“Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends’ wives into bed.”
— From Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, page 23.
The book, due out next week, just hit #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
“Steve Bannon privately expressed ambivalence about Donald Trump as a presidential candidate before taking over his campaign, calling Trump a ‘narcissist’ and stating that he didn’t care if Trump won,” according to emails obtained by BuzzFeed News.
“The email exchange, during Bannon’s first run as executive chairman of Breitbart News, is of fresh relevance after President Trump lambasted his former chief strategist.”
Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) “has not yet repaid $84,000 in taxpayer money for a settlement reached with a former aide who accused him of sexual harassment and other improper conduct, despite the Texas Republican’s statement late last year saying he would do so,” CNN reports.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has filed a lawsuit challenging the authority of special counsel Robert Mueller, The Hill reports.
Axios: “Manafort wants a judge to rule that Mueller can’t bring charges on any matters unrelated to Russian election meddling, an outcome that could be of significant importance to other’s in Trump’s orbit.”
Gallup announced it is discontinuing its daily tracking poll of presidential approval, the latest cutback of the company’s public polling.
The poll will now be done weekly.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) told a Utah radio station that he would support Mitt Romney if he decides to enter the race to replace him when he retires at the end of his term.
Said Hatch: “I didn’t call him before I made this announcement, but I did call him a while back and explored with him what he had on his mind, and I won’t discuss what we discussed. But there’s no question that he loves Utah and wants to support Utah anyway he can. And I’m hopeful he’ll run, because he would be just fine. And he would certainly be somebody who I think could succeed me into the job.”
He added: “If Mitt decides to run, he knows he’ll have my support.”
President Trump released a blistering statement on former adviser Stephen Bannon’s comments in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:
Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.
Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.
Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.
John Cassidy: “This is yet another argument for engaging in the political process in 2018. But staying engaged isn’t the same thing as being permanently addled, obsessing over every offensive Trump tweet, or lumping everyone who voted for him in with alt-right activists and neo-Nazis.”
“It means exercising patience, ignoring some of his verbal provocations (many of which are attempts at distraction), pointing out that his policies are hurting the very people he is claiming to represent, and, above all, committing to beating him and his allies politically. As the recent elections in Alabama and Virginia demonstrated, Trump and the Republicans can be defeated at the ballot box. Surely, the best way to survive the second year of the Trump era is to work calmly and deliberately toward that objective.”
“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these Jumos up to his father’s office of the 26th floor is zero.”
— Steve Bannon, quoted in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:, about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer.
Trump has denied ever meeting the Russian participants.
Coming soon: Stand Up! How to Get Involved, Speak Out, and Win in a World on Fire by Gordon Whitman.
New York Magazine runs an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:
Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.
Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears—and not of joy.
There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.
Jonathan Swan: “Bannon’s comments won’t surprise anyone who’s spoken to him, but as on the record statements they are shocking sources close to the president. The White House was prepared for the Wolff book to be bad for them — and sources there have told me he spent a ton of time in the building visiting with Bannon — but they weren’t prepared for Bannon doing this.”
“Bannon touched the third rail of Trumpworld — going after the president’s blood family.”
Time: “Buried inside the mammoth $700 billion defense bill President Donald Trump signed last month is a relatively miniscule $25 million to fund development of a new road-mobile, ground-launched cruise missile. The program could be easily overlooked amid the Christmas list of military hardware the administration is buying, except for one thing: the missile is prohibited by a 30-year-old Cold War arms control agreement with Russia.”
“The research and development on the medium-range missile is intended to serve as a direct response to Russia’s deployment in recent years of its own treaty-busting missile. U.S. intelligence first recognized Moscow’s potential violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty when the Russian missile was still in test phase. The Obama administration worked unsuccessfully to persuade the Kremlin to stand down the program. Now the Trump administration has decided to respond with a missile of its own.”
Chris Liddell-Westefeld: “How did one of the whitest states in the union propel the first African-American president to the nomination? What about him captured Iowans’ imaginations? What compelled hundreds of young people to uproot their lives and join a movement considered so unlikely in its nascent stages? What was unique about his organization that future candidates, aides, volunteers, and activists can learn from?”
“I spent a year looking for answers to these questions… The Obama campaign billed itself as an organic effort whose success would be built upon bringing new voters into a caucus process that discouraged broad participation. I wanted to tell that story from the perspective of the bit players history usually forgets.”
“You realize where this is going. This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner… It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”
— Stephen Bannon, quoted in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House on the Russian investigation.
Steve Bannon has described the Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.
Said Bannon: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”
Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, “reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.”
“Two new Democrats will be sworn in to the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, narrowing the Republican majority and complicating efforts by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to advance the White House’s legislative agenda before the November midterm elections,” the AP reports.
“Doug Jones, the first Alabama Democrat elected to the Senate in a quarter century, is one of two new members who will take the oath of office on the Senate floor at noon. The other is Minnesota Lt. Gov. Tina Smith, who was appointed to replace Al Franken following the Democrat’s resignation over accusations of sexual misconduct. Smith also plans to compete in the special election taking place in November to complete the final two years of Franken’s term.”
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.