President Trump “will visit North Dakota on June 27 to campaign with GOP Rep. Kevin Cramer, a trip that could go a long way toward extinguishing tensions between the White House and the Senate hopeful,” Politico reports.
“Trump’s planned trip to Fargo, which the candidate announced on Friday on Twitter, came after Cramer took the unusual step of publicly attacking the administration for its seemingly warm treatment of his Democratic opponent, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.”
“Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director and acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has picked a deputy at the budget office, Kathy Kraninger, to succeed him at the consumer watchdog agency,” the New York Times reports.
“The choice of Ms. Kraninger, who oversees the preparation of the budgets for cabinet departments, generated immediate opposition, with critics pointing to her inexperience in consumer and financial services issues and her association with Mr. Mulvaney. She was selected over the objection of some White House officials, who argued that her nomination could founder.”
“President Trump’s lawyers and special counsel Robert Mueller are hurtling toward a showdown over a year-long investigation into the president’s conduct, with Mueller pushing to write up his findings by summer’s end and Trump’s lawyers strategizing how to rebut a report that could spur impeachment hearings,” the Washington Post reports.
“The confrontation is coming to a head as Trump and his allies ratchet up their attacks on the special counsel probe, seizing on a report released Thursday by the Justice Department’s inspector general that castigated FBI officials for their conduct during the 2016 Hillary Clinton email investigation.”
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“Federal prosecutors in New York revealed on Friday that they had pieced back together shredded documents found during search-warrant raids in April targeting Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal attorney,” Politico reports.
“Lawyers from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan also said they’d managed to download the contents of one old BlackBerry found in the raids, as well as messages from encrypted apps, including WhatsApp and Signal, found on newer phones. ‘Approximately 731 pages of messages, including call logs,’ were found on those apps and were turned over to Cohen’s lawyers on Friday to be reviewed for potentially privileged materials like attorney-client communications, as well as ‘highly personal’ information, prosecutors said.”
“Democrats will hold their 2020 national convention in mid-July — two weeks earlier than the party’s 2016 event, a move Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez says ‘will not only allow for a unified party, but will ensure that our nominee is in the strongest position to take on Donald Trump or whoever the Republican nominee may be,'” ABC News reports.
“The DNC has also narrowed down the potential sites for their 2020 conventions, and are considering eight potential host cities: Atlanta, Birmingham, Denver, Houston, Miami Beach, Milwaukee, New York and San Francisco.”
“It is a cancerous growth.”
— Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC), quoted by Rolling Stone, on Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican party.
“As the Trump administration imposes tariffs on allies and rivals alike, provoking broad retaliation, global commerce is suffering disruption, flashing signs of strains that could hamper economic growth. The latest escalation came on Friday, when President Trump announced fresh tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods, prompting swift retribution from Beijing,” the New York Times reports.
“As the conflict broadens, shipments are slowing at ports and airfreight terminals around the world. Prices for crucial raw materials are rising. At factories from Germany to Mexico, orders are being cut and investments delayed. American farmers are losing sales as trading partners hit back with duties of their own.”
Andrew Sullivan: “It seems so long ago now. Almost immediately after Trump took office, the denial of reality began. The president’s and his spokesperson’s insistence that his inauguration crowd was the biggest in history — and certainly bigger than Obama’s — belied what everyone could see with their bare, lyin’ eyes. At the time, I wondered whether the president was psychologically unwell. Three thousand lies later, we have a fuller picture.”
“The president believes what he wants to believe, creates a reality that fits his delusions, and then insists, with extraordinary energy and stamina, that his delusions are the truth. His psychological illness, moreover, is capable of outlasting anyone else’s mental health. Objective reality that contradicts his delusions is discounted as “fake news” propagated by “our country’s greatest enemy,” i.e., reporters. If someone behaved like this in my actual life, if someone kept insisting that the sea was red and the sky green, I’d assume they were a few sandwiches short of a picnic. It’s vital for us to remember this every day: Almost no one else in public life is so openly living in his own disturbed world.”
“I won’t miss a lot of things about this place. I think some people lose their soul here. This is a place that just sucks your soul. It takes everything from you.”
— Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID), quoted by Politico, on leaving the House of Representatives.
Jennifer Duffy: “As the political universe fixates on the battles for control of Congress, little attention is being paid to the 36 gubernatorial contests on the ballot in November. But, the stakes for control of governorships are high given that most of the Governors elected this year will be in office during redistricting in 2021. And, races are starting to become engaged and more interesting.”
“Governors’ races are not immune to mid-term election trends. Just as the party in power loses seats in the U.S. House and Senate, it also loses gubernatorial seats… Given the near historic number of seats Republicans hold and mid-term trends, it would seem that they have nowhere to go but down. They are playing defense this cycle, while Democrats are working to put as many GOP-held seats on the board as possible.”
The Cook Political Report has updated its race ratings.
Politico: “Weeks of escalating strain between press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and reporters boiled over in the White House briefing room on Thursday, as press members tussled with Sanders over immigration issues, she insulted the intelligence of one reporter, and another interrupted the proceedings with a dramatic outburst.
“Reporters have been growing frustrated with Sanders over the lack of briefings and their short length. In addition, Sanders repeatedly refused to discuss her past denials that President Donald Trump had dictated a false statement about why his son met with a Russian lawyer—since contradicted by the president’s lawyers—prompting reporters to openly question her credibility.”
“In March, ahead of foreign service officers’ performance reviews, or ‘employee evaluation reports,’ the State Department sent out an email, signed off on by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and recently shared with BuzzFeed News, reminding managers of best practices.”
“Most of the points were straightforward… Point nine, however, told raters and reviewers to ‘avoid gender normative language,’ and reads, ‘It is disappointing that a few raters last year mentioned female employees’ baking skills, which, among other things, wasted space that could have been used to discuss the employee’s precept-linked accomplishments and potential for future advancement.’”
Catherine Rampell has a great case study on how President Trump’s tariffs on washing machines isn’t working.
“When you aggregate all those price increases across the 10 million washers sold annually in the United States, consumers will collectively pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for each job supposedly created or saved. Which is many multiples of what factory workers typically earn.”
“And it’s not even clear how safe their jobs are at this point, given the rest of Trump’s trade agenda. After all, his tariffs didn’t stop with washing machines.”
In one of his most forceful attacks on the special counsel yet, Rudy Giuliani told the New York Daily News that the Russia investigation could get “cleaned up” with pardons from President Trump in light Paul Manafort being sent to jail.
Said Giuliani: “When the whole thing is over, things might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons.”
“The White House said Friday that President Trump supports House legislation that closely tracks his priorities on border security and limiting legal immigration, walking back comments he made on national television rejecting the GOP bill,” the Washington Post reports.
“The reversal came after hours of confusion on Capitol Hill, where Trump’s words roiled an already fragile internal debate between conservative and moderate Republicans in the House who have beeen trying to find an immigration compromise after months of false starts.”
“The Senate battleground map has shrunk dramatically in recent weeks — a net plus for Democrats but not enough to change their status as heavy underdogs to win the chamber in November,” Politico reports.
“Democratic incumbents look increasingly safe in four Rust Belt states President Trump carried in 2016 — Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Republicans are locked in a bitter primary until August. Both parties agree a core universe of states are truly in play: Republicans are targeting Democratic incumbents in Missouri, Indiana, Florida and North Dakota, while Democrats are contesting GOP-held seats in Nevada, Arizona and Tennessee. There is disagreement on how competitive West Virginia and Montana are.”
“A company run by former officials at Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm brought down by a scandal over how it obtained Facebook users’ private data, has quietly been working for President Trump’s 2020 re-election effort,” the Associated Press reports.
“A federal judge on Friday refused to grant Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, an immediate restraining order against the attorney for adult film actress Stormy Daniels,” Reuters reports.
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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