President Trump falsely claimed that he has the “highest poll numbers in the history of the Republican Party.”
He added: “That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. There must be something wrong, please recheck that poll!”
Trump’s other tweets this morning included jabs at Michael Cohen and threats to shutdown down the government if Congress does not meet to his immigration demands.
An internal memo says the DNC has reached out to 30 million voters so far and acquired 94 million cell phone numbers of registered voters ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
Axios: “There are only 100 days until the election. Reaching voters where they are —on cell phones, not landlines — and connecting with new voters will be crucial to Democrats’ efforts in November and looking ahead to the 2020 presidential election.”
New York Times: “As scrutiny of the couple often referred to as Javanka became increasingly intense during the president’s first year, Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump seemed to retreat from public view, and after several of their allies in the White House departed, there was a near-constant stream of questions about whether they would follow.”
“But as one staff member after another has disappointed him and has departed or been dispatched, Mr. Trump has retreated into the familiarity of his family — his daughter, above all, and eventually, her husband. As Mr. Trump, cut off from dissenting voices and convinced of his own popularity, has become more emboldened, so have his daughter and son-in-law.”
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“A network of secret-money nonprofit groups has spent millions of dollars attacking swing-seat House Republicans on health care and taxes, quietly becoming one of the biggest players in the 2018 political landscape,” Politico reports.
“The groups have local members and names like Floridians for a Fair Shake, Michigan Families for Economic Prosperity and North Carolinians for a Fair Economy. But they are all linked to one obscure nonprofit in downtown Washington, D.C.: the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which has funneled millions of dollars to progressive causes in recent years and set up each of the new groups, according to D.C. corporation records.”
“The Trump administration is urging American-backed Afghan troops to retreat from sparsely populated areas of the country, officials said, all but ensuring the Taliban will remain in control of vast stretches of the country,” the New York Times reports.
“The approach is outlined in a previously undisclosed part of the war strategy that President Trump announced last year… It is meant to protect military forces from attacks at isolated and vulnerable outposts, and focuses on protecting cities such as Kabul, the capital, and other population centers.”
“A black man yelled at former White House press secretary Sean Spicer in a bookstore and accused Spicer of calling him a racial slur when they were students at a prep school decades ago,” the AP reports.
Said the man: “You don’t remember that you tried to fight me? But you called me a (N-word) first.”
A security guard led the man away as he kept talking: “I was 14 then. I was a scared kid then, Sean. I’m not scared to fight you now.”
The Newport Daily News has the incident on video.
Rudy Giuliani signaled that President Trump and his legal team are severing ties to Michael Cohen, Politico reports.
Said Giuliani: “We have complained to them that he’s violated the attorney client privilege, publicly and privately.”
“Giuliani confirmed the two sides have ended their joint defense agreement to share information.”
“The lawyer nominated to run the Superfund toxic cleanup program is steeped in the complexities of restoring polluted rivers and chemical dumps. He spent more than a decade on one of the nation’s most extensive cleanups, one involving Dow Chemical’s sprawling headquarters in Midland, Mich,” the New York Times reports.
“But while he led Dow’s legal strategy there, the chemical giant was accused by regulators, and in one case a Dow engineer, of submitting disputed data, misrepresenting scientific evidence and delaying cleanup, according to internal documents and court records as well as interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the project.”
Stan Collender: “When the House reconvenes, the GOP plans to devote a significant amount of the limited time it has left before fiscal 2019 begins to three tax cut bills that have no chance of being enacted any time soon because…wait for it…the Republican-controlled Senate has already said it’s not interested.”
“And none of this even begins to anticipate what the House Republicans who are running for reelection and think they will need to energize the Trump base will do in September as the Manafort trial and Cohen investigations continue and as the Mueller probe moves forward.”
“In other words, this year’s legislative crunch time is about to get very real but House Republicans have little leadership, no plan, a very divided caucus, are very likely to be distracted and are relying on a notoriously unreliable Donald Trump to do the right thing.”
“This is almost a textbook definition of political and legislative chaos.”
“Former Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson is considering jumping into the race for the U.S. Senate in New Mexico, raising the profile of a race that Democrats seeking to capture the majority in Congress had seen as a safe seat,” the AP reports.
Said consultant Ron Nielson: “He is weighing it over right now. He doesn’t want to get into a race he can’t win.”
“If Johnson, 65, enters the race, he would go against incumbent Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Mick Rich (R) in November.”
Arizona Republic: “Trump agreed to pose for a photo with Ward during the December 2017 visit, but specifically asked that it not be shared, according to a White House official who witnessed the brief exchange but is not authorized to speak publicly about it.”
“Ward… has been seeking the president’s endorsement since the earliest days of her campaign; she also failed to capture Trump’s endorsement during her unsuccessful 2016 primary challenge of U.S. Sen. John McCain. For nearly a year, Ward has touted a tweet in which Trump invoked her name while slamming U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, who is retiring.”
“President Trump’s appointees in the health department have deleted positive references to Obamacare, altered a report that undermined the administration’s positions on refugees and added anti-abortion language to the strategic plan — part of an ideological overhaul of the agency’s research office,” Politico reports.
“While every administration puts its imprint on the executive branch and promotes ideas that advance its own agenda, this one has ventured several steps further — from scrubbing links to climate change studies from an Environmental Protection Agency website to canceling an Interior Department study on coal mining risks and suppressing reports on water contamination and the dangers of formaldehyde.”
“Inside the Health and Human Services policy research shop, staffers say the political pressures to tailor facts to fit Trump’s message have been unprecedented.”
Former Trump lawyer Jay Goldberg tore into Rudy Giuliani on CNN saying he is seriously hurting the president’s case against Michael Cohen.
Said Goldberg: “I knew as soon as Giuliani spoke that he was damaging Trump’s case immeasurably. It ranks near 100 in terms of damage.”
Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell joins Chris Riback on this episode to help us better understand Trumponomics — and whether bad economics might just be good politics.
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Thanks, as always, to the Cook Political Report for sponsoring this episode.
“Campaigns, political parties and outside groups have booked or aired more than $1 billion in television advertising, months before voters head to the polls in November in what is likely to become the most expensive midterm election campaign in U.S. history,” The Hill reports.
“President Trump chaired a meeting Friday of his most senior national security advisers to discuss the administration’s effort to safeguard November’s elections from Russian interference, the first such meeting he’s led on the matter, but issued no new directives to counter or deter the threat,” the Washington Post reports.
“The meeting, which lasted less than an hour, covered all the activities by federal agencies to help state and local election officials, and to investigate and hold accountable Russian hackers seeking to undermine American democracy.”
“State-sponsored Russian hackers appear far more interested this year in demonstrating that they can disrupt the American electric utility grid than the midterm elections,” the New York Times reports.
”Despite attempts to infiltrate the online accounts of two Senate Democrats up for re-election, intelligence officials said they have seen little activity by Russian military hackers aimed at either major American political figures or state voter registration systems.”
“President Trump said Friday that he plans to spends almost all of his time this fall campaigning for the most vulnerable Republican congressional candidates in the midterm elections, a strategy that would have him in many districts where endangered lawmakers in his own party regard him as a liability,” the New York Times reports.
Said Trump: “I am going to work very hard. I’ll go six or seven days a week when we’re 60 days out, and I will be campaigning for all of these great people that do have a difficult race, and we think we’re going to bring them over the line.”
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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