“Nearly nine months after the conclusion of the 2016 general election and despite months of hesitation, Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) has finally confirmed that he voted for Donald Trump for president,” the Nevada Independent reports.
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Trump Under Intense Pressure to Fire Bannon
New York Times: “Rupert Murdoch has repeatedly urged President Trump to fire him. Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s former communications director, thrashed him on television as a white nationalist. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, refused to even say he could work with him.”
“For months, Mr. Trump has considered ousting Stephen Bannon, the White House chief strategist and relentless nationalist who ran the Breitbart website and called it a ‘platform for the alt-right.’ Mr. Trump has sent Mr. Bannon to a kind of internal exile, and has not met face-to-face for more than a week with a man who was once a fixture in the Oval Office, according to aides and friends of the president.”
“So far, Mr. Trump has not been able to follow through — a product of his dislike of confrontation, the bonds of a foxhole friendship forged during the 2016 presidential campaign and concerns about what mischief Mr. Bannon might do once he leaves the protective custody of the West Wing.”
Trump Aide Repeatedly Tried to Set Up Russia Meetings
Just after Donald Trump named his campaign foreign policy team in March 2016, new adviser George Papadopoulos offered to set up “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,” telling them his Russian contacts “welcomed the opportunity,” according to internal campaign emails read to the Washington Post.
“The proposal sent a ripple of concern through campaign headquarters in Trump Tower… But Papadopoulos, a campaign volunteer with scant foreign policy experience, persisted. Between March and September, the self-described energy consultant sent at least a half-dozen requests for Trump, as he turned from primary candidate to party nominee, or for members of his team to meet with Russian officials.”
“Papadopoulos emerges from the sample of emails as a new and puzzling figure in the examination of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian officials and their proxies during the 2016 election, now the subject of a special-counsel investigation.”
If Trump Goes Down, So Will Pence
Ronald Klain: “This is the vice-presidential prisoner’s dilemma: There is no distance he can achieve, no political support he can muster, no congressional chits he can collect, no donor base he can assemble that can survive the fallout from a failed presidency. A vice president is either implicated as being in the loop or looks foolish if he insists that he was out of it. There’s too much video of any vice president praising, promoting and partnering with his boss to say, ‘President who?'”
“A vice president’s record behind the scenes in the administration is, by definition, obscure to voters. As a result, for better or worse, a vice president must run on the president’s record: If Trump’s record is bad enough to prevent him from running in 2020, it will flatten Pence as well.”
“If Pence seeks the presidency in 2020 because Trump has been forced out of office, or pressured not to run for reelection due to unpopularity, he will suffer the same fate as Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Ford in 1976, Walter Mondale in 1984 and Dan Quayle in 2000: defeat. Nothing Pence is doing now will break him out of a political imprisonment of his own creation.”
Did Trump Finally Go Too Far?
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Conway Trying to Sell Her Consulting Firm
Kellyanne Conway has taken steps to sell her political consulting firm, Bloomberg reports.
“Conway received the right to defer capital gains taxes for her sale of the Polling Company/Woman Trend… She had valued her 100 percent stake in the firm at between $1 million and $5 million on a personal financial disclosure form that the White House released in March.”
Adelson Comes Out In Support of McMaster
“Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson has come out in support of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, disavowing a campaign against McMaster by a group Adelson funds, the Zionist Organization of America,” according to Jonathan Swan.
“Adelson is one of the biggest financial donors in Republican politics, and his influence over national security and Israel-related matters is substantial. His is a voice listened to by President Trump and other senior White House officials like Jared Kushner.”
Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism
Kristen Ghodsee: “A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women. Researchers marveled at this disparity in reported sexual satisfaction, especially since East German women suffered from the notorious double burden of formal employment and housework. In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper.”
“This generational divide between daughters and mothers who reached adulthood on either side of 1989 supports the idea that women had more fulfilling lives during the Communist era. And they owed this quality of life, in part, to the fact that these regimes saw women’s emancipation as central to advanced ‘scientific socialist’ societies, as they saw themselves.”
How Trump Built His Base
John Podhoretz: “For years, under the radar and likely with the guidance of his political guru Roger Stone, Trump built a powerful and loyal following through what could be called—yes, I know this is going to sound condescending and elitist, but what can I say, I’m condescending and elitist—the proletarian media.”
“I’m talking about Alex Jones and Infowars, the conspiracy-theory radio-show/website on which Trump has appeared for years; the radio show has 2 million listeners a week, and Jones was said in 2011 to have a larger online presence than Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. I’m talking about the WWE, which televises wrestling and which, in 2014, could claim a weekly audience of 15 million and on whose programs Trump intermittently served as a kind of Special Guest Villain in the manner of a villain on the 1960s Batman show. I’m talking about American Media, the company that owns the National Enquirer, the Star, the Sun, and the Weekly World News run by Trump’s close friend David Pecker; the combined weekly circulation of its publications is well in excess of 2 million. Trump helped make the birther issue a major one for a month in 2011 by talking about it on Meet the Press and Good Morning America, on network television. But he was surfacing an issue that had been roiling in the proletarian media, stirred and shaken constantly by his political guru, Roger Stone.”
“Talk about flying under the radar. These media institutions have no cultural purchase whatsoever except for the contempt they breed… By paying them heed, Trump was not only feeding his inexhaustible maw for attention. He was reaching a group of disaffected Americans entirely on the margins of American life, politically and culturally and organizationally.”
Trump May Pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio
President Trump told Fox News that he may soon issue a pardon for Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who was found guilty two weeks ago of criminal contempt for defying a state judge’s order to stop traffic patrols targeting suspected undocumented immigrants.
Said Trump: “I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio. He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He’s a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him.”
Trump said the pardon “could happen in the next few days.”
Trump’s Approval Sinks to a New Low
The Gallup tracking poll shows President Trump’s approval rate at 34%, a new low, and his disapproval rate at 61%, a new high.
For members: An Ugly Gallup Milestone for Trump
‘Kid Rock’ May Be Ineligible for Michigan Ballot
“Kid Rock” may not be allowed to appear on the ballot for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Nathan Gonzales reports.
Instead, Robert Ritchie would probably have to use his real name and not his stage name.
Trump Finally Condemns White Supremacist Violence
President Trump bowed to overwhelming pressure that he personally condemn white supremacists who incited bloody demonstrations in Charlottesville over the weekend — labeling their racists views “evil” after two days of equivocal statements, the New York Times reports.
Said Trump: “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
FBI Warned of Growing Threat from White Supremacists
“The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in May warned that white supremacist groups had already carried out more attacks than any other domestic extremist group over the past 16 years and were likely to carry out more attacks over the next year,” according to an intelligence bulletin obtained by Foreign Policy.
“Even as President Trump continues to resist calling out white supremacists for violence, federal law enforcement has made clear that it sees these types of domestic extremists as a severe threat.”
De Blasio May Run for President
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio “is putting out feelers to run for president, spreading whispers that Bernie Sanders, 75, and Elizabeth Warren, 68, are too old,” the New York Post reports.
“De Blasio, 56, will claim he’s the rightful standard bearer for the progressive wing of the Democratic party.”
Said one Democratic insider: “He thinks he’s going to coast to re-election victory. His people are sending out overtures asking where he should go next and whom he should meet on a national level.”
Inside the Elizabeth Warren Merchandising Empire
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) “isn’t just a progressive icon, she’s a merchandising industry unto herself,” Politico reports.
“The presidential prospect is at the center of a sprawling business built around her appeal to liberals across the country — a reminder of the unabashed devotion she inspires on the left and the footprint she’ll cast in the 2020 Democratic primary.”
Bonus Quote of the Day
“I mean, quite frankly, I’ve been to these events, a lot of the KKK guys with their hats off look like they’re from the cast of Seinfeld. Literally they’re just Jewish actors. Nothing against Jews in general, but they are leftists Jews that want to create this clash and they go dress up as Nazis.”
— Alex Jones, quoted by Media Matters.
Macron’s Approval in France Falls to Trump Level
A new YouGov poll in France finds French president Emmanuel Macron’s approval rate at just 36%, just a few months after winning the election with 65% of the vote.
