Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI) said on Twitter that he will not run for president this year after saying last month that he would seek the Libertarian Party’s nomination.
Said Amash: “After much reflection, I’ve concluded that circumstances don’t lend themselves to my success as a candidate for president this year, and therefore I will not be a candidate.”
“President Trump left no doubt what he wanted his GOP allies to focus on, diverting to the TV cameras before he entered a private huddle of Senate Republicans,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Trump: “Let me tell you exactly what my message is: The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of health care. You watch.”
“Nearly 14 months later, reminded of that day, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) broke into a knowing laugh, fully aware that Trump’s ‘party of health care’ declaration went nowhere. Within days, Republicans gave up on trying to draft a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, and after some hesitation this month, the Trump administration plowed ahead with its effort to get the Supreme Court to rule the 2010 law unconstitutional even as no substitute is being drafted on Capitol Hill.”
“Now faced with a viral pandemic that has driven more than 36 million workers to file unemployment claims in eight weeks, Republicans find themselves heading into an election season still lacking any health plan.”
“Over the past decade, Reade has left a trail of aggrieved acquaintances in California’s Central Coast region, who say they remember two things about her — she spoke favorably about her time working for Biden, and she left them feeling duped,” Politico reports.
“A number of those in close contact with Reade over the past 12 years, a period in which she went by the names Tara Reade, Tara McCabe or Alexandra McCabe, laid out a familiar pattern: Reade ingratiated herself, explained she was down on her luck and needed help, and eventually took advantage of their goodwill to extract money, skip rent payments or walk out on other bills.”
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“U.S. officials are preparing to begin checking passengers’ temperatures at roughly a dozen airports as soon as next week, as the coronavirus pandemic has heightened travel anxieties,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Details of the plan are under review by the White House and are subject to change, the people said. It couldn’t be determined which airports will initially have the new scanning procedures. A senior Trump administration official said the initial rollout is expected to cost less than $20 million, and that passengers won’t be charged an additional fee.”
“Wisconsin has been the battleground for political proxy wars for nearly a decade, the backdrop for bruising feuds over labor unions, executive power, redistricting and President Trump,” the AP reports.
“Now, six months before a presidential election, the state is on fire again. With a divided state government and a polarized electorate, Wisconsin has emerged as a hotbed of partisan fighting over the coronavirus, including how to slow its spread, restart the economy, vote during a pandemic and judge Trump’s leadership.”
“In recent weeks, every political twist has been dissected by the parties, political scientists and the press, all searching for insight into which way the swing state might be swinging in the virus era.”
“The United States is heading toward more than 100,000 coronavirus deaths by June 1, with leading mortality forecasts still trending upward,” Politico reports.
Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Washington Post that the State Department Inspector General was fired after opening an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and said the timing suggested “an unlawful act of retaliation.”
A Democratic congressional aide said that Steve Linick was looking into Pompeo’s “misuse of a political appointee at the Department to perform personal tasks for himself and Mrs. Pompeo.”
Playbook: “After a short detente of Republicans and Democrats coming together to support massive bailout packages, the partisan divide has returned in full force and passing the next bill is going to be messy at best.”
“I’ve always assumed like most people have that the primary motivation is to be loved and admired and recognized and praised. That is a motivation but the deeper motivation is domination, is to win. And that is a function of the fact that he has no conscience. And let’s be clear. No conscience.”
— Trump Art of the Deal co-author Tony Schwartz, quoted by the HuffPost, suggesting that coronavirus deaths “don’t matter” to President Trump.
Peter Nicholas: “On Tuesday, May 5, the White House press pool boarded Air Force One for a four-hour flight to Phoenix, where Trump toured a mask-making factory. Flying home, the president came back to the small press cabin and spoke off the record to the traveling press corps. Journalists on that plane hadn’t been tested for the coronavirus that day, or the day before. The last time they’d been tested was Sunday, May 3. In the 48 hours that followed, they could have picked up the virus and, conceivably, passed it to the president, his staff, or one another during the trip. (Let’s not forget that the tests aren’t foolproof: Reporters could have boarded the plane without anyone knowing they actually had the disease.)”
“No one would have been allowed on Air Force One without first getting searched for weapons. Yet here the journalists boarded with no guarantee they hadn’t recently contracted a potentially lethal and highly contagious virus. The episode illustrates how Trump, who likes to project a certain hypermasculine invincibility, has faced greater exposure than he might let on.”
“A Republican lawmaker opposed to pandemic safety measures at the Alaska Capitol compared them to Nazi Germany’s labeling of Jews in an email exchange Friday with fellow members of the Alaska House of Representatives,” the Anchorage Daily News reports.
“When lawmakers return to Juneau on Monday, they will be required to undergo a health screening. Those who pass the screening will be asked to wear a sticker.”
Said state Rep. Ben Carpenter (R): “How about an arm band that won’t fall off like a sticker will? If my sticker falls off, do I get a new one or do I get public shaming too? Are the stickers available as a yellow Star of David?”
“Four-time major champion Rory McIlroy criticized President Trump for his response to the coronavirus outbreak, and said it was unlikely the pair would meet for another round of golf,” Reuters reports.
Said McIlroy: “We’re in the midst of something that’s pretty serious right now. The fact that he’s trying to politicize it and make it a campaign rally and say that we administer the most tests in the world, like it’s a contest – there’s some stuff that just is terrible.”
He added: “It’s not the way a leader should act.”
“State Department Inspector General Steve Linick has been removed,” Politico reports.
“He played a minor role in the House of Representatives’ impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, ferrying a trove of documents to lawmakers that had been provided to the State Department by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.”
“A divided House on Friday narrowly passed a $3 trillion pandemic relief package to send aid to struggling state and local governments and another round of direct $1,200 payments to taxpayers, advancing a proposal with little chance of becoming law over near-unanimous Republican opposition,” the New York Times reports.
New York Times: “Far from a one-day onslaught, it was a climactic moment in a weeklong lurch by Mr. Trump back to the darkest tactics that defined his rise to political power. Even those who have grown used to Mr. Trump’s conduct in office may have found themselves newly alarmed by the grim spectacle of a sitting president deliberately stoking the country’s divisions and pursuing personal vendettas in the midst of a crisis that has Americans fearing for their lives and livelihoods.”
“Since well before he became president, Mr. Trump’s appetite for conflict has defined him as a public figure. But in recent days he has practiced that approach with new intensity, signaling both the depths of his election-year distress and his determination to blast open a path to a second term, even at the cost of further riling a country in deep anguish.”
“His electoral path has narrowed rapidly since the onset of the pandemic, as the growth-and-prosperity theme of his campaign disintegrated. In private, Mr. Trump has been plainly aggrieved at the loss of his central argument for re-election.”
“The acting intelligence chief announced a reorganization of the National Counterterrorism Center on Friday, part of an effort to reduce the size of the office overseeing the nation’s spy agencies,” the New York Times reports.
“Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, has been racing against the clock to make changes to his office before his appointment ends and he is replaced with a Senate-confirmed official.”
“The House on Friday approved the most radical change to its rules in generations, allowing its members to cast committee and floor votes from afar — the culmination of a months-long struggle to adapt the 231-year-old institution to the coronavirus pandemic,” the Washington Post reports.
“Despite bipartisan frustrations with the virus’s effect on the legislative process, the changes, which include temporarily authorizing remote committee work and proxy voting on the House floor, were adopted largely along party lines. The vote was 217 to 189.”
Roll Call: “The significant, yet temporary, change to operations was not enacted during any other national crisis in history.”
Former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa tells Vanity Fair that contrary to the Trumpian line, the volume of unmasking requests related to Michael Flynn’s behavior “is a bad look for him—not the Obama administration.”
Said Rangappa: “This does not help Flynn. This is a long list of names of people across disparate areas of government who independently felt that the intelligence reports they were reading were so alarming that they needed to know—without knowing, by the way, who it was beforehand—[who] the person was that was engaging in that communication or activity.”
Driving this point home, Rangappa asked of Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell: “Why not go ahead and disclose the underlying intelligence report?”
Earlier for members: Unmasking the “Obamagate” Nonsense.
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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