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Many Still Believe the Trump Myth

January 20, 2019 at 3:10 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

A series of University of Maryland surveys find that large swaths of the American public believe the myth of Donald Trump being a self-made billionaire.

“Across three surveys of eligible voters from 2016 to 2018, we found that as many as half of all Americans do not know that he was born into a very wealthy family. And while Americans are divided along party lines in their assessment of Trump’s performance as president, misperceptions regarding his financial background are found among Democrats and Republicans.”

“The narrative of Trump as self-made is simply false. Throughout his life, the president has downplayed the role his father, real estate developer Fred Trump, played in his success, claiming it was ‘limited to a small loan of $1 million.’ That isn’t true, of course.”

Pompeo to Discuss Running for Kansas Senate Seat

January 20, 2019 at 2:27 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “is slated to meet with veteran Republican strategist Ward Baker on Sunday afternoon to discuss a possible 2020 run for the vacant Kansas Senate seat,” Politico reports.

“Pompeo and Baker are expected to talk about what a Senate campaign would entail. Baker has deep political experience, having served as National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director during the 2016 election cycle. During the 2018 midterms, he helped to spearhead Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn’s successful Senate bid. He is also close to McConnell.”

Mark Meadows Is Trump’s Closest Adviser

January 20, 2019 at 11:35 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Politico: “Four sources with knowledge of their relationship said Trump talks to Meadows more than he does with many of his senior aides. They sometimes spend an hour-plus on the phone together or speak more than once per day.”

Voters Not Blaming Democrats for Shutdown

January 20, 2019 at 11:34 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Playbook: “Democrats have been telling us that they are looking at polling that indicates they are hardly getting any blame for the shutdown. That could change soon if it looks like Republicans are making offers and Democrats are sitting pat.”

Bonus Quote of the Day

January 20, 2019 at 11:32 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“I don’t take him on his word on anything.”

— Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), quoted by CBS News, on President Trump’s proposal to end the government shutdown.

Trump Obsesses Over the Chyrons

January 20, 2019 at 11:09 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

More excerpts of Team of Vipers by former White House aide Cliff Sims, via Axios, on how President Trump watches TV:

“He consumed TV like the late Roger Ebert must have watched movies… He commented on the sets, the graphics, the wardrobe choices, the lighting, and just about every other visual component of a broadcast. Sure, he liked to hear pundits saying nice things about him or White House officials defending him from attacks, but everything came back to how does it look?”

“With that in mind, the most Trumpian tactic the comms team employed was arguing with TV networks about the ‘chyrons,’ the words displayed at the bottom of the screen that act as headlines for whatever the commentators are discussing.”

Said Trump: “People watch TV on mute, so it’s those words, those sometimes beautiful, sometimes nasty little words that matter.”

Trump Threatens to Increase Deportations

January 20, 2019 at 10:41 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“President Trump lit into Democrats — and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in particular — in a Sunday tweetstorm in which he appeared to threaten to increase deportations of undocumented immigrants living in the United States and defended his proposal to end the partial government shutdown,” NBC News reports.

He added: “Nancy Pelosi has behaved so irrationally & has gone so far to the left that she has now officially become a Radical Democrat. She is so petrified of the ‘lefties’ in her party that she has lost control . . . And by the way, clean up the streets in San Francisco, they are disgusting!”

Giuliani Admits Trump Tower Moscow Talks During Election

January 20, 2019 at 10:39 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Rudy Giuliani told NBC News that plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow remained an “active proposal” as late as November of 2016, leaving open the possibility that Trump’s orbit continued to pursue the business deal up until the presidential election, months later than previously known.

Said Giuliani: “It’s our understanding that it, that talks went on throughout 2016, not a lot of them… but the president can remember having conversations with Michael Cohen about it… Probably up to, could be up to as far as October, November.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told NBC News that this was “big news.”

Said Warner: “The Republican nominee was actively trying to do business in Moscow… and if those negotiations were ongoing up until the election, I think that’s a relevant fact for voters … it’s remarkable we are two years after the fact and just discovering it today.”

What Does Kirsten Gillibrand Stand For?

January 20, 2019 at 8:43 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Washington Post: “Gillibrand overhauled her political identity during this period, abandoning the conservative positions that made her popular upstate and embracing or even moving further left than the liberal consensus on guns, immigration, Wall Street and same-sex marriage. As the Democratic Party itself moved left, she staked out positions popular with the party’s swelling base of liberals, a posture most evident when she called for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She has voted against President Trump’s agenda more than any other senator.”

“Gillibrand’s evolution seemed to reach its apex last week when she introduced herself as a candidate for president and a fighter for liberal values. But her shift in views from a decade ago is already raising questions among Democrats and provoking attacks from Republicans eager to define her as a flip-flopper.”

“Experts who have followed Gillibrand’s rise said the impression that she has hair-trigger judgment and an overriding instinct to capitalize on the political moment could prove more problematic than any one shift on policy.”

Quote of the Day

January 20, 2019 at 8:15 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“I get the urge people will have after Trump. ‘Look at the chaos and the exhaustion: Wouldn’t it be better to go back to something more stable with somebody we know?’ But there’s no going back to a pre-Trump universe. We can’t be saying the system will be fine again just like it was. Because that’s not true; it wasn’t fine. Not if we could careen into this kind of politics.”

— South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), quoted by the Washington Post., warning Democrats not to look in the rearview mirror for solutions.

Trump’s Slippage In Support Is Real

January 20, 2019 at 8:10 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Bruce Gyory: “Trump’s job approval rating is down to 31 percent among independents in Gallup. His approval ratings in Rasmussen are down from the 48-49 percent range of late last year to the 43-44 percent level of the past week or so. The Marist data for PBS shows a drop of 10 percent in job approval among Republicans and a decline of 11 percent among white evangelicals and 17% among suburban men.”

“And Trump continues to enrage the Dem base while this erosion in his base continues to progress. Blue collar white men being turned off from Trump shouldn’t surprise anyone, for they know the difficulty of living paycheck to paycheck. This, plus the skew of the tax cut package, spells political trouble for Trump long term, especially if a slow down, much less a recession, looms in 2020.”

“As an aside, it’s fair to ask why hasn’t this decline in the polls registered more with pundits and pols. I wonder if it’s because Gallup is not doing daily tracking polls anymore? In any case, Trump’s decline in the polls is significant precisely because slow declines are like weight gain. The quick gain of 5 pounds on a vacation can be easily shed. The slower gain of 10 pounds over a long winter can be brutal to reverse. As can the slow and steady erosion of your political standing.”

Trump Touts Border Wall In City That Has None

January 19, 2019 at 10:37 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

President Trump “boasted to reporters about how well San Antonio’s border wall is working. But the Texas city is 150 miles from the Mexican border and has no wall,” the HuffPost reports.

Said Trump: “Everybody knows that walls work. You look at different places, they put up a wall, no problem. You look at San Antonio, you look at so many different places, they go from one of the most unsafe cities in the country to one of the safest cities, immediately, immediately.”

Trump Divides Republicans with New Border Proposal

January 19, 2019 at 10:31 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

President Trump “broke a fundamental rule of modern politics Saturday when he outlined a new plan to get his border wall and re-open the federal government: Never split your own party,” NBC News reports.

“The basic idea is to give 1 million immigrants — 700,000 so-called Dreamers who were brought to the country illegally as children and 300,000 refugees facing expiration of their ‘temporary protected status’ — a three-year shield from deportation in exchange for $5.7 billion in funding for the wall.”

“While Republican leaders on Capitol Hill praised his leadership, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, readily agreed to bring his proposal up for a vote on the floor next week, conservatives were quick to criticize the president for offering “amnesty” to undocumented immigrants.”

New York Times: “Immigrant advocates denounced it as cruel. The conservative right howled that it was amnesty.”

Rove Warns Senate GOP Not to Only Focus on Base

January 19, 2019 at 10:30 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Former White House political strategist Karl Rove warned Senate Republicans in a meeting this week not to become overly reliant on their conservative base as they head into what could be a tough 2020 presidential election,” The Hill reports.

Pelosi Rejects Trump’s Shutdown Proposal

January 19, 2019 at 4:00 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called reports of a deal to be proposed by President Trump to end a record-long partial government shutdown a “non-starter,” The Hill reports.

Said Pelosi: lDemocrats were hopeful that the President was finally willing to re-open government… Unfortunately, initial reports make clear that his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total, do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives.”

She added: “It is unlikely that any one of these provisions alone would pass the House, and taken together, they are a non-starter.”

BuzzFeed Doubles Down on Report

January 19, 2019 at 3:12 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

BuzzFeed News “has doubled down on their bombshell report” on President Trump purportedly directing Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, according to Mediaite.

From a statement: “As we’ve re-confirmed our reporting, we’ve seen no indication that any specific aspect of our story is inaccurate. We remain confident in what we’ve reported, and will share more as we are able.”

Democrats Dismiss Trump Shutdown Offer

January 19, 2019 at 2:53 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Even before President Trump’s shutdown remarks on Saturday, Democratic aides on the Hill were dismissing his planned shutdown compromise offer as inadequate, Axios reports.

Said one Democratic aide: “Dems were not consulted on this and have rejected similar overtures previously.”

Said another: “Similar inadequate offers from the Administration were already rejected by Democrats.”

New York Times: “Lawmakers also said Ms. Pelosi was livid about being forced to cancel a trip to Afghanistan and Brussels after the president denied her use of a military plane and then scuttled her attempt to fly commercially by publicly revealing her travel plans.”

Why Trump Is Ready to Compromise to End Shutdown

January 19, 2019 at 11:42 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

A source close to the negotiations told Jonathan Swan “the inflection point for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was the letter from Nancy Pelosi telling Trump not to deliver the State of the Union. McConnell had been saying all along that Pelosi and Trump needed to negotiate because one needed to put a bill on the House floor and one needed to sign it — two people with singular power.”

But after Pelosi’s letter, it became clear to McConnell she was “never going to get off her position and some other spark needed to happen.”

“McConnell told the president that it was his view that Pelosi was never going to move. She would and could not negotiate on border funding because her caucus, and Trump needed to be the one to put something forward he would sign so that McConnell would have the presidential backing to bring it to the floor.”