“The behind-the-scenes competition for Wall Street money in the 2020 presidential race is reaching a fevered peak this week as no less than nine Democrats are holding New York fund-raisers in a span of nine days, racing ahead of a June 30 filing deadline when they must disclose their latest financial hauls,” the New York Times reports.
“With millions of dollars on the line, top New York donors are already beginning to pick favorites, and three candidates are generating most of the buzz: former Vice President Joseph Biden, Senator Kamala Harris of California and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.”
“California is beefing up Obamacare, restoring an individual mandate, expanding health insurance subsidies well into the middle class and covering some undocumented adults through Medicaid,” Politico reports.
“It’s an incremental step toward universal coverage that can animate the Democrats’ party-defining debate over how best to cover everyone — through a mixed public-private system or through Medicare for All.”
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“Democrats are preparing to kick off a campaign totaling hundreds of millions of dollars to blunt Donald Trump’s head start in the 2020 campaign as their party’s candidates slug it out for the right to take him on,” Politico reports.
“Democratic super PACs are set to soon launch a yearlong $150 million advertising onslaught countering the millions the president’s campaign has already spent targeting voters. On top of that, billionaire Tom Steyer is funding other groups testing a range of strategies to register and turn out people to vote. And the Democratic National Committee this week began training hundreds of college students to work as field staff in battleground states, an effort that will continue throughout the election.”
The Hill: “With just two weeks left in the month of June, the justices have yet to issue rulings in 24 cases, including high-profile decisions that will affect the census citizenship question and partisan gerrymandering.”
“The final stretch may also signal how the new conservative majority will rule on other major cases down the line, providing a glimpse of some of the issues the justices could take up when their next term starts in October.”
President Trump on Saturday predicted a stock market crash if he doesn’t win re-election in 2020.
Said Trump: “The Trump Economy is setting records, and has a long way up to go. However, if anyone but me takes over in 2020 (I know the competition very well), there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before!”
President Trump “hyped his forthcoming full interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, excerpts of which shook allies and opponents alike this week when the president revealed he would take foreign help if offered in the lead up to the 2020 election,” Politico reports.
“In a Twitter thread posted Saturday night, Trump said he had a positive experience with Stephanopoulos, adding that he thought other news outlets misinterpreted his comments. The president also said that he would consider doing more interviews with network news.”
“Trump’s interview with Stephanopoulos, which will be broadcast in full on Sunday, comes as his reelection campaign prepares to launch in the coming week. Trump’s tentative plan to do more network interviews and capture ‘earned media’ — where a politician garners free publicity from media hits rather than through traditional campaign ad buys — hints at a strategy he used frequently during the 2016 campaign and also as president.”
“Boris Johnson’s progress towards Downing Street appeared inexorable last night as his most senior rivals began circling for jobs in his cabinet and a new poll showed that voters believe he is the only leadership candidate who can win the next election,” the Sunday Times reports.
“Two of Boris Johnson’s rivals — Michael Gove and Sajid Javid — used interviews with The Sunday Times to issue coded job applications.”
“The YouGov poll put the Brexit party in first place on 24%, three points ahead of the Conservatives and Labour, reinforcing Johnson’s case that the next prime minister will need to seize votes from Nigel Farage’s party.”
Jonathan Greenberg: “How did Donald Trump, a self-serving promoter who lost billions of dollars for his investors, convince the world that he is a financial genius? It wasn’t just by fabricating tales of his success. It was also by bullying and silencing people who could have stopped those deceits — particularly reporters and Wall Street analysts — forcing all but a very few into a conspiracy of silence.”
“These tactics, which form a core element of his politics, were something I saw him hone firsthand in the 1980s and 1990s as Trump’s company was imploding.”
Rep. Chris Stewart, a Utah Republican who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said that it would be “foolish” not to take information from a foreign government pertaining to an election campaign, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.
Said Stewart: “It depends on who it is and the circumstances and how credible it is. There might be valuable information that comes from one of our allies. If they look at it, and it’s credible, I think it would be foolish not to take that information.”
President Trump’s campaign bought nearly $1 million in Facebook ads urging users to sign a birthday card to commemorate his 73rd birthday, Vice News reports.
“The users who click through to sign such ‘cards’ have offered gobs of contact information to help the president’s re-election effort build out voter lists that will be crucial to raising money. Imposing an arbitrary deadline for supporters to act, the birthday ads have been essential to a digitally savvy Trump campaign that strategists say has built out a sizable early lead over Democrats in collecting voter data.”
Quartz: “Google has been treating Beto’s campaign ads as if they weren’t political content, raising questions over whether Google is capable of keeping its already anemic promise of transparency for political ads. Google has promised to put ads it receives from candidates for U.S. federal political offices in its political ad archive, for transparency’s sake.”
“But the Beto ads reviewed by Quartz were missing from the archive—until we alerted Google to their existence. Google’s own rules don’t allow any political content in Gmail ads, but Beto’s campaign ads kept showing up there.”
“President Trump’s announcement on Fox and Friends Friday morning that Tom Homan would be his new ‘border czar’ appears to have been premature,” CNN reports.
“Homan, a Fox News contributor, was caught by surprise by the announcement… Two senior White House officials acknowledged the details of a position are still being worked out and conversations are ongoing.”
Bloomberg: “Vice President Mike Pence was set to deliver a speech criticizing China’s human rights record on June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre — until Donald Trump stepped in. The president delayed the speech to avoid upsetting Beijing ahead of a potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Group of 20 meeting in Japan at the end of this month.”
“Trump also put off U.S. sanctions on Chinese surveillance companiesthat Pence planned to preview in his remarks. The speech was tentatively rescheduled for June 24, just days before the Osaka meetings. But with Beijing signaling that Xi might not agree to a meeting, there is now debate within the administration about when Pence should deliver the speech and how hard he should be on the Chinese.”
New York Times: “Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s announcement that she would step down as White House press secretary has set off the latest round of musical chairs in the West Wing and an internal debate over whether to revive the daily news briefing as President Trump heads into the thick of election season. Some White House officials have argued that the daily briefing, which on the day of Ms. Sanders’s resignation on Thursday had not been held for 94 days, is a powerful tool that would help elevate Mr. Trump above his Democratic opponent in the 2020 race.
“One of those pushing for its revival, officials said, is Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff, who wants the next press secretary to play a more proactive role in shaping the White House message, adding at the least a daily untelevised briefing to his or her duties. But others have argued that Mr. Trump has never liked the daily briefing as a forum to disseminate the message of the day, preferring to do it himself on Twitter.”
“President Trump’s reelection machine is setting its sights on a new target, one it had left for dead just a few months ago: Elizabeth Warren,” Politico reports.
“With the Massachusetts senator rising in polls and driving a populist message that threatens to cut into the president’s blue-collar base, the Trump campaign is training its firepower on Warren with an eye toward blunting her momentum.”
“Backing down after days of huge street protests, Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, said on Saturday that she would indefinitely suspend a bill that would allow extraditions to mainland China,” the New York Times reports.
“It was a remarkable reversal for Mrs. Lam, the leader installed by Beijing in 2017, who had vowed to ensure the bill’s approval and tried to get it passed on an unusually short timetable, even as hundreds of thousands demonstrated against it this past week.”
“But she made it clear that the bill was being delayed, not withdrawn outright, as protesters have demanded.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Politico that she hopes to be remembered as being “transparent and honest” when her tenure comes to an end.
Said Sanders: “I hope that it will be that I showed up every day and I did the very best job that I could to put forward the president’s message, to do the best job that I could to answer questions. To be transparent and honest throughout that process and do everything I could to make America a little better that day than it was the day before.”
Stormy Daniels: “And I hope to be remembered for being a virgin.”
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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