Price out as HHS secretary after private plane scandal
By Kevin Liptak and Miranda Green
Tom Price, the embattled health and human services secretary, resigned Friday in the midst of a scandal over his use of private planes, a storm that enraged President Donald Trump and undercut his promise to bring accountability to Washington.
Price's departure came as he's being investigated by the department's inspector general for using private jets for multiple government business trips, even to fly distances often as short as from Washington to Philadelphia. The cost for the trips ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The scandal infuriated Trump, who viewed the controversy as a needless distraction from his agenda. Over the course of the week, Trump fumed to aides about Price's flights, which he deemed "stupid," according to multiple sources. Instead of moving past the storm, Price's offer to reimburse the government for only a fraction of the flights' costs enraged Trump further.
Speaking less than an hour before the resignation was announced, Trump bemoaned the optics of the matter, which he said obscured what otherwise had been a cost-saving tenure.
"I was disappointed because I didn't like it, cosmetically or otherwise. I was disappointed," Trump said.
Price and his aides have insisted that the trips he took by private charter jet had been approved through the usual legal and ethics offices at HHS. But the appearance of a millionaire Cabinet secretary flying routes easily navigated by far cheaper means proved an optics nightmare for an administration already accused of being out of touch with regular Americans.
Price is the latest casualty in an administration that's seen a high rate of dramatic departures over its first eight months. Since taking office, Trump has dismissed or seen quit his national security adviser, press secretary, communications director, chief strategist, acting attorney general and FBI director. The tumult has come as Trump struggles to fulfill key aspects of his agenda on Capitol Hill, and as his team confronts its most dire challenge yet on a storm-demolished Puerto Rico.
Trump was incensed that Price's actions undermined his vow to "drain the swamp," though Price is not the only Cabinet official to have used private air charters to travel around the country. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have both flown on private planes during their tenures in the administration.
The White House said this week it was examining whether to adopt stricter oversight of Cabinet secretaries' travel plans.
The first sign of Trump's ire emerged on Wednesday, when he said only "we'll see" after being asked if he was planning to fire Price. Neither Trump nor his top aides could say in the following days whether Price retained the President's confidence.
Departing the White House on Friday, Trump called Price a "very fine man" who had nonetheless made a grave mistake.
"This is an administration that saves hundreds of millions of dollars on renegotiating things," Trump said. "So I don't like to see somebody that perhaps there's the perception that it wasn't right."
The resignation was announced as Trump flew aboard Air Force One for another weekend at his golf club in New Jersey. Stepping off his own plane, Trump offered a thumbs-up sign when reporters asked if he'd accepted Price's resignation.
Price himself offered a rosy picture of his future on Thursday evening, telling CNN that he "absolutely" planned to stay on as health secretary -- a claim that was ultimately not meant to be.
Not close
Trump, who never grew as close to Price as he has to some of his aides, also viewed the health secretary as an ineffective promoter of Republican plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, an effort that has failed multiple times over the course of Trump's eight months in office.
During a rally with Boy Scouts in July, Trump quipped that if Price couldn't wrangle the votes, he'd dismiss him.
"He better get them. Oh, he better," Trump said. "Otherwise I'll say, 'Tom, you're fired.' "
Price didn't get the votes, but it was his use of private aircraft that ultimately led to his demise in the Trump administration.
Politico first reported Price's use of charter jets for official business last week and found that the secretary has traveled on charter flights at least 24 times since May, citing people familiar with his travel plans and a review of HHS documents.
Charter plane operators estimated 24 flights would have cost $400,000, Politico reported. Commercial trips would have cost thousands of dollars less. The Health and Human Services inspector general is reviewing whether the means of travel was appropriate.
Later, it was revealed that Price also took US military aircraft on two trips abroad, bringing the total cost of his non-commercial travel to more than $1 million. The military flights were approved by the White House.
Breaking precedent
Price's travel breaks with the precedent set by former President Barack Obama's HHS secretaries Sylvia Mathews Burwell and Kathleen Sebelius, who flew commercially when flying within the US.
Price said in a statement on Thursday that would write a personal check to the US Treasury to cover the cost of his travel on private charter planes.
"The taxpayers won't pay a dime for my seat on those planes," he proclaimed, though it was later revealed he would only pay for his seat and not the total cost of chartering a plane.
An HHS spokesperson said the check would come to $51,887.31, a small percentage of the total cost of the private flights.
Price, both in his role as Trump's health boss and as a Republican congressman from Georgia, was a frequent critic of government spending. He told CNN in April that he wanted to cut redundancy and waste in his agency.
"For us to say, 'OK, let's just throw more money at that system, let's see if more money helps that out,' is the wrong way," Price told CNN's Sanjay Gupta.
While at HHS, Price played an integral part helping craft many iterations of alternatives to Obamacare -- all of which ultimately failed to pass. Price was also part of the executive opioid commission announced by Trump in March.
Prior to his role in the administration, Price was a Georgia representative for over 10 years, and was an orthopedic surgeon for 20 years. He was the third doctor to hold the HHS secretary position.
September 29, 2017
No Clue...
Trump wants to cancel the Iran deal. His administration doesn’t seem to know what it does.
A really striking anecdote.
Updated by Zack Beauchamp
The Trump administration doesn’t seem to actually know very much about the nuclear deal with Iran that the White House may soon torpedo.
That’s the key takeaway from a new piece in Bloomberg Businessweek about how the International Atomic Energy Agency — the organization tasked with monitoring Iran’s adherence to the pact — has had to spend a large amount of effort educating the administration on basic details of the deal, including the fact that it’s limited to Iran’s nuclear program and not, say, Tehran’s support for the armed group Hezbollah.
Here’s the key part of the Bloomberg piece, written by Nick Wadhams:
Yukiya Amano, head of the IAEA, had to explain that agency monitoring doesn’t cover Iranian support for Hezbollah and meddling in the region. IAEA also denied administration appeals to reveal classified data collected in Iran, say the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
That’s jarring for one major reason. President Donald Trump has less than three weeks to decide whether to certify that Iran is complying with the terms of the pact. If he says Tehran is playing by the rules, he’ll be pledging himself to uphold the agreement he’s called the “worst deal ever”; if he says Iran is breaking the pact, it will collapse and Tehran could in theory resume its quest to attain nuclear weapons.
There are legitimate questions about Iran’s malign influence throughout the Middle East, from its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthi rebels in Yemen to the Shia paramilitary groups in Iraq. There’s also no question Tehran continues to work on more advanced missiles.
The problem for the White House is that the nuclear pact doesn’t cover any of those issues, so Iran’s activities have literally nothing to do with the agreement itself. The problem for the rest of the world is that Trump may use Tehran’s nonnuclear misdeeds to justify pulling the US out of the pact anyway.
Trump’s hatred for the nuclear deal has nothing to do with the nuclear deal
The Iran nuclear deal is a very specific thing. It ends a series of punishing international sanctions on Iran imposed prior to 2015 in exchange for Iran ending a large swath of nuclear-related activity and agreeing to a strict regimen of international inspections to ensure compliance. The punishment for Iranian cheating — like operating prohibited technology used to produce nuclear material — is the reimposition of sanctions.
The deal, by all accounts is working. The IAEA has repeatedly certified Iran’s compliance, and neither the Trump administration nor any other foreign intelligence agency has produced evidence to the contrary.
Instead, what you hear more from Trump and members of his administration is that Iran is violating the “spirit” of the agreement, through things like its support for terrorist groups and ballistic missile testing.
Trump has something of a point here: Iran’s activities are destabilizing to the entire Middle East and are definitely not in the “spirit” of US-Iranian cooperation. But they have little to do with the deal itself.
By pressing the head of the IAEA on things that aren’t germane to the pact, like Hezbollah, the Trump administration is signaling that it’s considering torpedoing the deal because it’s angry about the things that aren’t in the deal.
Much of the international community clearly doesn’t support canceling the deal on these terms, as representatives of major nations have expressed repeatedly in multiple different forums. And without buy-in from partners like the European Union, whose corporations do far more business with Iran than America’s, it’ll be very difficult to reimpose a sanctions regime that actually does serious damage to Iran’s economy.
The upshot is that if Trump does cancel the deal on October 15 for reasons largely unrelated to its terms, the results could very well be catastrophic.
“It’s just the worst of all possible worlds: You walk away from the deal but you’re not going to get the reimposition of sanctions,” Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told me earlier this month. “If this administration walks away from the Iran deal, my suspicion is that Iran will end up looking just like North Korea, right down to the thermonuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
A really striking anecdote.
Updated by Zack Beauchamp
The Trump administration doesn’t seem to actually know very much about the nuclear deal with Iran that the White House may soon torpedo.
That’s the key takeaway from a new piece in Bloomberg Businessweek about how the International Atomic Energy Agency — the organization tasked with monitoring Iran’s adherence to the pact — has had to spend a large amount of effort educating the administration on basic details of the deal, including the fact that it’s limited to Iran’s nuclear program and not, say, Tehran’s support for the armed group Hezbollah.
Here’s the key part of the Bloomberg piece, written by Nick Wadhams:
Yukiya Amano, head of the IAEA, had to explain that agency monitoring doesn’t cover Iranian support for Hezbollah and meddling in the region. IAEA also denied administration appeals to reveal classified data collected in Iran, say the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
That’s jarring for one major reason. President Donald Trump has less than three weeks to decide whether to certify that Iran is complying with the terms of the pact. If he says Tehran is playing by the rules, he’ll be pledging himself to uphold the agreement he’s called the “worst deal ever”; if he says Iran is breaking the pact, it will collapse and Tehran could in theory resume its quest to attain nuclear weapons.
There are legitimate questions about Iran’s malign influence throughout the Middle East, from its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthi rebels in Yemen to the Shia paramilitary groups in Iraq. There’s also no question Tehran continues to work on more advanced missiles.
The problem for the White House is that the nuclear pact doesn’t cover any of those issues, so Iran’s activities have literally nothing to do with the agreement itself. The problem for the rest of the world is that Trump may use Tehran’s nonnuclear misdeeds to justify pulling the US out of the pact anyway.
Trump’s hatred for the nuclear deal has nothing to do with the nuclear deal
The Iran nuclear deal is a very specific thing. It ends a series of punishing international sanctions on Iran imposed prior to 2015 in exchange for Iran ending a large swath of nuclear-related activity and agreeing to a strict regimen of international inspections to ensure compliance. The punishment for Iranian cheating — like operating prohibited technology used to produce nuclear material — is the reimposition of sanctions.
The deal, by all accounts is working. The IAEA has repeatedly certified Iran’s compliance, and neither the Trump administration nor any other foreign intelligence agency has produced evidence to the contrary.
Instead, what you hear more from Trump and members of his administration is that Iran is violating the “spirit” of the agreement, through things like its support for terrorist groups and ballistic missile testing.
Trump has something of a point here: Iran’s activities are destabilizing to the entire Middle East and are definitely not in the “spirit” of US-Iranian cooperation. But they have little to do with the deal itself.
By pressing the head of the IAEA on things that aren’t germane to the pact, like Hezbollah, the Trump administration is signaling that it’s considering torpedoing the deal because it’s angry about the things that aren’t in the deal.
Much of the international community clearly doesn’t support canceling the deal on these terms, as representatives of major nations have expressed repeatedly in multiple different forums. And without buy-in from partners like the European Union, whose corporations do far more business with Iran than America’s, it’ll be very difficult to reimpose a sanctions regime that actually does serious damage to Iran’s economy.
The upshot is that if Trump does cancel the deal on October 15 for reasons largely unrelated to its terms, the results could very well be catastrophic.
“It’s just the worst of all possible worlds: You walk away from the deal but you’re not going to get the reimposition of sanctions,” Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told me earlier this month. “If this administration walks away from the Iran deal, my suspicion is that Iran will end up looking just like North Korea, right down to the thermonuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
Yep, the rich will get richer off you....
The numbers are in: Trump's tax plan is a bonanza for the rich, not the middle class
Multi-millionaires get more than $700,000 back. The poorest fifth gets $60.
Updated by Dylan Matthews
The tax reform “framework” proposed by the Trump administration and Republican leaders in Congress would give the largest benefits to the top 1 and top 0.1 percent of households, according to a new analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The poor and middle class would get comparatively little. And the whole thing would leave a $2.4 trillion hole in federal revenue in the first decade.
The richest 1 percent — households making at least $732,800 — would get an average tax cut of $129,030, the analysis finds. For the typical one-percenter (who earns much more than $732,800), that means 8.5 percent more income after taxes. The richest 0.1 percent, earning at least $3.4 million a year, would get $722,510 back on average, for a 10.2 percent average boost in after-tax income.
By contrast, the middle class (households earning $48,600 to $86,100 a year) would get $660 back, a 1.2 percent income boost. The poorest fifth of Americans, earning $25,000 or less, would only get $60, a 0.5 percent increase.
Both in raw dollar amounts, and percentage terms, the cuts are concentrated among the richest Americans.
About one in eight families, especially households earning low-to-mid six figures, would see taxes go up.
More than 40 percent of households earning between $216,800 and $307,900 (the 90th to 95th percentiles) would see a tax increase; the average tax hike would be nearly $3,000. That's largely a consequence of the proposal's decision to eliminate most itemized deductions and in particular the deduction for state and local taxes, which doesn't help ultra-rich households much, but does help rich but not super-rich families (particularly in high-tax states like New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, or California) considerably.
While the issue is less pronounced for the middle class, 13.5 percent of middle class households would see a tax increase, of about $1,000 on average:
The entire cost of the plan comes from its corporate tax provisions, TPC finds. Reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent costs about $2 trillion over 10 years, while capping the rate on "pass-through" companies — like those in the Trump Organization — to 25 percent (down from 39.6 percent today) costs about $770 billion.
While some individual tax provisions — like cutting the top rate for high earners, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax and estate tax, and increasing the standard deduction and child tax credit — cost considerable money, TPC finds that the plan’s individual tax changes as a whole actually raise a modest amount of money. The costly changes on the individual side are paired with eliminating personal exemptions (which currently give taxpayers a $4,050 deduction for every person in the household) and eliminating the state and local tax deduction, which more than pay for the individual cuts.
You can think of the plan, then, as a corporate tax cut financed (insufficiently) by raising individual taxes on a concentrated subset of middle and upper-class individuals:
Put together, the whole thing costs $2.4 trillion in revenue over 10 years, before you take into account interest the government would have to pay on all that debt.
There are a number of ways the GOP could try to plug that hole. One — alluded to in the tax plan but not modeled by TPC — would be to add a fourth tax bracket, with a tax rate above 35 percent, for individuals. That would raise a significant amount of money, but probably wouldn’t be enough to raise $2.4 trillion, especially if the rate is below the current top rate of 39.6 percent.
Another obvious option would be to cut the corporate tax rate slightly less — to 25 or 28 percent, say, rather than 20 percent. The provision cutting taxes for pass-through companies, which serves no economic purpose and would be a major incentive for tax evasion by rich individuals, could also be junked. But House Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows (R-NC), a leader of House conservatives, has pledged to oppose any plan that includes a corporate rate higher than 20 percent or a pass-through rate above 25 percent. That indicates Republicans will face a ton of pressure to keep those cuts, even as they make the whole package quite costly.
Republicans have also indicated they want to score the plan “dynamically” — that is, assuming it will have a positive effect on economic growth that will offset some of the cost. It’s unlikely, however, that the Joint Committee on Taxation will judge the plan to cause a whopping $2.4 trillion in additional revenue from growth. Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves.
TPC emphasizes that their numbers are preliminary, and they had to make a number of assumptions about parts of the plan that the GOP framework left underspecified. The White House and congressional Republicans have declined to say where the new tax brackets for individuals in their plan kick in; TPC assumed the same thresholds as in a 2016 plan that House Republicans released. The framework also doesn’t say how much it’ll increase the child tax credit; TPC assumed it’d grow from $1,000 to $1,500, as it does in that 2016 House plan. And the framework specifies a few vague revenue-raisers, like a limit on deductibility of corporate debt payments, that TPC couldn’t model. If those get more specific, they could raise more revenue to pay for the plan.
Most contentiously, TPC assumes that corporate tax cuts overwhelmingly help the wealthy. While this is the prevailing view among economic modelers who think the tax is mostly paid by wealthy corporate shareholders, the White House strongly disagrees with it, and this week even removed a Treasury Department research paper which argued that corporate taxes hit the rich.
In any case, TPC’s analysis is a strong indication that President Trump’s claim that the plan was designed "protect low-income and middle-income households, not the wealthy and well-connected" was wildly misleading, that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is breaking his famous pledge to not enact an absolute tax cut for the wealthy, and that White House economic adviser Gary Cohn’s contention that “the wealthy are not getting a tax cut under our plan” and Mnuchin’s claim that the plan will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion were both straight-up lies.
Multi-millionaires get more than $700,000 back. The poorest fifth gets $60.
Updated by Dylan Matthews
The tax reform “framework” proposed by the Trump administration and Republican leaders in Congress would give the largest benefits to the top 1 and top 0.1 percent of households, according to a new analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The poor and middle class would get comparatively little. And the whole thing would leave a $2.4 trillion hole in federal revenue in the first decade.
The richest 1 percent — households making at least $732,800 — would get an average tax cut of $129,030, the analysis finds. For the typical one-percenter (who earns much more than $732,800), that means 8.5 percent more income after taxes. The richest 0.1 percent, earning at least $3.4 million a year, would get $722,510 back on average, for a 10.2 percent average boost in after-tax income.
By contrast, the middle class (households earning $48,600 to $86,100 a year) would get $660 back, a 1.2 percent income boost. The poorest fifth of Americans, earning $25,000 or less, would only get $60, a 0.5 percent increase.
Both in raw dollar amounts, and percentage terms, the cuts are concentrated among the richest Americans.
About one in eight families, especially households earning low-to-mid six figures, would see taxes go up.
More than 40 percent of households earning between $216,800 and $307,900 (the 90th to 95th percentiles) would see a tax increase; the average tax hike would be nearly $3,000. That's largely a consequence of the proposal's decision to eliminate most itemized deductions and in particular the deduction for state and local taxes, which doesn't help ultra-rich households much, but does help rich but not super-rich families (particularly in high-tax states like New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, or California) considerably.
While the issue is less pronounced for the middle class, 13.5 percent of middle class households would see a tax increase, of about $1,000 on average:
The entire cost of the plan comes from its corporate tax provisions, TPC finds. Reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent costs about $2 trillion over 10 years, while capping the rate on "pass-through" companies — like those in the Trump Organization — to 25 percent (down from 39.6 percent today) costs about $770 billion.
While some individual tax provisions — like cutting the top rate for high earners, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax and estate tax, and increasing the standard deduction and child tax credit — cost considerable money, TPC finds that the plan’s individual tax changes as a whole actually raise a modest amount of money. The costly changes on the individual side are paired with eliminating personal exemptions (which currently give taxpayers a $4,050 deduction for every person in the household) and eliminating the state and local tax deduction, which more than pay for the individual cuts.
You can think of the plan, then, as a corporate tax cut financed (insufficiently) by raising individual taxes on a concentrated subset of middle and upper-class individuals:
Put together, the whole thing costs $2.4 trillion in revenue over 10 years, before you take into account interest the government would have to pay on all that debt.There are a number of ways the GOP could try to plug that hole. One — alluded to in the tax plan but not modeled by TPC — would be to add a fourth tax bracket, with a tax rate above 35 percent, for individuals. That would raise a significant amount of money, but probably wouldn’t be enough to raise $2.4 trillion, especially if the rate is below the current top rate of 39.6 percent.
Another obvious option would be to cut the corporate tax rate slightly less — to 25 or 28 percent, say, rather than 20 percent. The provision cutting taxes for pass-through companies, which serves no economic purpose and would be a major incentive for tax evasion by rich individuals, could also be junked. But House Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows (R-NC), a leader of House conservatives, has pledged to oppose any plan that includes a corporate rate higher than 20 percent or a pass-through rate above 25 percent. That indicates Republicans will face a ton of pressure to keep those cuts, even as they make the whole package quite costly.
Republicans have also indicated they want to score the plan “dynamically” — that is, assuming it will have a positive effect on economic growth that will offset some of the cost. It’s unlikely, however, that the Joint Committee on Taxation will judge the plan to cause a whopping $2.4 trillion in additional revenue from growth. Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves.
TPC emphasizes that their numbers are preliminary, and they had to make a number of assumptions about parts of the plan that the GOP framework left underspecified. The White House and congressional Republicans have declined to say where the new tax brackets for individuals in their plan kick in; TPC assumed the same thresholds as in a 2016 plan that House Republicans released. The framework also doesn’t say how much it’ll increase the child tax credit; TPC assumed it’d grow from $1,000 to $1,500, as it does in that 2016 House plan. And the framework specifies a few vague revenue-raisers, like a limit on deductibility of corporate debt payments, that TPC couldn’t model. If those get more specific, they could raise more revenue to pay for the plan.
Most contentiously, TPC assumes that corporate tax cuts overwhelmingly help the wealthy. While this is the prevailing view among economic modelers who think the tax is mostly paid by wealthy corporate shareholders, the White House strongly disagrees with it, and this week even removed a Treasury Department research paper which argued that corporate taxes hit the rich.
In any case, TPC’s analysis is a strong indication that President Trump’s claim that the plan was designed "protect low-income and middle-income households, not the wealthy and well-connected" was wildly misleading, that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is breaking his famous pledge to not enact an absolute tax cut for the wealthy, and that White House economic adviser Gary Cohn’s contention that “the wealthy are not getting a tax cut under our plan” and Mnuchin’s claim that the plan will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion were both straight-up lies.
Who pays the rest??? You....
Trump health chief Tom Price will repay government $51K for 'my seat' on pricey jet jaunts, which cost taxpayers more than $400K
By Dan Mangan
Embattled Trump administration health affairs chief Tom Price will repay the federal government nearly $52,000 for his "seat" on more than two dozen pricey private jet trips — which cost taxpayers more than $400,000 — and promised to refrain from using charter flights in the future.
"Today, I will write a personal check to the US Treasury for the expenses of my travel on private charter planes," wrote Price, the secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, in a statement released Thursday.
"The taxpayers won't pay a dime for my seat on those planes," said Price.
Price did not say how much he would be paying back.
But an HHS spokeswoman said Price's check would total $51,887.31.
That is a small fraction of the more than $400,000 it reportedly cost the government to charter 26 flights on private jets for Price and his traveling companions since May.
"I will take no more private charter flights as Secretary of HHS. No exceptions," Price said in his email release.
Politico, which broke the stories about Price's penchant for private planes, has reported that HHS claimed private jets were used to accommodate his busy schedule.
Late on Thursday, Politico reported that the White House had given Price the OK to use military aircraft for trips to Africa and Europe earlier this year, costing taxpayers more than half a million dollars.
His wife accompanied him on the military flights, while other delegation members used commercial flights to Europe, the report said, adding that HHS said Price had reimbursed the agency for the cost of his wife's travel, without saying when.
Politico said its review brought taxpayer payments for Price's travel to more than $1 million since May.
The White House referred questions about Price's travel reimbursement to HHS.
Price's announcement came a day after President Donald Trump said he was displeasedwith his health chief's expensive habit of using private planes instead of commercial flights, as is traditional for Cabinet secretaries.
Trump ominously said, "We'll see," when asked if he would fire Price, a medical doctor and ex-congressman who long railed against excessive spending by the federal government.
"I'm looking at that very closely. I am not happy with him," Trump said.
Price earlier Thursday told reporters, "I think we've still got the confidence of the president."
In a letter sent to Trump on Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, noted that "federal regulations specifically prohibit official travel by chartered jet when it is not the most cost-effective mode of travel 'because the taxpayer should pay no more than necessary for your transportation.'"
Grassley asked Trump to urge his Cabinet secretaries to use "reasonable and cost-effective modes of travel." The senator noted that in addition to Price "there are questions about the travel expenses of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin" that are now under investigation by the inspectors general of both men's departments.
Grassley asked the president to inform him of "steps the administration has taken to ensure that cabinet secretaries use the most fiscally responsible travel in accordance with the public trust they hold."
BuzzFeed News reported Thursday that Price in the first two months of this year asked a White House official to tell Trump that he wanted to reopen HHS's executive dining room, which had been closed since George W. Bush was president.
In his statement Thursday, Price wrote that he welcomes and is "cooperating fully with the Office of Inspector General (OIG) review of processes and procedures related to my official travel as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
"I have also taken the additional step of initiating a departmental review to determine if any changes or reforms are necessary. As I have previously stated, all of this travel was approved by legal and HHS officials," Price said.
"Despite this, I regret the concerns this has raised regarding the use of taxpayer dollars," Price said.
"All of my political career I've fought for the taxpayers. It is clear to me that in this case, I was not sensitive enough to my concern for the taxpayer. I know as well as anyone that the American people want to know that their hard-earned dollars are being spent wisely by government officials."
Price also said, "I have spent forty years both as a doctor and in public service putting people first."
"It has been my personal honor to serve the American people, and I look forward to continuing that service."
Price on Thursday morning attended a press conference in Washington, D.C., to promote flu vaccinations. He left that event without taking questions from reporters inside the National Press Club for the conference.
The Democratic National Committe called Price's payment plan "an insult to American taxpayers.''
''Price wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money, but instead of reimbursing the full cost of his flights, he plans to return only a small fraction of what he spent for his seat on the plane,'' a DNC spokesman said.
''It's not just Price, though: Trump has consistently wasted taxpayer dollars on trips to his properties, and we've repeatedly seen headlines of other members of Trump's cabinet taking advantage of American taxpayers for their own gain. Trump is not fighting for the forgotten man; he is stealing from them."
By Dan Mangan
Embattled Trump administration health affairs chief Tom Price will repay the federal government nearly $52,000 for his "seat" on more than two dozen pricey private jet trips — which cost taxpayers more than $400,000 — and promised to refrain from using charter flights in the future.
"Today, I will write a personal check to the US Treasury for the expenses of my travel on private charter planes," wrote Price, the secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, in a statement released Thursday.
"The taxpayers won't pay a dime for my seat on those planes," said Price.
Price did not say how much he would be paying back.
But an HHS spokeswoman said Price's check would total $51,887.31.
That is a small fraction of the more than $400,000 it reportedly cost the government to charter 26 flights on private jets for Price and his traveling companions since May.
"I will take no more private charter flights as Secretary of HHS. No exceptions," Price said in his email release.
Politico, which broke the stories about Price's penchant for private planes, has reported that HHS claimed private jets were used to accommodate his busy schedule.
Late on Thursday, Politico reported that the White House had given Price the OK to use military aircraft for trips to Africa and Europe earlier this year, costing taxpayers more than half a million dollars.
His wife accompanied him on the military flights, while other delegation members used commercial flights to Europe, the report said, adding that HHS said Price had reimbursed the agency for the cost of his wife's travel, without saying when.
Politico said its review brought taxpayer payments for Price's travel to more than $1 million since May.
The White House referred questions about Price's travel reimbursement to HHS.
Price's announcement came a day after President Donald Trump said he was displeasedwith his health chief's expensive habit of using private planes instead of commercial flights, as is traditional for Cabinet secretaries.
Trump ominously said, "We'll see," when asked if he would fire Price, a medical doctor and ex-congressman who long railed against excessive spending by the federal government.
"I'm looking at that very closely. I am not happy with him," Trump said.
Price earlier Thursday told reporters, "I think we've still got the confidence of the president."
In a letter sent to Trump on Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, noted that "federal regulations specifically prohibit official travel by chartered jet when it is not the most cost-effective mode of travel 'because the taxpayer should pay no more than necessary for your transportation.'"
Grassley asked Trump to urge his Cabinet secretaries to use "reasonable and cost-effective modes of travel." The senator noted that in addition to Price "there are questions about the travel expenses of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin" that are now under investigation by the inspectors general of both men's departments.
Grassley asked the president to inform him of "steps the administration has taken to ensure that cabinet secretaries use the most fiscally responsible travel in accordance with the public trust they hold."
BuzzFeed News reported Thursday that Price in the first two months of this year asked a White House official to tell Trump that he wanted to reopen HHS's executive dining room, which had been closed since George W. Bush was president.
In his statement Thursday, Price wrote that he welcomes and is "cooperating fully with the Office of Inspector General (OIG) review of processes and procedures related to my official travel as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
"I have also taken the additional step of initiating a departmental review to determine if any changes or reforms are necessary. As I have previously stated, all of this travel was approved by legal and HHS officials," Price said.
"Despite this, I regret the concerns this has raised regarding the use of taxpayer dollars," Price said.
"All of my political career I've fought for the taxpayers. It is clear to me that in this case, I was not sensitive enough to my concern for the taxpayer. I know as well as anyone that the American people want to know that their hard-earned dollars are being spent wisely by government officials."
Price also said, "I have spent forty years both as a doctor and in public service putting people first."
"It has been my personal honor to serve the American people, and I look forward to continuing that service."
Price on Thursday morning attended a press conference in Washington, D.C., to promote flu vaccinations. He left that event without taking questions from reporters inside the National Press Club for the conference.
The Democratic National Committe called Price's payment plan "an insult to American taxpayers.''
''Price wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money, but instead of reimbursing the full cost of his flights, he plans to return only a small fraction of what he spent for his seat on the plane,'' a DNC spokesman said.
''It's not just Price, though: Trump has consistently wasted taxpayer dollars on trips to his properties, and we've repeatedly seen headlines of other members of Trump's cabinet taking advantage of American taxpayers for their own gain. Trump is not fighting for the forgotten man; he is stealing from them."
Lying Cheating Orangutan lies even more, yet stupid people believe....
How Trump’s Tax Plan Would Benefit Trump
By John Cassidy
Donald Trump constantly spouts falsehoods. Sometimes he merely shades the truth outrageously. Other times he tells full-on whoppers. And that’s what he did in Indiana on Wednesday, when he said that the new Republican tax-reform plan “is not good for me.”
Trump hasn’t released his tax returns, of course, so it’s difficult to estimate precisely how much money he will save if his tax plan goes through. But since last summer, when Trump’s Presidential campaign released an initial version of his vision for tax reform, tax experts and journalists have been pointing to aspects of it that could benefit him greatly. Among others, the Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley, NPR’s Jim Zarroli, and Slate’s Jordan Weissmann have investigated different ways that Trump stands to benefit. I’ll briefly try to explain each of the reform proposals that these reporters have previously looked at, and also mention one additional way that the tax plan could end up being a boon to the President’s businesses.
For starters, Trump would benefit from the abolition of the alternative minimum tax, which the Internal Revenue Service uses to insure that high-income people who have a lot of deductions and sheltered income contribute at least a minimum amount to the federal government. In 2005, the only tax year in the past couple of decades for which we’ve seen any of Trump’s filings—someone leaked two pages of his return to the financial journalist David Cay Johnston—he paid $38.4 million in federal taxes, and $31.3 million of that was to cover his A.M.T. liability.
Without the A.M.T., Trump’s tax bill that year, including self-employment taxes, would have been just $7.1 million. (This despite the fact that he grossed $152.7 million in business income, capital gains, salary, and interest.) Obviously, we can’t be absolutely sure that the A.M.T. has hit Trump in other years, or that it would hit him in the future. But, as a real-estate developer who can take advantage of many different deductions and loopholes in the tax code, he is exactly the type of taxpayer that the A.M.T. is designed to catch.
Another element of the G.O.P.’s tax plan that would benefit Trump is the proposal to tax so-called pass-through business income at a rate of twenty-five per cent. The White House is marketing this as a way to reduce the tax burden on small-business owners, who typically report their incomes on their personal tax returns. But it would also be a big gift to the owners of large private businesses, such as the Trump Organization, which are structured as investment partnerships, L.L.C.s, and S corporations. Just like mom-and-pop stores and restaurants, these much bigger firms “pass through” their income to their owners for tax purposes. At the moment, the I.R.S. treats this income like salary income, which means that anyone with taxable earnings of more than four hundred and forty thousand dollars a year pays the top rate of 39.6 per cent. But if the Trump tax plan goes into effect these high earners will see their tax rate reduced to twenty-five per cent—a huge reduction.
How can we be sure that Trump has a lot of pass-through income? Because he and his lawyers have said so. In March, 2016, Trump’s tax attorneys issued a disclosure letter that said, “you hold interests as the sole or principal owner in more than 500 separate entities. These entities are collectively referred to and do business as the Trump Organization . . . Because you operate these businesses almost exclusively through sole proprietorships and/or closely-held partnerships, your personal federal income tax returns are inordinately large and complex for an individual.” The letter didn’t reveal how much taxable income these companies generated. But in his 2005 tax return Trump said he had earned about $42.4 million in “business income,” and $67.4 million from “rental real estate, royalties, partnerships, S corporations, trusts, etc.” Clearly, these are substantial sums.
The third element of the tax plan that would benefit Trump (and his heirs) is the abolition of the estate tax. Trump has claimed to be worth at least ten billion dollars. Even if he is really only worth a tenth of that—a billion dollars—his estate would greatly exceed the threshold for getting hit by the estate tax, which is currently about $5.5 million. If Trump wanted to bequeath a billion dollars to his family members, they could theoretically face a federal-tax bill of up to four hundred million dollars. (The estate tax’s top rate is forty per cent.)
Of course, for people as rich and as tax-averse as Trump, there are ways to minimize, if not completely avoid, the estate tax—by, for example, setting up specialized trusts. In the country’s wealthiest Zip Codes, estate planning is a thriving industry. But the fact remains that some large fortunes are hit by hefty estate-tax duties, and Trump’s could conceivably end up being one of them. Abolishing the tax now would be a potential boon for his heirs, and for him.
An additional aspect of the tax plan that is favorable to Trump, and hasn’t received much attention, is its treatment—or non-treatment—of the aforementioned special benefits in the tax code that real-estate developers like the President enjoy. These range from unlimited deductions for interest payments on bank loans to generous treatment of losses on failed projects. On one line in his 2005 return, Trump reported “other income” of a deficit of a hundred and three million dollars. The statement explaining this loss wasn’t included in the few pages of the return that leaked, so we can’t be certain what its origin was. But tax experts cited by the Times speculated that it was a carryover from a huge loss of nine hundred and sixteen million dollars, which Trump reported on his 1995 return, and which Trump may have relied on for many years to minimize his tax bill or even wipe it out.
If the Trump Administration were serious about cleaning up the tax code and eliminating costly loopholes, the treatment of the real-estate industry would be an obvious place to start. But instead of tackling this issue head-on, the nine-page outline of the tax plan released this week speaks in generalities. “Special tax regimes exist to govern the tax treatment of certain industries and sectors,” it reads. “The framework will modernize these rules to ensure that the tax code better reflects economic reality and that such rules provide little opportunity for tax avoidance.” By the time the real-estate industry’s lobbyists have finished with the Republican-run committees on Capitol Hill that will actually write the tax legislation, this weak language is likely to be watered down to nothing. And if they have any trouble persuading lawmakers to preserve the favorable treatment of developers like Trump, they’ll know where to turn: the Oval Office.
By John Cassidy
Donald Trump constantly spouts falsehoods. Sometimes he merely shades the truth outrageously. Other times he tells full-on whoppers. And that’s what he did in Indiana on Wednesday, when he said that the new Republican tax-reform plan “is not good for me.”
Trump hasn’t released his tax returns, of course, so it’s difficult to estimate precisely how much money he will save if his tax plan goes through. But since last summer, when Trump’s Presidential campaign released an initial version of his vision for tax reform, tax experts and journalists have been pointing to aspects of it that could benefit him greatly. Among others, the Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley, NPR’s Jim Zarroli, and Slate’s Jordan Weissmann have investigated different ways that Trump stands to benefit. I’ll briefly try to explain each of the reform proposals that these reporters have previously looked at, and also mention one additional way that the tax plan could end up being a boon to the President’s businesses.
For starters, Trump would benefit from the abolition of the alternative minimum tax, which the Internal Revenue Service uses to insure that high-income people who have a lot of deductions and sheltered income contribute at least a minimum amount to the federal government. In 2005, the only tax year in the past couple of decades for which we’ve seen any of Trump’s filings—someone leaked two pages of his return to the financial journalist David Cay Johnston—he paid $38.4 million in federal taxes, and $31.3 million of that was to cover his A.M.T. liability.
Without the A.M.T., Trump’s tax bill that year, including self-employment taxes, would have been just $7.1 million. (This despite the fact that he grossed $152.7 million in business income, capital gains, salary, and interest.) Obviously, we can’t be absolutely sure that the A.M.T. has hit Trump in other years, or that it would hit him in the future. But, as a real-estate developer who can take advantage of many different deductions and loopholes in the tax code, he is exactly the type of taxpayer that the A.M.T. is designed to catch.
Another element of the G.O.P.’s tax plan that would benefit Trump is the proposal to tax so-called pass-through business income at a rate of twenty-five per cent. The White House is marketing this as a way to reduce the tax burden on small-business owners, who typically report their incomes on their personal tax returns. But it would also be a big gift to the owners of large private businesses, such as the Trump Organization, which are structured as investment partnerships, L.L.C.s, and S corporations. Just like mom-and-pop stores and restaurants, these much bigger firms “pass through” their income to their owners for tax purposes. At the moment, the I.R.S. treats this income like salary income, which means that anyone with taxable earnings of more than four hundred and forty thousand dollars a year pays the top rate of 39.6 per cent. But if the Trump tax plan goes into effect these high earners will see their tax rate reduced to twenty-five per cent—a huge reduction.
How can we be sure that Trump has a lot of pass-through income? Because he and his lawyers have said so. In March, 2016, Trump’s tax attorneys issued a disclosure letter that said, “you hold interests as the sole or principal owner in more than 500 separate entities. These entities are collectively referred to and do business as the Trump Organization . . . Because you operate these businesses almost exclusively through sole proprietorships and/or closely-held partnerships, your personal federal income tax returns are inordinately large and complex for an individual.” The letter didn’t reveal how much taxable income these companies generated. But in his 2005 tax return Trump said he had earned about $42.4 million in “business income,” and $67.4 million from “rental real estate, royalties, partnerships, S corporations, trusts, etc.” Clearly, these are substantial sums.
The third element of the tax plan that would benefit Trump (and his heirs) is the abolition of the estate tax. Trump has claimed to be worth at least ten billion dollars. Even if he is really only worth a tenth of that—a billion dollars—his estate would greatly exceed the threshold for getting hit by the estate tax, which is currently about $5.5 million. If Trump wanted to bequeath a billion dollars to his family members, they could theoretically face a federal-tax bill of up to four hundred million dollars. (The estate tax’s top rate is forty per cent.)
Of course, for people as rich and as tax-averse as Trump, there are ways to minimize, if not completely avoid, the estate tax—by, for example, setting up specialized trusts. In the country’s wealthiest Zip Codes, estate planning is a thriving industry. But the fact remains that some large fortunes are hit by hefty estate-tax duties, and Trump’s could conceivably end up being one of them. Abolishing the tax now would be a potential boon for his heirs, and for him.
An additional aspect of the tax plan that is favorable to Trump, and hasn’t received much attention, is its treatment—or non-treatment—of the aforementioned special benefits in the tax code that real-estate developers like the President enjoy. These range from unlimited deductions for interest payments on bank loans to generous treatment of losses on failed projects. On one line in his 2005 return, Trump reported “other income” of a deficit of a hundred and three million dollars. The statement explaining this loss wasn’t included in the few pages of the return that leaked, so we can’t be certain what its origin was. But tax experts cited by the Times speculated that it was a carryover from a huge loss of nine hundred and sixteen million dollars, which Trump reported on his 1995 return, and which Trump may have relied on for many years to minimize his tax bill or even wipe it out.
If the Trump Administration were serious about cleaning up the tax code and eliminating costly loopholes, the treatment of the real-estate industry would be an obvious place to start. But instead of tackling this issue head-on, the nine-page outline of the tax plan released this week speaks in generalities. “Special tax regimes exist to govern the tax treatment of certain industries and sectors,” it reads. “The framework will modernize these rules to ensure that the tax code better reflects economic reality and that such rules provide little opportunity for tax avoidance.” By the time the real-estate industry’s lobbyists have finished with the Republican-run committees on Capitol Hill that will actually write the tax legislation, this weak language is likely to be watered down to nothing. And if they have any trouble persuading lawmakers to preserve the favorable treatment of developers like Trump, they’ll know where to turn: the Oval Office.
We live in an oligarchy....
‘What a Rigged Economy Looks Like’: Top 10% Now Own 77% of American Wealth
As Trump and the GOP push massive tax cuts for the rich, new data shows that the wealthy are doing better than ever.
BY JAKE JOHNSON
As President Donald Trump and the Republican Party unveiled their “cruel joke” of a tax plan that would provide an enormous boon for the rich disguised as a “middle class miracle,” an analysis by the People’s Policy Project (3P) published Wednesday found that the top 10 percent of the income distribution now owns a “stunning” 77 percent of America’s wealth while those in the bottom 10 percent are “net debtors,” owning -0.5 percent of the nation’s wealth.
In response to the analysis, conducted by 3P president Matt Bruenig, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote on Twitter: “Meanwhile, the Walton family of Walmart has a net worth of $144 billion. This is what a rigged economy looks like.”
“We do not live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchy,” added the progressive group Digital Left.
3P’s examination of newly released Federal Reserve data also found that “[t]he bottom 38 percent of American families have an average net worth of $0.” By contrast, the top one percent — set to benefit massively from Trump’s tax agenda — owns 38.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. In 1989, that number was 29.9 percent.
The new Fed data also highlighted America’s enormous racial wealth gap.
A recent study conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Corporation For Economic Development (CFED) found that “[i]f average black family wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take black families 228 years to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today.”
“For the average Latino family,” the study found, “it would take 84 years.”
Bruenig notes that in 2016, mean white wealth exceeded $900,000 for the first time. Mean black wealth, by contrast, registered at just under $140,000.
Overall, Bruenig concluded, “[t]he median family in every racial group remains worse off than they were in 2007.”
As Trump and the GOP push massive tax cuts for the rich, new data shows that the wealthy are doing better than ever.
BY JAKE JOHNSON
As President Donald Trump and the Republican Party unveiled their “cruel joke” of a tax plan that would provide an enormous boon for the rich disguised as a “middle class miracle,” an analysis by the People’s Policy Project (3P) published Wednesday found that the top 10 percent of the income distribution now owns a “stunning” 77 percent of America’s wealth while those in the bottom 10 percent are “net debtors,” owning -0.5 percent of the nation’s wealth.
In response to the analysis, conducted by 3P president Matt Bruenig, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote on Twitter: “Meanwhile, the Walton family of Walmart has a net worth of $144 billion. This is what a rigged economy looks like.”
“We do not live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchy,” added the progressive group Digital Left.
The new Fed data also highlighted America’s enormous racial wealth gap.
A recent study conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Corporation For Economic Development (CFED) found that “[i]f average black family wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take black families 228 years to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today.”
“For the average Latino family,” the study found, “it would take 84 years.”Bruenig notes that in 2016, mean white wealth exceeded $900,000 for the first time. Mean black wealth, by contrast, registered at just under $140,000.
Overall, Bruenig concluded, “[t]he median family in every racial group remains worse off than they were in 2007.”
Showing signs of senility...
Is Donald Trump, Um, You Know, Getting a Little…Forgetful?
KEVIN DRUM
Donald Trump keeps talking about not passing Obamacare because a senator is in the hospital. There is no senator in the hospital.
It started Wednesday on—of course—Twitter. Trump later explained that he was talking about Thad Cochran, who is at home recuperating from surgery. But Cochran isn’t hospitalized. And he said he’d show up for a vote if needed.
Then Trump repeated the claim on Thursday. And then again.
To recap: Cochran isn’t in the hospital. He’s available to vote. And it wouldn’t matter anyway, since even with Cochran, Republicans don’t have 50 votes.
Then there was this, when asked why Sudan was removed from the latest version of the travel ban:
TRUMP: Well, the people – yeah, the people allowed – certain countries – but we can add countries very easily and we can take countries away.
REPORTER: What did Sudan do right?
TRUMP: And as far as the travel ban is concerned, whatever it is, I want the toughest travel ban you can have. So I’ll see you in Indiana.
Is Trump lying? Or is he showing signs of senility? It’s possible that we’re all missing the big story here by shrugging off all his peculiar lies as merely standard Trumpian bluster and misdirection.
KEVIN DRUM
Donald Trump keeps talking about not passing Obamacare because a senator is in the hospital. There is no senator in the hospital.
It started Wednesday on—of course—Twitter. Trump later explained that he was talking about Thad Cochran, who is at home recuperating from surgery. But Cochran isn’t hospitalized. And he said he’d show up for a vote if needed.
Then Trump repeated the claim on Thursday. And then again.
To recap: Cochran isn’t in the hospital. He’s available to vote. And it wouldn’t matter anyway, since even with Cochran, Republicans don’t have 50 votes.
Then there was this, when asked why Sudan was removed from the latest version of the travel ban:
TRUMP: Well, the people – yeah, the people allowed – certain countries – but we can add countries very easily and we can take countries away.
REPORTER: What did Sudan do right?
TRUMP: And as far as the travel ban is concerned, whatever it is, I want the toughest travel ban you can have. So I’ll see you in Indiana.
Is Trump lying? Or is he showing signs of senility? It’s possible that we’re all missing the big story here by shrugging off all his peculiar lies as merely standard Trumpian bluster and misdirection.
Twitter Flooded Swing States with Fake News...
Fake News on Twitter Flooded Swing States That Helped Trump Win
A new study reveals how junk content—including from Russia—hit Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, and beyond.
DENISE CLIFTON
Millions of tweets were flying furiously in the final days leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. And in closely fought battleground states that would prove key to Donald Trump’s victory, they were more likely than elsewhere in America to be spreading links to fake news and hyperpoliticized content from Russian sources and WikiLeaks, according to new research published Thursday by Oxford University.
Nationwide during this period, one polarizing story was typically shared on average for every one story produced by a professional news organization. However, fake news from Twitter reached higher concentrations than the national average in 27 states, 12 of which were swing states—including Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan, where Trump won by slim margins.
While it’s unclear what effect such content ultimately had on voters, the new study only deepens concerns about how the 2016 election may have been tweaked by nefarious forces on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. “Many people use these platforms to find news and information that shapes their political identities and voting behavior,” says Samantha Bradshaw, a lead researcher for Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project, which has been tracking disinformation strategies around the world since 2014. “If bad actors can lower the quality of information, they are diminishing the quality of democracy.”
Efforts by Vladimir Putin’s regime were among the polarizing content captured in the new Oxford study. “We know the Russians have literally invested in social media,” Bradshaw told Mother Jones, referring to reports of Russian-bought Facebook ads as well as sophisticated training of Russian disinformation workers detailed in another recent study by the team. “Swing states would be the ones you would want to target.”
The dubious Twitter content in the new study also contained polarizing YouTube videos–including some produced by the Kremlin-controlled RT network, which were uploaded without any information identifying them as Russian-produced. All the YouTube videos have since been taken down, according to Bradshaw; it’s unclear whether the accounts were deleted by the users, or if YouTube removed the content.
The Oxford researchers captured 22 million tweets from November 1 to November 11 in 2016, and they have been scrutinizing the dataset to better understand the impact of disinformation on the US election. The team has also analyzed propaganda operations in more than two dozen countries, using a combination of reports from trusted media sources and think tanks, and cross-checking that information with experts on the ground. Their recent research has additional revelations about how disinformation works in the social-media age, including from Moscow.
Putin’s big investment in information warfare
In studying Russia’s propaganda efforts targeting both domestic and international populations, the Oxford researchers found evidence of increasing military expenditures on social-media operations since 2014. They also learned of a sophisticated training system for workers employed by Putin’s disinformation apparatus: “They have invested millions of dollars into training staff and setting targets for them,” Bradshaw says. She described a working environment where English training is provided to improve messaging for Western audiences: Supervisors hand out topical talking points to include in coordinated messaging, workers’ content is edited, and output is audited, with rewards given to more productive workers.
The battle to identify bots
One telltale sign of bots stems from a group of accounts that tweet much more frequently than typical humans—or accounts that tweet on exact intervals, say, every five minutes. The bot-driven accounts may lack typical profile elements such as profile pictures (see also: the generic Twitter egg) and often don’t engage in replies with other social-media accounts. In addition to spreading fake news, “they can also amplify marginal voices and ideas by inflating the number of likes, shares and retweets they receive, creating an artificial sense of popularity, momentum or relevance,” the Oxford team reported recently.
While it’s difficult for researchers to untangle how many Twitter bots are Russian-controlled, they regularly see Russian accounts in the mix: For example, on Twitter, they found accounts following Trump that tweeted most frequently during Russian business hours and switched regularly between English and Cyrillic.
On Facebook, it’s much more challenging to sort out which content is bot-driven, says Bradshaw. That’s in part because on Facebook, bots typically operate pages or groups, which can be even more opaque than individual accounts.
The presence of bots during the election homestretch
The Oxford researchers also found that bots infiltrated the core conversations among their Twitter data during the election period—and several of their analyses revealed that bots supported Trump much more than Hillary Clinton. A separate research effort by Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California, cited in Oxford’s report, determined that about one-fifth of campaign-related tweets during the month before the election likely were generated by bots. Ferrara’s team recorded 4 million tweets during that time period posted by about 400,000 bots.
How Germany fought off the fake-news scourge
In the days before the September 24 parliamentary election, the Oxford researchers found that political bots were minimally active on Twitter in Germany. The most tweets tracked were in support of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which won 13 percent of the vote and became the first far-right party to earn a presence in Parliament in 60-plus years. The research also found that Germans were much less likely to share fake news stories than their American counterparts, sharing links from professional news organizations four times as often as links from sites pushing fake news. Researchers theorize that voters in Germany and other parts of Europe may have been inoculated to the effects of bot-driven fake news, thanks to the ongoing fallout from 2016. “I would speculate the Russians overplayed their hand in the US elections,” Bradshaw says. “Voters in the US weren’t really prepared, but that was part of the discourse in other countries like Germany.”
But the battle is only beginning. In the hands of bad operators “the bots get a bit smarter,” Bradshaw says. When those controlling them realize that the bots are being tracked, for example, they may adjust the frequency that they tweet in order to fly below researchers’ radar. Bradshaw also notes that voice-simulation technology combined with video-simulation technology is making it increasingly possible to create fake news—say, a video showing politicians making statements that they never actually said. “In innovations in technology,” she cautions, “the attackers always have the advantage.”
A new study reveals how junk content—including from Russia—hit Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, and beyond.
DENISE CLIFTON
Millions of tweets were flying furiously in the final days leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. And in closely fought battleground states that would prove key to Donald Trump’s victory, they were more likely than elsewhere in America to be spreading links to fake news and hyperpoliticized content from Russian sources and WikiLeaks, according to new research published Thursday by Oxford University.
Nationwide during this period, one polarizing story was typically shared on average for every one story produced by a professional news organization. However, fake news from Twitter reached higher concentrations than the national average in 27 states, 12 of which were swing states—including Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan, where Trump won by slim margins.
While it’s unclear what effect such content ultimately had on voters, the new study only deepens concerns about how the 2016 election may have been tweaked by nefarious forces on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. “Many people use these platforms to find news and information that shapes their political identities and voting behavior,” says Samantha Bradshaw, a lead researcher for Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project, which has been tracking disinformation strategies around the world since 2014. “If bad actors can lower the quality of information, they are diminishing the quality of democracy.”
Efforts by Vladimir Putin’s regime were among the polarizing content captured in the new Oxford study. “We know the Russians have literally invested in social media,” Bradshaw told Mother Jones, referring to reports of Russian-bought Facebook ads as well as sophisticated training of Russian disinformation workers detailed in another recent study by the team. “Swing states would be the ones you would want to target.”
The dubious Twitter content in the new study also contained polarizing YouTube videos–including some produced by the Kremlin-controlled RT network, which were uploaded without any information identifying them as Russian-produced. All the YouTube videos have since been taken down, according to Bradshaw; it’s unclear whether the accounts were deleted by the users, or if YouTube removed the content.
The Oxford researchers captured 22 million tweets from November 1 to November 11 in 2016, and they have been scrutinizing the dataset to better understand the impact of disinformation on the US election. The team has also analyzed propaganda operations in more than two dozen countries, using a combination of reports from trusted media sources and think tanks, and cross-checking that information with experts on the ground. Their recent research has additional revelations about how disinformation works in the social-media age, including from Moscow.
Putin’s big investment in information warfare
In studying Russia’s propaganda efforts targeting both domestic and international populations, the Oxford researchers found evidence of increasing military expenditures on social-media operations since 2014. They also learned of a sophisticated training system for workers employed by Putin’s disinformation apparatus: “They have invested millions of dollars into training staff and setting targets for them,” Bradshaw says. She described a working environment where English training is provided to improve messaging for Western audiences: Supervisors hand out topical talking points to include in coordinated messaging, workers’ content is edited, and output is audited, with rewards given to more productive workers.
The battle to identify bots
One telltale sign of bots stems from a group of accounts that tweet much more frequently than typical humans—or accounts that tweet on exact intervals, say, every five minutes. The bot-driven accounts may lack typical profile elements such as profile pictures (see also: the generic Twitter egg) and often don’t engage in replies with other social-media accounts. In addition to spreading fake news, “they can also amplify marginal voices and ideas by inflating the number of likes, shares and retweets they receive, creating an artificial sense of popularity, momentum or relevance,” the Oxford team reported recently.
While it’s difficult for researchers to untangle how many Twitter bots are Russian-controlled, they regularly see Russian accounts in the mix: For example, on Twitter, they found accounts following Trump that tweeted most frequently during Russian business hours and switched regularly between English and Cyrillic.
On Facebook, it’s much more challenging to sort out which content is bot-driven, says Bradshaw. That’s in part because on Facebook, bots typically operate pages or groups, which can be even more opaque than individual accounts.
The presence of bots during the election homestretch
The Oxford researchers also found that bots infiltrated the core conversations among their Twitter data during the election period—and several of their analyses revealed that bots supported Trump much more than Hillary Clinton. A separate research effort by Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California, cited in Oxford’s report, determined that about one-fifth of campaign-related tweets during the month before the election likely were generated by bots. Ferrara’s team recorded 4 million tweets during that time period posted by about 400,000 bots.
How Germany fought off the fake-news scourge
In the days before the September 24 parliamentary election, the Oxford researchers found that political bots were minimally active on Twitter in Germany. The most tweets tracked were in support of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which won 13 percent of the vote and became the first far-right party to earn a presence in Parliament in 60-plus years. The research also found that Germans were much less likely to share fake news stories than their American counterparts, sharing links from professional news organizations four times as often as links from sites pushing fake news. Researchers theorize that voters in Germany and other parts of Europe may have been inoculated to the effects of bot-driven fake news, thanks to the ongoing fallout from 2016. “I would speculate the Russians overplayed their hand in the US elections,” Bradshaw says. “Voters in the US weren’t really prepared, but that was part of the discourse in other countries like Germany.”
But the battle is only beginning. In the hands of bad operators “the bots get a bit smarter,” Bradshaw says. When those controlling them realize that the bots are being tracked, for example, they may adjust the frequency that they tweet in order to fly below researchers’ radar. Bradshaw also notes that voice-simulation technology combined with video-simulation technology is making it increasingly possible to create fake news—say, a video showing politicians making statements that they never actually said. “In innovations in technology,” she cautions, “the attackers always have the advantage.”
Notoriously corrupt
Donald Trump May Have Done a Lot More Than Just Take a Photo With the President of Azerbaijan
The notoriously corrupt and repressive country boasts about its leader’s “conversation” with Trump.
DAN FRIEDMAN
The Embassy of Azerbaijan is touting a meeting last week between the country’s president, Ilham Aliyev, and President Donald Trump. In fact, while Aliyev may have merely posed for a photograph with the president and their wives while attending a reception Trump hosted at the outset of the UN’s General Assembly, the photo is valuable for Aliyev—and awkward for Trump.
It’s not just that Aliyev is jailing journalists while deflecting accusations of vote-rigging, kleptocracy, and international bribery. (Leaders who do that sort of thing don’t seem to phase Trump.) It’s also that Aliyev himself has multiple connections to Trump’s own scandals.
Aliyev’s daughter, Leyla Aliyeva, who posted a picture of the presidents on her Instagram account shortly before drawing mockery for making faces and taking selfies while her father delivered a speech on genocide, is the ex-wife of Emin Agalarov, the pop singer son of Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Russian real estate magnate.
Trump partnered with the Agalarovs on the 2013 Miss Universe contest near Moscow and on a deal to build a Trump tower in Moscow, one of Trump’s failed bids to launch a project in the Russian capital. After Aras Agalarov met last year with Yury Chaika, the prosecutor general of Russia, the Agalorovs arranged a now infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a promise to deliver information damaging to Hillary Clinton. Rob Goldstone, Emin’s agent, said in an email to Donald Trump Jr. that the information formed “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Trump has another tie to Aliyev’s regime. As Mother Jones reported in 2015, the Trump Organization partnered in 2012 on a Trump Tower in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, with the son of Aliyev’s ally, Ziya Mammadov. Then Azerbajian’s transportation minister, he was described in a leaked State Department cable as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.” The tower was never finished, but it took shape partly on land controlled by the country’s transportation ministry, far from the city’s other hotels. Trump, who cut his company’s ties to the project after his election, never held an ownership stake in the tower. But he disclosed earning up to $2.8 million for licensing his name on it. The New Yorker reported this year that Mammadov awarded contracts to a group closely linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and that evidence “strongly suggests” Mammadov has profited by helping the guard, which the United States has considered naming a terrorist organization, launder money through various Azerbaijani construction projects.
Trump’s involvement in the deal has drawn scrutiny from Congress, and special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly investigating Trump’s real estate deals, likely including the Azerbaijani project. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act requires American companies to conduct due diligence to ensure foreign business partners have not engaged in corruption. Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, claims it did, but he declined to release results of its examinations of Mammadov and its other partners to The New Yorker or to other reporters. While Trump may not have known of malfeasance on the project, US courts have criminalized “conscious avoidance,” in which investors purposely remain in the dark about corrupt practices by foreign partners. Garten has also argued the organization could not have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because Trump did not own the tower. Lawyers familiar with the law dispute that contention.
Corruption is widespread in Aliyev’s Azerbaijan. This month, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and its European media partners reported a scheme in which $2.9 billion was allegedly steered from companies linked to Aliyev, state ministries, and the country’s largest bank, and laundered and used in part to bribe European politicians and journalists to lay off criticism of Aliyev.
Human Rights Watch warns that in recent years Aliyev’s government has “escalated repression against its critics, marking a dramatic deterioration in an already poor rights record.” That includes blocking access to independent media sites. On August 24, Azerbaijani police arrested Mehman Aliyev (no relation to the president), the editor-in-chief of the news agency Turan, which many observers describe as the country’s only remaining independent media outlet. “We urge the government of Azerbaijan to immediately release Mehman Aliyev, and all those incarcerated for exercising their fundamental freedoms,” the State Department said in an August 26 statement.
In the face of international criticism, Azerbaijan has been boasting of a rapprochement with the United States following Trump’s election. This year, Azerbaijan’s embassy hired two lobbying firms: the Podesta Group, with Democratic ties, and BGR Government Affairs, staffed mostly by Republicans. Both firms offer the country advice on US relations and do public relations work. Azerbajian, which has long employed lobbyists through state-run firms and varied organizations promoting trade ties with the United States, may still be hiring. Last week, Politico reported that Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, had promised Azerbaijian’s ambassador he could get Aliyev a meeting with Trump. Lewandowski denied making the offer, the latest of several reported efforts he has made trading on perceived access to Trump.
A meeting with Trump, or even a simple picture, clearly has value for Aliyev. “The Azerbaijani government, like others in the region, will take any opportunity they can to boost their international image through things like photo ops, especially when they’re being scrutinized for their poor human rights records,” said Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch.
The White House did not respond to questions about Trump and Aliyev’s interaction. Vugar Gurbanov, a counselor at the Azerbaijani Embassy, issued a statement saying the presidents conversed at the reception, but provided no specifics. “The presidents enjoyed a conversation,” Gurbanov says. “Azerbaijan has developed a very strong and resilient relationship with the United States and we appreciate our strategic partnership with the American side.”
The notoriously corrupt and repressive country boasts about its leader’s “conversation” with Trump.
DAN FRIEDMAN
The Embassy of Azerbaijan is touting a meeting last week between the country’s president, Ilham Aliyev, and President Donald Trump. In fact, while Aliyev may have merely posed for a photograph with the president and their wives while attending a reception Trump hosted at the outset of the UN’s General Assembly, the photo is valuable for Aliyev—and awkward for Trump.
It’s not just that Aliyev is jailing journalists while deflecting accusations of vote-rigging, kleptocracy, and international bribery. (Leaders who do that sort of thing don’t seem to phase Trump.) It’s also that Aliyev himself has multiple connections to Trump’s own scandals.
Aliyev’s daughter, Leyla Aliyeva, who posted a picture of the presidents on her Instagram account shortly before drawing mockery for making faces and taking selfies while her father delivered a speech on genocide, is the ex-wife of Emin Agalarov, the pop singer son of Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Russian real estate magnate.
Trump partnered with the Agalarovs on the 2013 Miss Universe contest near Moscow and on a deal to build a Trump tower in Moscow, one of Trump’s failed bids to launch a project in the Russian capital. After Aras Agalarov met last year with Yury Chaika, the prosecutor general of Russia, the Agalorovs arranged a now infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a promise to deliver information damaging to Hillary Clinton. Rob Goldstone, Emin’s agent, said in an email to Donald Trump Jr. that the information formed “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Trump has another tie to Aliyev’s regime. As Mother Jones reported in 2015, the Trump Organization partnered in 2012 on a Trump Tower in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, with the son of Aliyev’s ally, Ziya Mammadov. Then Azerbajian’s transportation minister, he was described in a leaked State Department cable as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.” The tower was never finished, but it took shape partly on land controlled by the country’s transportation ministry, far from the city’s other hotels. Trump, who cut his company’s ties to the project after his election, never held an ownership stake in the tower. But he disclosed earning up to $2.8 million for licensing his name on it. The New Yorker reported this year that Mammadov awarded contracts to a group closely linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and that evidence “strongly suggests” Mammadov has profited by helping the guard, which the United States has considered naming a terrorist organization, launder money through various Azerbaijani construction projects.
Trump’s involvement in the deal has drawn scrutiny from Congress, and special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly investigating Trump’s real estate deals, likely including the Azerbaijani project. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act requires American companies to conduct due diligence to ensure foreign business partners have not engaged in corruption. Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, claims it did, but he declined to release results of its examinations of Mammadov and its other partners to The New Yorker or to other reporters. While Trump may not have known of malfeasance on the project, US courts have criminalized “conscious avoidance,” in which investors purposely remain in the dark about corrupt practices by foreign partners. Garten has also argued the organization could not have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because Trump did not own the tower. Lawyers familiar with the law dispute that contention.
Corruption is widespread in Aliyev’s Azerbaijan. This month, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and its European media partners reported a scheme in which $2.9 billion was allegedly steered from companies linked to Aliyev, state ministries, and the country’s largest bank, and laundered and used in part to bribe European politicians and journalists to lay off criticism of Aliyev.
Human Rights Watch warns that in recent years Aliyev’s government has “escalated repression against its critics, marking a dramatic deterioration in an already poor rights record.” That includes blocking access to independent media sites. On August 24, Azerbaijani police arrested Mehman Aliyev (no relation to the president), the editor-in-chief of the news agency Turan, which many observers describe as the country’s only remaining independent media outlet. “We urge the government of Azerbaijan to immediately release Mehman Aliyev, and all those incarcerated for exercising their fundamental freedoms,” the State Department said in an August 26 statement.
In the face of international criticism, Azerbaijan has been boasting of a rapprochement with the United States following Trump’s election. This year, Azerbaijan’s embassy hired two lobbying firms: the Podesta Group, with Democratic ties, and BGR Government Affairs, staffed mostly by Republicans. Both firms offer the country advice on US relations and do public relations work. Azerbajian, which has long employed lobbyists through state-run firms and varied organizations promoting trade ties with the United States, may still be hiring. Last week, Politico reported that Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, had promised Azerbaijian’s ambassador he could get Aliyev a meeting with Trump. Lewandowski denied making the offer, the latest of several reported efforts he has made trading on perceived access to Trump.
A meeting with Trump, or even a simple picture, clearly has value for Aliyev. “The Azerbaijani government, like others in the region, will take any opportunity they can to boost their international image through things like photo ops, especially when they’re being scrutinized for their poor human rights records,” said Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch.
The White House did not respond to questions about Trump and Aliyev’s interaction. Vugar Gurbanov, a counselor at the Azerbaijani Embassy, issued a statement saying the presidents conversed at the reception, but provided no specifics. “The presidents enjoyed a conversation,” Gurbanov says. “Azerbaijan has developed a very strong and resilient relationship with the United States and we appreciate our strategic partnership with the American side.”
Puppis A Supernova Remnant
Driven by the explosion of a massive star, supernova remnant Puppis A is blasting into the surrounding interstellar medium about 7,000 light-years away. At that distance, this colorful telescopic field based on broadband and narrowband optical image data is about 60 light-years across. As the supernova remnant (upper right) expands into its clumpy, non-uniform surroundings, shocked filaments of oxygen atoms glow in green-blue hues. Hydrogen and nitrogen are in red. Light from the initial supernova itself, triggered by the collapse of the massive star's core, would have reached Earth about 3,700 years ago. The Puppis A remnant is actually seen through outlying emission from the closer but more ancient Vela supernova remnant, near the crowded plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Still glowing across the electromagnetic spectrum Puppis A remains one of the brightest sources in the X-ray sky.
Earth-Moon system
This black-and-white image of the Earth-Moon system was captured on Sept. 25, 2017 by NavCam 1, one of three cameras that comprise TAGCAMS (the Touch-and-Go Camera System) on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. At the time this image was taken, the spacecraft was retreating from Earth after performing an Earth Gravity Assist maneuver on Sept. 22. Earth and the Moon are shown 249,000 miles (401,200 kilometers) apart, and the spacecraft is 804,000 miles (1,297,000 kilometers) from Earth and 735,000 miles (1,185,000 kilometers) from the Moon.
Bizarre-O world
The Trump White House is a really, really strange place
Analysis by Gregory Krieg
Donald Trump arrived on the Republican primary circuit in 2015 with a promise to get by with a little help from his friends -- "the best and most serious people" on the market.
But after eight months in office, that pledge has become a favorite punchline on the web. Rather than a home to efficient, skilled operators, the Trump White House has been marked by an eccentric swirl of office politics run amok and off-hours fits of pique.
Set aside, if only for a moment, the very real issues animating the President's response to Puerto Rico, his views on white supremacist marchers, and the ongoing Russia scandaI. If you pitched what remained as satire, an editor would toss it right back as overdone. (Someone find Thad Cochran!)
Here's a quick skip through the profound -- and very real -- weirdness that has colored much of the current administration.
When Trump officials go missing
No one hides from the press (or the President) better than Trump's people.
First there was former FBI director James Comey. Trump initially decided to keep Comey on in his job and, during a post-inaugural reception at the White House, singled him out for a handshake and slap on the back. But as Comey confidante Ben Wittes told it on the Lawfare blog, the lanky lawman tried to avoid the awkward interaction by blending in with the drapes, which matched his blazer.
"So he stood in the back, right in front of the drapes," Wittes wrote, "hoping Trump wouldn't notice him camouflaged against the wall."
Alas, the President caught a glimpse. "Oh, and there's Jim," Trump said. "He's become more famous than me!"
That relationship would sour a bit, and on the occasion of Comey's firing, in early May, Trump communications staffers tried to steer clear of the media. Most notable was Sean Spicer, the dissembling former press secretary, who hid in -- correction: among -- some bushes on the White House grounds rather than confront a hungry pack of reporters.
Twit:
Priebus is in this van on tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, as Potus has not yet disembarked. Driver pulled van away as press moved toward it
Former chief of staff Reince Priebus's departure from his job, ditched on the tarmac after a ride on Air Force One, was an uncomfortable affair. Perhaps it would have been less so if there was a large trash can there to obscure reporters' view.
Twit:
This photo, courtesy of @tedbarrettcnn: Reince Priebus ducking out of Senate lunch for a phone call, obscured by giant trash bin
And then there is the curious case of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and their vacation schedule. The couple and their children often seem to be away when the President starts lighting fires. Is it a coincidence? Are they keeping a lid on Oval Office shenanigans -- only to see it pop off when they leave?
Or is it -- as the critics have increasingly suggested -- that they are actively trying to stay out of the less flattering headlines?
Starman Trump
To Trump, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is the "Rocket Man." That song, by Elton John, is from 1972. Another famous tune, from the same year, could be applied to Trump: David Bowie's "Starman."
Trump has repeatedly found himself in odd situations with the biggest star of all: the sun.
He most recently took on a solar eclipse -- training the presidential retinas directly on it.
According to the press pool on hand that afternoon, "White House aides standing beneath the Blue Room Balcony shouted 'don't look'" as Trump, well, looked.
President Donald Trump looks up toward the Solar Eclipse while joined by his wife first lady Melania Trump on the Truman Balcony at the White House on August 21, 2017.
President Donald Trump looks up toward the Solar Eclipse while joined by his wife first lady Melania Trump on the Truman Balcony at the White House on August 21, 2017.
Before that, there was the famous "orb." During his first visit to the Gulf as President, Trump gathered with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to paw an odd-looking, glowing sphere.
Twit:
@KingSalman and @POTUS inaugurate The Global Center for Combatting Extremist Ideology in Riyadh. #RiyadhSummit
As it turns out, this was less a star than some kind of incandescent globe, meant to signify, as noted in the Saudi embassy tweet, some kind of new joint effort to combat terrorism.
But Trump's most studied grappling with solar power came during a pair of visits to Europe earlier this year, when he repeatedly engaged in prolonged handshakes with French President Emmanuel Macron. The young leader has an appreciation for both clean energy and the power exercised by the Sun King, Louis XIV.
Does it please the President?
If we know one thing about Trump, it's that he prizes loyalty -- to Trump. He tells us constantly. His subordinates know it and have, on occasion, gone to outsize lengths to prove their own.
One memorable example: Before his own wings were clipped, The Washington Post reported, Priebus was called on to ground a fly that infiltrated an Oval Office meeting. It had been buzzing, and annoying Trump, who duly "summoned his chief of staff and tasked him with killing the insect."
Doing Trump's bidding, however ridiculous, is a core competency in this White House. Spicer's thirst for the job was tested on his first weekend, when he declared the audience for the previous day's festivities the largest "to ever witness an inauguration, period."
Spicer's rant was a signal of things to come. The next day. Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway went on NBC to defend her colleague's assertions, up to a point.
"You're saying it's a falsehood," she told "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd. "And they're giving -- Sean Spicer, our press secretary -- gave alternative facts."
But there was no alternative, only love, when Trump formally introduced his Cabinet in June. As the group went up and down a long conference table, they hand-bathed the President in praise.
Here's a taste:
Vice President Mike Pence: "Greatest privilege of my life to serve as your vice president."
Attorney General Jeff Sessions: "We are receiving, as you know -- I'm not sure the rest of you fully understand -- the support of law enforcement all over America."
Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta: "I want to thank you for keeping your commitment to the American workers."
Energy Secretary Rick Perry: My hat's off to you for taking that stand (on the Paris climate deal), for sending a clear message around the world that America is gonna continue to lead in the area of energy.
UN envoy Nikki Haley: "It's a new day at the United Nations. We now have a very strong voice. People know what the US is for, they know what we're against, and they see us leading across the board."
White House budget director Mick Mulvaney: "With your direction we were able to also focus on the forgotten man and woman who are the folks who are paying those taxes, so I appreciate your support and your direction in pulling that budget together."
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price: "I can't thank you enough for the privilege that you've given me and the leadership that you've shown."
Transportation secretary Elaine Chao: "I want to thank you for getting this country moving again and also working again."
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue: "I want to congratulate you on the men and women you've placed around this table. The holistic team of working for America is making results in each and every area."
And then came Priebus for the topper:
"On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you've given us to serve your agenda and the American people."
Business dinners
Do a deal. Have a meal.
Trump has brought with him to the presidency some of the vestiges of the New York City real estate life. Among them, a desire to combine food with business.
Earlier this month, that meant dinner with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi included Chinese food, but no Republicans. They walked out of the meeting with some conflicting reviews, though not of the cuisine. The questions centered on whether Trump had agreed to a deal that would protect DACA recipients in exchange for a bump in border security (but no money for the wall).
That last bit is still a mystery. What's not is the President's preference for a chocolate dessert. At the Pelosi-Schumer get-together, it was pie. But back in April, there was a different order. Two of them, actually. First for cake, then for airstrikes on Syria.
How do we know -- and why do we care -- what Trump had for dessert before making the decision? Because he told us. In an interview with Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo, the President turned his recollection of the strikes into an advertisement for his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Twit:
.@POTUS tells @MariaBartiromo he told President Xi about the Missile strikes over "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake."
"We had finished dinner," he said of himself and visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping. "We're now having dessert -- and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen, and President Xi was enjoying it -- and I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded."
And then?
"We made a determination to do it, so the missiles were on the way."
It wasn't the first time the President put on a show for the paying customers at Mar-a-Lago. In February, Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were tucking into iceberg wedge salads when word came down that North Koreans had launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile.
The leaders got down to business in full view of gawking guests. Some aides even illuminated potentially sensitive briefing papers with the flashlights on their phones, which might or might not have been secure. (Spicer later told reporters the leaders had been "reviewing the logistics for the press conference," not scouring classified documents.)
Waiters stayed on the scene too, swapping out the salads for a main course. But Trump and Abe soon moved to another room. It's unclear if they ever made it to dessert.
Loose lips sink...
The Trump administration is still short of the quarter pole and it's already staked a claim to being the leakiest in American history.
How bad is it? Well, when national security adviser H.R. McMaster authored a memo warning against the "unauthorized disclosure of classified information or controlled unclassified United States Government information," it was promptly shared with Buzzfeed.
And while it's not usually considered a leak when it comes from the President's mouth, The Washington Post in May reported that Trump shared highly classified information with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador during an Oval Office meeting.
The list goes on. Short-lived communications director Anthony Scaramucci sealed his own fate when, in his zest for pursuing leakers, he called up the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza to chat -- on the record -- about his colleagues. Warning, this link contains lots of graphic language.
And then there is new Trump lawyer Ty Cobb. He recently gave The New York Times a look at the inner workings of a White House increasingly at odds with itself over how to manage special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe.
How so? By conducting the conversation, with a colleague, over lunch at a popular Washington steakhouse in the immediate vicinity of both the White House and the Times' DC bureau.
How did the reporter spot him? Well, here's a picture of Cobb.
And here's what he looked like on that afternoon, dining and prattling on about all manner of internal intrigue.
Twit:
Ty Cobb griped that McGahn is "being very conservative" re: producing doc'ts to Mueller. Two are "locked in a safe.”
Analysis by Gregory Krieg
Donald Trump arrived on the Republican primary circuit in 2015 with a promise to get by with a little help from his friends -- "the best and most serious people" on the market.
But after eight months in office, that pledge has become a favorite punchline on the web. Rather than a home to efficient, skilled operators, the Trump White House has been marked by an eccentric swirl of office politics run amok and off-hours fits of pique.
Set aside, if only for a moment, the very real issues animating the President's response to Puerto Rico, his views on white supremacist marchers, and the ongoing Russia scandaI. If you pitched what remained as satire, an editor would toss it right back as overdone. (Someone find Thad Cochran!)
Here's a quick skip through the profound -- and very real -- weirdness that has colored much of the current administration.
When Trump officials go missing
No one hides from the press (or the President) better than Trump's people.
First there was former FBI director James Comey. Trump initially decided to keep Comey on in his job and, during a post-inaugural reception at the White House, singled him out for a handshake and slap on the back. But as Comey confidante Ben Wittes told it on the Lawfare blog, the lanky lawman tried to avoid the awkward interaction by blending in with the drapes, which matched his blazer.
"So he stood in the back, right in front of the drapes," Wittes wrote, "hoping Trump wouldn't notice him camouflaged against the wall."
Alas, the President caught a glimpse. "Oh, and there's Jim," Trump said. "He's become more famous than me!"
That relationship would sour a bit, and on the occasion of Comey's firing, in early May, Trump communications staffers tried to steer clear of the media. Most notable was Sean Spicer, the dissembling former press secretary, who hid in -- correction: among -- some bushes on the White House grounds rather than confront a hungry pack of reporters.
Twit:
Priebus is in this van on tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, as Potus has not yet disembarked. Driver pulled van away as press moved toward it
Former chief of staff Reince Priebus's departure from his job, ditched on the tarmac after a ride on Air Force One, was an uncomfortable affair. Perhaps it would have been less so if there was a large trash can there to obscure reporters' view.
Twit:
This photo, courtesy of @tedbarrettcnn: Reince Priebus ducking out of Senate lunch for a phone call, obscured by giant trash bin
And then there is the curious case of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and their vacation schedule. The couple and their children often seem to be away when the President starts lighting fires. Is it a coincidence? Are they keeping a lid on Oval Office shenanigans -- only to see it pop off when they leave?
Or is it -- as the critics have increasingly suggested -- that they are actively trying to stay out of the less flattering headlines?
Starman Trump
To Trump, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is the "Rocket Man." That song, by Elton John, is from 1972. Another famous tune, from the same year, could be applied to Trump: David Bowie's "Starman."
Trump has repeatedly found himself in odd situations with the biggest star of all: the sun.
He most recently took on a solar eclipse -- training the presidential retinas directly on it.
According to the press pool on hand that afternoon, "White House aides standing beneath the Blue Room Balcony shouted 'don't look'" as Trump, well, looked.
President Donald Trump looks up toward the Solar Eclipse while joined by his wife first lady Melania Trump on the Truman Balcony at the White House on August 21, 2017.
President Donald Trump looks up toward the Solar Eclipse while joined by his wife first lady Melania Trump on the Truman Balcony at the White House on August 21, 2017.
Before that, there was the famous "orb." During his first visit to the Gulf as President, Trump gathered with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to paw an odd-looking, glowing sphere.
Twit:
@KingSalman and @POTUS inaugurate The Global Center for Combatting Extremist Ideology in Riyadh. #RiyadhSummit
As it turns out, this was less a star than some kind of incandescent globe, meant to signify, as noted in the Saudi embassy tweet, some kind of new joint effort to combat terrorism.
But Trump's most studied grappling with solar power came during a pair of visits to Europe earlier this year, when he repeatedly engaged in prolonged handshakes with French President Emmanuel Macron. The young leader has an appreciation for both clean energy and the power exercised by the Sun King, Louis XIV.
Does it please the President?
If we know one thing about Trump, it's that he prizes loyalty -- to Trump. He tells us constantly. His subordinates know it and have, on occasion, gone to outsize lengths to prove their own.
One memorable example: Before his own wings were clipped, The Washington Post reported, Priebus was called on to ground a fly that infiltrated an Oval Office meeting. It had been buzzing, and annoying Trump, who duly "summoned his chief of staff and tasked him with killing the insect."
Doing Trump's bidding, however ridiculous, is a core competency in this White House. Spicer's thirst for the job was tested on his first weekend, when he declared the audience for the previous day's festivities the largest "to ever witness an inauguration, period."
Spicer's rant was a signal of things to come. The next day. Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway went on NBC to defend her colleague's assertions, up to a point.
"You're saying it's a falsehood," she told "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd. "And they're giving -- Sean Spicer, our press secretary -- gave alternative facts."
But there was no alternative, only love, when Trump formally introduced his Cabinet in June. As the group went up and down a long conference table, they hand-bathed the President in praise.
Here's a taste:
Vice President Mike Pence: "Greatest privilege of my life to serve as your vice president."
Attorney General Jeff Sessions: "We are receiving, as you know -- I'm not sure the rest of you fully understand -- the support of law enforcement all over America."
Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta: "I want to thank you for keeping your commitment to the American workers."
Energy Secretary Rick Perry: My hat's off to you for taking that stand (on the Paris climate deal), for sending a clear message around the world that America is gonna continue to lead in the area of energy.
UN envoy Nikki Haley: "It's a new day at the United Nations. We now have a very strong voice. People know what the US is for, they know what we're against, and they see us leading across the board."
White House budget director Mick Mulvaney: "With your direction we were able to also focus on the forgotten man and woman who are the folks who are paying those taxes, so I appreciate your support and your direction in pulling that budget together."
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price: "I can't thank you enough for the privilege that you've given me and the leadership that you've shown."
Transportation secretary Elaine Chao: "I want to thank you for getting this country moving again and also working again."
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue: "I want to congratulate you on the men and women you've placed around this table. The holistic team of working for America is making results in each and every area."
And then came Priebus for the topper:
"On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you've given us to serve your agenda and the American people."
Business dinners
Do a deal. Have a meal.
Trump has brought with him to the presidency some of the vestiges of the New York City real estate life. Among them, a desire to combine food with business.
Earlier this month, that meant dinner with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi included Chinese food, but no Republicans. They walked out of the meeting with some conflicting reviews, though not of the cuisine. The questions centered on whether Trump had agreed to a deal that would protect DACA recipients in exchange for a bump in border security (but no money for the wall).
That last bit is still a mystery. What's not is the President's preference for a chocolate dessert. At the Pelosi-Schumer get-together, it was pie. But back in April, there was a different order. Two of them, actually. First for cake, then for airstrikes on Syria.
How do we know -- and why do we care -- what Trump had for dessert before making the decision? Because he told us. In an interview with Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo, the President turned his recollection of the strikes into an advertisement for his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Twit:
.@POTUS tells @MariaBartiromo he told President Xi about the Missile strikes over "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake."
"We had finished dinner," he said of himself and visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping. "We're now having dessert -- and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen, and President Xi was enjoying it -- and I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded."
And then?
"We made a determination to do it, so the missiles were on the way."
It wasn't the first time the President put on a show for the paying customers at Mar-a-Lago. In February, Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were tucking into iceberg wedge salads when word came down that North Koreans had launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile.
The leaders got down to business in full view of gawking guests. Some aides even illuminated potentially sensitive briefing papers with the flashlights on their phones, which might or might not have been secure. (Spicer later told reporters the leaders had been "reviewing the logistics for the press conference," not scouring classified documents.)
Waiters stayed on the scene too, swapping out the salads for a main course. But Trump and Abe soon moved to another room. It's unclear if they ever made it to dessert.
Loose lips sink...
The Trump administration is still short of the quarter pole and it's already staked a claim to being the leakiest in American history.
How bad is it? Well, when national security adviser H.R. McMaster authored a memo warning against the "unauthorized disclosure of classified information or controlled unclassified United States Government information," it was promptly shared with Buzzfeed.
And while it's not usually considered a leak when it comes from the President's mouth, The Washington Post in May reported that Trump shared highly classified information with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador during an Oval Office meeting.
The list goes on. Short-lived communications director Anthony Scaramucci sealed his own fate when, in his zest for pursuing leakers, he called up the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza to chat -- on the record -- about his colleagues. Warning, this link contains lots of graphic language.
And then there is new Trump lawyer Ty Cobb. He recently gave The New York Times a look at the inner workings of a White House increasingly at odds with itself over how to manage special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe.
How so? By conducting the conversation, with a colleague, over lunch at a popular Washington steakhouse in the immediate vicinity of both the White House and the Times' DC bureau.
How did the reporter spot him? Well, here's a picture of Cobb.
And here's what he looked like on that afternoon, dining and prattling on about all manner of internal intrigue.
Twit:
Ty Cobb griped that McGahn is "being very conservative" re: producing doc'ts to Mueller. Two are "locked in a safe.”
Alternate universe
From Puerto Rico to Russia, Donald Trump is living in an alternate universe
By Chris Cillizza
To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the recovery efforts in Puerto Rico are going swimmingly -- thanks, in large part, to how well he is handling everything.
"Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló just stated: 'The Administration and the President, every time we've spoken, they've delivered,'" Trump tweeted Friday morning.
On Thursday night, Trump tweeted this: "Puerto Rico is devastated. Phone system, electric grid many roads, gone. FEMA and First Responders are amazing. Governor said 'great job!'"
Earlier Thursday, Trump scolded the press for its coverage of the story: "FEMA & First Responders are doing a GREAT job in Puerto Rico. Massive food & water delivered. Docks & electric grid dead. Locals trying really hard to help but many have lost their homes. Military is now on site and I will be there Tuesday. Wish press would treat fairly!"
The facts on the ground in Puerto Rico tell a very different story. Huge swaths of the country still don't have power. Drinking water is running low. So is food. The country's credit card system remains down. A flash flood watch is in effect for the weekend.
As San Juan Mayor Carmen YulÃn Cruz said on "New Day" Friday: "This is not a good news story. This is a people are dying story." (She was responding to an incredibly tone-deaf comment by acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke on Thursday afternoon.)
The simple fact is that Trump was caught flat-footed on the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Puerto Rico, distracted by both a fight he picked with pro-athletes over the National Anthem and the Alabama Senate race where his preferred candidate was resoundingly defeated on Tuesday.
That Trump, in the face of all facts to the contrary, continues to insist that things in Puerto Rico are coming around and that his administration's response to the hurricane has been pitch perfect is broadly consistent with the President's tendency to create an alternate reality when the fact-based one doesn't look so good for him.
Witness Trump's bizarre attempt this week to argue that his side actually does have the votes needed to pass legislation that would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and that the only reason it hasn't passed yet is because a GOP senator is in the hospital.
"We have the votes for health care," Trump insisted Wednesday. "The problem is we can't have them by Friday, because the reconciliation ends on Friday. So we'll have to do it in January or February.
But I feel we have the votes. I'm almost certain we have the votes, but with one man in the hospital we cannot display that we have them -- plus some people wanna go through a process just to make themselves feel better. That's OK."
Er, no.
First off, Republicans don't have the votes. At best, they have 46 "yeses" since three GOP Senators are hard "no's" (John McCain, Rand Paul and Susan Collins) and three more (Ted Cruz, Lisa Murkowski and Mike Lee) have yet to say whether they would or could be for the legislation sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
Second, there are no senators in the hospital. Trump appears to be referring to Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran, who is recuperating from a medical procedure in the Magnolia State. "Thanks for the well-wishes," Cochran tweeted in the wake of Trump's claim that he was hospitalized. "I'm not hospitalized, but am recuperating at home in Mississippi and look forward to returning to work soon."
Cochran also made clear he would be ready and able to return to Washington to vote for the Graham-Cassidy legislation if the votes were there to pass it.
SPOILER ALERT: They aren't.
Trump's attitude to the ongoing special counsel investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election and potential collusion with his campaign is similarly distanced from reality.
At a speech a week ago in Alabama in support of appointed Republican Sen. Luther Strange, who lost his primary bid Tuesday, Trump repeatedly sought to downplay the seriousness of Russia's involvement in the election.
"I call it the Russian hoax," Trump told the crowd. "One of the great hoaxes." He added, in a heroic feat of red herring-ness: "Any Russians in the audience? Are there any Russians in the audience? I don't see too many Russians."
Here's the thing: The FBI, CIA, NSA and the former Director of National Intelligence all agree that Russia not only actively sought to meddle in the election but that they did so with the express purpose of helping Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton.
Unless you believe all of those intelligence agencies are somehow involved in a massive conspiracy to make the President look bad, then Trump's repeated insistence that the Russia story is a "hoax" is way, way, way off base.
I've written before that Trump is forever telling himself a story of his life and his actions that make him look like the righteous hero -- never placing a foot wrong and always being proven right.
The facts -- from Puerto Rico to healthcare to Russia -- tell a very different story, however. And, while Trump has proven an uncanny ability to sell an alternate reality to himself and his supporters, the facts have a funny way of winning out in the long run.
You can only live in a world of your creation for so long before fact-based reality bursts your bubble. The question for Trump is how long he can keep this up.
By Chris Cillizza
To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the recovery efforts in Puerto Rico are going swimmingly -- thanks, in large part, to how well he is handling everything.
"Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló just stated: 'The Administration and the President, every time we've spoken, they've delivered,'" Trump tweeted Friday morning.
On Thursday night, Trump tweeted this: "Puerto Rico is devastated. Phone system, electric grid many roads, gone. FEMA and First Responders are amazing. Governor said 'great job!'"
Earlier Thursday, Trump scolded the press for its coverage of the story: "FEMA & First Responders are doing a GREAT job in Puerto Rico. Massive food & water delivered. Docks & electric grid dead. Locals trying really hard to help but many have lost their homes. Military is now on site and I will be there Tuesday. Wish press would treat fairly!"
The facts on the ground in Puerto Rico tell a very different story. Huge swaths of the country still don't have power. Drinking water is running low. So is food. The country's credit card system remains down. A flash flood watch is in effect for the weekend.
As San Juan Mayor Carmen YulÃn Cruz said on "New Day" Friday: "This is not a good news story. This is a people are dying story." (She was responding to an incredibly tone-deaf comment by acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke on Thursday afternoon.)
The simple fact is that Trump was caught flat-footed on the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Puerto Rico, distracted by both a fight he picked with pro-athletes over the National Anthem and the Alabama Senate race where his preferred candidate was resoundingly defeated on Tuesday.
That Trump, in the face of all facts to the contrary, continues to insist that things in Puerto Rico are coming around and that his administration's response to the hurricane has been pitch perfect is broadly consistent with the President's tendency to create an alternate reality when the fact-based one doesn't look so good for him.
Witness Trump's bizarre attempt this week to argue that his side actually does have the votes needed to pass legislation that would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and that the only reason it hasn't passed yet is because a GOP senator is in the hospital.
"We have the votes for health care," Trump insisted Wednesday. "The problem is we can't have them by Friday, because the reconciliation ends on Friday. So we'll have to do it in January or February.
But I feel we have the votes. I'm almost certain we have the votes, but with one man in the hospital we cannot display that we have them -- plus some people wanna go through a process just to make themselves feel better. That's OK."
Er, no.
First off, Republicans don't have the votes. At best, they have 46 "yeses" since three GOP Senators are hard "no's" (John McCain, Rand Paul and Susan Collins) and three more (Ted Cruz, Lisa Murkowski and Mike Lee) have yet to say whether they would or could be for the legislation sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
Second, there are no senators in the hospital. Trump appears to be referring to Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran, who is recuperating from a medical procedure in the Magnolia State. "Thanks for the well-wishes," Cochran tweeted in the wake of Trump's claim that he was hospitalized. "I'm not hospitalized, but am recuperating at home in Mississippi and look forward to returning to work soon."
Cochran also made clear he would be ready and able to return to Washington to vote for the Graham-Cassidy legislation if the votes were there to pass it.
SPOILER ALERT: They aren't.
Trump's attitude to the ongoing special counsel investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election and potential collusion with his campaign is similarly distanced from reality.
At a speech a week ago in Alabama in support of appointed Republican Sen. Luther Strange, who lost his primary bid Tuesday, Trump repeatedly sought to downplay the seriousness of Russia's involvement in the election.
"I call it the Russian hoax," Trump told the crowd. "One of the great hoaxes." He added, in a heroic feat of red herring-ness: "Any Russians in the audience? Are there any Russians in the audience? I don't see too many Russians."
Here's the thing: The FBI, CIA, NSA and the former Director of National Intelligence all agree that Russia not only actively sought to meddle in the election but that they did so with the express purpose of helping Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton.
Unless you believe all of those intelligence agencies are somehow involved in a massive conspiracy to make the President look bad, then Trump's repeated insistence that the Russia story is a "hoax" is way, way, way off base.
I've written before that Trump is forever telling himself a story of his life and his actions that make him look like the righteous hero -- never placing a foot wrong and always being proven right.
The facts -- from Puerto Rico to healthcare to Russia -- tell a very different story, however. And, while Trump has proven an uncanny ability to sell an alternate reality to himself and his supporters, the facts have a funny way of winning out in the long run.
You can only live in a world of your creation for so long before fact-based reality bursts your bubble. The question for Trump is how long he can keep this up.
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
Trump White House feels heat on Puerto Rico
By Stephen Collinson
Puerto Rico and Washington seem farther than 1,500 miles apart right now -- in fact they're experiencing a different version of reality.
Nine days after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, emerging video and news reports of a heartrending humanitarian crisis are jarring with the Trump administration's upbeat assessment of the relief effort.
And as the islanders' plight is revealed, the White House risks becoming increasingly exposed politically at a time when it is already being pummeled by a tide of scandal and defeats, including the controversy over Cabinet members using private jets and the latest failed bid to repeal Obamacare.
The dire situation, and the reluctance of President Donald Trump to publicly embrace complications in the relief effort, are also raising questions about why the response to Maria seems more sluggish than the government efforts following monster storms that hit Florida and Texas over the last month.
The President himself, who did not appear in public Thursday, took to Twitter to rebut rising criticism of his government's response, saying "massive" amounts of food and water had been delivered while noting his planned visit next week.
And he resorted to a familiar tactic when under fire -- slamming the media.
"Wish press would treat fairly!" he wrote.
Twit:
FEMA & First Responders are doing a GREAT job in Puerto Rico. Massive food & water delivered. Docks & electric grid dead. Locals trying....
Twit:
...really hard to help but many have lost their homes. Military is now on site and I will be there Tuesday. Wish press would treat fairly!
Trump returned to Twitter on Friday morning to defend his administration's response after Puerto Rico's governor appeared on CNN: "Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello just stated: "The Administration and the President, every time we've spoken, they've delivered......" Following up with a second tweet Trump went on: "... The fact is that Puerto Rico has been destroyed by two hurricanes.
Big decisions will have to be made as to the cost of its rebuilding!"
Part of the problem is the way the administration is talking about Puerto Rico.
On Tuesday, Trump repeatedly boasted during a news conference that his team was doing a "great job" and said how "nicely" he had been treated by the island's governor, who he said had praised the administration's work.
Three days later, even as harrowing scenes emerged from the territory, Trump's acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke described the federal response to the disaster as "a good news story."
The comments did not yet appear to match the notoriety of former President George W. Bush's comment to his FEMA director Michael Brown that he was doing a "heck of a job" during Hurricane Katrina.
But the unfortunate assessments could come back to haunt the administration if the situation in Puerto Rico deteriorates further.
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz rejected Duke's assessment.
"Maybe from where she's standing it's a good news story," she said on "New Day."
"When you are drinking from a creek it's not a good news story. When you don't have food for a baby, it's not a good news story."
And they are already conflicting with the emerging reality of life on the US territory, where nearly half the population remains without drinking water, hospitals struggle to stay open, food is scarce and 97% of people have no power. CNN reporters on Thursday related poignant stories of life after Maria, including that of one woman suffering from diabetes and an infection who was rushed to hospital by one of the network's crews.
Such coverage is prompting some Trump critics to suggest more must be done.
"Where is the cavalry?" asked Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson on Twitter.
Twit:
There is a crisis in Puerto Rico. Fuel, water & medicine sitting at the docks. Need immediate response by US military. Where is the cavalry?
No one is saying that responding to a disaster of such magnitude is easy.
Federal Emergency Management officials are exhausted after dealing with their third massive Hurricane in a few weeks after Harvey hit Texas and Irma barreled across Florida. Puerto Rico is less developed and wealthy than those states, and the logistical challenges of helping an offshore island with mountainous terrain are immense. The territory also lacks the network of NGOs and private sector groups that helped out when storms hit the US mainland.
The White House said Thursday that 10,000 federal relief workers and more than 7,000 troops were on the island in an operation that in many ways has more in common with US efforts to mitigate natural disasters in Haiti than storms on the US mainland.
Yet there are mounting questions about whether the administration did enough to prepare for the storm, and whether actions it has taken since have been sufficient. And the repeated explanation by top officials of how hard things are is starting to wear thin.
"The island setting presents logistical hurdles that do not exist on the mainland, where trucks from around the country can converge on disaster areas," said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Thursday, using a formulation repeatedly voiced by officials in recent days.
As criticism of the White House effort grows, several emerging political threats are evident. The increasing contrast between the situation on the island being portrayed in news reports and the White House is beginning to set up a credibility gap that is casting doubt on the administration's statements on the crisis.
There's also a sense that officials are struggling to catch up with the quickly worsening narrative on the ground, and in the absence of a high-profile supremo to run the operation, or at least to speak about it publicly, the political messaging about the storm has been inconsistent.
Whereas Duke referred to a "good news" story on Thursday, FEMA Administrator Brock Long declared that he was "not satisfied" with the situation in an interview with CNN's Kate Bolduan.
The government's response left retired Gen. Russel Honoré, who turned around the botched response to Katrina in 2005, fuming.
"I don't know what the hell is going on!" he said on CNN, calling for the military to surge air traffic controllers onto the island to open airports, transportation specialists to clear roads and the deployment of many more troops, ships and helicopters.
"Puerto Rico is bigger than Katrina," he said.
If the government effort continues to appear outpaced by the scale of the disaster, there will inevitably be scrutiny of the man on whose desk the buck stops -- Trump.
The President has yet to formally address Puerto Rico in a standalone speech. He has however mentioned the disaster during several encounters with the press and during other engagements.
On Monday, he denied that his feud with the NFL, that he stokes every day, had distracted him from the worsening situation on the island.
But the President has still gone about his normal business, including a trip to Indiana on Wednesday to promote his top political priority, tax reform.
His only remarks on the situation on Thursday were on Twitter, and did not exactly drip with empathy for the victims.
"The electric power grid in Puerto Rico is totally shot. Large numbers of generators are now on Island. Food and water on site," he wrote in one post.
Twit:
The electric power grid in Puerto Rico is totally shot. Large numbers of generators are now on Island. Food and water on site.
Still, the administration acted like it knows it had a perception problem on Thursday.
The President issued a waiver of the Jones Act, which requires cargo shipped between US ports to be carried on American flagged vessels, to facilitate the delivery of aid.
The Pentagon meanwhile named three-star Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan to lead the military operation in Puerto Rico.
And the White House deployed the President's top homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, who won good reviews of his performance during Irma and Harvey, to brief White House reporters.
Even so, some of his answers seemed defensive.
Asked by CNN's Jeff Zeleny why it had taken eight days to name Buchanan, Bossert answered: "It didn't require a three-star general eight days ago."
He also defended the timing of the Jones Act waiver, saying "that was not too late. It was not even too early."
Bossert also later defended Duke in an appearance on CNN, saying her remarks had been meant to highlight the selfless work of federal workers during the disaster.
In another CNN interview on Friday Bossert mounted a strong defense of the administration's effort but conceded there were logistical problems to be surmounted.
"I don't accept that we're doing anything short of everything we can do," Bossert said on "New Day".
By Stephen Collinson
Puerto Rico and Washington seem farther than 1,500 miles apart right now -- in fact they're experiencing a different version of reality.
Nine days after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, emerging video and news reports of a heartrending humanitarian crisis are jarring with the Trump administration's upbeat assessment of the relief effort.
And as the islanders' plight is revealed, the White House risks becoming increasingly exposed politically at a time when it is already being pummeled by a tide of scandal and defeats, including the controversy over Cabinet members using private jets and the latest failed bid to repeal Obamacare.
The dire situation, and the reluctance of President Donald Trump to publicly embrace complications in the relief effort, are also raising questions about why the response to Maria seems more sluggish than the government efforts following monster storms that hit Florida and Texas over the last month.
The President himself, who did not appear in public Thursday, took to Twitter to rebut rising criticism of his government's response, saying "massive" amounts of food and water had been delivered while noting his planned visit next week.
And he resorted to a familiar tactic when under fire -- slamming the media.
"Wish press would treat fairly!" he wrote.
Twit:
FEMA & First Responders are doing a GREAT job in Puerto Rico. Massive food & water delivered. Docks & electric grid dead. Locals trying....
Twit:
...really hard to help but many have lost their homes. Military is now on site and I will be there Tuesday. Wish press would treat fairly!
Trump returned to Twitter on Friday morning to defend his administration's response after Puerto Rico's governor appeared on CNN: "Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello just stated: "The Administration and the President, every time we've spoken, they've delivered......" Following up with a second tweet Trump went on: "... The fact is that Puerto Rico has been destroyed by two hurricanes.
Big decisions will have to be made as to the cost of its rebuilding!"
Part of the problem is the way the administration is talking about Puerto Rico.
On Tuesday, Trump repeatedly boasted during a news conference that his team was doing a "great job" and said how "nicely" he had been treated by the island's governor, who he said had praised the administration's work.
Three days later, even as harrowing scenes emerged from the territory, Trump's acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke described the federal response to the disaster as "a good news story."
The comments did not yet appear to match the notoriety of former President George W. Bush's comment to his FEMA director Michael Brown that he was doing a "heck of a job" during Hurricane Katrina.
But the unfortunate assessments could come back to haunt the administration if the situation in Puerto Rico deteriorates further.
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz rejected Duke's assessment.
"Maybe from where she's standing it's a good news story," she said on "New Day."
"When you are drinking from a creek it's not a good news story. When you don't have food for a baby, it's not a good news story."
And they are already conflicting with the emerging reality of life on the US territory, where nearly half the population remains without drinking water, hospitals struggle to stay open, food is scarce and 97% of people have no power. CNN reporters on Thursday related poignant stories of life after Maria, including that of one woman suffering from diabetes and an infection who was rushed to hospital by one of the network's crews.
Such coverage is prompting some Trump critics to suggest more must be done.
"Where is the cavalry?" asked Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson on Twitter.
Twit:
There is a crisis in Puerto Rico. Fuel, water & medicine sitting at the docks. Need immediate response by US military. Where is the cavalry?
No one is saying that responding to a disaster of such magnitude is easy.
Federal Emergency Management officials are exhausted after dealing with their third massive Hurricane in a few weeks after Harvey hit Texas and Irma barreled across Florida. Puerto Rico is less developed and wealthy than those states, and the logistical challenges of helping an offshore island with mountainous terrain are immense. The territory also lacks the network of NGOs and private sector groups that helped out when storms hit the US mainland.
The White House said Thursday that 10,000 federal relief workers and more than 7,000 troops were on the island in an operation that in many ways has more in common with US efforts to mitigate natural disasters in Haiti than storms on the US mainland.
Yet there are mounting questions about whether the administration did enough to prepare for the storm, and whether actions it has taken since have been sufficient. And the repeated explanation by top officials of how hard things are is starting to wear thin.
"The island setting presents logistical hurdles that do not exist on the mainland, where trucks from around the country can converge on disaster areas," said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Thursday, using a formulation repeatedly voiced by officials in recent days.
As criticism of the White House effort grows, several emerging political threats are evident. The increasing contrast between the situation on the island being portrayed in news reports and the White House is beginning to set up a credibility gap that is casting doubt on the administration's statements on the crisis.
There's also a sense that officials are struggling to catch up with the quickly worsening narrative on the ground, and in the absence of a high-profile supremo to run the operation, or at least to speak about it publicly, the political messaging about the storm has been inconsistent.
Whereas Duke referred to a "good news" story on Thursday, FEMA Administrator Brock Long declared that he was "not satisfied" with the situation in an interview with CNN's Kate Bolduan.
The government's response left retired Gen. Russel Honoré, who turned around the botched response to Katrina in 2005, fuming.
"I don't know what the hell is going on!" he said on CNN, calling for the military to surge air traffic controllers onto the island to open airports, transportation specialists to clear roads and the deployment of many more troops, ships and helicopters.
"Puerto Rico is bigger than Katrina," he said.
If the government effort continues to appear outpaced by the scale of the disaster, there will inevitably be scrutiny of the man on whose desk the buck stops -- Trump.
The President has yet to formally address Puerto Rico in a standalone speech. He has however mentioned the disaster during several encounters with the press and during other engagements.
On Monday, he denied that his feud with the NFL, that he stokes every day, had distracted him from the worsening situation on the island.
But the President has still gone about his normal business, including a trip to Indiana on Wednesday to promote his top political priority, tax reform.
His only remarks on the situation on Thursday were on Twitter, and did not exactly drip with empathy for the victims.
"The electric power grid in Puerto Rico is totally shot. Large numbers of generators are now on Island. Food and water on site," he wrote in one post.
Twit:
The electric power grid in Puerto Rico is totally shot. Large numbers of generators are now on Island. Food and water on site.
Still, the administration acted like it knows it had a perception problem on Thursday.
The President issued a waiver of the Jones Act, which requires cargo shipped between US ports to be carried on American flagged vessels, to facilitate the delivery of aid.
The Pentagon meanwhile named three-star Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan to lead the military operation in Puerto Rico.
And the White House deployed the President's top homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, who won good reviews of his performance during Irma and Harvey, to brief White House reporters.
Even so, some of his answers seemed defensive.
Asked by CNN's Jeff Zeleny why it had taken eight days to name Buchanan, Bossert answered: "It didn't require a three-star general eight days ago."
He also defended the timing of the Jones Act waiver, saying "that was not too late. It was not even too early."
Bossert also later defended Duke in an appearance on CNN, saying her remarks had been meant to highlight the selfless work of federal workers during the disaster.
In another CNN interview on Friday Bossert mounted a strong defense of the administration's effort but conceded there were logistical problems to be surmounted.
"I don't accept that we're doing anything short of everything we can do," Bossert said on "New Day".
This ain't no disco....
San Juan mayor: 'Dammit, this is not a good news story'
By Daniella Diaz
San Juan Mayor Carmen YulÃn Cruz reacted with shock and anger to acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke on Friday, saying Puerto Rico's recovery is "not a good news story."
"This is a 'people are dying' story," she said in disbelief.
Cruz was referencing Duke's comments from Thursday, when the Trump administration official said she was satisfied with the government's response to help Puerto Rico's recover from Hurricane Maria.
"I know it is really a good news story in terms of our ability to reach people and the limited number of deaths that have taken place in such a devastating hurricane," Duke said.
"Well maybe from where she's standing it's a good news story," YulÃn Cruz told CNN's Alisyn Camerota after she was played the clip on "New Day." "When you're drinking from a creek, it's not a good news story. When you don't have food for a baby, it's not a good news story. When you have to pull people down from buildings -- I'm sorry, that really upsets me and frustrates me."
She continued: "I would ask you (Duke) to come down here and visit the towns and then make a statement like that, because frankly, it is an irresponsible statement in contrast with the statements of support that I have been getting yesterday when I got that call from the White House. Dammit, this is not a good news story. This is a 'people are dying' story. It's a life-or-death story."
On Thursday, Duke expressed nothing short of full confidence when she talked to reporters about Puerto Rico outside the White House.
"I am very satisfied," Duke said. "I know it's a hard storm to recover from but the amount of progress that's been made, and I really would appreciate any support that we get. I know it is really a good news story in terms of our ability to reach people and the limited number of deaths that have taken place in such a devastating hurricane."
She clarified later, "It's good news that we have a unification of command where the governor, the federal response, and the people are all united toward saving lives and giving things to the people they need."
President Donald Trump also defended his administration's response to the humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico on Friday, tweeting a quote from Gov. Ricardo Rosselló he said on CNN.
Trump tweeted, "Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello just stated: "The Administration and the President, every time we've spoken, they've delivered......"
Twit:
Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello just stated: "The Administration and the President, every time we've spoken, they've delivered......
He continued:" ...The fact is that Puerto Rico has been destroyed by two hurricanes. Big decisions will have to be made as to the cost of its rebuilding!"
Twit:
...The fact is that Puerto Rico has been destroyed by two hurricanes. Big decisions will have to be made as to the cost of its rebuilding!
Trump is expected to visit the island on Tuesday but the White House confirmed this morning that his wife Melania will not make the trip as she did after previous disasters.
'We have to figure out how to handle' Puerto Rico
Tom Bossert, the administration's homeland security adviser, was on CNN Friday morning suggesting Puerto Rico's debt could influence how the federal government responds to the crisis.
"First, we always have big discussions after disasters pertaining to cost but what you need to know is Puerto Rico started this one $72 billion in debt," he told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day" Friday. "So the President is 1,000% right. We're going to have to figure out how to handle this when we move forward."
Cuomo asked Bossert to elaborate on what the connection is between Puerto Rico's debt and rebuilding.
"The idea here, Chris, with them being in debt, they don't have enough ready liquid cash to pay their normal share like Florida and Texas had ready, money to pay, so what we're going to do -- and the President has already done it -- is give a 180-day cost share adjustment," Bossert said. "The federal government is paying 100% of the tab here to make sure lives are saved. We'll worry about the big decisions later. That's the President's point."
But Bossert defended the administration, saying they're doing everything they can to help people in Puerto Rico.
"I don't accept that we're doing anything short of everything we can do. Yes, I accept that the people are going to see, at the very end, the last person in the most hardest to reach areas, will receive assistance in a way that is less acceptable than we would like to. We would like to give them a bottle of water and food immediately," he said. "I do accept there's going to be a difference between a full-throated, adequate response, and the complete satisfaction of bringing that entire territory back to its full functional state."
Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is the Commander of US Army North (5th Army), was appointed Thursday by the Pentagon to lead the military's hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico -- and told CNN in an interview after Bossert that the military has 10,000 people helping with the response -- but they need more.
"Well, we're certainly bringing in more," he told Camerota on "New Day." "For example, on the military side, we're bringing in both air force, navy, and army medical capabilities in addition to aircraft, more helicopters .., (but) it's not enough, and we're bringing more in."
By Daniella Diaz
San Juan Mayor Carmen YulÃn Cruz reacted with shock and anger to acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke on Friday, saying Puerto Rico's recovery is "not a good news story."
"This is a 'people are dying' story," she said in disbelief.
Cruz was referencing Duke's comments from Thursday, when the Trump administration official said she was satisfied with the government's response to help Puerto Rico's recover from Hurricane Maria.
"I know it is really a good news story in terms of our ability to reach people and the limited number of deaths that have taken place in such a devastating hurricane," Duke said.
"Well maybe from where she's standing it's a good news story," YulÃn Cruz told CNN's Alisyn Camerota after she was played the clip on "New Day." "When you're drinking from a creek, it's not a good news story. When you don't have food for a baby, it's not a good news story. When you have to pull people down from buildings -- I'm sorry, that really upsets me and frustrates me."
She continued: "I would ask you (Duke) to come down here and visit the towns and then make a statement like that, because frankly, it is an irresponsible statement in contrast with the statements of support that I have been getting yesterday when I got that call from the White House. Dammit, this is not a good news story. This is a 'people are dying' story. It's a life-or-death story."
On Thursday, Duke expressed nothing short of full confidence when she talked to reporters about Puerto Rico outside the White House.
"I am very satisfied," Duke said. "I know it's a hard storm to recover from but the amount of progress that's been made, and I really would appreciate any support that we get. I know it is really a good news story in terms of our ability to reach people and the limited number of deaths that have taken place in such a devastating hurricane."
She clarified later, "It's good news that we have a unification of command where the governor, the federal response, and the people are all united toward saving lives and giving things to the people they need."
President Donald Trump also defended his administration's response to the humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico on Friday, tweeting a quote from Gov. Ricardo Rosselló he said on CNN.
Trump tweeted, "Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello just stated: "The Administration and the President, every time we've spoken, they've delivered......"
Twit:
Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello just stated: "The Administration and the President, every time we've spoken, they've delivered......
He continued:" ...The fact is that Puerto Rico has been destroyed by two hurricanes. Big decisions will have to be made as to the cost of its rebuilding!"
Twit:
...The fact is that Puerto Rico has been destroyed by two hurricanes. Big decisions will have to be made as to the cost of its rebuilding!
Trump is expected to visit the island on Tuesday but the White House confirmed this morning that his wife Melania will not make the trip as she did after previous disasters.
'We have to figure out how to handle' Puerto Rico
Tom Bossert, the administration's homeland security adviser, was on CNN Friday morning suggesting Puerto Rico's debt could influence how the federal government responds to the crisis.
"First, we always have big discussions after disasters pertaining to cost but what you need to know is Puerto Rico started this one $72 billion in debt," he told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day" Friday. "So the President is 1,000% right. We're going to have to figure out how to handle this when we move forward."
Cuomo asked Bossert to elaborate on what the connection is between Puerto Rico's debt and rebuilding.
"The idea here, Chris, with them being in debt, they don't have enough ready liquid cash to pay their normal share like Florida and Texas had ready, money to pay, so what we're going to do -- and the President has already done it -- is give a 180-day cost share adjustment," Bossert said. "The federal government is paying 100% of the tab here to make sure lives are saved. We'll worry about the big decisions later. That's the President's point."
But Bossert defended the administration, saying they're doing everything they can to help people in Puerto Rico.
"I don't accept that we're doing anything short of everything we can do. Yes, I accept that the people are going to see, at the very end, the last person in the most hardest to reach areas, will receive assistance in a way that is less acceptable than we would like to. We would like to give them a bottle of water and food immediately," he said. "I do accept there's going to be a difference between a full-throated, adequate response, and the complete satisfaction of bringing that entire territory back to its full functional state."
Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is the Commander of US Army North (5th Army), was appointed Thursday by the Pentagon to lead the military's hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico -- and told CNN in an interview after Bossert that the military has 10,000 people helping with the response -- but they need more.
"Well, we're certainly bringing in more," he told Camerota on "New Day." "For example, on the military side, we're bringing in both air force, navy, and army medical capabilities in addition to aircraft, more helicopters .., (but) it's not enough, and we're bringing more in."
The Myth of Mitch
The Myth of Mitch McConnell, Political Super-Genius
The Senate majority leader has been coasting on an inflated reputation for too long. This week exposed just how little he has achieved.
By ADAM JENTLESON
The past eight months of massive and avoidable failures have delivered such a devastating blow to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s reputation for political savvy, it’s a wonder it ever existed at all.
So how did the Myth of McConnell get started in the first place? The story is one of cynicism, self-promotion and credulousness, born out of desperation for bipartisanship and craving for familiar roles in an era when American politics veered into uncharted territory.
For the uninitiated, the Myth goes something like this: A calculating Kentuckian, he sees three steps ahead while playing eight-dimensional chess on his solved Rubik’s cube with one hand, while using the other to hold an inside straight close to his vest, which is embroidered with Masonic secrets that only he can read and that unlock true mastery of the Senate, along with eternal enlightenment, for good measure.
In the Myth of McConnell, grand achievements are conjured out of last-minute, crisis-driven exercises in can-kicking—like extending the U.S. borrowing authority and government funding—all things that used to happen routinely before McConnell became leader of the Republican Caucus and unleashed his unique brand of unprecedented obstructionism on the Senate, manufacturing the very crises that made the last-minute deals necessary. Meanwhile, humdrum political events, like winning reelection in a deep red state in a strong year for Republicans—as McConnell did in 2014—are recast as achievements of Machiavellian brilliance.
If any believers in the Myth remain after the brutal week McConnell just endured, which capped off an unbelievably brutal eight months, they should take this challenge: Name one major legislative accomplishment to McConnell’s credit over the more than 30 years he has been in the Senate. (Last minute deals don’t count.)
You can’t do it: Unlike former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (my former boss) and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, McConnell has never authored a single piece of major legislation that became law, nor has he successfully shepherded a single major bill to passage as leader. Reid, Pelosi and former President Barack Obama were all party to the last-minute deals, but they all have a trove of historic accomplishments to show for their leadership: insuring millions of Americans through the Affordable Care Act, reforming the post-crash financial system with Dodd-Frank and ending the Iraq war, for starters. McConnell has nothing.
His failure to log even a single major achievement is without precedent in recent American history. It’s not like he hasn’t had the opportunity: Not only has McConnell enjoyed 250 days of unified Republican control in 2017, he also led a GOP majority in the Senate for the previous two years, paired with a solid Republican majority in the House. But under McConnell’s leadership, even bills backed by strong bipartisan support, tagged as likely to pass by seasoned Hill observers and likely to be signed by Obama, languished.
Remember the criminal justice reform bill? That effort was supported by a high-powered, bipartisan cast that included Senators Cornyn, Grassley, Scott, Leahy, Durbin and Booker, along with the Koch brothers. It never came to the floor, dogged for months by rumors that McConnell opposed it until he finally stuck the knife in it in the fall of 2016.
So where does the Myth of McConnell come from?
The Myth is manufactured out of a deeply cynical but highly effective public relations insight that McConnell exploited to maximum effect: If he simply labeled everything Obama and Democrats tried to do as “partisan,” regardless of the merits, then invented institutionalist-sounding reasons for his opposition, and conveyed those reasons in polished speeches delivered from the Senate floor in his rolling Kentucky drawl, the news media and the commentators would eat it up. He realized that he didn’t have to be a bipartisanship-seeking institutionalist—he could just play one on TV, giving him cover to push partisanship to the hilt in private.
The gambit worked—for a while.
In the post-2010 midterms stretch of the Obama administration, during which I served as a senior aide to Reid, watching the Myth take shape was like watching a banner being unfurled in slow motion. McConnell appeared to have learned from the blowback to his oft-quoted 2010 admission, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” He probably also learned from the blowback to a 2010 New York Times article, in which he bragged a little too openly about dissuading members of his conference who wanted to work with Democrats on the Affordable Care Act, and turning a concept derived from The Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney into a “partisan” bill.
From then on, the Myth advanced on the back of a steady series of crisis-driven deals, which McConnell spun as grand legislative accomplishments. From the 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts to the debt ceiling debacle of 2011 to the fiscal cliff of 2012, McConnell repeatedly brought America to the brink of crisis and then reaped credit for deciding not to push the country over the cliff. The deals were usually temporary, focused on blame-avoidance. Often, they set up future crises. And you don’t have to take this Democrat’s word for it: When Senator Tom Coburn was asked whether the 2011 debt ceiling deal provided certainty for the future or advanced any core Republican priorities, he replied, “No, it’s a political answer.”
As McConnell refined his approach, he zeroed in on his primary audience: the news media. That so many smart people would fall for his act is understandable, since in an era where Republican deal-makers were basically extinct, someone had to balance out the GOP side of the “both sides” seesaw, and McConnell was the best of what was around. But if you asked a reporter—over beers, say—to back up the Myth, the conversation would go something like, “Debt ceiling, fiscal cliff, I think he did something on Burma ...” and then trail off.
The Myth was accepted because the Washington hive brain needed a counterpart to the ambitious agenda of Obama, Reid and Pelosi, and the subdued, refined McConnell, who could soothe and snow reporters with talk of Senate procedure and institutional precedent as easily as rolling out of bed, felt like the right fit.
But when reporters had to put the Myth into print, they struggled, and things could get a little weird. For example, a 2011 Time magazine profile headlined “McConnell: The GOP’s Dealmaker,” neglected to cite a single deal McConnell made in his three-decade Senate career, aside from a last-minute, two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts. Stretching, the piece bizarrely credits McConnell with repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and ratifying the START treaty, both of which he voted against and the latter of which he opposed in highly vocal fashion.
McConnell’s unique ability to manufacture a crisis and then reap a windfall of credit for muddling through it is encapsulated in his 2014 quip, “Remember me? I’m the guy who gets us out of shutdowns.” Not mentioned is the fact that a few months earlier, he had been the guy who got us into the first government shutdown in 20 years. Yet this quote was reprinted over and over again in support of the Myth, casting McConnell as the savior, not the destroyer.
Finally, in 2016, McConnell stunned the world by holding open a Supreme Court seat for Trump to fill. Many, including me, viewed this as a reckless and unsustainable gambit at the time. Now, it looks like a stroke of genius, and it is the one legitimate accomplishment McConnell and his defenders can point to. But McConnell did not think Trump was going to win—by his own admission, he “didn’t think Trump had a chance.” If McConnell was merely delaying, holding the seat open for Clinton and a Democratic majority to fill, the blocking of Merrick Garland becomes one of self-preservation and blame-avoidance. McConnell had recently witnessed Speaker John Boehner get bounced out of office by a Tea Party rebellion, and he could surmise that if he let Obama fill Antonin Scalia’s seat, and then lost the Republicans’ Senate majority, he might suffer the same fate, or at least a major challenge.
It was a deeply cynical move, but cynicism is the lifeblood of McConnell’s career. There is no better example than this: When McConnell was a child, the March of Dimes helped him overcome polio. It’s a touching story McConnell told on the Senate floor and in his recent memoir; reporters often use it as a humanizing anecdote in profiles.
But when the March of Dimes came out against McConnell’s health care plan for the express reason that it would hurt their ability to help disadvantaged kids,like McConnell had been decades ago, how did he respond to the organization that saved his life? He refused to meet with them.
Mitch McConnell is good at many things: tactics, trolling Democrats, avoiding blame and spinning legislative straw into gold. But a master of the Senate? Not even close.
The Senate majority leader has been coasting on an inflated reputation for too long. This week exposed just how little he has achieved.
By ADAM JENTLESON
The past eight months of massive and avoidable failures have delivered such a devastating blow to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s reputation for political savvy, it’s a wonder it ever existed at all.
 |
| Mitch McConnell |
So how did the Myth of McConnell get started in the first place? The story is one of cynicism, self-promotion and credulousness, born out of desperation for bipartisanship and craving for familiar roles in an era when American politics veered into uncharted territory.
For the uninitiated, the Myth goes something like this: A calculating Kentuckian, he sees three steps ahead while playing eight-dimensional chess on his solved Rubik’s cube with one hand, while using the other to hold an inside straight close to his vest, which is embroidered with Masonic secrets that only he can read and that unlock true mastery of the Senate, along with eternal enlightenment, for good measure.
In the Myth of McConnell, grand achievements are conjured out of last-minute, crisis-driven exercises in can-kicking—like extending the U.S. borrowing authority and government funding—all things that used to happen routinely before McConnell became leader of the Republican Caucus and unleashed his unique brand of unprecedented obstructionism on the Senate, manufacturing the very crises that made the last-minute deals necessary. Meanwhile, humdrum political events, like winning reelection in a deep red state in a strong year for Republicans—as McConnell did in 2014—are recast as achievements of Machiavellian brilliance.
If any believers in the Myth remain after the brutal week McConnell just endured, which capped off an unbelievably brutal eight months, they should take this challenge: Name one major legislative accomplishment to McConnell’s credit over the more than 30 years he has been in the Senate. (Last minute deals don’t count.)
You can’t do it: Unlike former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (my former boss) and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, McConnell has never authored a single piece of major legislation that became law, nor has he successfully shepherded a single major bill to passage as leader. Reid, Pelosi and former President Barack Obama were all party to the last-minute deals, but they all have a trove of historic accomplishments to show for their leadership: insuring millions of Americans through the Affordable Care Act, reforming the post-crash financial system with Dodd-Frank and ending the Iraq war, for starters. McConnell has nothing.
His failure to log even a single major achievement is without precedent in recent American history. It’s not like he hasn’t had the opportunity: Not only has McConnell enjoyed 250 days of unified Republican control in 2017, he also led a GOP majority in the Senate for the previous two years, paired with a solid Republican majority in the House. But under McConnell’s leadership, even bills backed by strong bipartisan support, tagged as likely to pass by seasoned Hill observers and likely to be signed by Obama, languished.
Remember the criminal justice reform bill? That effort was supported by a high-powered, bipartisan cast that included Senators Cornyn, Grassley, Scott, Leahy, Durbin and Booker, along with the Koch brothers. It never came to the floor, dogged for months by rumors that McConnell opposed it until he finally stuck the knife in it in the fall of 2016.
So where does the Myth of McConnell come from?
The Myth is manufactured out of a deeply cynical but highly effective public relations insight that McConnell exploited to maximum effect: If he simply labeled everything Obama and Democrats tried to do as “partisan,” regardless of the merits, then invented institutionalist-sounding reasons for his opposition, and conveyed those reasons in polished speeches delivered from the Senate floor in his rolling Kentucky drawl, the news media and the commentators would eat it up. He realized that he didn’t have to be a bipartisanship-seeking institutionalist—he could just play one on TV, giving him cover to push partisanship to the hilt in private.
The gambit worked—for a while.
In the post-2010 midterms stretch of the Obama administration, during which I served as a senior aide to Reid, watching the Myth take shape was like watching a banner being unfurled in slow motion. McConnell appeared to have learned from the blowback to his oft-quoted 2010 admission, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” He probably also learned from the blowback to a 2010 New York Times article, in which he bragged a little too openly about dissuading members of his conference who wanted to work with Democrats on the Affordable Care Act, and turning a concept derived from The Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney into a “partisan” bill.
From then on, the Myth advanced on the back of a steady series of crisis-driven deals, which McConnell spun as grand legislative accomplishments. From the 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts to the debt ceiling debacle of 2011 to the fiscal cliff of 2012, McConnell repeatedly brought America to the brink of crisis and then reaped credit for deciding not to push the country over the cliff. The deals were usually temporary, focused on blame-avoidance. Often, they set up future crises. And you don’t have to take this Democrat’s word for it: When Senator Tom Coburn was asked whether the 2011 debt ceiling deal provided certainty for the future or advanced any core Republican priorities, he replied, “No, it’s a political answer.”
As McConnell refined his approach, he zeroed in on his primary audience: the news media. That so many smart people would fall for his act is understandable, since in an era where Republican deal-makers were basically extinct, someone had to balance out the GOP side of the “both sides” seesaw, and McConnell was the best of what was around. But if you asked a reporter—over beers, say—to back up the Myth, the conversation would go something like, “Debt ceiling, fiscal cliff, I think he did something on Burma ...” and then trail off.
The Myth was accepted because the Washington hive brain needed a counterpart to the ambitious agenda of Obama, Reid and Pelosi, and the subdued, refined McConnell, who could soothe and snow reporters with talk of Senate procedure and institutional precedent as easily as rolling out of bed, felt like the right fit.
But when reporters had to put the Myth into print, they struggled, and things could get a little weird. For example, a 2011 Time magazine profile headlined “McConnell: The GOP’s Dealmaker,” neglected to cite a single deal McConnell made in his three-decade Senate career, aside from a last-minute, two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts. Stretching, the piece bizarrely credits McConnell with repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and ratifying the START treaty, both of which he voted against and the latter of which he opposed in highly vocal fashion.
McConnell’s unique ability to manufacture a crisis and then reap a windfall of credit for muddling through it is encapsulated in his 2014 quip, “Remember me? I’m the guy who gets us out of shutdowns.” Not mentioned is the fact that a few months earlier, he had been the guy who got us into the first government shutdown in 20 years. Yet this quote was reprinted over and over again in support of the Myth, casting McConnell as the savior, not the destroyer.
Finally, in 2016, McConnell stunned the world by holding open a Supreme Court seat for Trump to fill. Many, including me, viewed this as a reckless and unsustainable gambit at the time. Now, it looks like a stroke of genius, and it is the one legitimate accomplishment McConnell and his defenders can point to. But McConnell did not think Trump was going to win—by his own admission, he “didn’t think Trump had a chance.” If McConnell was merely delaying, holding the seat open for Clinton and a Democratic majority to fill, the blocking of Merrick Garland becomes one of self-preservation and blame-avoidance. McConnell had recently witnessed Speaker John Boehner get bounced out of office by a Tea Party rebellion, and he could surmise that if he let Obama fill Antonin Scalia’s seat, and then lost the Republicans’ Senate majority, he might suffer the same fate, or at least a major challenge.
It was a deeply cynical move, but cynicism is the lifeblood of McConnell’s career. There is no better example than this: When McConnell was a child, the March of Dimes helped him overcome polio. It’s a touching story McConnell told on the Senate floor and in his recent memoir; reporters often use it as a humanizing anecdote in profiles.
But when the March of Dimes came out against McConnell’s health care plan for the express reason that it would hurt their ability to help disadvantaged kids,like McConnell had been decades ago, how did he respond to the organization that saved his life? He refused to meet with them.
Mitch McConnell is good at many things: tactics, trolling Democrats, avoiding blame and spinning legislative straw into gold. But a master of the Senate? Not even close.
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