I wanted to flag to your attention this new piece by our crack Capitol Hill team of Alice Ollstein and Tierney Sneed. I’ve been telling you in recent days how President Trump had made a flat demand for border wall money or he’d toss people off Obamacare and shut down the government to boot. Later he waffled and finally pulled one of Trump’s classic whipsaw pre-fails, deciding he’d just try to get the money in the fall. Read More
The codebreaker is simple: Every criticism Trump made was a prediction and aspiration.
This is really quite astounding. In this morning’s edition of Mike Allen’s not-Playbook from Axios he introduces what seems to be Ivanka Trump setting up something that sounds a lot like the Clinton Foundation, only in this case run from within the White House by a top presidential aide who is also the President’s daughter, who also runs her own large international company and who also has two brothers who are currently running the President/Father’s company and trying to rake in as much money as possible on the fame and power of the presidency. Also, let’s be honest, the Trumps are a notoriously corrupt family, especially when it comes to running foundations.
No less astounding is that Allen never mentions that there’s anything problematic about this or that it doesn’t mimic in a wildly more corrupt way what President Trump nominally ran most of the 2016 campaign against. Read More
Coming down off a hard to demand from less than a week ago (that Obamacare would get it if Dems didn’t fund his border wall) OMB Director Mulvaney says Trump will sign a funding bill without any money for a border wall.
If I’m not mistaken, Sean Spicer, presumably speaking for the administration, is making a series of distinct and perhaps contradictory arguments about why it doesn’t need to, can’t or just shouldn’t turn over documents tied to former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn. Read More
I noted over the weekend just how weak a hand President Trump was playing in his effort to force Democrats to vote for border wall money with a threat of taking away people’s health care coverage. I said this afternoon that it looked like he was getting ready to cave. But I could scarcely have imagined that Trump would preemptively cave as quickly, objectively and ridiculousness as he appears to have done. This is turning into the Dog Day Afternoon of legislative hostage dramas. Read More
John Pfaff, Professor of Law at Fordham University, will join us in The Hive for a discussion about criminal law. Feel free to ask him questions about sentencing, criminal justice reform, incarceration rates and more. Submit your questions any time or feel free to join us Thursday at 1. If you’d like to participate but don’t have TPM Prime, sign up here.
Senate Republicans returning to the Capitol this evening from recess don’t sound like they’re spoiling for a government shutdown over funding Trump’s border wall.