President Trump tweeted that he would push a “major middle income tax cut” if Republicans keep the Senate and presidency and take back the House in the 2020 elections.
Said Trump: “If Republicans take back the House, and keep the Senate and Presidency, one of our first acts will be to approve a major middle income Tax Cut! Democrats only want to raise your taxes!”
“British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would be telling President Trump at this weekend’s G7 summit to pull back from a trade war which is already destabilizing economic growth around the world,” Reuters reports.
Said Johnson: “I am very worried about the way it’s going, the growth of protectionism, of tariffs that we’re seeing.”
“As an ecological disaster in the Amazon escalated into a global political crisis, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, took the rare step on Friday of mobilizing the armed forces to help contain blazes of a scale not seen in nearly a decade,” the New York Times reports.
“The sudden reversal, after days of dismissing growing concern over hundreds of fires raging across the Amazon, came as international outrage grew over the rising deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rain forest. European leaders threatened to cancel a major trade deal, protesters staged demonstrations outside Brazilian embassies and calls for a boycott of Brazilian products snowballed on social media.”
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President Trump asserted that a 1977 law authorizes him, unilaterally, to punish businesses which continue to manufacture their goods in China.
Said Trump: “For all of the Fake News Reporters that don’t have a clue as to what the law is relative to Presidential powers, China, etc., try looking at the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Case closed!”
New York Times: “Mr. Trump’s threat to invoke the 1977 act to force companies to leave China would be his most recent unorthodox use of standby authorities that Congress delegated to the presidency for exigent circumstances. The president previously threatened to use those emergency powers to impose tariffs on Mexican goods, unless the Mexican government did more to stop migrants from illegally entering the United States.”
“When top Republicans convened at the St. Regis resort in Aspen, Colo. last month for an exclusive donor retreat, several attendees said there was palpable tension in the room as the gathering’s two headliners prepared to speak: Vice President Mike Pence and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley,” Politico reports.
“The assembled group of governors, high-dollar donors, and operatives were well aware that the two have big ambitions; to some it seemed as if Pence and Haley, who spoke on back-to-back days, were vying for their attention. Some in the audience found themselves parsing and comparing the two speeches and buzzed they were getting a sneak preview of a 2024 Republican primary. Others recalled something peculiar: Neither Pence nor Haley acknowledged each other in their presentations, even though they gave shout-outs to others attending the retreat.”
“President Trump has generally been outnumbered at summits like the G7 — the disrupter-in-chief in a room of more sober-minded leaders. This time around, disruption is the rule,” Axios reports.
“French President Emmanuel Macron, who’s hosting the summit this weekend in the seaside town of Biarritz, warned ahead of the gathering that twin threats to democracy and capitalism must be vanquished in order to ensure a free and prosperous future. For this weekend, though, he’d probably settle for anything short of disaster.”
“The series of economic and financial developments on Friday was a strange, bewildering, exhausting microcosm of why the global economy is at risk of a meltdown,” the New York Times reports.
“It showed the odd interplay at work between the Chinese government’s actions in the escalating trade war with the United States, the sober-minded global central bankers who have limited power to deploy and an American president whose public pronouncements often appear driven by grievance more than strategy.”
“President Trump arrives in France on Saturday for a meeting of the Group of 7 industrialized nations, having set the stage for fireworks and confusion. In one dizzying day, he had seemed to be searching for whom or what to blame for economic troubles, first using Twitter to call his own Federal Reserve chief an enemy of the United States and then to urge American companies to stop doing business with China.”
“And that was just while the markets were open. Later Friday, he said he would apply tariffs to all Chinese imports and increase those already in place.”
Politico: “Through executive orders, regulatory changes, political maneuvers and sometimes mere neglect, Trump has overseen major, possibly permanent, shifts in U.S. foreign policy that will be on full display this weekend in France as the president meets with other world leaders at the Group of Seven summit.”
“Thanks to Trump, current and former officials say, Palestinians may never get a state of their own, Iran may shun diplomacy with Washington for the foreseeable future and U.S. allies may forever be reluctant to trust their American counterparts. Relations with China, the effects of climate change and ending nuclear proliferation are among other challenges a future president may find harder to tackle in a post-Trump world.”
New York Times: “In the space of a few hours, he declared that his own central bank chief was an ‘enemy,’ claimed sweeping powers not explicitly envisioned by the Constitution to ‘order’ American businesses to leave China and, when stock markets predictably tumbled, made a joke of it.”
“Mr. Trump’s wild and unscripted pronouncements on Friday renewed questions about his stewardship of the world’s largest economy even as he escalated a trade war with China before heading to France for a high-profile summit with the leaders of many of the world’s other major industrial powers.”
“Even some of his own aides and allies were alarmed by his behavior, seeing it as the flailing of a president increasingly anxious over the dark clouds some have detected hovering over an economy that until now has been the strongest selling point for his administration. They privately expressed concern that he was hurting the economy and was doing lasting damage to his own prospects for re-election.”
“Facing a trade war against China that has shaken the global economy, President Donald Trump gathered his most trusted economic aides in the Oval Office,” the AP reports.
“The assembled brain trust for Friday’s urgent consultations included an economics chief best known for his stint as a cable TV commentator; a trade adviser whose pro-tariff views are outside the economic mainstream; and a treasury secretary (joining by phone on his way back from vacation) who made millions off the housing crisis and then turned to financing Hollywood movies.”
“Where past presidents have relied on top academics, business leaders and officials with experience in prior administrations, Trump has gone a different route, building a crew of economic advisers known more for their allegiance to him than their policy chops.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) “suggested that House Democrats should refrain from pushing for President Trump’s impeachment, warning that a premature effort to oust the president could undermine her case for doing so down the road,” The Hill reports.
Said Pelosi: “The public isn’t there on impeachment. It’s your voice and constituency, but give me the leverage I need to make sure that we’re ready and it is as strong as it can be.”
For members: Does Pelosi have a plan on Impeachment?
Joe Biden “took a series of unusual rhetorical detours at the end of a town-hall-style campaign event nominally dedicated to health care, speculating about how a political assassination of Barack Obama might have affected the country in 2008 and recalling that he was accused of being gay because of his support of women’s rights in the 1970s,” the New York Times reports.
“After speaking about the health care plan he introduced last month and taking a few questions, Mr. Biden grew most animated as he recalled the fraught political era of 1968, when he was a college senior, and two of his political heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated within weeks of each other.”
David Remnick: “As perilous and unnerving as things are, any form of political despair at such a moment remains unforgivable. Despair is a form of self-indulgence, a dodge. Trump’s derangements in policy and character should instead instill a kind of Trump Clarification Syndrome, a reckoning with what confronts us.”
“A reckoning, as the Amazon rain forest burns, with climate change. A reckoning, as Trump threatens to revoke the barest protections for immigrant children and the guarantee of birthright citizenship, with the history and persistence of bigotry in all forms. With the structural persistence of inequality of income and opportunity. With matters of truth and falsehood.”
“Trump’s presence in the White House is depressing, there is no doubt, but to wallow in that gloom, or even to imagine that public life will ‘return to normal’ on its own after his departure, is insufficient, even inexcusable. Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who cannot countenance Trumpist politics ought to welcome the most urgent kind of political debate on matters of policy and on who we are as a country. Perhaps it is a form of derangement to say it, but it’s entirely possible that Donald Trump, who has been such a ruinous figure on the public scene, has at least done the country an unintended service by clarifying some of our deepest flaws and looming dangers in his uniquely lurid light.”
“President Trump said he would raise tariffs against China from 10% to 15% on Friday, in the aftermath of a steep stock market drop following his earlier tweets denigrating Fed chair Jerome Powell and China,” Axios reports.
Trump’s announcement came after the stock market closed.
Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), “who is expected to announce a long shot primary challenge to President Trump in the coming days, is wooing the husband of Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, for a senior role in his campaign — a signal of his intent to troll Mr. Trump into engagement with him,” the New York Times reports.
Said Conway: “I think Walsh’s plan to attack Trump for his dishonesty, amorality, instability and incompetence is absolutely the right approach, and I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
Josh Barro: “It’s also worth considering the possibility that we have gotten too far down the trade-war road for the president to unwind the problems he’s caused. To the extent there are signs of weakness in the domestic economy, they are largely on the producer side. The consumer sector still looks decent. But tariffs and uncertainty over future tariffs have already discouraged businesses from producing and investing. And China has less reason to participate in a de-escalation than they did a year ago, since they can just ride out the next year and hope to be facing a new, less-hostile president.”
“With a China less willing to back down and a trade war maybe too far along to stop, the president is backed into a corner. He may feel he can’t save the economy by folding. And so he may follow his instinct — one of the few consistent policy views he has expressed for decades — that protectionism is good for the economy, and that despite what the markets and his advisers are telling him, trade wars are good and easy to win and more tariffs and more disruption will only mean more winning for the U.S.”
“What the president showed us today is he’s prepared to hit the gas as he approaches the cliff. That should make us all worried about the economic outlook — and it should make Republicans very worried about the political outlook.”
“The Trump administration took its hardest line yet to legalize anti-gay discrimination on Friday when it asked the Supreme Court to declare that federal law allows private companies to fire workers based only on their sexual orientation,” BuzzFeed News reports.
“An amicus brief filed by the Justice Department weighs in on two cases involving gay workers and what is meant by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination ‘because of sex.’ The administration argues courts nationwide should stop reading the civil rights law to protect gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers from bias because it was not originally intended to do so.”
“The office of an African American employee of the U.S. Department of Education was vandalized earlier this week, and other employees have expressed concern that the attack may have been racially motivated,” NBC News reports.
“African art figurines were found beheaded, with their limbs removed, and a school desegregation poster was damaged.”
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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