A new AP-NORC poll finds 65% of Americans think President Trump “doesn’t have much respect for the country’s democratic institutions and traditions or has none at all. Just a third of Americans, or 34%, thinks he has a great deal or even a fair amount of respect for them.”
Overall, 64% disapprove and just 35% approve of his job performance.
Jonathan Swan: “Republicans are seizing on a familiar — and for them, distressing — pattern: when President Trump applies unconventional or inappropriate pressure to ‘independent’ public officials, his intervention is often followed by damaging leaks.”
“About an hour after the Washington Post broke the story Wednesday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, I started hearing from Republicans who are starting to draw a straight line from Trump’s undisciplined venting to damaging leaks.”
Said one GOP operative close to the White House: “Leak was probably a response to stories about POTUS firing Mueller. Can’t fire him now.”
Mike Allen notes that with the Washington Post bombshell report that the obstruction probe is in full swing, White House officials and Republicans sweating profusely for several reasons:
Also troubling: “Any obstruction probe requires context, which means investigators digging into the finances of Flynn, Trump and Jared Kushner. This is the phase of the probe many Republicans have always feared most.”
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A new Gallup survey finds just 41% of Republicans say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S., down 17 percentage points since last month.
Overall U.S. satisfaction dropped to 24%, down seven percentage points.
Rick Klein: “A baseball game that literally pits the red team against the blue team has a chance to be more than that. But it’s only a chance, and it’s a fleeting one, if history is any guide. Tragedies tend to quiet politics, making once-urgent arguments seem petty, and serving as reminders of common bonds and shared commitments. That’s particularly true when service itself is under attack. But does anyone believe members of Congress will be applauding for the other side next week?”
“It’s not hard – or encouraging – to figure out what happens from here, in part because it started happening almost immediately. Political statements are made (this is politics, after all); someone will be accused of politicizing tragedy; everyone will be accused of politicizing tragedy; Democrats and Republicans will return to their respective dugouts.”
Los Angeles Times: “The attack almost seemed a natural, if sick, extension of the virulence that surrounds the country’s increasingly tribal politics.”
The Senate voted overwhelmingly “to allow Congress to block any efforts by the president to scale back sanctions against Russia, and to strengthen those sanctions in retaliation for Moscow’s alleged interference in the 2016 election and its actions in Syria,” the Washington Post reports.
“The vote of 97 to 2 is a sharp rebuke to President Trump’s posture on Russia and his resistance to the intelligence community’s assessment that the country was behind efforts to influence the election he won… Trump has repeatedly and openly doubted the intelligence community’s finding that Russia meddled in the presidential election. While his administration has not ordered a rollback of any existing sanctions, lawmakers have been concerned about his conciliatory, and at times even forgiving, rhetoric about Russia, as well as recent moves to give Moscow back control over two diplomatic compounds that the Obama administration reclaimed in late December.”
“Why do we have a Second Amendment? It’s not to shoot deer. It’s to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical!”
— Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), on Twitter, June 23, 2016.
“The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice,” the Washington Post reports.
“The move by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Trump’s own conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates.”
“Trump had received private assurances from former FBI Director James Comey starting in January that he was not personally under investigation. Officials say that changed shortly after Comey’s firing.”
John Cassidy: “Trump isn’t merely enabling the Republican right; with his daily pratfalls and incendiary statements, he is also drawing attention away from the Party’s policy initiatives. Imagine for a moment if a more normal Republican—a Marco Rubio or a Jeb Bush or a John Kasich—were in the White House. With no James Comey, Robert Mueller, or Jeff Sessions to chew on, the news networks would surely be focusing on health-care reform and the scandalous manner in which the G.O.P. is trying to ram through a piece of legislation that would affect a sixth of the American economy and cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their insurance.”
“Small wonder, then, that so many Republicans are willing to kiss Trump’s ring. He’s given the G.O.P. what it has long wanted: a White House willing to go along with its reactionary agenda, and a President who provides it with political cover. As long as Trump sticks to his side of the deal, he can expect to receive the loyalty he so prizes.”
Ryan Lizza: “In his letter announcing Comey’s dismissal, Trump made a point of advertising these conversations with Comey, noting, ‘I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.’ When Comey went public, last week, with his account of his interactions with Trump, the President’s defenders pounced on the fact that Comey corroborated Trump’s claim.”
“The irony in all of this is that Trump’s actions may very likely have caused him to personally come under investigation.”
“There is some public evidence that Mueller is taking the obstruction accusation seriously. He asked for and received all the memos that Comey wrote memorializing Comey’s interactions with Trump. Why would Mueller need those unless he was looking into possible obstruction?”
Gabriel Sherman: “As Fox News moves further into the post–Roger Ailes era, the network is shedding one of its most iconic elements. According to network executives, Fox News has abandoned the marketing slogan ‘Fair & Balanced.’ The decision was made last August after Ailes’s ouster by Fox News co-president Jack Abernethy, because the phrase had ‘been mocked,’ one insider said. Another executive explained that the tagline was ‘too closely associated with Roger.’ Fox executives have been instructed by management to market the network by its other tagline: ‘Most Watched. Most Trusted.'”
“It is hard to overstate the significance of what shedding ‘Fair & Balanced’ means for Fox News. (It would be like the New York Times giving up ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print.’) Ailes invented the slogan when he launched the network in 1996, and over the years it became a quasi-religious doctrine among Fox’s anchors and viewers.”
A new Quinnipiac poll finds Gov. Chris Christie (R) now has the lowest approval rating of any New Jersey governor in recorded history, 15% to 81%.
“Qatar will sign a deal to buy up to 36 F-15 jets from the U.S. even as a political crisis in the Gulf leaves the Middle East nation isolated by its neighbors and criticized by President Trump for supporting terrorism,” Bloomberg reports.
“Qatar’s defense minister will meet with Pentagon chief Jim Mattis on Wednesday to seal the agreement.”
Ahead of next week’s special election, Politico reports that Georgia’s voting systems “are uniquely vulnerable, security researchers say—and the state has ignored efforts to fix the problem.”
“A 29-year-old former cybersecurity researcher with the federal government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Lamb, who now works for a private internet security firm in Georgia, wanted to assess the security of the state’s voting systems… But his curiosity turned to alarm when he encountered a number of files, arranged by county, that looked like they could be used to hack an election. Lamb wrote an automated script to scrape the site and see what was there, then went off to lunch while the program did its work. When he returned, he discovered that the script had downloaded 15 gigabytes of data.”
“Not with respect to the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment right to bear arms is to ensure that we always have a republic. And as with any constitutional provision in the Bill of Rights, there are adverse aspects to each of those rights that we enjoy as people. And what we just saw here is one of the bad side effects of someone not exercising those rights properly. But we’re not going to get rid of freedom of speech because some people say some really ugly things that hurt other people’s feelings. We’re not going to get rid of Fourth Amendment search and seizure rights because it allows some criminals to go free who should be behind bars.”
— Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), quoted by Axios, when asked if today’s shooting changes his mind about gun control laws.
First Read: “Democrats start out with the advantage in this fall’s Northam-vs.-Gillespie general election. One, turnout suggests Democrats have enthusiasm on their side: There were more than 540,000 votes in the two-person Dem race, while the three-person GOP contest had 366,000 votes. (That turnout disparity looks like New Jersey, not Virginia.) Two, Democrats today hold a unity event with Northam and Perriello, while Republicans aren’t unified. ‘There is one word you will never hear from me, and that’s ‘unity,’’ Stewart told supporters, per the Washington Post. And three, President Trump’s job approval rating in Virginia is in the 30s. Add them all up, and you’d rather be Ralph Northam than Ed Gillespie, although we still have five months to go.”
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) was shot at a practice for a congressional baseball game, CNN reports.
“Scalise appears to have been shot in the hip and it appears two Capitol Hill police agents were shot.”
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) told the AP that Scalise “crawled into the outfield, leaving a trail of blood.”
The New York Times reports that about 50 shots were fired.
“At times there could be a good shutdown, at times there may not be a good shutdown. There could be reasons at various times why that is the right outcome.”
— Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, quoted by The Hill, when asked about President Trump’s tweet earlier this year that “Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!”
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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