Yesterday we were beguiled and aghast at President Trump’s awful and ridiculous comments in Puerto Rico. Soon enough though we’ll come back to what seems to be his major fixation: Puerto Rico’s public debt. Does President Trump own any of that debt? What about his family and associates? It’s not a crazy idea. We know very little about the President’s finances and assets. But I was curious about why it was such a focus of his even if he doesn’t stand to gain personally.
Then last night, he seemed to shift gears entirely, telling Geraldo Rivera that the government would “have to wipe that [debt] out” entirely. “You can say goodbye” to the existing debt no matter who takes a loss. He focused on “Goldman Sachs.” Was someone else talking to him? Was he just affected by what he saw? Was it all a show? Or will he just go back to his debt-punitive approach once he’s back? To this end, I was surprised to hear from TPM Reader RM that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a close associate and advisor of the President’s, was until quite recently the biggest shareholder and a board member of the company that is one of the biggest and most aggressive holders of the risk tied to Puerto Rico’s public debt. Read More
Just out from CNN: Russia Facebook campaign specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin and key demographic groups within those states.
From CNN …
A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump’s victory last November, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the situation.
It’s probably just a detail in a horrific story, rather than something that will be critical to understanding it. But I wanted to flag one aspect of the story. What did Stephen Paddock do for a living? And where did he get his money?
There have been reports, though not really confirmed, that he was actually a wealthy man, perhaps a real investor. He wired his girlfriend $100,000 a week ago. He also reportedly rented a series of condos over another outdoor concert that he had apparently considered attacking before choosing this country music concert. Those certainly suggest a decent amount of liquid assets, though if you knew you were about to end your life a middle-class person could likely sell things and come up with that amount of cash. Read More
Esme Cribb took all the awful things President Trump said today in Puerto Rico and put them in one place. Here it is.
If you were a wildly cynical Democrat and were hoping that President Trump would go to Puerto Rico and say a bunch of things that make him sound awful and racist, you really couldn’t top today. President Trump has already complained that Puerto Rican truck drivers aren’t doing enough to help. Later he chided Puerto Ricans for throwing the national budget out of whack with their hurricane catastrophe. And there’s more to come.
He’s back at it. Trump complains again that Puerto Ricans aren’t providing enough help for recovery efforts. “Their drivers have to start driving trucks. We have to do that, so at a local level they have to give us more help.”
House Republicans want to hold kids’ health insurance hostage for cuts to Medicare and public health.
Mick Mulvaney was one of the hardest core Tea Partiers and Freedom Caucusers during his time in the House. Part of that was a demand for fiscal austerity and budget cutting during the thinnest years coming out of the Great Recession. Now he’s decided deficits aren’t just okay. They’re positively necessary. Read More
Jelani Cobb has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He writes frequently about race, politics, history, and culture. His most recent book is “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.” He’s a professor of journalism at Columbia University. He won the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, for his columns on race, the police, and injustice.
Jelani will be in the Hive to discuss race relations in America, including the NFL and Trump’s verbal war with its protesters. Post your questions and join us this Friday! If you’d like to participate but don’t have TPM Prime, sign up here.
Trump, moments ago: “Look, we have a tragedy. We’re going to — what happened in Las Vegas is in many ways a miracle. The police department has done such an incredible job, and we’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by.”