The unanticipated question of new tariffs has taken the wind out of the sails of another White House focus from last week: what to do to improve school safety in the aftermath of last month’s school shooting in Florida. On Thursday afternoon, President Trump will hold another event supposedly related to that discussion: a White House roundtable with members of Congress and representatives of the video game industry. In the White House’s previous events focusing on preventing school shootings, Trump has pointed to violent TV and video games as contributors to aggression and desensitization in children.

Asked whether Trump thinks video games are “too violent,” press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday that “It’s certainly something that should be looked at and something that we want to have the conversation about.”

The White House has not yet announced who from the video game industry will be attending the meeting, but the Entertainment Software Association, a video game lobbyist group, will be represented. It’s not hard to see why industry executives wouldn’t be wild about showing up: they have pushed back strongly against the notion that their products encourage violent behavior, and they are apprehensive of becoming a White House scapegoat on the issue. Read more...

Mueller Watch—Whatever comes of the Mueller investigation, one thing’s for sure: President Trump’s approach to handling it won’t win him any prizes for discretion. The New York Times reported Thursday that Trump has “asked key witnesses about matters they discussed with investigators” on two occasions in recent months. From the Times:

In one episode, the president told an aide that the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, should issue a statement denying a New York Times article in January. The article said Mr. McGahn told investigators that the president once asked him to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. McGahn never released a statement and later had to remind the president that he had indeed asked Mr. McGahn to see that Mr. Mueller was dismissed, the people said.

In the other episode, Mr. Trump asked his former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, how his interview had gone with the special counsel’s investigators and whether they had been “nice,” according to two people familiar with the discussion.

The episodes demonstrate that even as the special counsel investigation appears to be intensifying, the president has ignored his lawyers’ advice to avoid doing anything publicly or privately that could create the appearance of interfering with it. Read more...

2018 Watch—Leading up to Tuesday evening’s Texas congressional primaries, many hyped the contests as an early barometer of Democratic momentum going into the 2018 midterms. Instead, the results ended up pretty much Texas standard: Ted Cruz coasted to his second nomination, picking up more than twice as many votes as his eventual Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke.

But one lower-profile Democratic primary made for a bizarre bit of political theater, as a House of Representatives candidate named Laura Moser, a progressive in the style of Bernie Sanders, qualified for a primary runoff in Texas’ Seventh District, despite strong opposition from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The DCCC tried to sink Moser’s candidacy in the weeks leading up to the election by publishing an opposition memo against her, calling her a “Washington insider who begrudgingly moved to Houston to run for Congress.”

“Democratic voters need to hear that Laura Moser is not going to change Washington,” the memo said.

Maybe the DCCC is right to believe that Moser couldn’t win a campaign in Texas. But it’s a strange world we live in where the campaign arm of the House Democrats try to knock off a (female!) challenger by calling her a “Washington insider.”

Must-Read of the Day—In the magazine this week, Jay Cost takes a look at the crowded field of Democrats lining up to try to unseat Donald Trump in 2020—and takes us through all the reasons why the fight to pick their challenger might get messy:

Democrats could use some sort of mechanism that nudges their factions to come to a consensus choice in a timely fashion. But their rules lack such a unifying force. Indeed, the Democratic Unity Commission—the group impaneled by the Democratic National Committee to evaluate the party rules after the 2016 nomination—has recently recommended doing away with most of the “superdelegates.” These are party officials who are able to vote as they please at the convention, unbound to any candidate. DNC chair Tom Perez has endorsed this idea, and it is likely to be enacted at the party’s next meeting this month.

What might this mean for 2020? As Niels Bohr once said, “It is very hard to predict, especially the future.” It is undoubtedly possible that some Democrat could emerge as the clear frontrunner, unite a sufficiently broad swath of the party, and secure the nomination in an expeditious manner. John Kerry managed this feat in 2004, catching fire at just the right moment to defeat Howard Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire. But given the multiplicity of factions within the party, the abundance of serious candidates who might run, and the lack of a mechanism to force a tidy conclusion to the process, the chances for a protracted battle are substantial.

It is not hard to envision three, maybe four candidates contesting the nomination all the way to the convention, each dominating some factions within the party while still falling short of a majority. Meanwhile, the elimination of the superdelegates would decrease the ability of the party leaders to preempt an ugly battle on the convention floor. And who is to say the eventual winner of such a knock-down, drag-out contest would reflect the values and interests of the whole party or serve as a winning alternative to Trump?