President Trump has said he “would not have minded” at all serving in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, CBS News reports. Mr. Trump avoided the U.S. military draft in place during the war by getting a medical deferment for bone spurs.
Said Trump: “I would not have minded that at all. I would’ve been honored, but I think I make up for it right now. I think I’m making up for it rapidly because we’re rebuilding our military at a level that it’s never seen before.”
“Democrats are planning to host a Capitol Hill event featuring psychiatrists who will warn that President Trump is unfit for office based on his mental health,” the Washington Examiner reports.
“The event will be led by Dr. Bandy Lee, a Yale School of Medicine psychiatrist and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book that argues psychiatrists have a responsibility to warn the public when a president is dangerous.”
A new Morning Consult poll found that 14% of Democratic voters listed women’s issues as their top priority, compared to just 6% that did so around the start of May.
“Although most voters still rank the economy and health care as their top priorities, that uptick marks a major increase in focus on women’s issues, a policy area that encompasses reproductive rights, pay equity, workplace discrimination, and maternal mortality.”
“This spike comes in the wake of numerous states passing abortion laws that sharply restrict women’s reproductive rights, drawing renewed attention to the need to defend abortion protections.”
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President Trump is already planting the seeds to blame the media if he loses in 2020.
His latest tweet: “If the totally Corrupt Media was less corrupt, I would be up by 15 points in the polls based on our tremendous success with the economy, maybe Best Ever! If the Corrupt Media was actually fair, I would be up by 25 points. Nevertheless, despite the Fake News, we’re doing great!”
“Beto O’Rourke issued an ambitious plan to revamp the U.S. voting system by cracking down on voter suppression and getting an additional 35 million people to the ballot box by the 2024 elections,” Reuters reports.
“A key part of O’Rourke’s plan would be to set term limits for politicians, to give young people incentive to vote for new and fresher candidates. He proposes limiting membership of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate to 12 years, and requiring Supreme Court justices – currently appointed for life – to step down after 18 years.”
Josh Krashaar: “President Trump is stuck on 259 electoral votes, and his campaign is trying to scheme any way possible to get him back to a majority.”
“That’s the takeaway from a new Politico story outlining the Trump campaign’s intent to target three Democratic-leaning states—New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Nevada—as part of its battleground state strategy.”
“On paper, it looks like the campaign is going on offense in states that should be solidly in the Democratic corner. In reality, it’s a concession that the traditionally Democratic Rust Belt states that fell to Trump in 2016—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—are turning away from the polarizing president, and he may need to look elsewhere to make up that ground. If he fails to breach that ‘blue wall’ again but holds the other swing states, Trump will still need 11 additional electoral votes to prevail.”
Of Trump’s new targets, the consensus electoral map currently only shows New Hampshire as a Toss Up.
A new study finds Russia’s infamous troll farm “conducted a campaign on Twitter before the 2016 elections that was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known,” Politico reports.
“The Internet Research Agency campaign may not only have had more sway — reaching large numbers of real users — than previously thought, it also demonstrated ample patience and might have generated income for some of the phony accounts.”
NBC News: “The IRA’s basic strategy was to use a small core of Twitter accounts to push out new content. And they harnessed a wider pool of automated accounts to amplify those messages. The operation was carefully planned, with accounts often registered months before they were used — well in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
President Trump said he’s “not even sure” his advance team requested that the USS John McCain be kept out of sight during his recent visit to Japan — a request the military has confirmed it received from the White House, NBC News reports.
Said Trump: “Here’s the thing, I’m not even sure it happened — first of all, I didn’t know anything about it. But I’m not even sure it happened. Somebody said they’re painting the ship and they have the tarpaulins and they’re painting the ship. And they have tarpaulins all over the place. I have no idea if it happened, or not. I hear it’s fake news. But maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”
Jonathan Swan: “Trump allies say that when 2020 candidates to Biden’s left inevitably start hitting him on his free-trade past, Republicans will piggyback to try to undermine him ahead of a potential general election fight in the Rust Belt.”
“Expect them to begin asking questions like: What specifically will Biden do with China? Will he lift President Trump’s tariffs? How does Biden defend his past advocacy for NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership?”
Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), who was popular when he left office last year, is hinting to Democrats that he may run for governor again in 2021, Axios reports.
President Trump wasn’t enthusiastic over a gift given to him by Piers Morgan during a Good Morning Britain interview — a bowler hat in the style of Winston Churchill.
Trump put on the hat for a few seconds, complaining that it was “a little big” before removing it and saying that “Winston looked much better in it.”
HuffPost UK has “7 takeaway moments” from the interview.
“A federal judge reversed course on Tuesday and absolved the Justice Department of a demand to make public transcripts of recorded phone calls between former national security adviser Michael Flynn and a Russian official,” Politico reports.
“U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan said he accepted the argument recently made from federal prosecutors who defied his earlier request to release any recordings from December 2016 between Flynn and Sergey Kislyak, who at the time was the Russian ambassador to the U.S.”
“Rep. Steve King (R-IA), hellbent on making a congressional comeback, is vowing to look at all procedural options to force his way back onto the committees from which he was exiled,” Politico reports.
“But the Iowa Republican is finding little support from his colleagues for the doomed mission, which comes nearly six months after King was kicked off the panels for making racist remarks.”
Said King: “It was a political lynch mob. I had to let the blood cool. And the blood has now cooled, and now they don’t want to be faced with the reality of what they’ve done.”
Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent behind the Trump dossier. has agreed to be questioned by U.S. officials over his relationship with the FBI, the London Times reports.
Although Senate Republicans believe they have the votes to override a veto preventing President Trump from putting tariffs on Mexico, the president tweeted a quote from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy saying House Republicans will sustain a veto-proof majority for Trump’s tariffs on Mexico no matter what the Senate does.
Playbook: “As long as McCarthy and House Republicans have the president’s back, the Senate can gripe — but that’s it.”
Washington Post: “His promise to punish Mexico with escalating tariffs unless it controls what he calls the ‘invasion’ of migrants across the southern border is premised on a law that has never been used either as a tool of immigration policy or tariffs. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) mentions neither.”
Politico: “Officials in Mexico and Canada in recent days kicked into gear with playbooks they’ve each used repeatedly in navigating a fractious relationship with Trump over the past two years. They’re deploying lessons other nations have come to learn as well: stay calm, speak the American president’s language and find Trump-friendly voices who can lean on him to deescalate the tensions.”
“Both countries also have learned to lean on each other with an informal support network to plot strategy and shape a shared action plan to keep Trump’s America First approach from destroying America’s two allies next door.”
Said Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard: “What we are doing is, prepare and keep a strategy of how to coexist with what is sometimes unpredictable. That’s our obligation.”
A new Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll in Michigan finds pitted Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), a libertarian Republican who endorses impeaching President Trump, in a hypothetical three-way White House race against Trump and Joe Biden.
The survey found that Amash would draw nearly 10% of the vote in Michigan if he ran as a third-party Libertarian, while Biden received 45% and Trump 39%. Six percent were undecided.
Amash basically reduces Biden’s lead if he’s on the ballot: In a traditional head-to-head match-up, Biden led Trump by 12 percentage points, but the lead narrows to 6 percentage points when Amash is included in the field.
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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