What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss… I think it’s partly because I’m a woman.”
— Hillary Clinton, quoted by CNN in her new book, What Happened.
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President Trump “doesn’t just have to worry about safeguarding the nation ahead of Hurricane Irma,” the Miami Herald reports.
“Trump owns a multi-million dollar mansion on the Caribbean island of St. Martin — and Category 5 Irma is heading straight for it.”
“Trump owns the 11-bedroom gated mansion through a trust set up to avoid conflict of interests during his presidency. The trust has been trying to offload the beachfront property for months. In August, its listing price was slashed from $28 million to $16.9 million.”
“Dozens of lobbyists, contractors and others who make their living influencing the government pay President Trump’s companies for membership in his private golf clubs, a status that can put them in close contact with the president,” a USA Today investigation found.
“Members of the clubs Trump has visited most often as president — in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia — include at least 50 executives whose companies hold federal contracts and 21 lobbyists and trade group officials. Two-thirds played on one of the 58 days the president was there, according to scores they posted online.”
“Because membership lists at Trump’s clubs are secret, the public has until now been unable to assess the conflicts they could create. USA Today found the names of 4,500 members by reviewing social media and a public website golfers use to track their handicaps, then researched and contacted hundreds to determine whether they had business with the government.”
“We should be cold-blooded and we should avoid steps to escalate tension. Without political and diplomatic levels, this situation will be very difficult to resolve and I think even impossible to do.”
— Russian president Vladimir Putin, quoted by CNN, on the escalating conflict with North Korea.
“The Senate is preparing to force President Trump to go on record to officially condemn the deadly white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville last month,” Politico reports.
“The Senate routinely takes up nonbinding measures commemorating people and institutions in the form of concurrent resolutions and simple resolutions – which are both purely symbolic and not submitted to the White House for the president’s signature.”
“But backers of the Charlottesville resolution have strategically chosen to introduce their measure as a joint resolution, which means it will be sent to Trump to sign into law.”
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds 55% of respondents say they’re comfortable with the United States becoming more diverse and tolerant of different lifestyles, gender roles, languages, cultures and experiences.
In addition, 64% believe immigration strengthens the country.
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that just 28% of adults called America the “single best place to live in the world,” with another 17% calling it “among the very few best places.”
More respondents put United States closer to the middle of the pack, with 37% calling America merely “above average” and 14% rating the country as “average.” An additional four percent called the U.S. “below average” on the global scale.
CNN: “A lengthy middle section of Clinton’s book is devoted to Russia’s attempts to influence the US presidential contest, which Clinton blames in part for her loss. She describes herself as consumed by the various threads of Russia’s involvement, writing that she follows ‘every twist and turn of the story,’ often with chagrin.”
Writes Clinton: “I read everything I could get my hands on.”
“Clinton’s book does involve some introspection and she takes responsibility for her failures, but the book oozes with contempt for Trump and blames two external factors — Russia and fired FBI Director James Comey — for her loss.”
“The president and White House staff have continued to work with Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) over the summer on their proposal to block grant federal health care funding to the states. And though the bill is being rewritten and Congress faces a brutal September agenda, Trump and his allies on health care are making a last-gasp push,” Politico reports.
Playbook: “There is little chance the Senate will take up an Obamacare repeal vote. McConnell has moved on. Senate Republicans, for the most part, have too.”
President Trump “is increasingly fixated on slashing the top corporate tax rate to 15 percent – a level that pretty much no one else working on the issue in the White House or Congress thinks is workable,” Politico reports.
“In a White House meeting on Tuesday, Trump again expressed his strong desire to hit the 15 percent target, from today’s 35 percent.”
Said one senior official: “You can’t get to 15 percent and anyone who has a back of an envelope can make that calculation. And he may not like that truth, but it’s the truth. It’s just math.”
“President Trump’s decision to rescind a popular program that protected the most sympathetic of immigrants here illegally — those who were brought as children by their parents — poses a huge threat to his party, forcing Republican lawmakers to choose between the party’s nativist wing, which strongly opposes any move resembling amnesty, and those who favor a more flexible approach to minority communities,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“The worst-case scenario for many GOP lawmakers: If Congress stalls again, next year’s midterm election campaigns could be accompanied by thousands of young people each week being fired from their jobs or kicked out of school, and ultimately by some being deported to countries they have not seen since they were toddlers.”
Politico: “President Trump’s White House will move Wednesday to quash growing GOP opposition to a strategy to raise the debt ceiling as part of a Hurricane Harvey relief package.”
“Administration officials will inform lawmakers that they will not be able to pay FEMA disaster claims for victims without a simultaneous increase of the debt ceiling, the sources said. House lawmakers are also being told by GOP leaders that Trump will give a full-throated endorsement to their plan to pair the two bills and send them to the Oval Office this week — without a penny worth of spending cuts long demanded by conservatives and even Republican leadership allies.”
Playbook: “The Senate plans to amend the Harvey relief bill with a debt-limit increase that will last through the end of 2018. Why? Most lawmakers would rather not have to vote to lift the debt limit more than once this Congress. There is talk of also attaching a continuing resolution, which would keep government open, but aides and lawmakers we spoke to say they do not think they’ll have enough time to get it ready this week.”
Mike Allen: “An agent who met with Sean Spicer told him that the going rate for speeches by most former White House press secretaries ranged from about $20,000 to $30,000. The agent said Spicer, who went elsewhere, thought he could get much more.”
Said the agent: “He thought he was a much bigger deal than the others. His name I.D. is massive — he’s obsessed with that. He kept talking about how everyone stops him for selfies — that’s one of his go-to lines. It’s true, by the way. It happened when I was talking to him.”
“Russia is widely thought of as an oligarchy run by President Vladimir Putin and a handful of billionaire cronies whose main accomplishment is looking out for their own financial interests. In a new paper, three economists say forensic evidence bears that out,” according to Axios.
“Economists Thomas Piketty, Filip Novokmet, and Gabriel Zucman found that income inequality is as great in Russia as the United States, with the top 1% of earners garnering upwards of 25% of national income, well above China and other former communist countries like the Czech Republic.”
Associated Press: “Since the day he launched his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has talked tough on immigration, promising to take the kind of decisive action he accused other politicians of avoiding. This week, he waffled.”
“Trump passed off responsibility for the fate of the 800,000 young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children to a Congress that has shown little ability to tackle politically fraught issues. He gave lawmakers six months to act, then said in a Tuesday night tweet that he would ‘revisit this issue’ if they didn’t. He sent Attorney General Jeff Sessions out to be the face of the controversial policy, effectively ceding one of the central roles of the presidency: explaining difficult decisions to the American people.”
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.
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