WaPo: “And as Tillerson has traveled the globe, Trump believes his top diplomat often seems more concerned with what the world thinks of the United States than with tending to the president’s personal image.”
We’ve first started looking into this when we saw claims that the NFL only really started pushing players standing for the anthem because the DOD was paying them to. That turns out not to be true. Or at least we see no evidence for it. The dates don’t line up. But between 2011 and 2015, the Pentagon did pay the NFL millions of dollars for flag displays, military family reuinitings and various military and patriotic displays. The changes in the anthem ceremony came in 2009, two years before the contract started. So it seems clear that it could not be tied – at least based on the evidence we have – to the DOD contract. But the other stuff is real. When I first heard about this I was a little surprised because I wouldn’t think it would be necessary for the DOD to pay. I would think NFL crowds would eat these displays up and be a kind of brand association – to use a painful marketing phrase – the NFL would want for its own reasons. But it was big business. Here’s our report from Allegra Kirkland.
On Tuesday, over the course of the day, President Trump called both the Las Vegas massacre and the Hurricane Maria aftermath in Puerto Rico a ‘miracle’. Some of this is simply President Trump’s ingrained weirdness, an uncanny awkwardness rooted in narcissism and a profound failure of empathy. But there’s something more than that. Trump, in his own unique and torrid awfulness, seems more like an intensification of something that predates him. We respond to unimaginable tragedies by deeper and deeper evocations of our own unique bonds of community and sacrifice which should shine through as a point of pride. Read More
“MS-13 turns young girls into sex slaves…yet Ralph Northam supports sanctuary cities…” That’s the text from a radio ad from Virginia GOP Governor candidate Ed Gillespie, as tweeted by Fenit Nirappil, a Virginia politics reporter from The Washington Post. That comes on the heels of a series of TV ads with a similar topic and theme “Kill, Rape, Control.” Read More
Will there be more of this?
At a panel event at the Heritage Foundation, former Ted Cruz presidential campaign spokesman Ron Nehring said that during the primaries he got a very different response when he criticized Donald Trump than any other candidate. The pattern he noted was about what you’d expect: When he was critical of Donald Trump he was inundated with hostile responses on Twitter and from accounts which followed a particular pattern. Read More
In my post this morning about Wilbur Ross’s role in the Puerto Rican debt crisis, I suggested that President Trump’s overnight suggestion that Puerto Rico’s public debt would need to be wiped clean might just be a throwaway line.
Well, yes, it was just a throwaway line. Or that’s what the evidence now suggests. Trump’s OMB Director Mick Mulvaney advised that we not take what Trump said “word for word.” He also suggested that he spoke at length to Trump on the flight back after the interview. So Trump agrees.
A remarkable press conference by Rex Tillerson just now to, how else can you say it?, save his job. He didn’t deny calling the President a “moron” over the summer, as NBC reported this morning, but he didn’t address it directly, dismissing it as part of DC’s tendency toward the “petty” and divisive.
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.