Jared Kushner boasted in mid-April about how President Trump had cut out the doctors and scientists advising him on the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, CNN reports.
Said Kushner, in a taped interview with Bob Woodward: “That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work. Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.”
“Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was confronted by Yitzhak Rabin’s daughter last week after a speech on the Arab-Israeli peace process in which he seemed to overlook the role of the late Israeli prime minister,” Axios reports.
“Rabin is quite a major figure to leave out. He’s remembered for making peace with Jordan, sealing the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, and establishing relations with Morocco, Oman and Tunisia.”
A surprised Mnuchin told her: “This was my speech and I don’t owe you any explanations.”
Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was the anonymous author of The New York Times Op-Ed article in 2018 whose description of President Trump as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective” roiled Washington and set off a hunt for his identity, the New York Times reports.
Taylor was also the anonymous author of A Warning, a book he wrote the following year that described the president as an “undisciplined” and “amoral” leader whose abuse of power threatened the foundations of American democracy.
Taylor released a statement admitting he was anonymous.
“President Trump will open up all 16.7 million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development, according to a notice posted Wednesday, stripping protections that had safeguarded one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests for nearly two decades,” the Washington Post reports.
“These are the same people saying that we can’t have tuition-free public colleges because there’s no money when these motherfuckers are only paying $750 a year in taxes.” — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), quoted by Vanity Fair.
Vanity Fair runs an excellent profile of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Said Ocasio-Cortez: “It’s not an accident that, every cycle, the boogeyman of the Democrats is a woman. A couple of cycles ago, it was Pelosi. Then it was Hillary, and now it’s me.”
“The Trump administration has recently removed the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s premier scientific agency, installed new political staff who have questioned accepted facts about climate change and imposed stricter controls on communications at the agency,” the New York Times reports.
“The moves threaten to stifle a major source of objective United States government information about climate change that underpins federal rules on greenhouse gas emissions and offer an indication of the direction the agency will take if President Trump wins re-election.”
“By the time President Trump finished speaking to thousands of supporters at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield on Tuesday night and jetted away on Air Force One, the temperature had plunged to nearly freezing,” the Washington Post reports.
“But as long lines of MAGA-clad attendees queued up for buses to take them to distant parking lots, it quickly became clear that something was wrong.”
“The buses, the huge crowd soon learned, couldn’t navigate the jammed airport roads. For hours, attendees — including many elderly Trump supporters — stood in the withering cold, as police scrambled to help the most at-risk get to warmth.”
The Daily Beast counts at least 18 people connected to President Trump who “have been locked up, indicted, or arrested since the real-estate mogul announced his candidacy in 2015.”
Washington Post: “Over the past year, public servants across the country have faced similar ordeals. The targets encompass nearly every category of government service: mayors, governors and members of Congress, as well as officials Trump has turned against within his own administration.”
“The dynamic appears to be without precedent: government agencies taking extraordinary measures to protect their people from strains of seething hostility stoked by a sitting president.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) “has been the president’s loyal confidant and golf buddy during his White House tenure,” the Daily Beast reports. “Now, as Graham faces a tough challenge at home, Trump isn’t coming to his aid.” Meanwhile, Fox News had apparently had enough of Lindsey Graham begging for money so they just cut him off.
When Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) switched parties, he pledged his “undying support” to President Trump, CNN reports.
Van Drew now says it wasn’t what he meant: “I think voters understand that when you’re in the Oval Office and you’re having a very exciting day and you’re making a little piece of history, that sometimes we all say things.”
He added: “I think the words didn’t explain as well what I exactly felt. It’s not undying support that, whatever you say I’m going to do, or undying support, I agree with whatever you say. It was undying support for the presidency, for the idea of the greatness of America.”
“The relationship between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) has hit a new low after the bitter fight over newly sworn in Justice Amy Coney Barrett,” The Hillreports.
“The deterioration of their relationship in recent months, a tense election year when control of the Senate in 2021 is at stake, raises questions about their ability to work together in the future and whether Democrats will change the chamber’s rules once in power to circumvent McConnell entirely.”
Washington Post: “In the aftermath of the White House outbreak that put the president in the hospital, his administration could have aggressively used contact tracing and genetic analysis to identify how the virus got into the White House and how far it had spread.”
“Instead, one month later, the Trump administration consistently failed to effectively deploy either technique in response to the superspreader event, leaving not just the president and his staff at risk, but the hundreds of people who were potentially exposed.”
Trump campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley was interviewed on CNN by Alisyn Camerota:
CAMEROTA: Hospitals in Wisconsin are near capacity. Does that give you any pause about going there and holding a big rally?
GIDLEY: No, it doesn’t… the vice president has the best doctors in the world around him.
Politico: “The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have both reported finding no evidence that Joe Biden benefited from the Hunter Biden business dealings that have drawn scrutiny. More explicitly pro-Trump media outlets — OAN, Breitbart, Newsmax — have mostly shied away from publishing fresher, more salacious allegations. And conservative talking heads — pundits, politicians and loud MAGA Twitter personalities alike — have been more focused on the meta narrative around the laptop, arguing that mainstream media, social media companies and the deep state are conspiring to prevent President Trump’s reelection by suppressing the story.”
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