Today in Trumpworld — Jan. 29
January 30, 2018 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
TRUMP’S SCHEDULE TODAY
11 a.m.: President Donald Trump will receive his daily intelligence briefing in the Oval Office.
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11:30 a.m.: Trump will participate in the swearing-in ceremony for Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
12:10 p.m.: Trump will have lunch with U.N. Security Council diplomats at the White House.
DAILY BRIEFING: Press secretary Sarah Sanders will brief the press at the White House at 1:15 p.m.
STATE OF THE UNION WATCH: From POLITICO’s Seung Min Kim and Rachael Bade: “President Donald Trump’s inaugural State of the Union on Tuesday could offer an opportunity for the first-term leader to unify Congress behind a plan to protect the undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers. Instead, the immigration blueprint his administration laid out days before the highly anticipated address is splintering Congress in all directions, with conservatives complaining it provides amnesty for immigrants who lack legal status and Democrats recoiling from Trump’s pitch to restrict legal, family-based immigration. Trump plans to put the weight of the bully pulpit behind his immigration proposal on Tuesday night and attempt to rally lawmakers around his plan, but some Republicans already think the president’s wish list is too broad to find agreement in Congress. An ever-widening group of senators is still trying to forge ahead with their own legislative ideas. Some senators have urged Trump to help them move toward a deal by striking a compassionate tone during his speech.”
THE INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN: From POLITICO’s Lauren Gardner: “President Donald Trump won the White House promising a $1 trillion, 10-year blueprint to rebuild America — an initiative he said would create millions of jobs while making the nation’s highways, bridges, railroad and airports ‘second to none.’ But the infrastructure plan he’s poised to pitch in Tuesday’s State of the Union is already drawing comparisons to the ‘The Hunger Games.’ Instead of the grand, New Deal-style public works program that Trump’s eye-popping price tag implies, Democratic lawmakers and mayors fear the plan would set up a vicious, zero-sum scramble for a relatively meager amount of federal cash — while forcing cities and states to scrounge up more of their own money, bringing a surge of privately financed toll roads, and shredding regulations in the name of building projects faster. The federal share of the decade-long program would be $200 billion, a sum Trump himself concedes is ‘not a large amount.’ The White House contends it would lure a far larger pool of state, local and private money off the sidelines, steering as much as $1.8 trillion to needs as diverse as highways, rural broadband service, drinking water systems and veterans hospitals. (Maybe even commercial spaceflight, one recently leaked draft suggests.)”
THE MEMO FIGHT: From the New York Times’ Nicholas Fandos, Adam Goldman and Sharon LaFraniere: “A secret, highly contentious Republican memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of a former Trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring, according to three people familiar with it. The renewal shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent. But the reference to Mr. Rosenstein’s actions in the memo — a much-disputed document that paints the investigation into Russian election meddling as tainted from the start — indicates that Republicans may be moving to seize on his role as they seek to undermine the inquiry. The memo’s primary contention is that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials failed to adequately explain to an intelligence court judge in initially seeking a warrant for surveillance of Mr. Page that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Democrats who have read the document say Republicans have cherry-picked facts to create a misleading and dangerous narrative.”
IMMIGRATION LATEST: From the Washington Post’s David Nakamura: “Lawmakers in both parties said Sunday that the immigration debate should focus narrowly on efforts to legalize young immigrants known as ‘dreamers’ and beef up border security, suggesting that President Trump’s demands to slash legal immigration levels are likely to sink a deal. Democrats have voiced fierce opposition to a White House plan, released late last week, that featured a path to citizenship for 1.8 million dreamers in exchange for $25 billion for his border wall and sharp cuts to family immigration visas. Though Democratic leaders have grudgingly offered wall funding, they have accused the president of leveraging the dreamers as ‘ransom’ to severely constrict legal immigration, calling it a wish list for ‘anti-immigration hard-liners’ and ‘white supremacists.’ Congress members, including some Republicans, said Sunday that the negotiations have gone too far afield ahead of a March 5 deadline after which 690,000 dreamers in an Obama-era deferred action program could begin to lose their protections from deportation.”
