“His aides are wooing bundlers, and his campaign this week openly embraced a super PAC that is racing to collect millions,” CNN reports.
“As President Trump gears up for a re-election battle in 2020, Team Trump is deploying all the instruments of a traditional campaign apparatus that he mocked during his first, unconventional bid for the White House.”
Los Angeles Times: “In 2016, Donald Trump stormed Washington and swept aside a hostile Republican Party establishment. Now, as he seeks reelection, the president has tightened his grip on the GOP as loyalists — whose main credential is fealty to the White House — seize control of state parties around the country.”
“Trump acolytes have replaced veterans and party insiders in places such as Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which were crucial to his election, the perennial swing state of Florida, as well as New Hampshire, which holds the first presidential primary.”
“Here in Arizona, an emerging 2020 battleground, the new party chief is Kelli Ward, a former state lawmaker, fierce Trump devotee and twice-failed candidate for U.S. Senate who campaigned against fellow Republicans the way a battering ram meets a brick wall.”
Jonathan Bernstein: “While presidents are almost always the most public face of the policies they support, most will try to find allies that allow them to depersonalize things to some extent. Normal presidents love having bipartisan support; if that’s unavailable, they’ll at least fall back on their parties. Trump is out there alone on topic after topic, from his border wall to Yemen. On trade, he’s especially isolated. Yes, he’s brought a handful of Republicans with him, and on China in particular he may have a few added allies. But overall, Trump’s trade wars are going to result in some unusually personal successes or failures.”
“Even under the best of circumstances, this would be a very delicate issue for a president. Expanded trade tends to produce overall gains for the economy at the expense of losses in specific sectors. That’s dangerous enough, since visible losses can be politically potent. But starting a trade war not only imposes specific losses when other countries retaliate, it also risks serious damage to the broader economy. That’s a whole lot of risk for a president with very little potential reward.”
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tried to tamp down the political backlash over the Senate Intelligence Committee’s decision to subpoena Donald Trump Jr., urging the president “not to worry,” The Hill reports.
Said McConnell: “I know the president’s upset about that, but I think he ought not to worry about it. The chairman of the Intelligence Committee has already said the committee when it reports will find no collusion.”
Ryan Cooper: “The 2016 candidates spent almost all their time in a handful of states, most of them medium or large. Two-thirds of campaign events happened in just six states — Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Michigan. If we include Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Arizona, then those 12 states account for 96 percent of campaign events.”
“The nine smallest states (including D.C.), meanwhile, got precisely zero attention. Only the tenth-largest, New Hampshire, got any events at all. In total, 25 states (mostly small and medium-sized) got no events whatsoever. And while it’s true the states that got huge attention are mostly on the big side, the very largest states were almost totally ignored as well — California and Texas got one event apiece, and New York none.”
“The reason for this is obvious. Almost every state gives all of its electoral votes to whoever wins the state — allowing candidates to take the votes of strongly partisan states for granted. Indeed, it’s actively foolish to campaign where you are guaranteed to win or lose — only the swing states matter.”
The consensus electoral map shows just seven states currently Toss Ups.
Mike Allen: “If Trump allows Democrats to rummage through notes and witnesses, he risks new material surfacing that piles on top of the Mueller report, triggering impeachment.”
“If Trump refuses all cooperation with Congress, Democrats increasingly see the opportunity to try to impeach him.”
President Trump predicted that Joe Biden will edge out Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary.
Said Trump: “Looks to me like it’s going to be SleepyCreepy Joe over Crazy Bernie. Everyone else is fading fast!”
Jonathan Chait: “In 2016, Donald Trump’s campaign learned Russia was working to help him win, and many of its members actively sought to exploit that assistance. In 2020, now possessing the powers of the Executive Branch, it’s pressuring a foreign government to assist Trump’s reelection campaign. The effort consists of Trump’s agents lobbying Ukraine to smear his political rivals.”
“The smear campaign is being run by Rudy Giuliani, who — perhaps operating on the theory that a massive scandal boasted about the media by its perpetrators is less damaging than one uncovered by investigators — is broadcasting his scheme.”
Said Giuliani to the New York Times: “There’s nothing illegal about it. Somebody could say it’s improper.”
“Well, yes, they could. It’s grossly, terrifyingly improper.”
“Joe Biden is crafting a climate change policy he hopes will appeal to both environmentalists and the blue-collar voters that elected Donald Trump, according to two sources, carving out a middle ground approach that will likely face heavy resistance from green activists,” Reuters reports.
Karen Tumulty: “President Trump has finally proved, beyond any doubt, that there is such a thing as #FakeNews.”
“In the 1980s and 1990s, the media conspired to perpetrate a vast fraud on the American people. So-called journalists and their complicit editors colluded — yes, that’s the word — to convince an unwitting public that Trump was a spectacularly successful businessman.”
“The scale of the ink-fueled myth has been exposed at last, thanks to 10 years’ worth of his tax information obtained by the New York Times, which revealed Trump’s enterprises were flopping on an epic scale.”
“Congress and Donald Trump’s fight over his financial records is now on the fast track,” CNN reports.
“Judge Amit Mehta plans next week to weigh the major legal issues raised in President Trump’s challenge of a congressional subpoena for his accounting firm’s records, according to an order issued Thursday — putting the case on an even faster track than it previously looked to be.”
“Congress has subpoenaed Trump and his business’ accounting records from the firm Mazars USA, and Trump’s personal legal team sued to stop the records from being turned over. A hearing is now scheduled for May 14.”
“The Department of Housing and Urban Development acknowledged that a Trump administration plan to purge undocumented immigrants from public housing could displace more than 55,000 children, all of whom are legal U.S. residents or citizens,” the Washington Post reports.
“The proposed rule, published Friday in the Federal Register, would tighten regulations against undocumented immigrants accessing federally subsidized housing to ‘make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it,’ HUD Secretary Ben Carson said last month. But the agency’s analysis of the rule’s regulatory impact concluded that half of current residents living in households potentially facing eviction and homelessness are children who are legally qualified for aid.”
Here’s the kicker: “Restricting those subsidies to families in which all members are legal U.S. residents would cost an additional $193 million to $227 million a year because entire families would receive higher subsidies.”
President Trump, the morning after levying fresh tariffs on China, caused confusion among journalists and traders by tweeting there is ‘no need to rush’ on China trade — then deleting that and other tweets moments later, Bloomberg reports.
Ezra Klein: ‘The Democratic Party has lots of policy ideas. But policymaking is downstream from power. The kinds of policies that get crafted, considered, and passed, reflect the balance of power in society. And for all the clarity and rigor Democrats bring to the policy debate, they don’t have a clear theory of power — who they think holds it, and what, if anything, they want to do about it.”
NBC News: “The three new missiles North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has tested over the past week are eerily familiar to military experts: They look just like a controversial and widely copied missile the Russian military has deployed to Syria and has been actively trying to sell abroad for years.”
Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told CBS News that Congress will never get to see President Trump’s tax returns, despite efforts by House Democrats to subpoena the information.
Said Mulvaney: “They’re not entitled to see them by law.”
Mulvaney called efforts to obtain the tax returns “a pure show pony-type of situation,” and said that House Democrats were just trying to “embarrass” the president.
Politico: “Celebrating defeat is unusual for a politician, and doing so makes O’Rourke notably different from the rest of the unwieldy field of Democrats running for president. … O’Rourke instead presents his loss to Cruz as a prominent selling point.”
“For O’Rourke, the phenomenon on display in that race—failure without negative effects, and with perhaps even some kind of personal boost—is a feature of his life and career. That biography is marked as much by meandering, missteps and moments of melancholic searching as by résumé-boosting victories and honors.”
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) told the St. Louis Post Dispatch that he determined very early it was futile to try to alter the way President Trump operates.
Said Blunt: “You can get a whole lot done if you minimize wasting time on things you can’t do anything about.”
He added: “I have been less concerned by that than many of my colleagues have. One, I have never thought from day one that you are going to dramatically change him as a person or the way he communicated through the entire campaign. And I believe there haven’t been very many instances where I have given him advice on this topic — publicly, or any other way. And in spite of all of the complaints he has heard from all kinds of people … about how we wish he’d quit doing that, I think that is a waste of time.”
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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