Editors’ Blog
When I got word this morning that Mike Waltz was making his final swirl around the National Security Advising bowl I set myself to thinking: what’s the stupidest way this could play out. I tried, readers, and I failed as we’ve now learned that Marco Rubio will be taking over as interim National Security Advisor. I should point out that Marco Rubio is now Secretary of State, Administrator of USAID, National Security Advisor and Archivist of the United States (head of the National Archives). I’m not at all joking about any of that. It’s possibly there are yet other jobs I’ve forgotten.
Yesterday I excoriated Politico for a deeply ingenuous report on GOP Medicaid cuts, now presenting the matter as something congressional Republicans are trying to foist on a skeptical Trump. I also said that they were making up the idea that Trump has repeatedly pledged never to touch Medicaid as he has repeatedly promised not to tamper with Social Security and Medicare.
Read MoreA new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh check in on the polling, economy and judge arrests (!) after Trump’s first few months in office.
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The Other Side of the Trump DOJ’s House of Corruption 
There’s been an emerging scandal in Florida for a few weeks now that directly affects not only Ron DeSantis but also his wife, Casey DeSantis, who is weighing a run to succeed Ron as governor. The gist of the scandal is the state of Florida settled an over-billing case against a major Medicaid contractor and then laundered a portion of the funds from the settlement through a series of foundations until … well, until somehow over $10 million ended up in the bank account of the Florida GOP and another $1.1 million ended up in Ron’s personal political committee. It’s good to be the king, right?
This story has been percolating for a few weeks. It got new life when a Republican state lawmaker, Rep. Alex Andrade (R), who has been leading a state House investigation into the issue, accused two top DeSantis associates of money laundering and wire fraud. What got my attention this morning is that the Miami Herald talked to four former federal prosecutors, of both political parties, who told the Herald that by normal standards there’s more than enough evidence to start a federal criminal investigation at least into the associates who directly made the relevant transfers if not the DeSantises themselves. (One of the associates who directly arranged things is then-DeSantis chief of staff and current Florida AG James Uthmeier.) The former prosecutors the Herald spoke to say that the question of whether this meets the bar for a federal investigation is not remotely a close call.
Read MoreI found this new piece in Politico about Medicaid politics genuinely jarring. Reporters Rachel Bade et al. concoct this alternative reality in which House Republicans are pressuring Trump to cut Medicaid while he’s deeply “wary” of doing so. As you’d expect, this story comes from “six White House officials and top allies of the president.”
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Play ‘GOP Health Care Slaughterhouse’ with Your Own Rep
Here’s my latest hobby: looking at just how many constituents House Republicans, especially the so called “moderates,” want to strip of their health care coverage. Congressional Republicans are currently in hard negotiations and a game of chicken for how to pay for their big tax cut, which seems to be getting bigger by the day. They want to pay for it by taking away people’s health care coverage. But just how that gets done is the key. As Nicole Lafond pointed out this week, moderate House Republicans are saying they may not be willing to support $880 billion of cuts to Medicaid. But they might be willing to cut one of the major provisions of Obamacare, the so-called Medicaid expansion system, which pays 90% of the cost for states to substantially expand their Medicaid coverage to more people. This is a big part of how Obamacare dramatically reduced the number of people without coverage. It’s not just about the exchanges and the subsidies.
Read MoreA newly released AJC poll shows support for Donald Trump falling to 43% in Georgia; disapproval 55%.
According to Punchbowl, Sen. Ron Johnson just announced he won’t support the reconciliation bill being written by House Republicans. He says there have to be $5 trillion in cuts to get his vote. And forget about the July 4th deadline. For perspective, the House Freedom Caucus was demanding either $1.5 or $2 trillion.
This is part of what we mean when we say that public opinion matters. If Trump were at 55% support or even 50% there is zero chance Johnson would be doing this. But they see him as currently weak and on the rocks. So someone like Johnson is happy to say, “You’re weak. So I’ll come forward and inflate my cred with hard right-wingers at your expense.”
I’ve gotten a range of responses to yesterday’s post (“Trump’s Already Lost“) on Trump’s gambit and whether he’s already lost. There were a few specific questions, however, that came up again and again, that I wanted to answer.
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Trump’s Already Lost
There are a number of you who simply don’t agree with me about the role of public opinion in the battle against Trumpism, which I sketched out in yesterday’s Backchannel and in other posts over recent months. And that’s great. Because, among other reasons, you keep me on my toes. And TPM isn’t a community that has any one point of view, in any case. But I note this because I have to again whack this same hornets nest today. So apologies in advance, probably mostly to myself. But this time it’s not with an argument, not some proposition I want to convince you of. It’s more a personal interpretation, my perception of events.
Quite simply, I think Trump’s already lost.
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