We begin today’s roundup with an analysis by Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post on the confessions coming out of the White House:
Repeatedly and often in real time, Trump has told me — as well as any other members of the public who happened to have left the television on while cooking dinner or jogging on the treadmill — that he’s been pushing foreign leaders to take actions for his own private benefit. [...]
These comments didn’t amount to a rumor of solicited foreign interference in our elections; this was the live commission of the act itself. As with the Ukraine “favor,” this was a request Trump had initially made during a private phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to leaked reports.
Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s behavior by Michelle Cottle at The New York Times:
It’s easy to mock Mr. Mulvaney’s missteps. He has emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s top go-to guys for carrying out questionable orders, such as taking the practical steps necessary to withhold Ukraine’s aid money or shove aside career diplomats in favor of political lackeys.
But, in Mr. Mulvaney’s defense, he should never have been put in this position. The guy who’s doing the dirty work should not also be the guy expected to go out and defend it to a roomful of journalists. [...] Here we see a concrete downside to the White House’s slapdash approach to staffing, its disdain for professionalism and this president’s conviction that, because he’s such a communications whiz, he doesn’t need a message team backing him up.
Dana Milbank explains the failed GOP attempt to censure Rep. Adam Schiff this way:
Apparently, Republicans chose to answer Schiff’s original parody with a satire of a censure resolution.
Completing the farce: Just a few hours before consideration of the resolution alleging Schiff misrepresented Trump, Trump served up an entirely new falsehood about Schiff. Without basis, Trump alleged that Schiff invented the whistleblower’s allegations.
Asawin Suebsaeng at The Daily Beast writes that the president is in a litigious mood:
The delivery of the Trump attorney’s four-page document [to CNN complaining of its coverage and threatening to sue] was a blip on the news cycle, but one that offered a glimpse into how the president has often responded over the decades when he feels besieged. In his game-show host years and real estate days, he and his legal counsel would frequently lean on lawsuits and legal threats as an intimidation tactic—even if they knew there was no chance of it advancing in the courts. It’s a strategy that Trump hasn’t abandoned, even after he became leader of the free world. And with impeachment at the hands of House Democrats looming, one senior White House official said that the president’s impulse to sue, or say he’ll sue, “everybody who pisses him off” is only intensifying.
David Graham at The Atlantic provides an overview of where we are today:
Support for impeachment has gone up sharply over a few weeks, settling in the low-to-mid-50s in the past few days. This suggests that, even though the approval and disapproval ratings are barely changing, something important is happening.
Trump’s disapproval numbers, like his approval, have been uncannily stable for years. The people who approve of Trump are largely monolithic: They will support Trump no matter what. The disapprovers are more varied. Some of them are as fervently anti-Trump as the approvers are pro-Trump, and they have long wanted him removed from office. But some of them have disliked what Trump was doing, but still didn’t favor an impeachment inquiry or removing him from office.
Something has changed for this group over the past few weeks, and 10 to 15 percent of them have decided they back impeachment after all. Their precise reason is hard to discern. Was it the Ukraine-call transcript? The whistle-blower complaint? Foreign policy? The launch of an inquiry? Or simple fatigue with the endless parade of bad news from the White House? Some of them have multiple or varying reasons.
Josh Barro explains why Trump’s offer of his property for the G7 “at cost” was a farce:
So if we were being honest about the true economic “cost” to the Trump organization to hold the G7 at Doral in June, we should be looking at payments similar to the ones Marriott would make to a hotel where a customer makes an award booking during low season, when the hotel has many empty rooms. That is to say: very low payments. In practice, this does not appear to be how Trump thinks about charging the government for use of his resort facilities. As Derek Kravitz reported for ProPublica last year, a group of White House staffers had drinks at Mar-a-Lago one evening in April 2017, and American taxpayers bought them 54 drinks at $18.67 per drink. There was also a 20 percent service charge, even though Trump’s aides kicked the bartender out of the room and poured their own drinks. It is hard to imagine that $18.67 covers only the variable cost of serving each drink.
On a final note, Speaker Pelosi’s office has released a breakdown of the shakedown and coverup (PDF). It’s definitely worth a read.