“The U.S. posted the widest November budget deficit on record as spending doubled revenue,” Bloomberg reports.
“The U.S. ran the largest deficit in six years in fiscal 2018, the first full year of Donald Trump’s presidency when his Republican party enacted a tax-cut package and raised federal spending for the military and other priorities. The measures have added to the growing federal deficit, which is forecast to push past $1 trillion by 2020 when the U.S. next holds presidential elections.”
“No family is complete without an embarrassing uncle. We have too many embarrassing uncles in the United States Senate. Lots of embarrassing stuff.”
— Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), quoted by The Hill, in her farewell speech on the Senate floor.
The U.S. Senate rebuked Saudi Arabia and President Trump over the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi with a vote to end U.S. military involvement in Yemen, the Washington Post reports.
Thursday’s action is largely symbolic, as the resolution is dead on arrival in the House, where lawmakers blocked such a measure from being voted on this year.
President Trump has narrowed the search for his third White House chief of staff to five “mostly well known” people, Roll Call reports.
Trump said his five candidates are “really good ones” and “terrific people.”
President Trump was asked in a interview about the possibility of Gov. John Kasich or retiring Sen. Jeff Flake running against him in 2020, and he responded, “I hope so,” CNBC reports.
John Weaver, Kasich’s chief political strategist responded: “Be careful what you wish for.”
President Trump doubled down on the claim that he’s not responsible for campaign finance violations by Michael Cohen on Fox News, saying that investigators should be looking at Congress’ “slush fund” for campaign violations instead.
Said Trump: “Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to something that’s not even a crime. Nobody except for me would be looked at like this. Nobody. What about Congress? The slush fund. Millions and millions of dollars paid out each year. They have a slush fund. Millions. They don’t talk about campaign finance anything.”
“Gun deaths in America have reached a record high,” CNN reports.
“Nearly 40,000 people in the United States died by guns last year, marking the highest number of gun deaths in decades, according to a new analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control.”
“President Trump on Thursday tacitly admitted, for the first time, that he directed Michael Cohen to facilitate hush-money payments to two women who had alleged affairs with Trump, Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels,” the Washington Post reports.
“Whether Trump’s actions violated the law is an open question. His tweets were meant to argue that he didn’t specifically direct his former longtime personal attorney Cohen to do anything illegal, even if he did direct the payments.”
“But that valid legal question aside, it’s worth emphasizing just how horrendous of a coverup this whole episode has proved to be. Regardless of legal culpability, Trump and his team have spent the last 11 months engaging in a very public and irreconcilable effort to obscure all of this. And as the days pass, their statements look worse and worse.”
“A Russian gun rights activist pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring with a senior Russian official to infiltrate the conservative movement in the United States as an agent for the Kremlin from 2015 until her arrest in July,” the Washington Post reports.
“Maria Butina, 30, became the first Russian national convicted of seeking to influence U.S. policy in the run-up and through the 2016 election as a foreign agent, agreeing to cooperate in a plea deal with U.S. investigators in exchange for less prison time.”
President Trump is expected to spend 16 days at Mar-a-Lago over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, according to an alert issued by the Federal Aviation Administration this morning, the Palm Beach Post reports.
“If you just want to keep track of how much the president has lied about that, he said he didn’t know about the payment. I know it’s hard to keep track of all this stuff, the disclosures come bit by bit, but I mean come on, he lied so extravagantly about this story from beginning to end.”
— Jeffrey Toobin, quoted by The Hill, about President Trump consistently denying he knew anything about hush payments made to a porn star and Playboy model.
CNN updated its rankings of the 10 Democrats most likely to win their party’s nomination to run against President Trump in 2020.
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Matt Bai: “What that televised confrontation really showed is that Trump understands exactly what keeps his listing presidency afloat, even if you don’t.”
“First of all, Trump knows that immigration — legal, illegal, extraterrestrial, whatever — is the single resonant issue of his political life, and has been since he rode down that escalator and straight into our nightmares. He may run afoul of Republicans and independents when it comes to Russia or Saudi Arabia or trade, but he can always come home again to the issue that got him here in the first place.”
“Trump could have had the Secret Service handcuff Pelosi and Schumer right there and force-fed them his remaining inventory of Trump steaks, and as long as he said he was doing it to keep undocumented, nonwhite people out of the country, his core voters would applaud.”
“And Trump the entertainer understands, in a way his critics still don’t, that most Americans are bone-tired of all the phony stagecraft. What we in Washington consider dignified behavior worthy of the office strikes an awful lot of voters as something else — namely, a condescending put-on.”
“A federal judge is tossing a lawsuit by a Republican incumbent congressman from Maine who lost the nation’s first congressional election held by a candidate-ranking system,” the AP reports.
“Democrat Jared Golden defeated U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin after voters from two trailing candidates were eliminated and reassigned to the remaining field. Poliquin contends the system was unconstitutional.”
Philip Bump: “Let us dispatch quickly with a lot of truly remarkable context for President Trump’s Thursday morning tweets denying culpability for alleged campaign-finance law violations. So we’ll note only hastily how noteworthy it is that a sitting president has been implicated by his own Justice Department in the commission of multiple felonies. Quickly note how significant it is that those felonies relate to allegations from a Playboy model and an adult-film actress that the president engaged in extramarital affairs. Mention in passing that a person who served as the president’s personal attorney for nearly a decade, Michael Cohen, has been sentenced to three years in prison in part for violating campaign finance laws to keep those relationships from being discussed publicly before the election.”
“And, of course, dedicate only one line to the president’s striking demand that Americans ignore his demonstrably false claims about the payments — that he wasn’t aware of them, that he wasn’t involved — and instead accept this latest, complicated iteration as God’s-honest-truth.”
First Read: “If you turn on your TV news, scroll through your newspapers and thumb through your tweets, this might seem like just another normal week in the Trump Era. The president’s former lawyer/fixer was sentenced to three years in jail; Trump got rid of his chief of staff but has no replacement lined up; and the government appears hurtling toward a possible partial government shutdown. Boring. Ho-hum. Same old, same old.”
“But let’s snap out of it. It’s a HUGE deal that another person close to the president or his 2016 campaign was sentenced/indicted/pleaded guilty for wrongdoings. It’s a HUGE deal that there’s so much internal chaos in the White House that it’s too much for a four-star general, and that the odds-on favorite to replace him as chief of staff didn’t want the job. It’s a HUGE deal that the president has threatened to shut down the government if he doesn’t get his border wall.”
“And it’s a HUGE deal that the president of the United States has been identified as Individual-1 in prosecutors’ legal filings.”
“We get the temptation of how these stories can become numbing – to the public, to the journalists covering them, and to Washington at large. But remember, any of these stories this week would be a five-alarm political fire for any other presidency.”
President Trump tweeted that “Mexico is paying for the wall” through savings to the U.S. in new trade deal.
Said Trump: “I often stated, ‘One way or the other, Mexico is going to pay for the Wall. This has never changed. Our new deal with Mexico (and Canada), the USMCA, is so much better than the old, very costly & anti-USA NAFTA deal, that just by the money we save, MEXICO IS PAYING FOR THE WALL!”
“Am I concerned that the president might be involved in a crime. Of course.”
— Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), quoted by NBC News.
President Trump disputed claims by former lawyer Michael Cohen that he engaged in “dirty deeds” that include hush payments to two women to keep them quiet during the 2016 election, USA Today reports.
Said Trump: “I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law.”
He added: “It is called ‘advice of counsel,’ and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made. That is why they get paid.”
“Over the past year, the indictments, convictions, and guilty pleas have largely been connected, in one way or another, to Russia. But now, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office is preparing to reveal to the public a different side of his investigation. In court filings that are set to drop in early 2019, prosecutors will begin to unveil Middle Eastern countries’ attempts to influence American politics,” three sources familiar with this side of the probe told the Daily Beast.
“In other words, the so-called ‘Russia investigation’ is set to go global.”
“While one part of the Mueller team has indicted Russian spies and troll-masters, another cadre has been spending its time focusing on how Middle Eastern countries pushed cash to Washington politicos in an attempt to sway policy under President Trump’s administration.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt 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.
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