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Yachts of Trump Backer and Russian Oligarch Meet

March 15, 2017 at 11:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.”

Just 24% Back GOP Health Care Bill

March 15, 2017 at 9:35 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.

Quote of the Day

March 15, 2017 at 9:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“You, sir, shut up.”

— Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), quoted by the Dallas Morning News, at a town hall meeting.


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GOP Health Care Effort Is Unraveling

March 15, 2017 at 8:54 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.”

Paranoia Consumes the White House

March 15, 2017 at 8:48 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“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.”

Trump Calls Release of Tax Returns ‘Fake News’

March 15, 2017 at 8:47 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.

O’Malley Already Polling In Iowa

March 15, 2017 at 8:45 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“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.”

How Kellyanne Conway Muzzled Mitt Romney

March 15, 2017 at 8:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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?”

Can the Fed Survive This New Era of Populism?

March 15, 2017 at 7:30 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.”

Voters Split on Health Care Bill

March 15, 2017 at 7:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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).”

The Ultimate Trump-Russia Timeline

March 15, 2017 at 7:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Friend of Political Wire Thomas Wood has put together a remarkable 117-page timeline detailing President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

It’s the most comprehensive (and incriminating done to date), and as Wood notes, “the more detailed and more comprehensive it gets, the more incriminating it all seems.”

Trump Prizes Loyalty Over Experience

March 15, 2017 at 6:30 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

New York Times: “Every president sweeps into office with a coterie of friends and hangers-on who sometimes have minimal experience in the arcana of the federal government. But few have arrived with a contingent more colorful and controversial than that of Mr. Trump, whose White House is peppered with assistants and advisers whose principal qualification is their long friendship with Mr. Trump and his family.”

Interesting: “Most other staff members must go through Keith Schiller, who rose from part-time security guard at the Trump Organization to its director of security. Mr. Schiller is now the director of Oval Office operations, controlling physical access to a president whose whims and frustrations routinely send aides throughout the building scurrying to deflect, defend and justify.”

The Making of an Economic Nationalist

March 15, 2017 at 6:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The Wall Street Journal has a must-read profile of White House adviser Stephen Bannon:

There were many factors that turned Steve Bannon into a divisive political firebrand. But his decision to embrace “economic nationalism” and vehemently oppose the forces and institutions of globalization, he says, stems from his upbringing, his relationship with his father and the meaning those AT&T shares held for the family.

“Everything since then has come from there,” he says. “All of it.”

Spicer ‘Very Confident’ Wiretapping Evidence Will Emerge

March 14, 2017 at 11:36 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

In the latest verbal acrobatics over President Trump’s allegation that President Barack Obama spied on him during the 2016 campaign, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that he was confident Mr. Trump’s claim would eventually be found to be true, the New York Times reports.

Spicer said Trump is “extremely confident” that there will be evidence to support his accusation: “There is significant reporting about surveillance techniques that have existed throughout the 2016 election. I’ll leave it to them to issue their report, but I think he feels very confident that what will ultimately come of this will vindicate him.”

Trump Hires Another Goldman Banker for Senior Post

March 14, 2017 at 11:25 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

President Trump “said he planned to nominate Goldman Sachs managing director James Donovan to serve as deputy treasury secretary, selecting his fifth Goldman veteran to take a senior role in his administration,” the Washington Post reports.

“Trump vilified Wall Street during his presidential campaign, and one of his final campaign ads included a clip that showed Goldman chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and suggested he was part of a ‘global power structure.’ But since the election, Trump has picked two Goldman executives and two former Goldman executives to serve in top posts.”

GOP Senators Want Changes to Health Care Bill

March 14, 2017 at 11:20 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

New York Times: “They told Trump administration officials — including the health secretary, Tom Price — that they wanted to see lower insurance costs for poorer, older Americans and an increase in funding for states with high populations of hard-to-insure people. They said those changes would greatly improve the chances of Senate approval even though they might further alienate conservatives.”

Wall Street Journal: GOP Senators say health care bill won’t pass without changes.

King Predicts Blacks and Hispanics Will Fight Each Other

March 14, 2017 at 8:37 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told an Iowa radio station that blacks and Hispanics “will be fighting each other” before overtaking whites in the U.S. population.

Said King: “When you start accentuating the differences, then you start ending up with people that are at each other’s throats. And he’s adding up Hispanics and blacks into what he predicts will be in greater number than whites in America. I will predict that Hispanics and the blacks will be fighting each other before that happens.”

White House Tries to Salvage GOP Health Care Bill

March 14, 2017 at 7:27 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“The White House launched an intensive effort Tuesday to salvage support for the Republican plan to revise the Affordable Care Act, even as a growing number of lawmakers weighed in against the proposal,” the Washington Post reports.

“One day after the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis showing that 14 million fewer Americans would be insured next year under the GOP plan, Vice President Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price came to Capitol Hill to rally backing for the proposal.”

“But widespread dissatisfaction among both House and Senate lawmakers — conservatives and moderates alike — showed no signs of dissipating, increasing the chances that the proposal of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) would have difficulty passing the House if it goes to the floor over the next two weeks — not to mention whether it can collect a majority in the Senate.”

Politico: Republicans can’t stop feuding over Obamacare.

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan 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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