Fresh from what he sees as a great victory in Singapore, where Kim Jong-Un pantsed him, Trump's Wednesday was pretty crazy. ZTE, which he promised China he would save, tanked-- 40% tanked ($3 billion)-- as Congress threatened to block Trump's deal.Polling shows that although self-identified Republican voters are still behind Trump, normal people don't think he's doing a good job and think the most important opportunity in the midterms is to elect a Congress that will act as a check on him. Earlier, we looked at polls from Suffolk and Quinnipiac showing that Ohio Republican candidates are suffering because of Trump's toxicity. George Washington University also released one showing that Trump is inspiring a big turn out. In Wisconsin Tuesday, Democrats and independents rushed to the polls in a very red state Senate district Scott Walker had won by 24 points in 2014 and Trump had won by 18 points in 2016, where the Democrat beat a Republican 51.4% to 48.6%. The George Washington University poll warns that this is going to happen across the country, where 53% of voters-- 46% strongly-- think Trump is doing a bad job.
Americans are overwhelmingly engaged in the upcoming 2018 congressional elections, and are poised to split with the president on a number of high-profile policy issues. In the inaugural edition of the George Washington University Politics Poll more than three-quarters (78 percent) of registered voters said they definitely will vote in the November general elections; another 15 percent said they probably will. Only 2 percent said they would definitely not vote. On a generic ballot for U.S. House, voters chose Democrats over Republicans, 45 to 38 percent. Voters also indicated they think their members of Congress care about their political careers and political parties’ agendas more than local communities or “people like you.”“In two respects, the poll suggests some Democratic advantages that are less visible on the surface,” John Sides, associate professor of political science and a poll co-director, said. “Democratic voters remain more politically engaged than Republican voters on several dimensions-- including their willingness to do the spadework of an election campaign. And Democratic incumbents in the U.S. House are perceived more positively than Republican incumbents. Whether that will add up to a veritable ‘wave’ remains to be seen.”
If that doesn't give Trump enough to yell and scream about, ABC News reported that Cohen is likely to flip as the law firm representing him bails. "[T]he law firm handling the case for Cohen is not expected to represent him going forward... Cohen, now with no legal representation, is likely to cooperate with federal prosecutors in New York, sources said."Trump wasn't even able to bask in the glory of having destroyed Mark Sanford's career on Tuesday night before finding out that his order-- over a month ago-- to promote Rudy Giuliani's son was circumvented by Chief of Staff John Kelly. In fact, instead of being promoted, Andrew Giuliani's West Wing pass was rescinded.
Kelly and others, including Office of Public Liaison director Justin Clark, won't promote Andrew because they think he "subverts the chain of command" and claim he had other issues in the workplace that they weren't happy about, according to two sources familiar with the situation.According to a source familiar, Kelly took away Andrew's blue staff pass about two weeks ago, revoking his West Wing access. He now only has a green pass, which means he can’t enter the West Wing without an escort.
To top it all off and get Trump flipping out over fake news again, Foreign Policy ran 3 articles that must be driving Trump crazy, one asserting that if anyone deserves a Nobel it's South Korean President Moon Jae-i and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, not Trump. "Talk of the peace prize is obviously premature. Trump’s meeting with Kim had great visuals, but there was no real deal struck and certainly no pledge of denuclearization from the North. And this isn’t the first summit to cause hopes to soar for inter-Korean reconciliation."Even worse was Kim Got What He Wanted in Singapore. Trump Didn’t. The point is that "The G-7 and Singapore summits have put on display breathtaking strategic incoherence and appalling moral vacuity on the part of the Trump administration... Kim made only a vague promise to 'work towards' the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, with no details on timing or verification. This commitment is far less specific even than the past promises the North has broken,' but got all that he could have hoped for.Even more embarrassing-- if Trump was capable of being embarrassed: Mari Stull, a former food and beverage lobbyist-turned-wine blogger under the name 'Vino Vixen,' who Trump game a señor just in the State Department 2 months ago is skulking around try to determine whether employees of the State Department are loyal to Señor Trumpanzee and his absurd political agenda. She's been reviewing the social media pages of State Department staffers for signs of ideological deviation. She has researched the names of government officials to determine whether they signed off on Obama-era policies-- though signing off does not mean officials personally endorsed them but merely cleared them through the bureaucratic chain. And she has inquired about Americans employed by international agencies, including the World Health Organization and the United Nations, asking their colleagues when they were hired and by whom, according the officials."Her motto seems to be "Global swamp will be drained." Several staffers want to leave the Department because of her. One official told FP that "I have in my entire federal career never experienced anything at this level of chaos and dysfunction."
The turmoil comes at a time when the secretary is trying boost morale at the State Department, which took a sharp plunge under his predecessor, Rex Tillerson. The exodus in the international organization bureau underscores the continuing struggles of career diplomats in an administration whose president has repeatedly shown disdain for traditional American diplomacy.Stull was largely unknown in diplomatic circles in Washington until her appointment in April. Her bio cites her work as a lobbyist in the food and beverage industry, which included work for the Grocery Manufacturers of America. More recently, she served as a senior fellow at American Opportunity, a Virginia-based conservative group affiliated with former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore.She also previously worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization as a partnerships and outreach advisor. But several diplomatic sources said that she left the organization on contentious terms.Stull’s conservative politics can be gleaned from her decade-old wine blog, where one trip to the wine store for bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne became a vehicle for knocking former President Jimmy Carter and promoting the expansion of oil drilling sites in the United States.On her Twitter feed, Stull has criticized the U.N. as “bloated” and “biased,” dismissed the U.N. Human Rights Council as an “abject failure,” and derided UNESCO, the organization that supports international education, culture, and history, as the U.N.’s “seedy underbelly.”She has also said the budget for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election would be better spent on storm victims in Texas and Florida.In response to a tweet by former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a controversial law enforcement figure and high-profile Trump supporter, promising to poke the press “in the eye with a sharp stick and bitch slap these scum bags til they get it,” Stull replied: “@SheriffClarke has spoken. #StandDown #FakeNews #Fierce.”