| | | | | | Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on March 12. | |
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 In his public events over the weekend, President Trump seemed carefree and relaxed, swapping self-deprecating jokes with the press Saturday at Washington’s annual Gridiron Dinner. “I really am very proud to call him ‘the apprentice,’” Trump said of Vice President Mike Pence. “But lately, he’s showing a particularly keen interest in the news these days. He starts out each morning asking everyone, ‘Has he been impeached yet?’” But Trump’s cheerful remarks belied the frazzled state of the White House at the end of a week that was wild even by this administration’s standards. To recap: - Communications director Hope Hicks, one of Trump’s most trusted and loyal aides, announced she would resign in the next few weeks.
- The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was an embarrassing sideshow all week: his security clearance was downgraded, it was reported that foreign agents had viewed him as an easy target for diplomatic manipulation, and—most damaging—it came out that he had hosted White House meetings with an equity firm weeks before it made large loans to his family business. On Sunday, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called for Kushner to resign: “The situation is made much worse by the fact that we have family members in the White House,” he said. “It makes it much more difficult.”
- As the country grappled with how to respond to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Trump flitted from policy proposal to policy proposal: suggesting at various points that teachers be permitted to carry guns, that gun sales be restricted to buyers 21 and older, that background checks be expanded, and that the police confiscate guns from people suspected to be unstable, then “go through due process second.” One moment he was excoriating Republican lawmakers for being “afraid of the NRA”; the next he was meeting with NRA executives in the Oval Office.
- Finally, Trump drove all of that from our minds with his announcement that the United States would implement large new tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, angering foreign leaders and drawing loud protests from lawmakers in his own party. Meanwhile, the decision appears to have further damaged the already delicate renegotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The daily struggle of trying to keep up with the sound and fury of the Trump news cycle makes it easy to forget even the recent past. But we’ll be feeling the effects of last week’s shakeups for quite some time. |
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| | Meanwhile, as recently as Sunday, many in the administration didn’t seem to know exactly what the new tariffs will look like. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, one of the few administration officials who supports the policy, insisted on Meet the Press Sunday that American consumers would not be hurt by the tariffs—but then also left room for Trump to reverse course altogether. “Whatever his final decision is, is what will happen,” Ross said. “What he has said, he has said. If he says something different, it’ll be something different.” Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro further muddied the waters Sunday, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that the White House would not exempt allied countries from the tariff—but that some specific exemptions would be allowed. Read more... | |
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| | Mueller Watch—A small Sunday scoop from Axios: special counsel Robert Mueller issued a subpoena to an unknown individual last month requesting all their communications since November 2015 with 10 current and former Trump associates, including Carter Page, Corey Lewandowski, Hope Hicks, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, and Trump himself. | |
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| | Be sure to read Alice B. Lloyd’s writeup of Sunday night’s Oscars, which “were always going to be weird, but in a mostly predictable way”:
The self-serious host—this year’s is Jimmy Kimmel, who’s made earnest political talk a running theme of his late night talk show—and all those announcing and accepting awards guaranteed that political hits would come early and often..
With woke jokes like—“We don’t make films like Call Me By Your Name for money, we make them to upset Mike Pence,” and “Oscar is the most respected man in Hollywood, no penis—the type of man we need more of in Hollywood”—the one thing worth watching Sunday, besides who would win the actual Oscars, was whether the patriarchy or the president would be a richer target.
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Song of the Day—"This Time Tomorrow,” The Kinks 
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