Month: October 2018

Erdogan gave the most detailed account of the timeline surrounding Khashoggi’s murder, including how Saudi’s scouted the city and countryside the day before, and how they sent a body double walking around town after the murder.

On Wednesday pipe bombs were sent to Obama, the Clintons and CNN’s New York studios. This follows similar bombs sent to George Soros on Monday.

In tweets and public statements, one at a rally and another at the White House, Trump has all but blamed the pipe bomb delivery–up to 10 by the end of the week–on the mainstream media’s negative reporting on his administration: “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News.”

He also fed into the false flag conspiracy theory that is percolating in right wing circles by tweeting the word “bomb” in quotes: “Republicans are doing so well in early voting, and at the polls, and now this “Bomb” stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows – news not talking politics. Very unfortunate, what is going on. Republicans, go out and vote!” This was tweeted just hours before the bomber, an outspoken Trump supporter, was captured. Here is a list of all the people who were the target of the bomber, and they are all Trump critics or people Trump has called out for criticism. 

Trump is clearly frustrated that the bombing attempts have moved the news cycle away from the midterm, and potentially created a negative narrative for himself and Republicans. In a public statement after the suspect was captured he said of the Republicans running for Congress: “They were also competing with this story,” he said with palpable frustration. “Now our law enforcement’s done such a good job,” he added, “maybe that can start to disappear rapidly because we don’t like those stories.”

On Saturday a virulent anti-Semite shot up a Pittsburgh Synagogue, killing 11 people at a baby-naming ceremony.

Immigration News:

According to new government numbers:

• 47 separated kids still in custody.
• Parents of 33 already deported.
• Lawyers for families say “government has not yet provided… a timeline” for 258 reunited but still-detained families.

We also learned that the government revised its number of children separated to 2,668, having discovered 14 previously unaccounted for separated children.

According to a new government report, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services were in the dark about the child-separation policy until Sessions publicly declared the Zero-Tolerance policy, thus they were unprepared to carry it out. Also: “Data released on Tuesday by Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, showed that the agency apprehended 16,658 people in families in September, a record. Such arrests reached 107,212 for the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, exceeding the previous high of 77,857 in the 2016 fiscal year. In total, nearly 400,000 people were apprehended by border agents in the 2018 fiscal year.”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%

On Monday the Saudi’s floated the idea that Kashoggi was accidentally killed during an interrogation, after two weeks of denying that he was even dead. Trump spoke to reporters and floated the idea that “rogue killers” may be responsible.

In an interview with the AP, Trump said about Khashoggi’s death and Saudi Arabia: “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh. And he was innocent all the way.” On his conversation with the Saudi king: “Yesterday, when I spoke with the father, not so much today, but when I spoke to the father, it just sounded to me like he felt like he did not do it. He did not know about it and it sounded like, you know, the concept of rogue killers.”

The Saudi released $100 million to the U.S. on Tuesday. The payment was promised in August for stabilization in Syria, but there was always a question to whether it would be paid in full and by what date. The fact that it was paid during the Khashoggi controversy, when Trump is currently giving rhetorical cover to the Saudi, leads experts to believe the “Saudis want Trump to know that his cooperation in covering for the Khashoggi affair is important to the Saudi monarch,” and that “Much of its financial promises to the U.S. will be contingent on this cooperation.”

On Wednesday Turkey leaked details of the audio recording of Khashoggi’s murder by Saudi agents.

“The New York Times has confirmed independently that at least nine of 15 suspects identified by Turkish authorities worked for the Saudi security services, military or other government ministries. One of them, Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, was a diplomat assigned to the Saudi Embassy in London in 2007, according to a British diplomatic roster. He traveled extensively with the crown prince, perhaps as a bodyguard.”

By the end of the week Saudi Arabia changed their story and admitted that Khashoggi was killed by accident in a fistfight with his interrogators. They claim security guards places him in a chokehold and he died as a result. This story was not widely believed. Except by Trump, who says he believes the Saudi explanation is plausible. He is breaking with U.S intelligence, who believe “he was assassinated on high-level orders from the Saudi royal court.”

Trump boosters in the far right and in Congress, including Don Jr, are beginning to circulate and spread negative stories about Khashoggi in the hopes of protecting Trump from a political backlash for supporting Saudi Arabia.

The Washington Post published Khashoggi’s last column, which was submitted before he disappeared. In it he Arab states where people “are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives. A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche, and while many do not believe it, a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative.”

ProPublica released an investigative report about the Trump organization during the early 2000s that documents how “post-millennium comeback and global expansion rested on the brilliant purity of a licensing strategy that paid him millions simply for the use of his name” is another Trump-crafted lie.

Immigration News:

In that same AP interview, Trump spoke an a range of subjects, including his child-separation policy, where he denied it ever happened:  “As I just said, we’ve taken children who have no parents with them standing on the border. We’ve taken many children, and I’m not talking about a small percentage, I’m talking about a very large percentage where they have no people, no parents. In addition to that, we’re separating children who are just met by people that are using them coming into the border, not their parents. They are using them coming into the border. … The parents would sometimes come up with their kids, leave them at the border and go back. So we’re in this position where we have an innocent young child at the border; there are no parents. We take them in, we care for the child and then we get horrible publicity.”

Sara Sanders added: “I’ll send you guys the DHS report that has the numbers that show that, like, 75 percent of the kids were actually self-separated. Their parents chose to go back and signed the paperwork to leave their kids behind.”

After a record number of migrants arrived at the border in September–over 16,000–I.C.E is now putting families in budget motels in the Tuscan area because there is no where else to keep them.

In Russia News:

While the Muller team has been quiet this election season, they have been busy, still interviewing witnesses, convening the grand jury, and meeting with Manafort nine times in four weeks.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.3%

On October 2, The New York Times published its year and a half investigation of how Trump inherited his wealth from his father, and the 13 page story was reprinted in the Sunday print edition on October 7. It details how Fred Trump used numerous tax dodges to pass his wealth to his children while paying very little tax. It also proves that Trump has continuously lied about the fact that he inherited very little money from his father. Fred Trump started giving him millions when he was just a boy and it continued into the late 1990s. The story did not break through as a major scandal in part because it there are no direct legal implications on the president, and it was released the week of the Kavanaugh confirmation debate. However, it is an important historical record, and it will provide leads to other journalists or investigators about where to look for the next story about Trump’s finances.

At a ceremony at the White House Monday, before the other members of the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh sounded conciliatory: “With gratitude and no bitterness,” he would be “a force for stability and unity.” But Trump said “I want to apologize to Brett and the entire Kavanaugh family for the terrible pain you have been forced to endure… a campaign of political and personal destruction based on lies and deception.” He and other Republicans hope to use this issue to continue to motivate GOP voters for the election four weeks away.

Nikki Haley unexpectedly resigned on Tuesday. White House aids were unclear about why she chose to do it now, four weeks before the midterms. She claimed it was fatigue of six years as governor and 2 at the UN, and said she has no plans to run for president in 2020 but will instead be supporting Trump.

A UN report on climate change was released this week. It said that by 2040 the world will warm 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and the consequences of that are more sever than previously known. Recommendations include steeper taxes on carbon than any nation is currently considering, and to stop burning coal. The Trump Administration ignored the report.

It is believed that a Saudi journalist living in Virginia, Jamal Khashoggi, was lured to his death in Turkey by the Saudi royal family. It is causing a rift between the Trump and Congress over the administration’s uncritical support for Saudi Arabia. Politico reports that the White House is hoping this “will blow over the same way other thorny dilemmas involving Saudi Arabia have in recent years.”

In Russia News:

Peter W. Smith, who was trying to purchase Clinton emails in 2016, and who died 10 days after talking about this to a reporter, is of increasing interest to the Muller team. Smith raised “at least” $100,000 in secret for the project.

The New York Times reports that Rick Gates worked with an Israeli company staffed by former intelligence operatives to create a social media strategy that would: 1) use “authentic looking fake online identities” to sway support against Cruz during the nomination fight; 2) use “clandestine means to build intelligence dossiers” on Clinton; 3) “to help Mr. Trump by using social media to help expose or amplify division among rival campaigns and factions… [such as] minority, suburban female and undecided voters in battleground states.” No work was done beyond the proposal, and this appears to be separate from the Russian influence campaign. It shows how these tools were viewed at least by the Trump campaign, as a natural outgrowth of traditional campaigning.

In Immigration News:

The Trump Administration, and Stephen Miller in particular, are pushing a way to still separate families at the border. They are looking into invalidating the Flores Decree which limits family detention to 20 days. Or applying “binary choice” where they detain a family for 20 days, then make the following offer to the parents: either stay in the shelter with your child for months or years until your court hearing, or give up your child to be placed with relatives or foster parents living in the US. August saw a large increase in families arriving at the border.

Here is Dara Lind on binary choice: “And it’s not clear where it would put the families who make either choice. Because the Trump administration doesn’t yet have the capacity to detain thousands of families for months or years, it’s not clear what it would do if most families chose detention. Meanwhile, HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is currently looking after record numbers of unaccompanied children, partly due to the fact that some relatives eligible to sponsor their children are (justifiably) afraid they’ll risk deportation if they step forward. So if most parents chose separation, that agency would be overwhelmed.”

There is a growing danger that some of the children separated from their parents will be given up for adoption to their U.S. foster parents, according to this AP investigation.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.8%

One consistent feature of Trump’s job approval rating is that it ping pongs up and down over the course of several weeks. When the approval rating increases, as a result of positive news or simply reversion to the norm, a series of events invariably occur to bring about a dip. When the rating drops, the negative news cycle inevitably burns out and the rating begins to tick back up, usually regaining whatever approval was lost during the dip.

The chart below measures the approval rating at the bottom of each dip to the highest point of the recovery. For most of 2018, Trump’s approval has ping ponged between 40% and 42%.

Now that we are less than one month from the election, the question is whether Trump will be in a dip or a recovery on election day. The difference of even a couple points may make a difference in how many seats Democrats can pick up in the House (An approval rating of 36% vs. 41% is worth ~20 seats). Even though 42% is low, it is Trump’s happy place, where half the country is not actively angry or concerned about his performance and the people in the middle (whoever is represented in that 2-4% of the country whose opinions keep ping ponging) are inclined to tell pollsters they approve of him. But when the rating is closer to 40% (and it dipped to 39% for a hand full of days last month) something has happened to put the country in a bad mood about Trump, and that mood could make the difference in close Mid-Term races.

Let’s look at the data.

The average duration of a Trump approval increase is 2.6 weeks after a dip has ended. The longest sustained increase was 8 weeks, from March to June, 2018, but most all of the others have only lasted 1-4 weeks. Trump’s previous dip (his 12th) ended on September 15. For the current rebound to last through the election it would have to last 8 weeks.

It’s not unreasonable to expect the quiet spell to last that long. Republicans and Trump have powerful motivation to keep things calm until Election Day. On September 2 Chuck Grassley tweeted: “My prayer is that our President can be as disciplined in his discourse and speeches like last two wks b4 his election/Then we will be successful in next two months like he was successful.”

But what might cause an approval dip to begin, and can Trump control those events? Here are the four categories of political events that correspond to these dips, with the percent of the 12 dips that each helped to drive. Note that 10 of the 12 dips were driven by 2-4 factors occurring simultaneously.

• Policy actions (either from the White House or the GOP congress)–67%
• Big events in the Russia investigation–67%
• Broken cultural or political taboos–50%
• White House chaos stories–33%

Let’s look at the likelihood of each of these factors flaring up in the next month.

White House Chaos

These stories usually stem from high profile firings, staff misbehavior, or very visible SNAFUs due to Trump’s unorthodox management style–all things that the White House can try to keep a lid on for at least a few weeks. Olivia Nuzzis’ wild story in New York Magazine published Monday is evidence the White House is sensitive to this. Staff believed she was going to write an article about how Trump was going to soon fire John Kelly, and Trump invited her into the Oval Office, and lined up Sara Sanders, Kelly, Pence, Pence’s chief of staff, and the Secretary of State, all to convince her: “We have a very smooth-running organization even though it’s never reported that way. So the real story is that. It’s really the real story. When you walk in here, you don’t see chaos. There is no chaos. The media likes to portray chaos. There’s no chaos.”

Taboos

For these to affect approval rating, there has to be an large national event–a White Power protest, a press conference with Putin, the death of a war hero–upon which Trump then immolates himself with a response that is completely at odds with the public sentiment. These are infrequent enough that we can assume it won’t happen before the election, especially since Congressional Republicans are begging Trump to behave.

Policy

This is not the season for Congress or the White House to push a policy agenda. Barring any unexpected situation that requires a policy response, and there is no guarantee that response would be perceived negatively, it is unlikely there will be many news cycles driven by policy details. One exception may be the Texas judge who is set to rule on Obamacare, invalidating all or parts of the law that protect people with preexisting conditions. One of Trump’s largest dips was in 2017 and resulted in part from Paul Ryan’s attempt to repeal Obamacare. If the judge rules before Election Day, it will cause a decline that will hurt many GOP candidates.

Russia Investigation

Trump has good reason to complain about the Russia Investigation because big breaks in the case have been major factors in 8 of his 12 approval dips. Mueller’s operation will run silent until after the midterms, but news could come from other sources. For example, someone in the intelligence community with a juicy piece of evidence could leak it to the press this month. On Twitter there are rumors (but aren’t there always?) that evidence may soon come out that proves Michael Cohen actually did go to Prague in 2016 to meet with Russian spies. Something like that, which would blow massive hole in the No Collusion narrative, would definitely start an approval dip. I find this the most likely scenario of the ones listed above.

But more likely than not, restrain and political survival instincts will make this a pretty quiet month in Trump world.

Episode 12

Rank: 6

Decline: -2.10%

Lowest Approval: 39.9%

Date Range: August 18-September 15, 2018

Key Events:

• Policy: Kavanaugh completes his confirmation hearing
• White House Chaos: Omarosa promoting her tell all book, releasing tapes of her firing; Trump attacks Sessions again and announces McGahn’s removal; quotes from Woodward book are released; anonymous op-ed by White House insider is published
• Taboos: Trump revokes Brennan’s security clearance, with bipartisan blowback from intelligence community; McCain memorial services; White House response with raising the flag early and a weak statement; Trump absent (and attacked) at the funeral; Trump attacks Sessions for not protecting two GOP congressman charged with crimes
• Russia Investigation: News of McGahn’s 30 hours of interviews to Mueller; Cohen takes plea deal and says Trump ordered him to commit crimes; Manafort guilty verdict; Pecker and Weisselberg granted immunity; Manafort agrees to plea deal with Mueller

This episode has a rank of 6 out of 10 on the severity scale; 6 of the 12 episodes have been more severe, so this one is in the middle of the pack. There has not been a dip this severe since December 2017. The dip is a result of a convergence of three negative news cycles: 1) the White House chaos exposed by Omarosa’s secret tapes, Woodward’s book, and the anonymous Trump official who claimed to be part of the Trump resistance; 2) new turns in the Russia Investigation with Cohen and Manafort’s plea deals; 3) McCain’s death and week long memorial, in which Trump was repeatedly unfavorably compared to McCain. The dip ended in mid September, since then his approval rating has regained the two points lost.

 

 

 

 

Canada, the US and Mexico reached agreement on a revised version of NAFTA.

When asked by a reporter if he has a message for young men in America, Trump said “it’s a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of. This is a very difficult time.” When asked if he has a message for young women, he said “Women are doing great.” On Tuesday night Trump mocked Ford at a rally: “Thirty-six years ago this happened. I had one beer, right? I had one beer,” Mr. Trump said, imitating Dr. Blasey. “How did you get home? I don’t remember,” he said. “How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Ben Wittes, who admires Kavanaugh and supported his nomination, makes the case this week that senators should not confirm him, in part because of his partisan attacks undercut his judicial temperament, and also because he thinks the weight of evidence more corroborates Ford’s testimony: namely that she told people Kavanaugh was the attacker before Trump was president, and she has intimate knowledge of Kavanaugh’s high school social circle.

David French makes the opposite argument, that Ford’s case is collapsing, in part because she cannot corroborate who was at the party or get anyone else to back her up.

The FBI concluded its investigation on Wednesday after interviewing nine people. The White House sent the report to the Senate in the middle of the night, and senators began reviewing it Thursday morning. On Friday the Senate voted to approve Kavanaugh for a final floor vote. Manchin, Collins and Flake voted for Kavanaugh. Murkowski voted against. Collins make a 43 minute floor speech laying out her case for her vote: her belief that Kavanaugh is a mainstream jurist who will not overturn Roe (implied here is that Kavanaugh’s replacement may be more conservative); that she believed Ford was attacked but to deny Kavanaugh the nomination there had to be at least some corroborating evidence to make it “more likely than not” he did it.

The final vote was 48 to 50. One GOP senator was not present because he was at his daughter’s wedding, and Murkowski voted present instead of nay to spare Kavanaugh from being confirmed with a one vote margin, which has not happened since 1881.

Here is a history of the nomination strategy that McGahn helped to steer, including how Kavanaugh was coached to come across as angry and go on the attack to goose wavering Republicans and the GOP base to see his confirmation through an exclusively partisan lens. 538 has the data to back this up: “Graham and Trump, even if they have not studied the data, have figured this out. And while those two were perhaps the most vocal in suggesting there is an ongoing war on men, there was little resistance to that idea from other prominent figures in the Republican Party, male or female.”

Immigration Policy

1,600 migrant children are being shipped to a tent city in Tornillo, Texas. The permanent shelters are over crowded due to an influx from Central America, especially Guatemala, combined with the fact that the Trump administration is making it harder to unite the children with families already in the US. The average stay in custody has increased from 34 days to 59 days. The children are being taken from their current shelters at night: they “are being woken up and moved in the middle of the night because they will be less likely to try to run away in the dark.” Here is a good explainer of some key questions. 

The Department of Homeland Security inspector general released its report on child separation, saying that the government was unprepared for the consequences of the policy; unable to keep track of the families once separated; held children for longer that the law allows; and made decisions that caused huge lines at official ports of entry that lead to more asylum seekers crossing illegally.

Lawfare speculates that agents who carried out the separation policy may find themselves in court for their actions. The list some egregious behavior that has come into the news recently: “A lawsuit recently filed by parents separated from their children accuses officials of “sadistically teas[ing] and taunt[ing] parents and children with the prospect of separation,” while another plaintiff reports that an officer told her “Happy Mother’s Day” before separating her from her child. An emergency physician who deals with migrant children described in the New Yorker a child’s guardians as threatening that an eight-year-old boy “won’t be reunited with his parents unless he behaves” and that giving the boy a hug constituted “rewarding his bad behavior.” Then the author concludes: “Agents who act in this manner could one day find themselves under scrutiny for violating the civil rights of children in implementing the separation policy. In this case, incompetence will not serve as an excuse; it may also mean culpability.”

A federal judge stopped the Trump administration from suspending the Temporary Protected Status for people from Sudan, El Salvador, Haiti and Nicaragua. Many of these people have been in the US for decades and have children who are citizens. Here is an in-depth story of one 14-year-old girl who is preparing for life without her parents, who may be sent back to El Salvador if the suspension of TPS is upheld by the courts.

In 2018 only 51 Iraqi refugees with US affiliates were allowed into the US, compared to three thousand, five thousand and seven thousand in the three year’s prior. About 100,000 had applied for special refugee status and were in the pipeline. The Trump administration is lowering the cap of all refugees allowed into the country, and the Pentagon requested that the Iraqis be allowed in without being counted against the cap. This was not approved by the White House.

The State Department will no longer grant visas to gay domestic partners of United Nations diplomats. The new rule requires that they be legally married even though only 12% of UN member states allow gay marriage.

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Trump’s Job Approval Rating: 42.4%