Trump Dump

Health Care the Soap Opera:   On Wednesday Trump hosted a luncheon for Republican Senators, telling them they better get back to work passing something: repeal, replace, whatever, or else.  To hammer home the “or else” part he singled out Nevada Senator Dean Heller, cynically asking him if he wants to stay a Senator. Majority Leader McConnell left the meeting, promising that there will be a vote on something next week, a version of Trumpcare or a straight Obamacare repeal. Trump said they were closer than ever to passing something.  Ted Cruz said they would look like fools if they don’t pass something. The opposing Republican groups were sent off to meet with administration staffers at  7:30 pm to work out their vast differences, guns and knives to be left at the door. Senator Susan Collins, whose mind is made up, excused herself from the meeting saying that she was due at her weekly spinning class.  It’s not clear that anything will come out of the group grope but huge efforts are being made to isolate, influence, and threaten each of the naysayers, an extra $200 billion is being thrown at Medicaid and some of them are likely to cave. It is also not clear if McConnell will be able to get the fifty votes he needs for a motion to proceed to even get a bill to the floor for a vote and last night’s sad announcement that Senator McCain has brain cancer has probably made his task even harder.  Late in the day the CBO released a scoring report for the Obamacare repeal option.  The CBO concluded that getting rid of Obamacare without an immediate replacement would result in a deficit reduction of $473 billion and would cause 32 million people to lose their insurance.  Premiums would rise by 25% in the short term, doubling by 2026.  A Fox News Poll says that 74% of people want Republicans to reach out to Democrats to come up with a health care plan. By all logic, this health care push whether it’s Trumpcare or a straight Obamacare repeal should be ten feet under but every soap opera has at least one character who repeatedly comes back from the dead no matter how harrowing his demise, so this isn’t over until it’s over. 

Trump Dump: Trump spilled his guts to the New York Times last night in an astounding interview that his staff, family, or advisors should never have permitted.  He started by going after Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying that he never would have appointed him if he had known that he would recuse himself from the Russia investigation. It sounds like he wants Sessions to resign soon and if Sessions has any pride, he will.  He went on to criticize Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein who stepped into Session’s shoes as the overseer of the Russian investigation for being from Baltimore, a city without any real Republicans, and for appointing Special Counsel Mueller.  Then he attacked former FBI Director Comey, bizarrely suggesting that when Comey pulled him aside in January to give him a heads up about the seamy accusations in the infamous graphic Steele dossier, he was blackmailing him, using the dossier as leverage.  He added that Comey had lied many times during his testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee.  He also attacked Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe citing his wife’s work on several Democratic campaigns as evidence that he is biased.  He saved a few special threats for Special Counsel Mueller, who he believes has many, many conflicts of interest.  He said that he had no plans to fire him but he added that he would reconsider if Mueller crossed a “red line” by straying from investigating Russia into Trump family finances.  He finished by expressing a very disturbing  belief that the Director of the FBI should report directly to  the president rather than the Department of Justice.  In a separate article, the New York Times reported that regulators are looking into Trump Family finances focusing on $300 million of loans made by Deutsche Bank’s wealth management department.  Deutsche Bank expects that information about the loans will be turned over to Special Counsel Mueller. If he hasn’t already, Mueller is about to cross that “red line.”  A Nixonian Saturday night massacre may be imminent.

The Russian Front:  During his NY Times interview, Trump also addressed his G 20 pop-up meeting with Putin.  He said that the one hour tete-a-tete  lasted only fifteen minutes and that beyond normal pleasantries, they only talked about Russian adoptions.  By Russian adoptions, he is using the code word for the sanctions that were imposed as part of the Magnitsky Act, the sanctions that Putin desperately wants lifted so that he and his oligarch friends can more freely move money through the US banking system.  Don Jr and Paul Manafort, who owed $17 million to Russian related entities as recently as December, have been invited to speak before an open session of the Senate Judiciary Committee next Wednesday to talk about their “Russian Adoption” meeting with Putin’s lawyer lackey Natalia Veselnitskaya.  Jared Kushner, whose company also has many outstanding Deutsche Bank loans, is expected to meet with the heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee and their staff on Monday behind closed doors.  Yesterday Trump ended covert CIA aid to Syrian rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad, a move that pleases Putin, who supports Assad.  This decision is considered a concession that will diminish US influence in Syria and may explain why Putin was so happy during that fifteen minute conversation that really lasted one hour.    

Voter Suppression Commission:  Trump kicked off the first meeting of his voter commission. He promised that the commission will be very transparent, as long as it finds the three to five million voters who illegally voted for Hillary Clinton and suggested that states that don’t participate must be hiding something.  After the meeting Kris Kobach, the Vice Chair of the commission, refused to acknowledge that Hillary won the popular vote.  Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois called Kobach a “hair on fire conspiracy theorist,” suggesting that he is looking for unicorns and won’t find any.      

After learning about John McCain’s diagnosis, President Obama tweeted  for all of us “Cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against. Give it hell John.”