The Return of Teleprompter Trump

Tax Reform:  Teleprompter Trump traveled to Missouri on Wednesday to deliver the outlines of his tax reform plan and bash Missouri’s Democratic Senator, Claire McCaskill who is up reelection  in 2018 in the state that Trump won. He began his speech by sending thoughts and prayers to the victims of Hurricane Harvey because he was widely criticized for failing to do that during his Tuesday Texas fly by.  He then provided a less than detailed overview of his tax reform plan, the one that doesn’t really exist yet because his staff, Treasury secretary, economic advisor and congressional leadership can’t agree on details.  For the most part his objectives follow the traditional Republican playbook: reduce corporate taxes, reduce taxes on high income earners,  pretend to reduce taxes on the middle class and assert that economic growth will offset tax cuts, leaving the deficit unchanged or reduced.  Trump proposed incentives to get corporations to repatriate overseas profits and wants to reduce the corporate tax rate to an unrealistic 15%, though his advisors believe he will be lucky to get the rate down to 25%.   He also called for the audience to vote McCaskill out of office if she doesn’t support his tax reform legislation.  He read the McCaskill threat off of the teleprompter which means that his staff wrote those “campaign words” into his speech.  Political campaign threats during official visits, written by White House staff, are violations of the Hatch Act, not that anyone in the White House worries about things like that.  Given the tragedy unfolding in Texas, the speech seemed ill-timed particularly since the huge costs of repairing and restoring Harvey impacted parts of Texas and Louisiana will put further pressure on the deficit and budget negotiations, making tax cuts more difficult to achieve.               

General Rebuke:  Before leaving for Missouri, Trump responded to North Korea’s most recent missile launch by tweet smacking “The US has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years.  Talking is not the answer!”  Hours later when asked about Trump’s tweet eruption during a Pentagon meeting with South Korea’s Defense Minister, Defense Secretary Mattis contradicted Trump by emphatically saying “We are never out of  diplomatic solutions.”  Together with Secretary of State Tillerson, General Mattis has given up trying to tow the Trump line.  Both of them continue to advocate diplomacy and sanctions over force.  What earlier looked like a “carrot and stick approach” to the North Korea problem is looking more and more like a “just ignore what Trump says and listen to us solution.”  Trump can’t be happy that Tillerson and Mattis, who is also doing his best to limit the impact of Trump’s transgender ban, are disregarding his direction but firing Secretaries isn’t easy, especially given when an increasing number of Americans question your competence.  Trump is also stewing over economic advisor Gary Cohn’s criticism about his Charlottesville comments. Cohn, who was part of the Missouri tax reform traveling squad, was excluded from the list of people Trump acknowledged in his teleprompter speech.  At least Trump’s kids are still on board his train.  Yesterday Ivanka, who speaks frequently about the importance of equal pay for women, announced her endorsement of the administration’s decision to  drop an Obama era equal pay initiative that required big corporations to aggregate information about how much they pay employees broken down by race, gender and ethnicity. 

Russia, Russia, Russia:  Last night Politico reported that Special Counsel Mueller is coordinating his investigation into Paul Manfort and his sketchy financial transactions with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. This is bad news for both Manafort and Trump.  Trump’s pardon power applies only to Federal crimes, if he’s hoping to pursuade Manafort to keep quiet with the promise of a pardon, his strategy won’t work if New York charges are filed. For his part Mueller may be using the threat of New York prosecution to box Manafort into a corner.  Schneiderman, who extracted a large settlement from the Trump organization over fraudulent business practices at Trump University, has a long history with Trump and would be more than happy to help Mueller complicate the Manafort investigation. And there is lots to investigate, last night the Wall Street Journal reported that Manafort’s association with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and friend of Putin, goes back over ten years.  Manafort has represented Deripaska’s interests in Ukraine, Georgia, and Montenegro, countries that Putin considers within his sphere of influence.  For his part Trump made a curious call this week, he let Iowa Senator Grassley, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, know that he is fully supportive of regulations promoting corn ethanol, a product near and dear to Iowa. Not so coincidentally Donny Jr is scheduled to testify about his meeting about “Russian adoptions” in front of Grassley’s committee soon. That “Russian adoption/Hillary dirt” meeting is getting lots of prosecutorial attention.  The Financial Times reports that Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian American lobbyist and suspected Russian spy and computer hacking specialist, who attended the meeting, has already testified to Mueller’s grand jury.  Then there is that email that  Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen sent to the Kremlin asking for help with the Trump Moscow hotel project. The Kremlin acknowledges that they received the missive, but claim that they didn’t respond.  After saying that his lawyers have advised him to stop talking to the press, Michael Cohen told the Huffington Post that pitching the hotel project while Trump was running for president may have been gross but wasn’t illegal.  Sadly, the gross but illegal defense may have merits.       

When the Sun Came Out: On Wednesday, a federal judge in Texas blocked most of the provisions of SB 4, a Texas law that would punish local officials who didn’t cooperate with federal government deportation efforts. The immigration crackdown was set to go into effect on September 1.  The judge ruled that there is “ample evidence” that the law’s ban on so-called sanctuary cities will “erode public trust and make many communities and neighborhoods less safe.”  Mayors of the state’s biggest cities, including Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas all oppose the law.  To put this into the context of current events, the mayor of Houston felt compelled to reassure illegal immigrants affected by Hurricane Harvey that the city will not be checking immigrantion status at storm shelters.  Even though the rain is stopping in Texas more people will be needing shelter this morning.  Texas is light on zoning restrictions and industrial plant monitoring, the kind of model for government regulation that Trump finds so appealing.  With plants built perilously close to residential communities, the risk of exposure to hazardous chemicals leaking or exploding due to flood conditions is multiplying.  Yesterday, the Arkema group said that there was nothing they could do to prevent one of their plants from burning. They were right, this morning it exploded sending dangerous fumes into the surrounding community.