President Trump lashed out at the Washington Post over its reporting on his attacks against a group of minority congresswomen.
Said Trump: “The Washington Post Story, about my speech in North Carolina and tweet, with its phony sources who do not exist, is Fake News. The only thing people were talking about is the record setting crowd and the tremendous enthusiasm, far greater than the Democrats. You’ll see in 2020!”
He added in a separate tweet: “Presidential Harassment!”
“Barring a surprise of historic proportions, Boris Johnson will be announced on Tuesday morning as leader of the U.K.’s Conservative Party, and the country’s next prime minister,” Axios reports.
“Polls suggest roughly three-quarters of the 160,000 Conservative Party members who’ll pick the next prime minister prefer him to Jeremy Hunt, the current foreign secretary and Johnson’s lone remaining rival.”
“Beto O’Rourke has gone from phenom to front-runner to flailing in five months, and so he came home to this dusty border town last week to regroup, prepare for the next debate, and try to recast himself as the underdog in a Democratic presidential race in which many have already counted him out,” NBC News reports.
“O’Rourke says that he doesn’t plan to change his freewheeling style much, but that a top priority now is to raise the money to keep building his campaign organization so it will be ready to rebound.”
Said O’Rourke: “If you remember in Texas, it didn’t happen overnight. It was a really long process that was against the odds, very often counted down and out.”
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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told PBS’s Firing Line that he thinks President Trump could “absolutely” be defeated in the 2020 election and predicted there could be “staggering” Democratic voter turnout.
Said Cruz: “I personally handicap the 2020 election as a coin flip. I think it’s about 50-50.”
He added: “I think we are going to see staggering Democratic turnout in 2020. Anger is a powerful motivator. The far left is pissed. They are enraged by Donald Trump, and it means they’re going to show up, and the big open question is, does everybody else show up?”
“Donald Trump is more George Wallace than George Washington.”
— Joe Biden, quoted by Reuters.
New York Times: “Over decades in business, entertainment and now politics, Mr. Trump has approached America’s racial, ethnic and religious divisions opportunistically, not as the nation’s wounds to be healed but as openings to achieve his goals, whether they be ratings, fame, money or power, without regard for adverse consequences.”
Bloomberg: “An elected Democratic official in the state, speaking on condition of anonymity, complained that if Biden has a campaign in Iowa, he doesn’t know who’s working on it or how many.”
“In contrast, Elizabeth Warren, who jumped into the race four months before the former vice president, has built one of the most robust operations in the state, positioning her to capitalize on her surging national poll numbers and her steady rise in Iowa, Democratic operatives say.”
“President Trump’s own top aides didn’t think he fully understood what he had done last Sunday, when he fired off a trio of racist tweets before a trip to his golf course,” the Washington Post reports.
“As is often the case, Trump acted alone — impulsively following his gut to the dark side of American politics, and now the country would have to pick up the pieces. The day before, on the golf course, he hadn’t brought it up. Over the coming days, dozens of friends, advisers and political allies would work behind the scenes to try to fix the mess without any public admission of error, because that was not the Trump way.”
Harry Enten: “The Trump strategy is pretty simple: 1. Drive up the unfavorable ratings of his Democratic rival as he did in 2016 in order to compensate for his own low ratings. 2. Bank on an electoral college/popular vote split as he did in 2016. 3. Use a campaign of racial resentment to drive up turnout even more among groups favorable toward the President.”
“Remember, Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He won because he flipped a congressional district in Maine (good for one electoral vote) and the states of Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from blue in 2012 to red in 2016. If the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate wins all the states Hillary Clinton won, then she or he only needs to win the closest of those three Trump flipped (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin). It seems simple enough.”
“The potential problem for the Democratic candidate lies in Wisconsin.”
Test your own strategy on the interactive Electoral Vote Map.
“We are going to reelect the president,”
— Rep. Matt Gaetz, quoted by the New York Times when asked about his goal for this week’s House hearing with special counsel Robert Mueller.
“The Democratic National Committee is getting smoked by its GOP counterpart in fundraising — and some major Democrats are panicked it could hurt their chances at defeating President Trump next year,” Vice News reports.
“The DNC brought in just $22.9 million over the last three months including $9.5 million in June, according to a campaign finance report filed Saturday night with the Federal Election Commission. That’s less than half the Republican National Committee’s haul over the same time period: $51 million.”
“Plagued by anemic polling and underwhelming fundraising, some campaigns are falling into a spiral of perceived hurdles that are becoming increasingly self-fulfilling, making it hard to find money to build an expansive campaign organization,” the AP reports.
“The anxiety is building ahead of September’s presidential debate, which impose tougher qualification rules that will winnow the field from two dozen candidates. That’s a humbling prospect for senators and governors who have spent their political careers building what they hoped would be strong resumes for a White House run only to face the reality that voters aren’t interested or, worse, don’t know who they are.”
“Federal Reserve officials signaled they are ready to lower interest rates by a quarter-percentage point later this month, while indicating the potential for additional reductions, despite the recent surge in market expectations of a half-point cut,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for sweeping budget cuts if he wins a second term in the White House… a move that would dramatically reverse the big-spending approach he adopted during his first 30 months in office,” the Washington Post reports.
“Trump’s advisers say he will be better positioned to crack down on spending and shrink or eliminate certain agencies after next year, particularly if Republicans regain control of the House of Representatives.”
“But this second-term ambition is already sowing confusion about how the White House should approach the current slate of negotiations, in which some conservatives want Trump to push for spending restraint.”
New York Times: “Lawmakers choreographing the hearings before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees warn that bombshell disclosures are unlikely. But over about five hours of nationally televised testimony, they hope to use Mr. Mueller, the enigmatic and widely respected former F.B.I. director, to refashion his legalistic 448-page report into a vivid, compelling narrative of Russia’s attempts to undermine American democracy, the Trump campaign’s willingness to accept Kremlin assistance and the president’s repeated and legally dubious efforts to thwart investigators.”
“For a party divided over how to confront Mr. Trump — liberals versus moderates, supporters of impeachment versus staunch opponents — the stakes could scarcely be higher.”
“President Trump on Friday demonstrated the limited influence of allies or advisers who try to steer him away from pre-election racial and cultural fights. He walked back his disavowal of a racially loaded chant at a campaign rally less than 24 hours after making it,” the New York Times reports.
“Acquiescing to behind-the-scenes pressure from nervous Republican lawmakers and from his elder daughter, Ivanka Trump, the president distanced himself on Thursday from the chant of ‘Send her back!’ that the crowd at his rally on Wednesday in Greenville, N.C., directed at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who was born in Somalia. Mr. Trump said he was ‘not happy’ with the chant’s language and claimed, falsely, that he had tried to cut it off.”
“But on Friday, the president appeared to disavow his disavowal — following the same three-stage crisis playbook he used after setting off a wave of criticism when he defended neo-Nazi protesters in 2017 Charlottesville, Va.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders “defended his campaign’s compensation package Friday after a Washington Post story highlighted concerns among staffers that they were not receiving the $15-an-hour wages Sanders champions on the campaign trail,” the Des Moines Register reports.
But he also expressed frustration: “It does bother me that people are going outside of the process and going to the media. That is really not acceptable. It is really not what labor negotiations are about, and it’s improper.”
“President Trump’s campaign and the RNC have paid more than $600,000 in legal fees to the law firm that represents Hope Hicks,” CNN reports.
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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