Organizing Principles

Here is a “Complete List of Trump’s Attempts to Play Down Coronavirus” from January to March.

Early in the week, German officials seemed to confirm reports that the Trump Administration attempted to secure exclusive ownership over a vaccine produced by a German company.

The Washington Post reports that of the four federally operated vaccine labs: “two of the sites are taking no role, while the other two expect to conduct small-scale testing of potential coronavirus vaccines.”

On Monday there was a change in tone and urgency from the White House, Trump in particular. Based in part on a British model that says 2.2 million people could die in the United States.

Here is an account of how the White House culture of infighting has shaped the response so far: “Senior aides battling one another for turf, and advisers protecting their own standing. A president who is racked by indecision and quick to blame others and who views events through the lens of how the news media covers them. A pervasive distrust of career government professionals, and disregard for their recommendations. And a powerful son-in-law whom aides fear crossing, but who is among the few people the president trusts.”

On Wednesday Trump authorized the Defense Production Act, but it is unclear that the administration is using those powers to produce and transport more medical equipment: “people familiar with the administration’s actions say it is still trying to figure out how industry supply chains operate, which companies could produce additional products and what kinds of subsidies it may need to offer. And without the Defense Production Act, the government will lack the ability to channel these supplies to areas that need it most — or to persuade companies to act quickly and without regard for their profits.

“As reported cases of the virus in the United States have soared, Mr. Trump, who is known to recruit input from a variety of outside advisers, has been getting conflicting advice. The proliferating number of private sector voices with direct access to the president and his top advisers — notably his son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner — has resulted in a chaotic process. The president’s advisers say they see the role of the federal government as a facilitator, as opposed to the chief producer or a national governor. They have tried to encourage states to get by with what they can, suggesting there will be support from the federal government but that this should not be the first option.

ProPublica reported that Senator Burr saved millions of dollars by selling stock just before the markets crashed, and that he knew the COVID-19 was more dire that he was saying publicly: “Burr’s Feb. 13 selling spree was his largest stock selling day of at least the past 14 months, according to a ProPublica review of Senate records. Unlike his typical disclosure reports, which are a mix of sales and purchases, all of the transactions were sales. His biggest sales included companies that are among the most vulnerable to an economic slowdown. He dumped up to $150,000 worth of shares of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, a chain based in the United States that has lost two-thirds of its value. And he sold up to $100,000 of shares of Extended Stay America, an economy hospitality chain. Shares of that company are now worth less than half of what they did at the time Burr sold.” Some have accused him of insider trading.

Burr issued a statement saying he has asked the ethics committee to investigate.

At a Friday press conference, Trump was asked by an NBC reporter “What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now and are scared?” Trump’s response: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say. It is a bad signal that you are putting out to the American people. You want to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism. Let’s see if it works. I happen to feel good about it. Who knows. I have been right a lot. Let’s see what happens.”

The Washington Post reported a good summary of how intelligence reports from January and February informed leaders about the threat of the virus and how Trump did not listen: “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” this official said. “The system was blinking red.”

This New York Times piece details how the virus is a challenge that Trump’s defensive style is not equiped to handle: “Mr. Trump’s performance on the national stage in recent weeks has put on display the traits that Democrats and some Republicans consider so jarring — the profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism. For years, skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation, and now they know.

“Aides have long understood that Mr. Trump needs to hear support for his decisions, preferably described in superlatives. He often second-guesses himself, prompting advisers to ask allies to tell him he made the right call or go on Fox News to make that point in case he might be watching.

“Over the last week, as Mr. Trump has faced ever more draconian and expensive options, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, sought to coax him into action by using bits of praise in news coverage or from other officials as a motivator, according to people familiar with the discussions.Officials have learned that the president craves a constant diet of flattery, which they serve up during daily televised briefings. Vice President Mike Pence makes a point of repeating it day after day, sometimes repeatedly in the course of a single briefing. “Mr. President, from early on, you took decisive action,” he said during one. Other advisers have followed suit.”

There was also an effort by Trump and his media this week of re-branding the coronavirus as the Chinese or Wuhan virus. David Frum: “by revving up hate among their supporters against China, Trump and Fox can redirect those supporters’ rage from the dangerous target it might otherwise find: the trusted political and media figures who lied and lied and lied to them, exposing those supporters to disease and death for their own crass ends. Hate China, not me!

“While Trump, Fox, and Carlson try to redirect the anger of the people they betrayed, it’s worth noticing something strikingly absent from the speeches and writings of this administration and its Trump-line network: a word of sympathy or compassion for the thousands of Americans getting sick and dying on this president’s watch, as a result of this president’s neglect of his duties. They’re not capable of such language. They gain power by targeting outsiders. A virus is the ultimate outsider, but it’s not a very satisfying target for rage. Only human beings will do, human beings marked in some way as different: by nationality, by ethnicity, by race.”

In Other News:

On Wednesday Ignatius reported on concerns in the National Security community that Grennell was purging professionals. One of the details he reported on was this. Russell Travers is acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center: “A half-dozen intelligence veterans told me it is crucial that Travers remain in his job.”

On Thursday he reported that Travers just lost his job. Christopher Miller was appointed to replace Tavers as director. Travers is allowed to stay on as Miller’s deputy. “An intelligence source told me that Miller received a call about 10 p.m. Tuesday from the White House, asking if he would take the job…. The move will add to concerns within the U.S. intelligence community, and among its partners abroad, that Trump is continuing a purge of what he views as disloyal subordinates at the ODNI, FBI and other spy agencies.”

Travers told colleagues he was fired by Grenell.

Former intelligence chiefs wrote and signed an op-ed in the Washington Post to decry to removals of careen officials: This is not just about protecting a few senior officers. These unceremonious removals send a damaging message across the intelligence community. Every current officer sees that speaking truth to power in this administration is an immediate career-killer. Every young recruit will conclude that joining the intelligence community is little different from signing up for any other politicized element of the federal bureaucracy. Countless more talented young Americans will decide that federal service, indeed public service, is not a worthy calling.

Personal Log:

We are in the first week of schools being closed, and working from home. Word came that one of our school’s staff members is being tested for the virus, and that results could take six days. By Sunday that test came back positive and the network said two other staff members were also infected. Our two year old has been going to daycare. Few kids are still going, and staff takes their temperatures before entry. Parents are not allowed beyond the front office. By Sunday we decide not to risk sending her.

A relative is self-quarantining because someone working in her building had the virus. Another relative (Trump supporter from a red state) said they did not plan to cancel their travel plans to the British Isles (assuming the travel ban there is lifted by the end of April) and that talks of a lock down was “democrats” propaganda.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 43.2%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 15,219 / 201

Early in the Week

State Department told Americans not to go on cruise ships, despite Trump’s disagreement with that policy: “The decision came after President Trump resisted requests from administration officials to publicly urge older travelers to avoid cruise ships and plane travel, saying he thought it would harm those industries…”

On Tuesday the health officials in the administration seemed to pivot to telling people that there will be more infections and people need to change behaviors. Trump: ““Just stay calm — it will go away,” he said, but there is no scientific assessment to back that up.” He also floated the idea of a payroll tax holiday through the election to Republican Senators, who were cool to the idea. It would cost $700 billion.

According to reporting by Coppins, Trump’s spin machine is gearing up to blunt the political blowback from COVID-19: “The administration’s response to the outbreak has drawn some comparisons to that of the autocratic regimes in China and Iran, where information about the virus was tightly controlled to the detriment of the local populations. But what Trump has actually shown is that he doesn’t need to silence the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or censor the press to undermine politically inconvenient information about a public-health crisis—he can simply use his presidential bullhorn to drown it out…. Trump supporters have been warned incessantly not to trust mainstream journalistic coverage of the issue. When the market tanked earlier this week, the president blamed it on “fake news.” When White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham appeared on Fox & Friends, she condemned the media for using the virus “as a tool to politicize things and to scare people. Meanwhile, Trump’s right-wing media allies are working to minimize the perceived dangers of the coronavirus. “Put it in perspective,” Sean Hannity told his Fox News audience this week. “Twenty-six people were shot in Chicago alone over the weekend. I doubt you heard about it.””

Despite that, a member of Trump’s taskforce, Anthony Fauci, is contradicting Trump’s talking points with blunt talk: “I mean, people always say, well, the flu does this, the flu does that,” Fauci said. “The flu has a mortality of 0.1 percent. This has a mortality rate of 10 times that. That’s the reason I want to emphasize we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.”

Mid-Week

Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office Wednesday night. He tried to be upbeat, saying that our economy and preventive measures will protects us, and that the virus is affecting foreign nations worse than here: “The virus will not have a chance against us,” Trump said. “No nation is more prepared or more resilient than the United States.”

Reviews of the speech were generally bad. Frum: He offered no guidance or policy on how to prevent the spread of the disease inside the United States. Should your town cancel its St. Patrick’s Day parade? What about theaters and sporting events? Schools and colleges? Nothing…. There was one something in the speech: a ban on travel from Europe, but not the United Kingdom. It’s a classic Trump formulation. It seeks to protect America by erecting a wall against the world, without thinking very hard how or whether the wall can work. The disease is already here. “

Then Frum explains the psychology of the situation: “He has no care or concern for others; he cannot absorb the trouble and suffering of others as real. He monotones his way through words of love and compassion, but those words plainly have no content or meaning for him. The only thing that is real is his squalid vanity. This virus threatens to pierce that vanity, so he denied it as long as he could. What he refuses to acknowledge cannot be real, can it? And even now that he has acknowledged, he still cannot act, because he does not know what to do. His only goal now is to shove blame onto others. Americans have to face that in the grip of this epidemic, the Oval Office is for all practical purposes as empty as the glazed eyes of the man who spoke from that office tonight.”

Turns out at least four key details Trump said were not accurate: “Trump’s speech contained at least two errors and a significant omission. He said the travel ban would apply to cargo; it did not. He said health insurance companies would waive patients’ co-payments for coronavirus testing and treatment; industry officials later clarified that they would waive payments for testing only. And he did not fully explain the details of his travel restrictions, leaving out the fact that U.S. citizens would be exempt.”

In the Washington Post: “Trump — who believed that by giving the speech he would appear in command and that his remarks would reassure financial markets and the country — was in “an unusually foul mood” and sounded at times “apoplectic” on Thursday as he watched stocks tumble and digested widespread criticism of his speech, according to a former senior administration official briefed on his private conversations.”

End of Week

The CDC released a report of worst case estimates if no mitigation happens: “As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.”

Hospitals are already becoming overwhelmed. One major concern is estimates suggest hospitals may need over 740,000 ventilators when they only have 160,000 on hand currently: “The biggest, most dreadful thing we might face is rationing or triaging who gets ventilators,” said Gabe Kelen, the director of the Office of Critical Event Preparedness at Johns Hopkins University. “I really hope we never have to make these kinds of life-and-death decisions.”

The House passed an emergency aid bill on Friday, and Trump gave a Rose Garden press conference where he declared a national emergency, saying we are in “a new phase.”

During the Friday press conference, Trump was asked if he took responsibility for the lack of testing so far. He said “I don’t take responsibility at all.” This prompted Jack Goldsmith to write in a Twitter thread: “This episode, more than any other to date in the Trump presidency, reveals the vital importance of leadership in our democracy, and the woeful absence of it now.”

Here is a good summary of how Trump, with Kushner working behind the scenes, oversold the Google testing plan: “The president’s effort to sell the website as a significant response to an urgent public health crisis came amid a national outcry over the administration’s repeated failures to deliver on promises to quickly expand access to testing for the virus. The disconnect between Mr. Trump’s exuberant comments and the project’s more modest expectations was the latest example of the president exaggerating, overselling or making wholly inaccurate statements about his administration’s response to the virus, even as facts on the ground contradicted his rosy assessments of progress.”

Here is the Washington Post’s story on the Administration’s response: “The problem is no one is sure who is in charge,” a senior administration official said. “Unless someone comes to you and says, ‘I was with the president five minutes ago,’ and you know they’re telling the truth, getting irreversible direction is a little difficult.”

In Other News

A federal court rules that Congress can have un-redacted grand jury information from the Mueller investigation: “Courts must take care not to second-guess the manner in which the House plans to proceed with its impeachment investigation or interfere with the House’s sole power of impeachment.”

There was a rocket attack on American bases in Iraq, leaving several military wounded.

Personal Log: By midweek it was clear that this was going to be the last normal week, and by Friday even that level or normalcy was gone. In the morning, thick homework packets were rushed into students’ hands. Charter schools announced closings throughout the day. We stood in the office around one computer to watch Trump’s afternoon press conference. It was hard to stay focused on finishing out the week’s work items. Friday evening the superintendent sent out a robocall that announced all of Newark Public Schools would be closed for two weeks, until March 30. By Saturday afternoon the mayor announced the first confirmed COVID-19 case in Newark. And the governor of West Virginia, where there are no confirmed cases, closed all schools indefinitely. Throughout the weekend, people were taking to social media to either scold or scare people from going out to bars and restaurants. There is a sense that authorities will soon direct us to stay in our houses.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 42.3%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 1,629 / 41

COVID-19

Trump spoke with the press from the CDC on Friday, in which he said he did not want to evacuate a cruise ship off of California because it would cause the tally of Covid-19 patients in the US to double: “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

According to Politico: “For six weeks behind the scenes, and now increasingly in public, Trump has undermined his administration’s own efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak — resisting attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios, overturning a public-health plan upon request from political allies and repeating only the warnings that he chose to hear…. Interviews with 13 current and former officials, as well as individuals close to the White House, painted a picture of a president who rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news. For instance, aides heaped praise on Trump for his efforts to lock down travel from China — appealing to the president’s comfort zone of border security — but failed to convey the importance of doing simultaneous community testing, which could have uncovered a potential U.S. outbreak.”

“As the outbreak has grown, Trump has become attached to the daily count of coronavirus cases and how the United States compares to other nations, reiterating that he wants the U.S. numbers kept as low as possible. Health officials have found explicit ways to oblige him by highlighting the most optimistic outcomes in briefings, and their agencies have tamped down on promised transparency. The CDC has stopped detailing how many people in the country have been tested for the virus, and its online dashboard is running well behind the number of U.S. cases tracked by Johns Hopkins and even lags the European Union’s own estimate of U.S. cases.”

But Trump has added to that disorganization through his own decisions. Rather than empower a sole leader to fight the outbreak, as President Barack Obama did with Ebola in 2014, he set up a system where at least three different people — Azar, Vice President Mike Pence and coronavirus task force coordinator Debbie Birx — can claim responsibility. Three people who have dealt with the task force said it’s not clear what Birx’s role is, and that coronavirus-related questions sent to her have been rerouted to the vice president’s office.

In response, Pence’s office said it has positioned Birx as the vice president’s “right arm,” advising him on the response, while Azar continues to oversee the health department’s numerous coronavirus operations.

According to ABC news: “The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted the plan this week as a way of trying to control the virus, but White House officials ordered the air travel recommendation be removed…”

Trump replaced Mulvaney as chief of staff with Mark Meadows on Friday. Although it was soon revealed that Meadows put himself in self quarantine due to possible contact with someone who may have been infected.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 42.8%

COVID 19 cases/deaths: 213/11

COVID-19

The CDC announced that Americans need to prepare for the disruptions that Coronavirus will bring: As of “Tuesday, the United States has just 57 cases, 40 of them connected to the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship overwhelmed by the coronavirus after it docked in Japan. Those patients are in isolation in hospitals, and there are no signs of sustained transmission in American communities.”

On Wednesday Trump gave a Coronavirus press conference and named Pence as the person in charge of the US response.

From the New York Times, and other newspapers, Thursday night: “Federal health employees interacted with Americans quarantined for possible exposure to the coronavirus without proper medical training or protective gear, then scattered into the general population, according to a government whistle-blower who lawmakers say faced retaliation for reporting concerns.”

At a rally in South Carolina on Friday, Trump suggested the coronavirus fear mongering was a “new hoax” by the democrats to undermine him, linking it with the Mueller Report”: “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. They’re politicizing it,” he said. “They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That did not work out too well. They could not do it. They tried the impeachment hoax.” Then Trump called the coronavirus “their new hoax.”

Friday saw the largest stock market drop since 2008, based on virus related fears of an economic downturn.

According to the New York Times: “Sixty-five cases of the virus have been reported in the United States, but until this week, all of the cases could be explained by overseas travel or contact with someone who had been ill. The three new cases on Friday, and a case earlier in the week, in California, were the first in the United States where the cause was mysterious and unknown…”

On Saturday the CDC announced the first death from the virus, a man in Washington state.

In Other News

A three judge panel ruled that the House cannot compel Don McGahn to testify since Trump told him not to.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 43.3%

COVID-19 Cases/Deaths: 65/1

Roger Stone was sentenced to three years in jail on charges stemming from the Mueller investigation.

Here is Wheeler on Barr’s role in the Stone case: “The whole scandal probably led ABJ to tailor her comments to address it. On top of making clear how outrageous Stone’s obstruction was, she also alluded to the tweets of the President. She ended her statements by saying, “He was not prosecuted, as some have claimed, for standing up for the president. He was prosecuted for covering up for the president.” She backed that by noting Stone’s comment to Randy Credico that he, Stone, couldn’t take the Fifth because it would hurt the President. This establishes a legal record that Stone is going to prison to protect Trump — far stronger than what went in for Scooter Libby, who was also going to prison to protect his superiors.”

On Tuesday Trump pardoned or commuted 11 famous white collar criminals. Here is a list.

Intelligence officials warned the Congress that Russia was again interfering in the presidential election: “The day after the Feb. 13 briefing to lawmakers, the president berated Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, for allowing it to take place, people familiar with the exchange said. Mr. Trump was particularly irritated that Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the leader of the impeachment proceedings, was at the briefing.”

According to the Washington Post: “Five days later, Trump announced that Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and a presidential loyalist, would step in as the new acting director of national intelligence. Maguire was told to vacate his office at the DNI’s headquarters in Virginia by 10 a.m. the next morning, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.”

Trump is now installing political loyalists in the National Security Council, as well as reducing the number of members.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 43.3%

On Tuesday: “Senior Justice Department officials intervened to overrule front-line prosecutors and will recommend a more lenient sentence for Roger J. Stone Jr.” The original prosecution team had recommended 7-9 years but that was downgraded to: “the government defers to the Court as to what specific sentence is appropriate under the facts and circumstances of this case.” This came after Trump tweeted that Stone was being treated unfairly in sentencing.

Four prosecutors on the Stone case resigned due to this intervention.

According to the New York Times: “Mr. Barr and his lieutenants intervened on Tuesday hours after Mr. Trump assailed the original sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years in a middle-of-the-night Twitter eruption. The president congratulated Mr. Barr on Wednesday “for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought” and said prosecutors “ought to apologize” to Mr. Stone. But numerous legal scholars say that Mr. Trump has shredded norms that kept presidents in check for decades, undermining public trust in federal law enforcement and creating at least the perception that criminal cases are now subject to political influence from the White House.”

This article has a good tick-tock of the decision making process: On Monday, several people familiar with the matter said, Mr. Shea told the prosecutors that he wanted a lower sentence, reminding them that they had discretion to deviate from the guidelines. But three of the four prosecutors threatened to quit the case, so Mr. Shea acquiesced until Mr. Barr and the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, overruled him on Tuesday.

As Lawfare points out, this episode casts a new light on the DOJ’s decision last month to lower Flynn’s sentencing recommendation from 0-6 months jail time to probation, for which no explanation was offered.

Here is Marcy Wheeler on this: “Stone was silent, until the time that the Probation Office provided the sentencing range for the crimes that was built in to the way that Mueller charged this just over a year ago. That is, by charging Stone with witness tampering, Mueller built in the possibility that Stone would be facing the steep sentence recommended yesterday. And that steep sentence may have been envisioned not as the sum of what Stone’s actual actions entailed — certainly every single warrant save the last four showed probable cause that Stone had done far more, but rather as leverage to get Stone to tell what he knows about Trump’s involvement in all this.”

On Thursday Barr gave an interview to ABC in which he said Trump’s tweets made it “impossible for me to do my job” and that “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.”

John Kelly is publicly speaking out against Trump, the Ukraine scheme, and the firing of Vindman: When Vindman heard the president tell Zelensky he wanted to see the Biden family investigated, that was tantamount to hearing “an illegal order,” Kelly said. “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”

Closing arguments were given in the Senate on Tuesday.

Frum: “Yet the impeachment process has achieved something. It has removed deniability from the Republicans. They were enablers; now they are accomplices. They are all Carmela Soprano in the classic scene with the psychiatrist who speaks the truth about her criminal husband: “One thing you can never say: that you haven’t been told.” The Republican Party as an institution has utterly merged itself into the Trump cover-up machine, and there is no escape for any of them.”

Peter Wehner: “what they don’t tell themselves, probably because it would be too psychologically shattering, is that they have become fully complicit in a corrupt enterprise called the Trump presidency. (Romney is the rare exception.)”

Wittes critiques arguments made by senators Alexander and Rubio for why they voted not to have witnesses: “…would be a more compelling argument if Rubio proposed to deploy any of the “multiple ways … to constrain” the president to which he refers. But he does not…. Indeed, Rubio’s position is not that it is the voters, not senators, who should depose Trump and that he will thus campaign against Trump in Florida. And while Alexander likewise argued on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “the people” are the appropriate remedy for Trump’s behavior, he also does not propose to avail himself of that remedy. Both men support Trump’s reelection, meaning that they actively oppose the use of the remedy they suggest as the alternative to removal by impeachment—which is to say that they do, in fact, oppose accountability for what Trump did.”

Here is audio from the last day of arguments. You can also listen to audio from all the previous days of the trial on this podcast.

Trump gave his State of the Union Tuesday evening.

Trump was acquitted on Wednesday afternoon. All Democrats voted for both impeachment articles, and Mitt Romney voted for the abuse of power article.

Here is the text of Romney’s speech. Koppins was granted an interview with Romney on the day before the vote: “I found Romney filled with what seemed like righteous indignation about the president’s misconduct—quoting hymns and scripture, expressing dismay at his party, and bracing for the political backlash.”

Then on Friday, Trump fired Vindman and his twin brother from the National Security Council, and Sondland: “President Trump wasted little time on Friday opening a campaign of retribution against those he blames for his impeachment, firing two of the most prominent witnesses in the House inquiry against him barely 48 hours after being acquitted by the Senate.”

A Clevland-based pastor Darrel Scott, one of Trump’s prominent black supporters, is running a sham charity organization called Urban Revitalization Coalition. Its purpose is to hold Trump events in black cities and give out cash prizes of $300-$500 to black residents in hope it will sway them to vote for Trump. The effort is intended to decrease the Democrat vote total from urban areas: “The group’s “Christmas Extravaganza” event in Cleveland last month featured a $25,000 giveaway and an appearance by Ja’Ron Smith, a deputy assistant to the president. A Cleveland native who worked on Trump’s criminal justice reform, Smith is among the highest-ranking black officials in the White House.”

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 43.8%

On Sunday night the New York Times published a scoop about John Bolton’s book in which he confirmed that Trump was engaged in a qui pro quo with Ukraine: “President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens”

In a sign that the entire book or key portions of it have been leaked, on Monday evening the same New York Times reporters released another story about it, this time involving Barr: “John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, privately told Attorney General William P. Barr last year that he had concerns that President Trump was effectively granting personal favors to the autocratic leaders of Turkey and China, according to an unpublished manuscript by Mr. Bolton. Mr. Barr responded by pointing to a pair of Justice Department investigations of companies in those countries and said he was worried that Mr. Trump had created the appearance that he had undue influence over what would typically be independent inquiries, according to the manuscript. Backing up his point, Mr. Barr mentioned conversations Mr. Trump had with the leaders, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Xi Jinping of China.”

These revelations prompted some GOP senators to call for witnesses in the impeachment trial: “I think it’s increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, told reporters. He later told Republican colleagues at a closed-door lunch that calling witnesses would be a wise choice politically and substantively, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Trump’s defense concluded their three days of testimony on Tuesday.

Senators got to ask questions on Wednesday.

The White House claimed on Wednesday that Bolton’s book contains a lot of classified material. Bolton’s lawyers disagree.

On Friday the Senate voted not to call witnesses, with only Collins and Romney voting with the Democrats.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 43.4%

Wittes’s analysis of Trump’s initial legal defense briefs submitted to the Senate: Read together, Cipollone’s October letter and this new document written with Sekulow set expectations for the president’s defense: barely contained, and barely coherent, rage—a middle finger stuck at the impeachment process, rather than any kind of organized effort to convince senators or the public that the president’s conviction would be unmerited, imprudent, or unjust.

On Wednesday the House managers presented their opening arguments. Adam Schiff gave a powerful two hour speech that others are praising as one for the history books.

After three long days, the House managers closed their opening statements on Friday night. According to this New York Times reporter: “The sense in the Capitol was that the trial was heading toward its predictable conclusion, Mr. Trump’s acquittal, as early as next week.”

Schiff is widely regarded as the manager who gave the most effective speeches.

Trump’s defense team began their opening arguments on Saturday.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 43%

Trump’s last approval decline (Episode 19) corresponded with the breaking news cycle wherein we learned the details of the Ukraine scheme for which he was eventually impeached. That decline was of above average severity (6 out of 10) on my ranking system, and was a significant drop of 2.10% points. But since that decline ended in late October 2019, his approval rating has fluctuated a lot while rising on average a total of 2.70%. In the week of his acquittal in early February 2020, there is talk of Trump having some of his best approval ratings (Gallup has him reaching a “personal best” of 49% in one poll). What is going on?

Over the 6 weeks after the last dip, he rose 1.60% points, but not consecutively. He would rise for a couple weeks, then drop slightly for a couple weeks, repeat. The decline adds up to .50% points. Then in the week of the House Impeachment vote, the approval jumps 1.50% in one week, reaching 43.3%. At the time I thought this jump was just noise since a jump of that much that quickly is rare. It has only happened four times (Weeks 33, 54, 67, 108). And sure enough, over the next three weeks the approval rating dropped exactly 1.50%, erasing the sudden gain. But then, starting in the week of January 12, the approval rating increased 1.60%.

Here is a graphic of this change:

As stated above, Trump’s approval has increased 2.70% on average between Week 144 and 158. This is a significant climb. However, this increase seems at this point (in the middle of Week 159) to be inconsistent, with lurches up and then down and then up again, as opposed to a steady, reliable increase in support. It may be noise, and the weeks after 159 may show another approval from of 1-1.5% and a return to Trump’s normal equilibrium of between 41-42%.

On the other hand, Trump’s approval may be entering a new, higher equilibrium in this 2020 election year. For three of the last eight weeks, Trump has been above 43%. This has not happened at any point in the past year, nor in Trump’s second year. In fact, Trump has not been above 43% since the first 8 weeks of his presidency (January-March 2017).

To sum up: The Ukraine scandal hurt Trump, but he has recovered any approval that was lost. The jury is still out on whether the complete impeachment process has helped Trump, but his approval rating has reached new heights since the formal proceedings began, even if it is too early to tell if those gains are solid and have staying power.