The Ebola outbreak, Israeli strikes in Gaza, Putin in Beijing and Arsenal win the Premier League – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists Continue reading...
A Republican strategist says that Trump is hurting politically right now and warned a GOP lawmaker who appeared with the president."This is a really terrible week for this Trump administration," Rina Shah said during an appearance on CNN. She added that Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) "should not have trumped" the president at a campaign event on Friday."Lawler has been confusing in the past many months," Shah explained. "By continuing to seem like he wants to be close to the White House," despite "his colleagues in the Senate...they're reading the room."She brought up the fiery meeting between GOP senators and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, where they "really stood up" and chewed into him regarding the "anti-weaponization" fund, Shah said.The midterm elections are six months away, and "it's time to get tough about what matters." The senators who ripped into Blanche "aren't in full revolt. They're just in midterm savior mode," Shah added."So Lawler, if he knew better, he would be doing that too," she explained. "He's employing a throw-it-all-at-the-wall strategy. He thinks that maybe Trump's charisma might win out with some folks, but again, the pocketbook issues."She tried to send the message to Lawler that "your constituents hate endless war," but Trump is "making it all about himself."
Life finally man-handled President Donald Trump like it typically abuses Democratic presidents: with pushback and disappointment. But don’t expect to see this brand of ego acknowledge it, says Washington Post writer Luke Broadwater.“By pretty much any estimation, President Trump has had a very bad week,” said Broadwater. “New poll numbers show his approval rating has hit a second-term low. He is weighing whether to restart a bombing campaign in an unpopular war against Iran. Gas prices are high and inching higher heading into Memorial Day weekend. And his grip over Republican lawmakers is beginning to slip after he proposed a pair of deeply unpopular spending items, prompting an unusual revolt from the Senate.”Normally when confronted with so intense a backlash ahead of precarious midterm elections, politicians pivot — maybe even display some humility — while redirecting their priorities to more popular policies.“But Mr. Trump has decided to double down, presenting himself as politically all-powerful even in the face of indications that he is not,” said Broadwater. Trump has proven invincible after winning re-election despite being under multiple criminal indictments. He has managed to twist the nonpolitical DOJ into his personal team of lawyers to prosecute his enemies and he has successfully targeted members of his own party for daring to oppose his policies, acknowledge his Jan. attempted coup or push for the release of the Epstein files — which for some reason Trump really wants to keep under wraps.And Trump has doubled down on his despised $1.8 billion slush fund to reward, said Broadwater, moaning that he could have simply used the taxpayer money to enrich himself. And he has sent his former personal lawyer and now acting attorney general Todd Blanche to ply Congressional Republicans to approve the fund. But what Blanche got was a verbal trouncing for daring to broach the topic.“The meeting went so poorly for Mr. Blanche that party leaders scrapped planned votes on another of Mr. Trump’s top priorities: a $72 billion immigration crackdown measure lawmakers had planned to muscle through before Memorial Day,” said Broadwater.“There’s a boiling point here,” said George Washington University political science professor Sarah Binder, driven primarily by Trump’s habit of doubles down instead of showing any sign of self-awareness or awareness in temperature changes around him. His dogged pursuit of other taxpayer-draining projects like his ballroom and the Trump Arch, while Americans struggle with his self-caused inflation and high gas prices, are other examples.And Binder says it does not appear to matter to him that he is jeopardizing the very Republican enablers that make his invincibility possible.“He’s focused on the arch. I think he’s focused on his own personal legacy. He’s focused on vengeance,” said Binder. “He doesn’t have a legislative agenda, so does he really need a Republican Senate?”
Donald Trump last year amassed one big beautiful rap sheet of scandal and criminality, with multiple instances of corruption that made Teapot Dome look quaint. But the president’s bogus new “settlement” with his own administration’s IRS, which he had sued in January for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns in 2020, hits scorching new heights of depravity. The deal’s contours were bad enough when it looked like Trump was simply going to take a small fortune of taxpayer money and line his own pockets. But that was last week: The new plan is for $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to be set aside as a slush fund, which Trump will effectively control, to pay out to January 6 insurrectionists and political cronies that he believes were wronged back when the Department of Justice wasn’t his mobbed-up plaything. Some of the worst people in America are already lining up for payouts.There are plenty of ways to describe this arrangement. Call it cartoon villainy. Call it criminal. For certain, call this an utterly impeachable offense. Also call this very worrisome: There is a non-zero chance that Trump will simply get away with it, now that corrupt elites dominate American life with absolute impunity. For those with any vested interest in restoring democracy and clearing out the Augean stables of Trumpism, how we respond to this is very important.The Trump White House is a kleptocratic organ, pure and simple—one that increasingly resembles authoritarian regimes around the world. “This new slush fund is no different than what we see in other kleptocracies,” Casey Michel, frequent TNR contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, told me. “It’s a ruling figure creating a new pot of wealth that they can use for whatever they want—in this case, paying off a bunch of insurrectionists who Trump can now transform into his own personal paramilitary, without any oversight or checks whatsoever. It’s something we’ve never seen in U.S. history—but is perfectly familiar to those who study autocracy around the world.”There is, however, a key distinction between Trump and the scores of foreign kleptocrats that Michel has spent years studying: “The only difference here is that most foreign kleptocrats at least try to hide their tracks—instead of broadcasting them to the world, like we’re seeing with Trump.” While most criminals endeavor to keep the newspapers from finding out about their intention to commit crimes, Trump does it in plain sight—either because he’s incredibly stupid or because the Supreme Court has told him he’s wholly immune from prosecution. (It’s probably both.)But the newspapers’ early coverage of the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is troubling. If sanewashing was last year’s problem in the political press, sinwashing might be the au courant media malady. The initial coverage from The New York Times suggested that the scheme merely “could funnel money to Trump allies,” even though this was its expressed purpose. The news department also couldn’t bring itself to call it a slush fund, instead drafting “critics” to say what is plainly and objectively true (the paper’s editorial board at least named it appropriately). Elsewhere, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal found a useful euphemism, referring to the settlement’s arrangement as merely “unusual” instead of nakedly criminal. (TNR’s headline, if you’re keeping score, nailed it: “Trump Just Launched a Taxpayer-Funded $1.8 Billion MAGA Slush Fund.”) So I’m concerned that when Democrats return to power, the media will either be an impediment or an enemy to any effort to put things right. But at least that effort is kicking off right away. Representative Jamie Raskin told TNR’s Greg Sargent he is planning to “introduce a bill that would block the fund and other future efforts like it.” He’ll be doing so with the full support of party leadership, who will seek to bring the vote to the House floor over the Republican majority’s objections via a discharge petition. While such a maneuver will require some GOP support, Republicans in the House have in recent weeks broken ranks on the disclosure of the Epstein files—and a few have defected from the party line on funding Trump’s grifty ballroom, as well, likely killing the $1 billion that Republicans had planned to allocate to it in their ICE-funding reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, HuffPost’s Jen Bendery reports that Senator Chris Van Hollen will be launching a similar effort in the Senate, amending the reconciliation bill to prevent January 6ers—some of whom assaulted the Capitol Police officers who protect these politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike—from obtaining money through this slush fund. Taken as a whole, these efforts tick a lot of boxes for those, like me, who bemoan Democrats’...
The week began with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) losing his primary to a Trump-backed challenger. It went only downhill from there for Senate Republicans. On Monday, the Department of Justice unveiled a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate Biden-era “lawfare” victims, including possibly for U.S. Capitol rioters. President Donald Trump snubbed Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) […]
