Playbook: “Chris McDaniel (R), the GOP state senator who challenged Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) in 2014, told us that he has had several conversations with Steve Bannon about his political future over the last month, including meetings at Breitbart’s headquarters on Capitol Hill… McDaniel has been toying with primarying Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS).”
McDaniel said Bannon told him he would “love to see me enter the U.S. Senate race, and that he’ll support me in whatever race I would run.”
Washington Post: “Most days bring another round, often at dawn, like plot points in a 24-7 miniseries. In just the past few weeks, Trump has started, without any clear provocation, fights with football players who kneel during the national anthem, departments stores that declare ‘happy holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas,’ and late-night television hosts for their ‘unfunny and repetitive material.'”
“Then there are the individual targets: Clinton, of course, but also ‘Liddle’ Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, North Korea’s ‘Little Rocketman’ Kim Jong Un, ESPN anchor Jemele Hill, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), and a shifting array of reporters, newspapers and networks he labels as the ‘fake news.'”
“Although the targets often appear tangential, if not contradictory, to his governing priorities, both the president and his senior aides see them as central to his political strategy. In each instance, the combat allows Trump to underline for his core supporters the populist promise of his election: to challenge the power of political elites and those who have unfairly benefited from their ‘politically correct’ vision.”
Mike Allen: Trump’s alternative reality.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told President Trump that Steve Bannon’s midterm insurgency was detrimental to tax reform and other key elements of the administration’s agenda, the Washington Examiner reports.
“McConnell emphasized that Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, was undermining the president’s agenda with plans to recruit and finance primary challenges against Republicans who are some of his most reliable supporters in the Senate.”
Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) told CNN he stands by his blistering criticism of President Trump.
Said Corker: “My thoughts were well thought out. Look, I didn’t just blurt them out.”
He added: “I’ve had private dinners, I’ve had private phone calls, I’ve tried to intervene on topics that I thought things were going in a different direction and are not going to be good for our country. This is not a new thing, it’s been building for some time. And it’s a pattern that I think we’ve fought and expressed for some period of time.”
“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”
— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), in a speech at the 2017 Liberty Medal ceremony.
“President Trump convened his cabinet on Monday in the hopes of kick-starting his stalled domestic policy agenda and complained that Democrats in Congress are obstructing his efforts on tax reform, health care and the confirmation of judicial nominees,” the New York Times reports.
Said Trump: “The Democrats have terrible policy. They are very good at, really, obstruction.”
He also lashed out at “some Republicans” in the Senate, members he accused of refusing to go along with their party.
President Trump urged Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) “to seek out an Obamacare deal with Democrats — encouragement that might help sway Republicans who are skeptical of a bipartisan agreement,” Politico reports.
“Alexander said Trump told him by phone Oct. 14 he’d like to see a bill that funds the Obamacare cost-sharing subsidies that he abruptly cut off last week. In return, he wants to see ‘meaningful flexibility for the states in providing more choices.'”
“Friends say President Trump has grown frustrated that his greatness is not widely understood, that his critics are fierce and on TV every morning, that his poll numbers are both low and ‘fake,’ and that his White House is caricatured as adrift,” Politico reports.
“So on Monday, the consummate salesman—who has spent his 71 years selling his business acumen, golf courses, sexual prowess, luxury properties, and above all, his last name—gave the Trump White House a Trump-sized dose of brand enhancement.”
“With both the Roosevelt Room and Rose Garden as backdrops, he mixed facts and mirage, praise and perfidy in two head-spinning, sometimes contradictory performances designed to convince supporters and detractors alike that everything’s terrific, moving ahead of schedule and getting even better. His opponents were cast as misguided, deluded or even unpatriotic.”
President Trump falsely asserted that Barack Obama and other presidents did not contact the families of American troops killed in duty, the New York Times reports.
Said Trump: “If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate.”
“Mr. Trump’s assertion belied a long record of meetings Mr. Obama held with the families of killed service people, as well as calls and letters. Mr. Obama regularly traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to greet the caskets of troops, a ritual that began early in his presidency before he decided to deploy 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.”
“The Canadian man who was held hostage with his family by the Taliban for five years thought his captors were kidding when they told him Donald Trump was president,” the New York Post reports.
Said Joshua Boyle: “It didn’t enter my mind that he was being serious.”
Coming soon: Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency by Corey Lewandowski and Dave Bossie.
President Trump said that he would try to talk his former top strategist, Steve Bannon, out of backing primary challenges against at least some incumbent Republican senators, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Said Trump: “Steve is doing what Steve thinks is the right thing. Some of the people that he may be looking at, I’m gonna see if we can talk him out of that.”
Jonathan Chait: “The last time Republicans had control of government, they explained that cutting taxes would not get in the way of fiscal responsibility. Not only would tax cuts produce faster growth, they argued, they would also force Congress to restrain spending. Their strategy utterly failed. Not only did the tax cuts fail to produce higher growth, they also failed to encourage spending restraint…”
“And so there they are, back to the exact same policy they tried in 2001: Pass a huge tax cut and hope somehow it leads to cutting spending. That this policy is now being carried out by the same people who rose to power by denouncing the failure of the exact same policy last time tells you everything you need to know about the state of economic policy thought in the Republican Party now.”
A North Korean official reaffirmed Pyongyang’s commitment to developing a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching “all the way to the East coast of the mainland U.S.,” telling CNN that the rogue nation is currently not interested in diplomacy with the U.S. until it achieves that goal.
President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “held a surprise press conference following their lunch meeting at the White House Monday,” Axios reports.
Said Trump: “McConnell and I have been friends for a long time. We’re probably now, despite what you read, closer than ever before.”
However, earlier the New York Times reports Trump “offered support to Stephen Bannon, his former White House adviser, who has declared political war against members of the Republican establishment, including several senators like McConnell.”
Former Gov. Phil Bredesen (D), the last Democrat to win a statewide race in Tennessee, is considering a bid to succeed retiring Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) in the U.S. Senate, the AP 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.