Left Behind

Defying the Odds goes into some length on the economic and social distress that boosted Trump.

James Pethokoukas writes at AEI:

Recent attention — thanks in good part to the 2016 elections — on inequality and mobility issues has focused on America’s “left behind” Appalachian and Rust Belt regions, such as depicted in “Hillbilly Elegy“. A couple of recent Economic Innovation Group reports add context.

One illustrated the lopsided nature of the post-recession recovery, finding that (a) 20 counties alone generated half of the country’s new business establishments, and (b) only 15 large counties enjoyed their strongest recovery in the 2010s. A more recent analysis — based in part on data from Harvard’s Equality of Opportunity Project — finds 51% U.S. counties home to 60% of kids exert “a negative impact on children’s future earnings.” As that report concludes, “Most children in the United States are growing up today in counties with a poor record of fostering upward mobility. As the geography of U.S. economic growth narrows, it may become even harder to prevent further retreat of economic mobility”.

Does a Bad Economy Loom?

At Bloomberg, Jason Shenker reports that unemployment was at a low 4.5 percent in March.  But....

At 98,000, the number of net new jobs created in March was soft, coming in below the 180,000 median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The report calls into question the narrative of an economy on autopilot that continues to generate strong job growth amidst rising rates. The downward revision of 38,000 fewer jobs for the previous two months only adds to those questions.

The most recent quarterly Fed member forecasts show a path of higher rates, with a mean estimate of 1.4 percent for the end of the year, which is up from the current target range of 0.75 percent to 1 percent. And some market participants had become even more hawkish than members of the Federal Open Market Committee.

Although the Fed has a dual mandate to support full employment and contain inflation, its policy is not on a set course. Yes, the economy is at full employment, but the slower March job gains will make the April employment report critical for determining if the latest number is a blip or the start of a new trend.

From the Atlanta Fed:

The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2017 is 0.6 percent on April 7, down from 1.2 percent on April 4. The forecast for first-quarter real GDP growth fell 0.4 percentage points after the light vehicle sales release from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the ISM Non-Manufacturing Report On Business from the Institute for Supply Management on Wednesday and 0.2 percentage points after the employment release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the wholesale trade release from the U.S. Census Bureau this morning. Since April 4, the forecasts for first-quarter real consumer spending growth and real nonresidential equipment investment growth have fallen from 1.2 percent and 9.7 percent to 0.6 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively.

Vacuum

Mike Allen reports at Axios that many Trump jobs are going unfilled, so responsibility flows to Kushner, who can't possibly keep up with it.

"Too few people are doing too much, and it's keeping the Cabinet weak," said one outside adviser to the West Wing. "In a Cabinet of people who are used to being superstars, no one has been able to negotiate to get a high-powered team in."

...
"I don't know what Rex does every day," a friend said. "[SecDef] James Mattis is home alone."

According to the Political Appointee Tracker of the Partnership for Public Service, of 553 key positions in the Trump administration requiring Senate confirmation, 486 have no nominee, 24 are awaiting nomination, 21 have been nominated and 22 confirmed.

The partnership shared the latest historical equivalents with Axios AM. As of today:

• Trump: 21 nominations, 22 confirmed.
• George H.W. Bush: 72 nominations, 27 confirmed.
• Bill Clinton: 69 nominations, 44 confirmed.
• George W. Bush: 65 nominations, 32 confirmed.
• Obama: 120 nominations, 54 confirmed.
• As Trump might tweet: Big difference!

Kleptocrat-in-Chief

Derek Kravitz and Al Shaw report at ProPublica:

In an interview with ProPublica, Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten confirmed that President Trump can withdraw profits and underlying assets from his trust at any time.

He also said the president has been able to withdraw money since Trump took office on Jan. 20. That language was not included in a Jan. 26 summary of the trust — what’s known as a trust certification — but was included in a Feb. 10version of the document.

Asked about the change, Garten said the Trump Organization prepares different versions of the summaries to “highlight different things for different people.”

The full details of the trust are in what’s known as a trust agreement, which Garten said the Trump Organization will not release. He referred further questions about release of the trust agreement to the law firm of Morgan Lewis, which did not respond to a ProPublica request for comment. We have updated the story’s headline to reflect Garten’s comments.

Jonathan Chait writes at New York:

In December Trump promised, “No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.” In January, that pledge was scaled back to simply mean no new foreign deals. Accordingly, Trump’s company announced a massive expansion of its domestic hotel business. “There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U.S., and we’re in five,” Trump Hotel chief executive Eric Danziger said in January. “I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be in all of them eventually.”

Trump promised in January he would donate any profits at his hotels that came from foreign governments. When reporters found two months later that he had failed to do so, his organization promised the donations would happen at the end of the calendar year.
The main problem with Trump’s “separation,” of course, is that it operates on his say-so.

Without access to his tax returns, the extent of his business conflicts is a matter of guesswork to the public. And, with the president enjoying an idiosyncratic exemption from the strict conflict-of-interest requirements that bind other federal employees, the only enforcement mechanisms lie in Congress’s hands. Congress could require Trump to release his tax returns, but the Republican majority has voted down even these halting steps.

Why It Is Still Hard to Repeal Obamacare

Russell Berman writes at The Atlantic:

The Republican repeal-and-replace plan for Obamacare died an unceremonious death last month when President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan abandoned the bill minutes before a floor vote that they knew was doomed to fail.

But now, just in time for Easter, the bill has seemingly returned to life and is back under discussion on Capitol Hill. Vice President Mike Pence is shuttling once again between the White House and the clubhouse of the House Freedom Caucus, dangling a proposal to push the legislation even further to the right in order to secure the votes of the GOP’s hardest-to-please conservatives. The changes under consideration would threaten Trump’s oft-repeated promise to protect people with preexisting conditions by allowing states, under certain conditions, to gut the regulations undergirding that pledge.

Gallup reports:

Fifty-five percent of Americans now support the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a major turnaround from five months ago when 42% approved and 53% disapproved. This is the first time a majority of Americans have approved of the healthcare law, also known as Obamacare, since Gallup first asked about it in this format in November 2012.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports:

The latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, conducted the week after House Republicans pulled the American Health Care Act (AHCA) from a vote, finds about two-thirds of the public (64 percent) says it is a “good thing” that Congress did not pass the bill. Majorities of Democrats (87 percent) and independents (63 percent) say it is a “good thing” the bill didn’t pass, compared to about half of Republicans (54 percent) who view it as a “bad thing.” For those who say Congress not passing the bill is a good thing, similar shares feel this way because they do not want the 2010 health care law repealed (31 percent, overall) as feel this way because while they support repeal efforts they had concerns about the AHCA (29 percent, overall).

"Veep" Meets "The Americans"

At Buzzfeed, Ali Watkins reports that a member of the Trump campaign's foreign policy advisory committee had met with a Russian spy in 2013.

The adviser, Carter Page, met with a Russian intelligence operative named Victor Podobnyy, who was later charged by the US government alongside two others for acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government. The charges, filed in January 2015, came after federal investigators busted a Russian spy ring that was seeking information on US sanctions as well as efforts to develop alternative energy. Page is an energy consultant.

A court filing by the US government contains a transcript of a recorded conversation in which Podobnyy speaks with one of the other men busted in the spy ring, Igor Sporyshev, about trying to recruit someone identified as “Male-1.” BuzzFeed News has confirmed that “Male-1” is Page.

The revelation of Page’s connection to Russian intelligence — which occurred more than three years before his association with Trump — is the most clearly documented contact to date between Russian intelligence and someone in Trump’s orbit. It comes as federal investigators probe whether Trump’s campaign-era associates — including Page — had any inappropriate contact with Russian officials or intelligence operatives during the course of the election. Page has volunteered to help Senate investigators in their inquiry.
...
The court filing includes a colorful transcript of Podobnyy speaking with Sporyshev about trying to recruit Page.

“[Male-1] wrote that he is sorry, he went to Moscow and forgot to check his inbox, but he wants to meet when he gets back. I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am...He got hooked on Gazprom thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up,” Podobnyy said. “I also promised him a lot...this is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.”

Michael Weiss writes at The Daily Beast:

Not every bank lists a convicted spy serving 30 months in an Ohio prison as its active deputy representative in New York. But then, not every bank is headed by a former spy, much less one found to have spent time with Jared Kushner during a “roadshow” last year, when Donald Trump’s son-in-law was then just a top campaign advisor and not a likely witness about to testify before a Senate committee on Russia’s meddling in U.S. democracy.

In those charmed days before the director of the FBI raised in an open session of Congress the very real possibility that some of the president’s men might be working on behalf of a hostile foreign power, there was the curious case of a Wall Street analyst who was handcuffed in his Bronx neighborhood in late Jan. 2015 after going out for groceries. His crime wasn’t peddling junk sub-primes to trusting pensioners but working for Moscow Center.

Sleaze Update, April 3

Mark Maremont and James V. Grimaldi report at The Wall Street Journal:

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s daughter and her White House adviser husband, are paying $15,000 a month to rent their new home in Washington’s fashionable Kalorama neighborhood from its billionaire owner, according to newly filed documents.

The documents, filed by the landlord with the District of Columbia housing department, present the first concrete financial information about the rental agreement between the couple and the home’s owner, a Chilean magnate whose company is embroiled in a dispute with the U.S. government over a mine potentially worth billions of dollars.

The rent is in line with that paid for similar luxury properties in the area, according to local brokers. Even so, it represents a seemingly poor financial deal for the landlord, according to real-estate experts.

The owner, Andrónico Luksic, bought the house after the November election and paid $5.5 million for the six-bedroom property. The house never was advertised for rent. The White House has said Ms. Trump’s and Mr. Kushner’s broker knew somebody had a bid on the property and helped facilitate the match. The couple moved in shortly afterward.

Michael Isikoff reports at Yahoo:

The White House abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting in February between President Trump and a high-level Russian central banker after a national security aide discovered the official had been named by Spanish police as a suspected “godfather” of an organized crime and money-laundering ring, according to an administration official and four other sources familiar with the event.

The event had been planned as a meet and greet with President Trump and Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Bank of Russia and a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, in a waiting room at the Washington Hilton before the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 2. Torshin, a top official in his country’s central bank, headed a Russian delegation to the annual event and was among a small number of guests who had been invited by Prayer Breakfast leaders to meet with Trump before it began.

But while reviewing the list of guests, a White House national security aide responsible for European affairs noticed Torshin’s name and flagged him as a figure who had “baggage,” a reference to his suspected ties to organized crime, an administration official told Yahoo News. Around the same time, a former campaign adviser alerted the White House that the meeting could exacerbate the political controversy over contacts between Trump associates and the Kremlin, another source familiar with the matter said.
The sources were unable to say who inside the White House canceled the scheduled meeting, or precisely when the decision was made. The administration official who spoke to Yahoo News said that White House officials were already planning to scrap the meeting when the National Security Council staffer raised concerns about it. But it was not until the night before the Prayer Breakfast that Torshin was informed, without explanation, that his meeting with the president had been scrapped.

...
“He’s sort of the conservatives’ favorite Russian,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who together with Rep. Tom Massie, R-Ky., had dinner with Torshin and other members of the Russian delegation to the Prayer Breakfast at a Washington restaurant. “He’s someone who understands our system. His approach is, ‘I agree with you Americans: People should have a right to own guns. There should be religious freedom. The whole problem is with radical Muslims. We were able to have a very good exchange.”

Robert Faturechi reports at ProPublica:

On the same day the stockbroker for then-Georgia Congressman Tom Price bought him up to $90,000 of stock in six pharmaceutical companies last year, Price arranged to call a top U.S. health official, seeking to scuttle a controversial rule that could have hurt the firms’ profits and driven down their share prices, records obtained by ProPublica show.

Stock trades made by Price while he served in Congress came under scrutiny at his confirmation hearings to become President Trump’s secretary of health and human services. The lawmaker, a physician, traded hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of shares in health-related companies while he voted on and sponsored legislation affecting the industry, but Price has said his broker acted on his behalf without his involvement or knowledge. ProPublica previously reported that his trading is said to have been under investigationby federal prosecutors.

On March 17, 2016, Price’s broker purchased shares worth between $1,000 and $15,000 each in Eli Lilly, Amgen, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, McKesson, Pfizer and Biogen. Previous reports have noted that, a month later, Price was among lawmakers from both parties who signed onto a bill that would have blocked a rule proposed by the Obama administration, which was intended to remove the incentive for doctors to prescribe expensive drugs that don’t necessarily improve patient outcomes.

What hasn’t been previously known is Price’s personal appeal to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services about the rule, called the Medicare Part B Drug Payment Model.

This is use of official position to influence an election. Look at the photo and description underneath. Bush WH would have fired him https://t.co/xTAcfIv3K3

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) April 1, 2017

This is use of official position to influence an election. Look at the photo and description underneath. Bush WH would have fired him https://t.co/xTAcfIv3K3

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) April 1, 2017

WH wrong again. Personal Twitter page cannot be loaded up with official stuff and then used for partisan politicshttps://t.co/3OhXrMvyl6

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) April 2, 2017