President Trump “defended his explosive and so far unsupported claim that former President Barack Obama ordered an illegal wiretap of Trump Tower,” Politico reports.
Said Trump: “Wiretap covers a lot of different things. I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.”
“When President Trump boarded Air Force One on Wednesday morning to travel to Michigan and Tennessee, he didn’t wing it alone: his entire senior West Wing staff traveled with him,” Politico reports.
“It’s a dynamic that’s been in place since Trump took office — wherever the president goes, the gang’s always all there with him.”
President Trump’s “budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year would slash the Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent and cut State Department spending by a similar amount in a brash upending of the government’s priorities,” the New York Times reports.
“The budget outline, to be unveiled on Thursday, is more of a broad political statement than a detailed plan for spending and taxation. But it represents Mr. Trump’s first real effort to translate his bold but vague campaign themes into the minutiae of governance.”
“The president would funnel $54 billion in additional funding into defense programs, beef up immigration enforcement and significantly reduce the nondefense federal work force to further the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state,’ in the words of Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.”
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A new Fox News poll finds President Trump’s overall job approval is down five percentage points from last month. Currently, 43% of voters approve, while 51% disapprove.
A new Kaiser Health Tracking Poll shows 49% of Americans have a positive view of the current Affordable Care Act as compared to 44% who have a negative view.
A slight majority of respondents — 51% — are opposed to repealing the law.
“When rumors started swirling after the election that Chelsea Clinton was considering her own foray into politics, it was met with eye rolls even from staunch supporters of the family,” The Hill reports.
“But that skepticism is starting to fade… Clinton has only stoked the rumors further, particularly on Twitter, where she has repeatedly gone after President Trump and his associates since Inauguration Day.”
“It is mortally wounded, I don’t know if it’s died yet.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), quoted by the Huffington Post, on the GOP health care bill.
Rick Klein and Shushannah Walshe: “If this slice of an old tax return wasn’t leaked by someone in the close Trump orbit, it may as well have been, or someone wishes they had the idea, at least. What exactly do we know about President Trump – his finances, his business connections, his potential conflicts of interest – that we didn’t know before Tuesday night? He paid a pile of money to the government after making a really big pile of money in one particular year. He would have paid less to the government if not for the Alternative Minimum Tax. And, well, that’s about all that can be gleaned based on two pages of a 1040 from a dozen years ago.”
“Yes, what we don’t know is a reminder of why tax returns – the full documents – matter. Yes, the White House confirmation of authenticity explodes the myth that active audits have kept details of the president’s taxes from public scrutiny. But the cable hype and confirmation that the president did pay federal taxes, at least during one year in the middle of last decade, will only make it easier for Trump allies to argue that he is under unfair attack. ‘CLIENT COPY’ may be part of an elaborate scheme, or a huge clue, but the impact of this return is essentially the same.”
First Read: “But to us, the biggest news is: Who leaked these taxes to David Cay Johnston. And why? As NBC’s Ari Melber pointed out on “Today” this morning, only these people would have access to the tax return — Trump, his family, his accountant, or the IRS. Melber also noted that it is NOT illegal for an individual to release his or her own taxes to the public.”
Palm Beach Post: “The coincidences are piling up. Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev last week disavowed any contact with President Donald Trump. But speculation again was stoked when his state-of-the-art yacht Anna sat anchored in the British Virgin Islands on Friday night and another equally resplendent luxury liner, the Sea Owl, sidled up, according to a website that tracks the movement of yachts.”
“After disavowing any contact with President Donald Trump this past week, Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev’s state-of-the-art yacht Anna sat anchored in the British Virgin Islands on Friday night when another equally resplendent luxury liner, the Sea Owl, sidled up, according to a website that tracks the movement of yachts. The owner of the dark-hulled yacht? President Donald Trump’s biggest financial supporter and Breitbart News moneyman, Robert Mercer.”
A new Public Policy Polling survey finds just 24% of voters support the GOP health care bill as compared to 49% who are opposed.
Even among Republican voters only 37% are in favor of the proposal to 22% who are against it, and 41% who aren’t sure one way or another.
“You, sir, shut up.”
— Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), quoted by the Dallas Morning News, at a town hall meeting.
First Read: “You know things aren’t going well at the White House when the president would rather want to talk about his taxes than health care. And that brings us to what is still the biggest story American politics: The Republican’s health care overhaul efforts are unraveling.”
Playbook: “We’re not going to make predictions about whether congressional Republicans will be able to live up to their near decade-old promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare. Legislating takes time. The process has ups and downs. Arms get twisted, leaders give rousing rally cries and support materializes seemingly out of nowhere. But, look around — things look shaky, at best, for President Donald Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan’s American Health Care Act. ”
Rick Klein: “The health care overhaul… is in real danger in the place that passage was supposed to be easiest. Now House moderates are joining with conservative colleagues to back away from the measure, for opposing reasons that again tell the story of GOP divisions. It’s a storyline that looks likely to end badly for the push to ‘repeal and replace,’ and could be equally bad for the tenuous Trump-Ryan relationship, amid talk that the Trump team may cut a deal without the speaker’s overt blessing.”
David Nather: “It’s going to be tough to satisfy all of the Republicans who have problems with the House Obamacare replacement bill… But don’t assume that’s the end of the road. Smart Republicans who were around for the passage of Obamacare, the mirror image of what Republicans are going through now, tell me there’s probably still a path to President Trump’s desk for something they can call repeal. Just don’t assume it’s going to look like this bill.”
Key takeaway: “Republicans can’t just give up on repeal after running on it in four elections.”
“A culture of paranoia is consuming the Trump administration, with staffers increasingly preoccupied with perceived enemies—inside their own government,” Politico reports.
“In interviews, nearly a dozen White House aides and federal agency staffers described a litany of suspicions: that rival factions in the administration are trying to embarrass them, that civil servants opposed to President Trump are trying to undermine him, and even that a ‘deep state’ of career military and intelligence officials is out to destroy them.”
President Trump denounced as “fake news” the release by journalists of a portion of his 2005 income tax form, just hours after his administration appeared to confirm the accuracy of the documents, the New York Times reports.
“The leadership PAC of former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley commissioned a Public Policy Polling survey of the first-in-the-nation caucus state earlier this month,” according to a copy of the results obtained by Politico.
“The poll, which shows O’Malley at 18 percent of Democratic caucus-goers in a field of nine potential candidates if the contest were held today, also asked the Iowans about New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, former Housing Sec. Julian Castro, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, California Sen. Kamala Harris, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.”
The Atlantic: “During the transition, Conway began publicly criticizing, on Twitter and on television, Trump’s consideration of Mitt Romney for secretary of state. Romney and Trump were in the midst of a high-profile courtship, and Romney was reportedly a leading contender for the job, when Conway tweeted that she was receiving a ‘deluge’ of feedback from Trump fans who would feel ‘betrayed’ by Romney’s selection.”
“Romney dined with Trump in New York and gave a public statement that seemed to retract his previous concerns and expressed confidence in the president-elect. Nonetheless, he was passed over. Trump chose Rex Tillerson, the ExxonMobil CEO, for the post instead.”
Said one high-ranking White House official: “Judas Iscariot got 30 pieces of silver; Mitt Romney got a dish of frog legs at Jean-Georges. And even at that, it was the appetizer portion. We’ve sort of taken out his larynx—how can he criticize Trump now?”
New York Times: “The pressing question for this era of populist policy making and popular anger is whether the Federal Reserve as we know it — arcane and academic, with the autonomy to set monetary policy as it sees fit — will survive the tension this time.”
“Given the ferocious discontent with the ‘establishment’ stoked by Mr. Trump among his angry electoral base, the threat against the Fed this time seems of a higher order.”
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds 46% of voters approve of the GOP health care proposal, more than the 35% who disapprove. Nineteen percent of voters say they don’t have an opinion of the bill.
Key finding: “But any support is shallow: Only 4-in-10 voters say they either ‘strongly approve’ or ‘strongly disapprove’ of the bill, with strong disapproval (22 percent) slightly outpacing strong approval (18 percent).”
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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