Mueller interviews one of Trump’s ‘closest friends and confidants’

MSNBC

The Rachel Maddow Show – TheMaddowBlog

Mueller interviews one of Trump’s ‘closest friends and confidants’

By Steve Benen May 7, 2018

Then FBI Director Robert Mueller arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., May 16, 2012, to testify during a hearing. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team have spoken to a long list of people, but the Associated Press added an important name to the list over the weekend.

Investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller have interviewed one of President Donald Trump’s closest friends and confidants, California real estate investor Tom Barrack, The Associated Press has learned.

Barrack was interviewed as part of the federal investigation of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

We don’t yet know what topics Mueller’s team covered with Barrack. One of the AP’s sources, for example, said the discussion “focused entirely” on former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and his longtime deputy, Rick Gates. Another AP source said, however, that the interview with Barrack “was broader and did include financial matters about the campaign, the transition and Trump’s inauguration.

And while I have no idea which of the sources is correct, the fact that Mueller’s investigators sat down with Barrack at all is an important development – because when it comes to the cast of characters surrounding the president, Barrack is a highly interesting figure.

He and Trump have been associates for decades, for example, and when the Republican launched his presidential campaign, Barrack became a prominent fundraiser.

But that’s not all he did. As the New York Times reported last spring, it was Barrack who brought Paul Manafort onto Trump’s campaign team (where Manafort worked for free, despite his financial difficulties). The Washington Post added in the fall that when Manafort was forced to resign from the Republican candidate’s team, he “left the country and headed for Barrack’s yacht off of the coast of Greece.”

The same article went on to note, “Barrack then hired Manafort’s right-hand man, Rick Gates, as deputy chair of Trump’s inaugural committee.” (Gates pleaded guilty in February to charges of conspiracy and lying to the FBI, and he’s now a cooperating witness.)

That inaugural committee, of course, was led by Barrack, and it also became controversial over its questionable finances.

Or put another way, there’s no shortage of things federal investigators might want to talk to him about.

The Damage of Trump’s Low-Bar Presidency Is Worse Than You Think

Daily Beast – Bigotry of Low Expectations

What will we come to expect of our elected leaders when he is gone?

Matt Lewis May 7, 2018

We are so distracted every day by the latest Trump scandal that it becomes hard to recognize the collective damage being done by his presidency.

It’s not just the breaking of the norms. It’s is the massive lowering of expectations that people will have in their politicians and their governing institutions.

Take this past week. We were told three different story lines on one separate story after it was revealed—in a wholly separate matter—that Trump had dictated that glowing 2015 health report from his doctor.

But it’s more than just the misdirection and mistruths. It’s the cynicism that accompanies them. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) now says the Department of Veterans Affairs is unmanageable. “I’m not sure anyone can run the VA,” he confessed, as the nomination of Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson to head the department teetered in the balance. “It’s so big, it’s one of the biggest bureaucracies in the federal government.”

Meanwhile, President Trump says he thought the job would be easier and that nobody knew how complicated health care would be.

He has, in short order, created The Low-Bar Presidency, an administration in which we have grown to expect that the spokespeople mislead, that Cabinet officials are corrupt, and that the commander in chief is learning on the job.

Most of us are shocked in real time. But the existential question is whether the Low-Bar Presidency ends when Trump’s tenure does. Or will our expectations forever be lowered because of what he has managed to do less than 18 months into office? Will we assume, from here on out, that our politicians lie so cavalierly to us? That they misuse our taxpayer funds for the betterment of their private lives? That they are incapable of meeting the challenges of governance? If so, the costs could be horrifying.

A population that believes its elected representatives will fail them will stop demanding success, or truth, or competence, or ethics. We won’t throw the bums out. We’ll grow accustomed to living with them.

We’ve been through a crisis of confidence before—as recently as the 1970’s. “Americans heard for years that the presidency had grown too complex for one person to manage, that the office had been crippled,” Time magazine’s Lance Morrow recalled in 1986, before adding that, “Reagan seems to slide through a presidential day with ease.”

But since the Gipper rode off into the sunset, we have reverted to form. Just last year, Jeremi Suri’s book, The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office, made this same argument. In the May 2018 edition of The Atlantic, John Dickerson did the same:. “No one man—or woman—can possibly represent the varied, competing interests of 327 million citizens,” he wrote.

Instead of giving presidents a pass for poor leadership, perhaps we should examine how one man did defy the doomsayers. As Morrow wrote, the fundamental reason Reagan defied the odds is simple: “Reagan seems to derive his strength from the fact that he does exactly what he says he will do.”

“He told the air-traffic controllers what he would do, for example, and when they persisted in their strike, he fired them and made it stick. All that has a tonic effect,” wrote Morrow.

Which brings us back to Trump. He doesn’t do what he says he’s going to do.

Whether it’s DACA or TPP or gun control—or sitting down with Robert Mueller or reimbursing Michael Cohen—he consistently has a casual relationship with the truth. Either that, or “his truth” keeps changing.

If it feels like a form of psychological manipulation, that’s because it is. As conservative commentator Amanda Carpenter’s new book argues, Trump is “Gaslighting America.” We’ve had our share of liars and incompetents in the Oval Office, but never before have we had a president so masterful at psychologically manipulating us and making us question our own perception of reality.

“The difference is that Clinton and Nixon used gaslighting to try and create this alternative reality as a defensive measure when they were caught doing something wrong,” Carpenter explains. “Trump is different on an extreme level because he does it offensively.”

The end result is a public that doesn’t trust its government to tell the truth—or have confidence that it can properly function. It is the Low-Bar Presidency. And not only does it rejigger our expectations and change our level of tolerance for this kind of behavior in real time, it also invites the next president (regardless of party) to act this way too down the road.

Call it normalizing bad behavior, or creating permission structure, if you will. We have broken the seal; the genie is out of the bottle.

The closer one looks at Trump’s finances, the louder the questions become

MSNBC

The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog

The closer one looks at Trump’s finances, the louder the questions become

By Steve Benen May 7, 2018

Presidential contender Donald Trump gestures to the media on the 17th fairway on the first day of the Women’s British Open golf championship on the Turnberry golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, July 30, 2015. Photo by Scott Heppell/AP

Last summer, Donald Trump sat down with the New York Times, which asked whether Special Counsel Robert Mueller will have crossed “a red line” if the investigation into the Russia scandal extends to include examinations of the resident’s finances. “I would say yeah. I would say yes,” he replied, adding, “I think that’s a violation.”

Naturally, this generated no shortage of speculation as to why Trump is so concerned about scrutiny of his finances. For that matter, there’s no reason to separate questions about the president’s finances with the Russia scandal – because as Rachel has explained on the show more than once, there’s an amazing number of people from Russia who’ve purchased Trump properties over the years. (My personal favorite is the story of Dmitry Rybolovlev, the fertilizer king, who purchased a derelict Florida estate from the future president at an extreme markup.)

Keep all of this in mind when reading this amazing report from the Washington Post over the weekend on Trump’s unexplained shift in strategy, evolving from someone who loved taking on debt and spending others’ money to someone who was suddenly flush with cash:

In the nine years before he ran for president, Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties – including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks – during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described “King of Debt.”

Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window into the president’s private company, which discloses few details about its finances.

The entire Post piece is well worth your time – it’s an impressive piece of reporting, and I’m only touching on some of its revelations – but pay particular attention to the fact that Trump had one ironclad set of principles, which guided his entire business strategy, which he suddenly abandoned without explanation.

Barbara Res, who was a top executive for Trump throughout the 1980s and continued to work for him for most of the 1990s, told the Post, “He always used other people’s money. That’s for sure. Not cash. He always got somebody to put up funds for him. To put up the money. And he’d put up the brilliance.”

At face value, his willingness to abandon this approach seems difficult to understand. Trump’s entire business philosophy was tied to the belief that he could succeed by getting money from others – investors, banks, partners, et al – and putting it to good use. But he adopted an entirely new posture in 2006, as the real-estate bubble started to burst and not long before some of his enterprises went bankrupt, investing millions in cash on new properties, some of which continued to lose money after the purchases.

What was it exactly that led Trump to embrace an entirely new investment strategy, with liquid assets of unknown origins?

While that question lingers, the New York Times had an entirely separate report, which also ran over the weekend, on Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and go-to fixer, who “built a shadowy business empire,” which grew after he joined the Trump Organization in 2007.

The article covers a lot of ground – it, too, is well worth your time – but this jumped out at me:

Like many of Mr. Cohen’s business dealings, the transactions were unconventional. His companies would buy a building, often in cash. Soon after, they would flip the building in another all-cash deal for four or five times the previous purchase price. The buyer was generally another limited liability company.

In October 2011, for example, a limited liability company listing as its address Mr. Cohen’s apartment at Trump Park Avenue purchased a building on Rivington Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for $2.1 million. In 2014, Mr. Cohen sold the building for $10 million in cash – nearly five times what he paid three years earlier.

That same day, Mr. Cohen sold three other Manhattan buildings, also entirely for cash. In total, the four buildings sold for $32 million – nearly triple what Mr. Cohen had paid for them in the span of no more than three years.

The more we learn about Trump World’s finances, the louder the questions become.

No, White Friend — You Weren’t “Embarrassed” by Barack Obama

PopSugar

No, White Friend — You Weren’t “Embarrassed” by Barack Obama

John Pavlovitz May 7, 2018, First published June 19, 2018

The following story, “No, White Friend — You Weren’t ‘Embarrassed’ by Barack Obama,” was originally published on JohnPavlovitz.com

Image Source: Getty/Alex Wong

I remember the day after the Election, a friend of mine who happens to be white, remarked on social media that he “finally wasn’t embarrassed of America and our President.”

I sprained my eyes rolling them and they have never fully recovered.

Since then I’ve heard this sentiment echoed by more white folks than I can count, especially in recent months; supposed relief at once again having a leader who instills pride.

Since I don’t have the time to ask each of the individually, I’ll ask here:

So, you were embarrassed for the past 8 years, huh?

Really?

What exactly were you embarrassed by?

Were you embarrassed by his lone and enduring twenty-five year marriage to a strong woman he’s never ceased to publicly praise, respect, or cherish?

Were you embarrassed by the way he lovingly and sweetly parented and protected his daughters?

Were you embarrassed by his Columbia University degree in Political Science or his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School?

Maybe you were embarrassed by his white American and Black Kenyan parents, or the diversity he was raised in as normal?

Were you embarrassed by his eloquence, his quick wit, his easy humor, his seeming comfort meeting with both world leaders and street cleaners; by his bright smile or his sense of empathy or his steadiness — perhaps by his lack of personal scandals or verbal gaffes or impulsive tirades?

No. Of course you weren’t.

Honestly, I don’t believe you were ever embarrassed. That word implies an association that brings ridicule, one that makes you ashamed by association, and if that’s something you claim to have experienced over the past eight years by having Barack Obama representing you in the world — I’m going to suggest you rethink your word choice.

You weren’t “embarrassed” by Barack Obama.

You were threatened by him.
You were offended by him.
You were challenged by him.
You were enraged by him.

But I don’t believe it had anything to do with his resume or his experience or his character or his conduct in office — because you seem fully proud right now to be associated with a three-time married, serial adulterer and confessed predator; a man whose election and business dealings and relationships are riddled with controversy and malfeasance. You’re perfectly fine being represented by a bullying, obnoxious, genitalia-grabbing, Tweet-ranting, Prime Minister-shoving charlatan who’s managed to offend all our allies in a few short months. And you’re okay with him putting on religious faith like a rented, dusty, ill-fitting tuxedo and immediately tossing it in the garbage when he’s finished with it.

None of that you’re embarrassed of? I wonder how that works.

Actually, I’m afraid I have an idea. I hope I’m wrong.

Listen, you’re perfectly within your rights to have disagreed with Barack Obama’s policies or to have taken issue with his tactics. No one’s claiming he was a flawless politician or a perfect human being. But somehow I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here. I think the thing President Obama did that really upset you, white friend — was having a complexion that was far darker than you were ever comfortable with. I think the President we have now feels much better.

Because objectively speaking, if what’s happening in our country right now doesn’t cause you great shame and doesn’t induce the continual meeting of your palm to your face — I don’t believe embarrassment is ever something you struggle with.

No, if you claimed to be “embarrassed” by Barack Obama but you’re not embarrassed by Donald Trump — I’m going to strongly suggest it was largely a pigmentation issue.

And as an American and a Christian committed to diversity and equality and to the liberty at the heart of this nation — that, embarrasses me.

The most surprising places melanoma can hide

Yahoo – Lifestyle

The most surprising places melanoma can hide

Korin Miller, Yahoo Lifestyle May 7, 2018

Melanoma can show up in some hard-to-find places. (Photo: Getty Images)

When you check your skin for suspicious moles, you probably look at your arms, chest, stomach, back, and legs. But melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, can show up anywhere you have skin — even in places that the sun doesn’t reach.

Melanomas are most commonly found on the chest and back in men and on the legs in women, according to the American Cancer Society, but they’re also likely to show up on the neck and face in both sexes. However, melanoma isn’t limited to those places.

“We see melanoma everywhere,” New York City dermatologist Doris Day, MD, author of Beyond Beautiful, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. She’s seen it show up in a person’s belly button, in between the butt cheeks, between the toes, under the nails, on the scalp, and behind the ears. In rare cases, you can even develop melanoma inside your eyes and mouth and on your genitals, according to the American Cancer Society.

That’s why it’s so important to have every inch of your skin checked by a dermatologist, Gary Goldenberg, MD, assistant clinical professor of dermatology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. The American Cancer Society recommends checking your own skin once a month and having a doctor do it “regularly,” which Day says is usually once a year.

Here’s the thing, though: You have to know what you’re looking for. “Many times people are concerned about a raised spot that’s fine, but there’s another concerning one near it that they think is nothing,” Day says. “A lot of times, people don’t recognize what’s normal and what’s not.”

When you inspect your body, you want to be thorough. You can rope in a partner to help with your back and hard-to-see places, or you can use a hand-held mirror to get a good look, suggests the American Cancer Society.

In general, you’re looking for new or changing moles, and you want to follow the ABCDE rules for skin cancer detection, Day says. A stands for asymmetry (i.e. if you cut the mole in half, one side of the mole looks different from the other side), B stands for border (concerning spots may have a jagged edge), C stands for color (harmful spots can be black, gray, blue, or white), D stands for diameter (any spot larger than the size of a pencil tip eraser is concerning), and E stands for evolution (whether a spot changes in size, shape, or color over time). If you come across a spot that meets any of these criteria, you need to see a dermatologist to have it evaluated, says Goldenberg.

Melanoma is serious, and it’s not something that you want to put off or ignore. About 91,270 new melanomas will be diagnosed in 2018, according to estimates from the American Cancer Society, and more than 9,000 people will die of the disease.

If you happen to spot a mole that looks unusual on your body, it’s always best to just get it checked out to be safe, Day notes. It’s also a good idea to take a picture of it and keep taking photos during your monthly skin checks to see if it’s changing, and to have a record to show your doctor during follow-up visits.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

This is why redheads are more at risk for melanoma

The doctor’s appointment you can’t afford to miss this summer

Meet the powerful women who flaunt, not hide, their scars

A New Model for Progressive Politics in the Heart of Deindustrialization

In These Times

A New Model for Progressive Politics in the Heart of Deindustrialization

By Bruce Vail May 4, 2018

Aerial view of wheat fields and farm near Peoria, Illinois. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

It’s startling when your hometown is labeled the worst city in the United States for African Americans.

That’s what happened in Peoria in late 2016 when a survey by the online publication 24/7 Wall St. rated the central Illinois city at the top of its list of the “Worst Cities for Black Americans.”

The slap at Peoria wasn’t even the worst indignity suffered by the people of the city at that time. Shortly afterward, world-famous machinery maker Caterpillar Inc. said it would close the company’s Peoria world headquarters and move to Chicago. The decision was announced after years of discussion about the future of the company’s headquarters, during which the locals were consistently misled to believe that Caterpillar was committed to remaining in the city. The move reflects the deindustrialization and associated ills that are afflicting Peoria and scores of other small cities across the Midwest.

The two events were recently cited by labor activists as the sparks that generated the Peoria Peoples Project, a new initiative to unite labor unions and the city’s progressive elements. The goal is to improve the lives of working people across the city through political action, particularly action at the state-wide policy level, the labor activists say.

Spearheaded by local units of the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Project got started last year with the help of the Chicago-based Grassroots Collaborative, says Jeff Adkins-Dutro, president of the Peoria Federation of Teachers. The Collaborative is dedicated to building labor-community alliances in Chicago, Adkins-Dutro says, but is also keen to see similar alliances established in the smaller Illinois cities. Collective action from multiple city-based alliances of this sort are needed to reverse some of the statewide trends that are undermining the interests of working families in Peoria and elsewhere around the state, he says.

Right now, Illinois trends in voting are very much on the minds of the leaders of the leading health care workers union, adds Beth Menz of SEIU Healthcare Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Kansas, a regional grouping of SEIU locals for hospital, nursing home and home care workers. Unions of all kinds are mobilizing for the November election, she says, and are determined to defeat the re-election bid of anti-union incumbent Gov. Bruce Rauner.

“There are multiple goals,” of the Peoria Peoples Project, Menz says, and increased progressive voting is just one of them. “We are more issue-based,” than concerned with the results of particular elections like Rauner’s, she tells In These Times. Quality healthcare and adequate funding for public schools are obvious priorities for the two unions involved. Most of the tens of thousands of members of the SEIU group are low-income or middle-income African-American women, so bread-and-butter economic issues are foremost, Menz says.

“Progressive organizations have been springing up in Peoria,” as a response to the right-wing agenda of Gov. Rauner and President Donald Trump, adds Chama St. Louis, an organizer for both the Peoria Peoples Project and the Grassroots Collaborative. It’s a fertile field for new organizing, she says, as the increasing power of conservative forces is inspiring pushback in many circles. Rauner’s attacks on public employee unions, for example, are being reinforced by the pending Janus U.S. Supreme Court decision, which is expected to further weaken unions. Adkins-Dutro agrees, telling In These Times that the teachers’ union is now aiming to strengthen its internal cohesiveness in the face of the Janus threat.

A year after 24/7 Wall St. insulted the city, an updated survey replaced Peoria with Erie, Penn., as the country’s worst for African. That reduces the sting a little bit, but the city still has a long way to go, St. Louis says. The Peoria Peoples Project is seen by labor unions as a step in that direction.

One initiative on the agenda for this year is to build support for an Illinois constitutional amendment on taxes. The Illinois Federation of Teachers, SEIU Healthcare and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) are all supporting an amendment that would raise taxes on high-income individuals, according to St. Louis. This kind of tax restructuring is needed to secure adequate funding for public schools and universal health care, St. Louis emphasizes.

The Project is still very much an early stage. SEIU’s Menz says, for example, that initial efforts have been focused on drawing union members and progressives together to form the solidarity needed for any effective political action down the road. The Peoria community has been badly battered by outside forces and turning things around will take time.

Bruce Vail is a Baltimore-based freelance writer with decades of experience covering labor and business stories for newspapers, magazines and new media. He was a reporter for Bloomberg BNA’s Daily Labor Report, covering collective bargaining issues in a wide range of industries, and a maritime industry reporter and editor for the Journal of Commerce, serving both in the newspaper’s New York City headquarters and in the Washington, D.C. bureau.

More by Bruce Vail

A New Model for Progressive Politics in the Heart of Deindustrialization

Bernie’s Platform Could Win in Maryland’s Gov. Race, With Support From Clinton Voters

Inside the Trump Administration’s Plan to Shrink the NLRB

Trump NLRB Appointee Behind Major Anti-Union Ruling Accused of Corruption

Here’s Why These 3 Rank-And-File Union Members Are Running for Maryland Public Office

Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, new study finds

ThinkProgress

Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, new study finds

Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond warns southern states face greatest impact from rising temperatures.

Joe Romm May 4, 2018

During major heat wave, a construction worker dumps water from his hard hat over his head in Washington, D.C., July 2007. Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds.

Remarkably, this ground-breaking study, “Temperature and Growth” concludes that “under the business-as-usual scenario, the projected trends in rising temperatures could depress U.S. economic growth by up to a third.”

As the Wall Street Journal summed up the findings: “Climate Change May Deeply Wound Long-Term U.S. Growth.”

The study focused on the impact of high temperatures in productivity and found that rising temperatures have their biggest negative economic impact in the summer — but that it’s not just outdoor work like farming and construction that suffers. Using historical data, the authors showed that the finance, retail, and real estate sectors also get hit hard during the hottest summers.

The authors note that a scenario of low CO2 emissions would sharply reduce the economic harm. But such a scenario requires far more aggressive action than the world embraced in the Paris Climate Accord.

This is what America will look like if we follow Trump’s climate policies

In reality, the Trump administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst business-as-usual scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming.

Significantly, the researchers from the University of North Carolina, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank found that “the temperature effects are particularly strong in states with relatively higher summer temperatures, most of which are located in the South.”

The estimated summer impact “for the ten warmest states is about three times as large as their whole-country counterpart.” This means those ten states would be economically devastated in the coming decades.

NASA’s Hansen: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable.”

The study ranks the states by average summer temperature. The top ten, in order, are: Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Arizona. Besides all being in the south, they all also voted for Trump.

We’ve long known the southern U.S. would be hit the hardest by climate change. Back in 2011, the nation’s top climate scientist, James Hansen (then at NASA), warned “If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”

And earlier studies have found that rising temperatures would hit worker productivity hard in peak summer months globally. For instance, a study done in 2013 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that “heat-stress related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate.”

NOAA found that business-as-usual policies cut labor capacity in half during peak months by century’s end.

Individual labor capacity (%) during annual minimum (upper lines) and maximum (lower lines) heat stress months. RCP8.5 (red lines) is our current emissions path. Credit: NOAA

But the Richmond Fed study is the first to focus specifically on this country: It’s “the first in the literature to systematically document the pervasive effect of summer temperatures on the cross-section of industries in the U.S.”

So it’s the first study to document that Trump’s climate policies will hit the states that voted for him the hardest.

This week in Trumponomics

Yahoo Finance

This week in Trumponomics

Rick Newman May 4, 2018

President Trump is proud of the 3.9% unemployment rate, the lowest since 2000. But it’s not as great as it sounds.

Employers added 164,000 jobs in April, which was lower than forecasts but still okay. Employers have created an average of 200,000 new jobs each month so far in 2018, which is a strong pace of job growth. But the unemployment rate, which fell from 4.1% to 3.9%, is a puzzlement. There were fewer people looking for jobs in April, which means fewer people counted as unemployed. When unemployment falls because people get jobs, that’s good. But when unemployment falls because people give up looking for jobs, it’s not so good.

For that reason, our weekly Trumpometer says: MEDIOCRE.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Economists struggle to explain two oddities in the current labor market. The first is the relatively low portion of working-age Americans who have a job or are looking for one. The so-called labor-force participation rate is 62.8%, a level it has generally been stuck at since 2014. The peak was 67.3% in 2000. So while the unemployment rate is back to the low levels of 2000, the portion of Americans working or looking for work is considerably lower.

An aging labor force might explain part of the problem, since workers aged 55 to 64 — a bracket that is swelling, as the baby boomers age — are less likely to work than younger folks. The opioid epidemic might keep some people who would otherwise have a job from working. Recent research from the Conference Board suggests more people consider themselves disabled these days, a third possible explanation for the low participation rate.

The other oddity is weak wage growth, with wages rising just 2.6% during the last 12 months. Ordinarily, employers hike pay as unemployment drops and workers become scarce. There are 6.5 million unfilled jobs in America, and there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that a lot of employers can’t find workers. But if they’re paying more to get the people they need, it’s not showing up in the data.

These two factors—weak wage growth and low worker participation—are a drag on economic growth, and they seem out of sync with an unemployment rate that’s historically low. Trump’s main economic policy is tax cuts, which are supposed to leave workers and businesses with more after-tax income to spend and invest. But it’s not clear tax cuts will do anything to pull more workers into the labor force, or boost basic pay.

The other important Trumponomics news this week was no news on a trade breakthrough with China. Trump, of course, has demanded that China open its market to more American-made products, and he’s in the process of enacting tariffs on Chinese imports as a punitive measure if Chinese doesn’t give. Trump sent top aides, including his Commerce and Treasury secretaries, to China this week to negotiate, and they wrapped up two days of talks with no news at all.

Trade fears are suppressing stock prices and casting clouds on an economic outlook that’s otherwise bright. China has stopped buying American soybeans, a clear indication of how China can retaliate against U.S. tariffs. Farmers are squawking, as they should be, while Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, explains that Americans need to “absorb a little pain” in order to get a better trade arrangement with China. Pain, however, was not a Trump campaign promise.

If Scott Pruitt were a CEO, he’d be long gone

3 economic ideas Democrats can run on

What the Trump tax cuts got wrong

Why the Trump tax cuts are flopping

Trump’s big mistake on trade

Trump is becoming the backfire president

Rick Newman is the author of four books, including Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success.

Running list of Trump’s false or misleading claims

Fact Checker, from The Washington Post posted a new episode.

May 4, 2018

We’re keeping a running list of Trump’s false or misleading claims, including the ones he says the most. Here’s our latest tally as of May 2018.

Unraveling President Trump's top 5 claims

We're keeping a running list of Trump's false or misleading claims, including the ones he says the most. Here's our latest tally as of May 2018.

Posted by Fact Checker, from The Washington Post on Friday, May 4, 2018

The level of dysfunction in Trump World gets a little worse

MSNBC

The Rachael Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog

The level of dysfunction in Trump World gets a little worse

By Steve Benen May 4, 2018

File Photo: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator (EPA) Scott Pruitt testifies before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in…Aaron Bernstein

Who’s the most scandal-plagued member of Donald Trump’s team? It’s a subjective question, of course, but if we exclude the president himself, it’s fairly easy to make the case for EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, followed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, both of whom have faced a series of awkward questions that have proven difficult to answer.

And as it turns out, those two cabinet officials were the subject of a fascinating report in The Atlantic yesterday about Pruitt’s team “scrambling to divert the spotlight” away from their controversial boss and toward Zinke.

In the last week, a member of Pruitt’s press team, Michael Abboud, has been shopping negative stories about Zinke to multiple outlets, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the efforts, as well as correspondence reviewed by The Atlantic. […]

The stories were shopped with the intention of “taking the heat off of Pruitt,” the sources said, in the aftermath of the EPA chief’s punishing congressional hearing last week.

According to the story, which an EPA spokesperson denied the accuracy of, the member of Pruitt’s press team believed Zinke’s staff was poised to “leak damaging information about the EPA, as part of a rivalry between Zinke and Pruitt.”

Abboud, the story goes, therefore tried to defend Pruitt by beating his rivals at the other cabinet agency to the punch.

It’s not altogether clear what, if anything, Pruitt knew about the scheme, but a White House official with knowledge of the events told The Atlantic, “Absolutely nothing Scott Pruitt did would surprise me.”

At a certain level, I can appreciate why much of the public would look past a story like this. After all, it involves allegations from dueling press teams. Click-bait, it isn’t.

Indeed, I imagine some cynics might assume cutthroat D.C. politics features back-stabbing tactics like these all of the time.

But reports like these are important because they serve as a reminder of a larger truth: the level of dysfunction surrounding the Trump administration isn’t normal. It fact, it’s ridiculous and kind of scary given the importance of the administration’s power and responsibilities.

Stories like these don’t reflect business as usual in the nation’s capital; they point to a governing dynamic that’s far dumber than it should be.

Explore:

The MaddowBlog and Cabinet

Blindsided White House aides in a…

With new executive order, Trump takes aim at church-state wall