“This ain’t over. This ain’t over by a long shot.”
— Vice President Mike Pence, quoted by CNN, on the GOP promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
A Siberia Scrapbook
Russian president Vladimir Putin released photos from his summer vacation, which included snorkeling, fishing, spearfishing, and other outdoor activities.
Trump’s Base Is Shrinking In 4 Key States
Join now to continue reading.
Members get exclusive analysis, bonus features and no advertising. Learn more.
Republican Shadow Campaign for 2020 Takes Shape
President Trump’s first term “is ostensibly just warming up, but luminaries in his own party have begun what amounts to a shadow campaign for 2020 — as if the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue weren’t involved,” the New York Times reports.
“The would-be candidates are cultivating some of the party’s most prominent donors, courting conservative interest groups and carefully enhancing their profiles. Mr. Trump has given no indication that he will decline to seek a second term.”
“But the sheer disarray surrounding this presidency, the intensifying investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the plain uncertainty about what Mr. Trump will do in the next week, let alone in the next election, have prompted Republican officeholders to take political steps that are unheard-of so soon into a new administration.”
Miller Eyed as Possible Communications Director
White House aide Stephen Miller is under consideration for White House communications director, Mike Allen reports.
“The effort to find a Mooch successor is still in the name-gathering process, and Miller is not the top contender… But Steve Bannon likes the idea of Miller for the job, and Miller was the hero of the West Wing after he attacked CNN’s Jim Acosta as a ‘cosmopolitan’ for his views on immigration.”
“The super-key point: Trump cares primarily about how people perform on TV. He’s totally uninterested in the behind-the-scenes, unglamorous planning work of a comms director.”
Ryan Opposes Trump’s Immigration Plan
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) “cautioned he has yet to fully review the proposal and said he does want to overhaul the immigration system to focus on economic needs like dairy farms and research and engineering work. But he questioned the wisdom of actually cutting the number of immigrants entering the United States,” the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.
Said Ryan: “I just think arbitrary cuts to legal immigration don’t take into effect the economy’s needs as the boomers are retiring. With baby boomers leaving the workforce, we’re still going to have labor shortages in certain areas and that is where a well-reformed legal immigration system should be able to make up the difference.”
Keeping Trump’s Attention Is a Challenge
Washington Post: “In a disorderly West Wing in which decisions are evaluated not by ideology but by their impact on the Trump brand and their fealty to the president’s campaign-trail promises, McMaster has struggled to become a dominant foreign policy force… Among his biggest challenges was holding the attention of the president… Trump had little time for in-depth briefings on Afghanistan’s history, its complicated politics or its seemingly endless civil war.”
“Even a single page of bullet points on the country seemed to tax the president’s attention span on the subject.”
Said one Trump confidant: “I call the president the two-minute man. The president has patience for a half-page.”
Clinton Begins Hiring for New ‘Resistance’ PAC
BuzzFeed: “Hillary Clinton has hired two political operatives from her 2016 presidential campaign to help manage Onward Together, the project she founded this spring with former governor Howard Dean to fund and support a coalition of Democratic groups led by activists and organizers. The new additions, Emmy Ruiz and Adam Parkhomenko, held central roles on Clinton’s campaign.”
“Clinton’s new group, registered in May as a 501(c)4 organization with an affiliated super PAC, is working to establish a small but diverse cooperative of about 10 to 12 grassroots efforts, each one focused on a different area of the energy and activism set off by Donald Trump’s election and presidency.”
Run for Something
Out next month: Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself by Amanda Litman.
Bonus Quote of the Day
“I choose not to dwell on situations where we come up a little bit short.”
— Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), quoted by the AP, on his party’s failed health care bill.
Is Trump’s Presidency Effectively Over?
Jonathan Chait: “Barring resignation or removal from office — which would require the vote of a House majority plus two-thirds of the Senate — we are stuck with a delegitimized president serving out the remaining seven-eighths of his term. Politically gridlocked presidencies have become normal, but for the office to be occupied by a man whose own party elites doubt his functional competence and even loyalty is, to borrow a term, unpresidented. Trump’s obsession with humiliation and dominance has left him ill-prepared to cope with high-profile failure. He seems unlikely to content himself with quiet, incremental bureaucratic reform.”
“And yet it is difficult to see what Trump can do to reverse the situation. His next major domestic-agenda item, a regressive tax cut, is highly unpopular. He has inherited peace and prosperity. Nobody in the administration has been indicted. It is far easier to imagine conditions changing for the worse than the better.”
Trump Tests a Nation’s Capacity for Outrage
New York Times: “After six months in office, Mr. Trump has crossed so many lines, discarded so many conventions, said and done so many things that other presidents would not have, that he has radically shifted the understanding of what is standard in the White House. He has moved the bar for outrage. He has a taste for provocation and relishes challenging Washington taboos. If the propriety police tut tut, he shows no sign of concern.”
“After all, this is a president who refused to release his tax returns or divest from his private businesses, who put his son-in-law and daughter on the White House staff, who accused his predecessor of illegally tapping his phones without proof, who fired the F.B.I. director leading an investigation into the president’s associates and who has now undercut his ‘beleaguered’ attorney general in public. When he talked politics, jabbed the news media and told stories about Manhattan cocktail parties before tens of thousands of children at the nonpartisan National Scout Jamboree here in West Virginia on Monday, it was hardly surprising.”
Fox News Host Sent Lewd Text Messages
“Eric Bolling, a longtime Fox News host, sent an unsolicited photo of male genitalia via text message to at least two colleagues at Fox Business and one colleague at Fox News,” a dozen sources told HuffPost.
“Recipients of the photo confirmed its contents to HuffPost, which is not revealing their identities. The women, who are Bolling’s current and former Fox colleagues, concluded the message was from him because they recognized his number from previous work-related and informal interactions.”
Soft Money Is Back In Full Force
Politico: “Here’s how this shell game works: Top donors spent the 2016 election cycle legally writing six-figure checks to so-called joint fundraising committees—committees that can dole their contributions out to multiple allies, notably including state political parties. But rather than keep all the cash, the state parties have been quickly steering the money to the national parties, taking advantage of their ability to transfer unlimited cash to their national affiliates.”
“The joint fundraising vehicles aren’t new, but the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision to eliminate some obscure but important campaign contribution limits in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission had the effect of supercharging them. The 2016 election provided a first, full glimpse at what the new legal landscape would mean in reality.”
“The result: Parties are more aggressively and successfully courting a small number of deep-pocketed donors, giving the wealthy another way to exert their ever-growing influence over politics.”
Quote of the Day
“I do think it is a, certainly a serious matter when a special counsel is accused—and I was accused of that—of exceeding his or her authority. That’s a serious matter because we do not want investigators and prosecutors out on a fishing expedition.”
— Former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, interviewed on CNN.
More Republicans Think They’re Losing Under Trump
A new Pew Research survey finds that 42% of Republican voters say their side has been winning more on the important issues, while 46% say their side has been losing.
McMaster Attacked for Being ‘Controlled by Jews’
President Trump’s National Security Adviser General H. R. McMaster “is being targeted in recent days by a far-right campaign that is accusing him, simultaneously, of being controlled by rich Jews and of harming the state of Israel,” Haaretz reports.
“The campaign is coming from media outlets and writers affiliated with Steve Bannon, President Trump’s senior political adviser, who has been accused in the past of making anti-Semitic comments.”
“The campaign against McMaster intensified after he fired a number of mid-level officials from the National Security Council, who were considered loyal to Bannon and to the former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.”
The Hill: Trump defends McMcMaster in the wake of criticism on the right.
Mueller Seeks White House Documents on Flynn
“Investigators working for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, recently asked the White House for documents related to the former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and have questioned witnesses about whether he was secretly paid by the Turkish government during the final months of the presidential campaign,” the New York Times reports.
“Though not a formal subpoena, the document request is the first known instance of Mr. Mueller’s team asking the White House to hand over records.”
