Some reporting this week about the mid-terms. Reporters are noticing that GOP candidates are not talking too much about the booming economy and their tax bill, but are instead using Trump-like cultural attacks on their Democrat opponents. The prevalent theory is that the tax bill is not that popular, it doesn’t benefit the down scale voters that will decide the House races.
One theory is that because most House races are occurring in Trump districts, and many are trending toward the democrats, the GOP candidates have to pump up Trump’s core supporters.
Facebook told lawmakers this week that they shut down 32 fake accounts designed to gin up social divisions for the 2018 elections.
Trump’s top national security team–Wray, Coates, Bolton and Nelson–held a press conference in the briefing room of the White House where they said Russia is actively trying to interfere in the 2018 election and the government is doing everything they can to counter it. Trump was not present, and made no mention of it in his rally that evening.
Another group who want to be caught doing something about Russia (after Trump’s Helsinki summit) is in the Senate. A bipartisan group of senators including McCain and Grahm, began pushing a bill to increase sanctions on Russia and block the president from leaving NATO without Senate approval.
Child-Separation Policy
Here is a Washington Post recap of the history of the child separation policy.
Vox reported that a lawyer representing four fathers says they have been separated form their children a second time: “The fathers claim that ICE agents presented them with forms that were written mostly in English, with three options at the bottom in Spanish: being deported with their children, being deported without their children, and waiting to speak to a lawyer. All four claim that the first option — parent and child alike getting deported — had already been selected for them.”
Judge Sabraw told the government it is responsible for reuniting the 572 children sill separated from parents the government claims to not know the location of. 410 have already been deported. Sabraw said: “for every parent who is not located there will be a permanently orphaned child. And that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration.”
- 559 children still separated
- 386 parents have been deported
- the government had been in touch with 299 of them
- they have no information at all about 26.
In Russia News
The Washington Post reported that Mueller’s team has offered to cut the number of questions for a Trump interview in half.
Trump tweeted on Wednesday that Sessions should end the Russia investigation “right now.” In my twitter feed I started reading a Jack Goldsmith piece titled “The Cycles of Panicked Reactions to Trump.” It took me a paragraph to realize he had written it in April 2018, the last time Trump was threatening the Mueller investigation. Goldsmith’s reposting of it was an attempt to prove his point: that Trump is making these threats cyclically, not because he is likely to follow through, but to discredit Mueller and muddy the waters for when the final conclusions come down. What struck me as I read it–where he set out seven possibilities for why Trump makes these threats–is that it encapsulates the mood of the times: none of us know what is actually happening (or has actually happened), and all we can do is speculate, and rank our speculation in long lists that contain their own lists of justifications and caveats. This week FiveThrityEight’s podcast was a debate over the merits of “Four theories of the Trump Russia Connection” which was modeled on a Lawfare piece from May 2017 titled “Seven Theories of the Case: What Do We Really Know About L’Affaire Russe and What Could it All Mean?” This inspired Wittes et.al. to revise their seven theories: “The bottom line is that the spectrum of possibility has narrowed but remains broad.” The headline is that “there is still no evidence that any Russian infiltration efforts saw success—at least not if success is defined by what we have colloquially come to call “collusion.” It’s a year and a half later (and two years after the campaign) and we still don’t know what it all means.
Manafort’s trial began on Tuesday. The judge has banned references to Russia and collusion.
Trump’s Job Approval: 41.4%