Mercedes Schlapp, Tony Sayegh, and Kellyanne Conway vie for the job‐‐and Michael Anton is a darkhorse.
| | The departure of Hope Hicks, the single most trusted aide to President Trump,from the White House Thursday has left two voids in the West Wing. The first is as just about the only person around him who can give an unvarnished opinion to the president—and be heard and taken seriously. This position made Hicks valuable not just to Trump but to other advisers and staff looking to communicate with the man in the Oval Office. Her absence creates a gap nobody else, inside the White House or out, can bridge. The second is more ordinary: Hicks's job as communications director. Whether this void gets filled in the short term depends on the president—who may decide he can live without someone in charge of communications. Until then, White House aides Mercedes Schlapp and Tony Sayegh have been not-so-subtly vying for the job (and dunking on each other) through the press, with Kellyanne Conway also making it clear she's interested. The Washington Examiner reported Thursday that Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council, is also being discussed as a potential new communications director. Anton joined the NSC staff at the beginning of the administration and has survived the tenures of both Michael Flynn and now H.R. McMaster. As one of the only West Wing staff members who brought previous White House experience—he served as a speechwriter and communications aide in the George W. Bush administration—Anton is popular among others on staff for his institutional knowledge. His future in an NSC run by John Bolton is uncertain, but he's not actively, or even passively, lobbying for the comms director job. Read more... |
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| This is how one senior administration official described President Trump's forthcoming infrastructure speech to reporters Thursday, as Air Force One made its way to Cleveland: "Obviously, today's focus is going to be on workers and what this plan will do for the American workers." But as my colleague Andrew Egger reported, the president strayed from the the script to address, well, a lot of other things: At his speech in Ohio, Trump stayed briefly on-topic, saying his plan would "transform our roads and bridges from a source of endless frustration into a source of incredible pride" while admitting that "you're probably going to have to wait until after the election" to see it passed. But Trump used the majority of his time to wander through one of his signature stream-of-consciousness rants, quickly abandoning the topic of infrastructure to muse about foreign policy, immigration, his Wednesday decision to fire Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin, and Roseanne Barr's new TV show. "Look at Roseanne. Look at her ratings," Trump said of the latter, in which Barr plays a Trump supporter. "They were unbelievable. Over 18 million people. And it was about us."
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Reality Check—But would it have mattered if Trump had stuck to the script and given a perfect pitch for his big spending proposal? Republicans I talk with on Capitol Hill are not just skeptical they'll pass an infrastructure proposal anything like what the president is proposing—they insist it's almost certainly not going to happen. That's because there's little interest from GOP leadership in either house of Congress, particularly in an election year.
In the House, Paul Ryan's focus is on welfare reform—what he's been calling workforce development—while Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is taking more of a bunker mentality ahead of the midterms, trying to move forward on ambassadorship and judicial nominations and not much else.
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Mark It Down—"The president has expressed his concerns with Amazon. We have no actions at this time." —White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters, March 29, 2018
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| Must-Read of the Day—On the website my colleague David Byler took a deeper look at a recent, wide-reaching, online scientific poll of Trump's approval. He comes away with a few interesting points about the president's popularity, including that there's hardly any soft disapproval of Trump—if you don't like him, you really don't like him.
There's not the same sort of universal intensity, however, among those who approve of the president. Here's more: In most of SurveyMonkey's polls, strong Trump approvers outnumbered those who approved somewhat, but the split isn't as lopsided as it is Trump disapprovers (this is similar to what we've seen in YouGov polls of Trump voters). Maybe more interestingly, the mix of somewhat and strong Trump approvers seems to have changed at least a little bit over time. Every poll is noisy, so these shifts shouldn't be overinterpreted. But the lack of stability in this graphic compared to the last one (plus real changes we've seen in topline averages) suggests that Trump supporters aren't immovable. Sometimes they go from supporting Trump enthusiastically to being more lukewarm. And sometimes they go from approving of Trump to not approving (or back to approval). This is another problem for the GOP in the midterm elections. A drop in Republican turnout (which we saw in numerous races in both 2017 and 2018) combined with strong Democratic turnout and crossover voting would add up to big problems for the House and Senate GOP. Figuring out the exact odds of a Democratic House or Senate takeover is a trickier task, but lower GOP turnout is one possible ingredient of a bad midterm performance. | |
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Hollywood Watch—Another disturbing story from the entertainment industry of sexual abuse and misconduct, this time involving underage girls, comes via BuzzFeed: "Robyn Byrd and Katie Rice were teenage Ren & Stimpy fans who wanted to make cartoons. They say they were preyed upon by the creator of the show, John Kricfalusi, who admitted to having had a 16-year-old girlfriend . . ."
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