“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. Maybe I’ll have another five years. Maybe with the advances in oncology, they’ll find new treatments for my cancer that will extend my life. Maybe I’ll be gone before you hear this. My predicament is, well, rather unpredictable.”
— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), in the audio recording of his new book, The Restless Wave.
Susan Glasser: “This coming Monday, Putin, already Russia’s longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin, will be inaugurated to a new six-year term. In March, Trump defied his own advisers to congratulate Putin in a post-election phone call, then surprised them again by inviting Putin to Washington for a summit meeting. It seems implausible and politically insane to imagine that Trump would even consider a chummy one-on-one with Putin now, especially when the risks to Trump from the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s Russia ties appear so significant. And yet the invitation, I’m told, was real, and reflects the President’s strongly expressed personal preference.”
“Will Trump follow through with it—and add yet another high-drama plotline to the already oversubscribed Trump show?”
“The Missouri General Assembly has taken the historic step of calling itself back into special session to decide whether to impeach Gov. Eric Greitens (R),” the Kansas City Star reports.
“According to the petition signed by 138 House members and 29 senators — both more than the three-fourths required in each chamber to call a special session — lawmakers will consider the findings and recommendations of a House committee investigating Greitens, ‘including, but not limited to disciplinary actions against Gov. Eric R. Greitens.'”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “The unprecedented move comes a day after the House released a second scathing report on the governor and sets the state for the special session to start during the governor’s trial on felony invasion of privacy charges related to an extramarital affair he had in 2015.”
First Read: “Here’s a question to ponder: Who would you rather be right now — Republican Josh Hawley in Missouri’s Senate race or Democrat Phil Bredesen in Tennessee? If your answer is Bredesen (who has a slight lead in the polls) over Hawley (who’s essentially tied as Missouri looks to impeach the state’s GOP governor), then it’s not all that hard to see how Democrats could gain the net of two seats they need to win the Senate in November.”
Here’s our latest Top 10 Senate takeover list ranked in order of most likely to flip parties:
“So if the first two Senate races on our list flip parties (Nevada and Arizona) and nothing else does, then Democrats net their two-seat pickup. Ditto if just the first four seats (Nevada, Arizona, North Dakota, Tennessee) switch hands.”
The unemployment rate has dipped below 4% for the first time since 2000, CNN reports.
New York Times: “April marked the 91st consecutive month of job gains, far and away the longest streak of increases on record. The average monthly gain has declined each year since 2014, but that’s normal for an economy that’s been in recovery for such an extended period.”
Sacramento Bee: “An independent campaign committee supporting Republican businessman John Cox in the state’s gubernatorial race has launched a television advertisement playing off the #MeToo movement by comparing Democratic candidates Gavin Newsom and Antonio Villaraigosa with high-profile men who have been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women.”
“Newsom and Villaraigosa both admitted during their first mayoral terms to having affairs, and both publicly apologized. But it is misleading to equate consensual romantic relationships with allegations against other powerful men who have been accused in numerous cases of serial sexual harassment and misconduct.”
Rudy Giuliani told NBC News that President Trump “only recently found out that he reimbursed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 nondisclosure agreement with adult performer Stormy Daniels just days before the 2016 election.”
Said Giuliani: “I don’t think the president realized he paid him back for that specific thing until we made him aware of the paperwork.”
Giuliani said the president responded: “Oh my goodness, I guess that’s what it was for.”
Politico: “A web of new political action committees raised nearly $6 million in recent months under the guise of supporting police, veterans and cancer research. But nearly all the money has gone to their own vendors and staff, as opposed to those causes — hallmarks of so-called scam PACs.”
“Lewandowski in recent months has been encouraged to repair relationships with officials at the RNC, whose work he had previously trashed, in order to become more involved in the party’s 2018 strategy,” a source told BuzzFeed News.
“Lewandowski’s cameo at the Michigan rally was not a one-off, spontaneous event, according to a source close to the president who is involved in 2018 strategy. The plan is to have the former campaign manager travel more with the president for rallies ahead of November’s elections. He’s already made some appearances at events with Vice President Mike Pence, as he travels the country selling the tax code overhaul to voters.”
“President Trump’s new attorney, Emmet Flood, a veteran of the Clinton impeachment battles, is the leading candidate to replace the White House’s top lawyer,” the AP reports.
“The move would be an effort to prepare for the possibility that Democrats could regain control of the House after the November election and undertake new congressional investigations.”
Jonathan Swan: “As part of his exasperation with being handled, Trump has taken to telling friends that — like Lyndon Johnson — he doesn’t even need a chief.”
“Trump has never fully grasped the concept. Sources close to Trump repeat the cliché that he wants to run the White House like the Trump Organization — an unstructured family business where he woke most days unsure of what lay ahead, and ran his business like a series of jazz improv sets.”
“Back then, he spent his days on the phone, taking calls, receiving ideas, making decisions on pure gut instinct with a disdain for sophisticated data or prescriptions from consultants.”
Neil Cavuto slammed President Trump on Fox News for the president’s “pattern of false statements.”
“As Rudy Giuliani enters the center ring of the legal fight between President Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller, the former New York City mayor is already anticipating one possible battle – a subpoena for President Trump to testify,” ABC News reports.
Said Giuliani: “I think it’s 50/50. But I got to prepare for that 50 percent.”
From a Wall Street Journal editorial:
Mr. Trump’s public deceptions are surely relevant to his job as President, and the attempted cover-up has done greater harm than any affair would have. Mr. Trump asked Americans, not least his supporters, to believe his claims about the payments. They were false and conveniently so in putting the onus on Mr. Cohen. Now, as more of the story has emerged, he wants everyone to believe a new story that he could have told the first time.
Mr. Trump is compiling a record that increases the likelihood that few will believe him during a genuine crisis—say, a dispute over speaking with special counsel Robert Mueller or a nuclear showdown with Kim Jong Un. Mr. Trump should worry that Americans will stop believing anything he says.
Federal documents obtained by the Washington Post “reveal that it fit a pattern” by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt “of planning foreign travel with significant help from outside interests, including lobbyists, Republican donors and conservative activists.”
“After taking office last year, Pruitt drew up a list of at least a dozen countries he hoped to visit and urged aides to help him find official reasons to travel, according to four people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal agency deliberations. Pruitt then enlisted well-connected friends and political allies to help make the trips happen.”
“As of last week, the American public had been told that President Trump’s doctor had certified he would be the ‘the healthiest individual ever elected.’ That the president was happy with his legal team and would not hire a new lawyer. That he did not know about the $130,000 payment to a former pornographic film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him,” the New York Times reports.
“As of this week, it turns out that the statement about his health was not actually from the doctor but had been dictated by Mr. Trump himself. That the president has split with the leaders of his legal team and hired the same new lawyer he had denied recruiting. And that Mr. Trump himself financed the $130,000 payment intended to buy the silence of the actress known as Stormy Daniels.”
This ad from West Virginia U.S. Senate candidate Don Blankenship (R) is unreal.
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.