Sunday afternoon after the Synagogue massacre, Trump tweeted: “The Fake News is doing everything in their power to blame Republicans, Conservatives and me for the division and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Country. Actually, it is their Fake & Dishonest reporting which is causing problems far greater than they understand!”
The President and the the First Lady were met with protests and the welcome of no public officials when they visited the Pittsburgh Synagogue. The mayor and the top four Republican and Democratic congressional leaders who were invited to join him all declined.
The migrant caravan has shrunk by over half to around 3,000 people. Yet Trump ordered 5,200 troops to the border by the end of the week. The move is being criticized for using active duty military as a prop in a midterm election stunt.
Conspiracies about the caravan are widespread among people who consume right-leaning media. Several people in the Trump Administration, including Trump himself, are pushing out the idea that the caravan includes “criminals and Middle Easterners.” Both the pipe bomber and the Synagogue shooter were bothered by the caravan.
Adam Sewer makes an explicit case that Trump’s caravan rhetoric was in part responsible for the shooting: “Before committing the Tree of Life massacre, the shooter, who blamed Jews for the caravan of “invaders” and who raged about it on social media, made it clear that he was furious at HIAS, founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish group that helps resettle refugees in the United States. He shared posts on Gab, a social-media site popular with the alt-right, expressing alarm at the sight of “massive human caravans of young men from Honduras and El Salvador invading America thru our unsecured southern border.” And then he wrote, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.””
Here is a survey of Trump’s closing campaign arguments, a replay of his 2016 greatest hits: economic populism, xenophobia, and tough-guy rhetoric. We will know next week how successful it is.
As the week ended, Trump doubled down on fear of immigration as his closing election argument, making speeches that stoke fear of the migrant caravan, and releasing an internet campaign video of an illegal Mexican immigrant cop-killer. He claims–contrary to law–that the military will be able to shoot migrants and arrest them.
As for the troops Trump has ordered to the border: “Officials said that forces are staging at military installations for now because it is unclear precisely where on the border their main object of concern — several caravans of Central American migrants, the first of which is now in central Mexico — will head.”
As some predicted over the summer, the tax law failed to work as a campaign issue for Republicans, and so immigration fear mongering filled the void. This week Republicans announced that they would not tackle additional tax cuts until 2019.
Turkey revealed that Khashoggi was strangled upon entrance in the consulate, and then his body was dismembered and destroyed.
The Trump administration reimposed oil sanctions on Iran that were in place before the nuclear pact, however they gave wavers to eight mostly Asian countries. Europe was not granted any waivers.
Congressional democrats released more evidence this week that the Trump Administration is trying to keep the FBI headquarters from being moved to outside Washington. They want the current J. Edgar Hoover building to be demolished and replaced in the same site. The suspicion is that Trump does not want commercial buildings build on the current site because that might lead to competition with his hotel.
In Russia News:
This week, Muller’s team interviewed people, including Bannon, about Roger Stone’s connection to Wikileaks and the release of the Podesta emails.
Roger Stone is in the news a lot this week. He has released some emails with Bannon where they are discussing the Wikileaks dump. Text messages with a friend who is being interviewed by Muller have also been released. This indicates that in this campaign season lull, Mueller and the grand jury have been busy talking to people about Stone, who are in turn talking to the press. It may indicate that charges will be brought against Stone after the election.
The Jaworski “Road Map,” a Special Prosecutor’s report to congress about impeaching Nixon was unsealed this week. It had never been made public and several groups, including Lawfare.org pushed for its release in part to reveal a possible precedent for Mueller to follow regarding the Russia investigation and Trump.
Here is Wittes and Goldsmith’s analysis. They note that the Jaworski Road Map did not accuse Nixon of crimes, just laid out the evidence of the crimes; it did not recommend impeachment but said “that the evidence referred to above [should] be transmitted forthwith to the House Judiciary Committee for such use as it considers appropriate.” In other words, less it more. They close with one important lesson of the Trump era: “There is a tendency in the age of Donald Trump to assume that excess is needed to combat excess, that the proper response to gross norm violations involve the scrapping of other norms. Yet faced with Richard Nixon, Leon Jaworski wrote a meticulous 55-page document that contains not a word of excess. He transmitted it to Congress, where it did not leak. It is powerful partly because it is so by-the-book. Kind of like Bob Mueller.”
Then there was this strange story: “A company that appears to be run by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist offered to pay women to make false claims against Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the days leading up to the midterm elections—and the special counsel’s office has asked the FBI to weigh in. ‘When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation,’ the Mueller spokesman Peter Carr told me in an email on Tuesday.”
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Trump’s Job Approval Rating: 42.1%