Finally today we see a significant loss for the “Big Club”. Speaker Paul Ryan, the GOPe professional business class, Wall Street and the U.S. CoC accept the Border Adjustment Tax is not going to be a part of any larger tax reform agenda under the Trump administration.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and President Trump win the policy argument with the removal of the B.A.T.
In a joint statement outlining the forward plans for tax reform the “Big Six” tax negotiators (Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady), announce the consumer punishing BAT will not be included.

[…] “While we have debated the pro-growth benefits of border adjustability, we appreciate that there are many unknowns associated with it and have decided to set this policy aside in order to advance tax reform.” (more)

The B.A.T was to revenue collection on imported products and impact on consumers – what the Obamacare mandate was to revenue collection on healthcare and impact on consumers.
The B.A.T  was simply a scheme to embed the cost of renegotiated trade import tariffs, directly onto the consumer, isolated away from any responsibility on the corporation to reduce their own internal efficiencies as a method to keep the price down. It was a dubious and manipulative effort.
(more…)

Interesting development.  If you follow the nuance within twitter-speak it would appear that White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci is flagging Chief of Staff Reince Priebus as a potential leaker.  At least that’s the juicy narrative angle clutched upon by the always sketchy, and easily distracted to the ‘shiny thing’, WHCA (White House Correspondents Association) membership.

Or it could be far more innocuous in that Mr. Scaramucci was just notifying Mr. Priebus of the issue by adding his twitter address to the tweet.  You decide.

WASHINGTON DC – […]  While it’s unclear why Scaramucci tagged Priebus, Priebus has been named as a potential leaker by some Trump supporters, like Roger Stone.  Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent for the New Yorker, tweeted that he can confirm that Scaramucci wants the FBI to investigate Priebus for leaking.
The “leak” Scaramucci is referring to is likely a reference to a Politico report Wednesday evening, which details Scaramucci’s financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics.

(more…)

The swamp fights back.  Predictable Flak and Countermeasures deployed, right on time, by the UniParty. You can almost set your watch to it.  Once you see the strings on the marionettes you can never go back to a time when you didn’t see them.
House Intelligence Committee member Trey Gowdy discusses Jared Kushner, the controversy with attorney general Jeff Sessions and the ongoing Trump-Russia probe. etc.

(more…)

When President Trump made his initial remarks reflecting disappointment in Attorney General Jeff Sessions it was initially unnerving.  The subsequent fallout from the public criticism has united the NeverTrump crowd, Cruzbots and professionally GOPe, to defend the honor of the much beloved former Senator.   The opportunity to bash Trump is simply an ancillary benefit.
Conversely, the MAGA community has largely portrayed the rift as if the Presidential critique was part of a larger strategy between the President and Attorney General. If we wait long enough some mysterious master plan is eventually to be discovered.
However, the subsequent POTUS tweets and comments do not indicate any joint strategy at all.  What they do actually show is a genuine disappointment and frustration with the focus of Jeff Sessions; and the cabinet member’s apparent unwillingness to confront the corruption within the DOJ and by extension the larger DC swamp.
It is not accidental the frustration and disappointment surface as the various opposition groups to the Trump presidency begin to target the entire Trump family.   Despite some opinion to the contrary, Donald Trump does have a nuclear trigger point; target his family and you’ll find it quick.  Just ask anyone who has known him for any substantive amount of time.
(more…)

The Senate votes on a motion to proceed, beginning debate on the legislation. However, unlike typical Senate procedure, many lawmakers are unclear on what the actual healthcare reform bill will be.
♦ Latest: 2:40pm Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins have voted against proceeding. All other republican senators have voted to proceed. (live stream link)
3:00pm Senator John McCain arrives to vote “aye”.  Senator Ron Johnson also votes ‘yes’. Senator Joe Manchin has voted “nay”.  All Democrats are voting along party line no defectors..
3:10pm With final vote to proceed tied at 50/50 Vice President Mike Pence casts the tie-breaking vote and the motion to proceed passes.

3:15pm Senator John McCain took to the floor to deliver a speech (video added below). McCain stated he voted to proceed with debate, but he will never vote for the Senate bill.  Instead McCain demands the entire process begin again; starting over in committee (time for more lobbyist $$).
McCain then delivers a 10 minute speech filled with virtue signaling, pearl clutching, and ‘reach-across-the-aisle’ “isms”; while demanding that all senators stop listening to the American people and return to the preferred way of indulging in their own Senatorial best interests.   McCain communicated to the chamber that the American electorate are too stupid to know what’s good for them, and the Senators should rule over the proles.
Despite his looming incapacity and terminal brain cancer, McCain refuses to resign.
Donald Trump was entirely right about John McCain.
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The palace intrigue continues…

(WASHINGTON DC via Fox News) Multiple former Republican National Committee officials who followed Reince Preibus and Sean Spicer to the White House are “seriously concerned” about their jobs now that President Trump tapped Anthony Scaramucci as his new communications director, White House sources told Fox News.
The sources said Scaramucci’s influence has skyrocketed inside the West Wing. The Washington Post reported that “Scaramucci has moved into Trump’s inner sanctum and is now described by some colleagues as almost family to the president.”
(more…)

Everything is proceeding according to a natural and predictable path.  Mr. Scaramucci is now in charge of White House messaging, the focus can now look toward the Capitol and go on offense; the “Big Ugly” is very clearly on the horizon.

Anxious Trump voters have been understandably frustrated by the lack of speed with which President Trump is able to force the MAGA agenda onto an unwilling DC political apparatus.  However, if you step back and look at the scope of the challenge, the situation is entirely understandable.
Donald Trump was a 100% pure political outsider, a citizen politician.  There was never any underlying organizational apparatus to support victory.  There was Dan, Hope, Michael and Corey; later Paul then Kellyanne and Steve. Everything else needed to be constructed from scratch and even the party apparatus didn’t support candidate Trump.
On November 9th 2016 President-elect Trump did not wake up with a staff of 50 political career employees sitting at Trump desks with Rolodexes filled with a network of affiliate political allies, personnel and associates to call upon to create the Trump administration.  Consequently President Trump needed to import the entire administrative personnel architecture to support the move to the White House. (more…)

If you watch or listen to the interviews today with new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, and then overlay them against a backdrop of ongoing events (including last week), there’s a very solid outlook that Reince Priebus is close to being replaced as Chief of Staff.

Scaramucci says today: “If they want to stay on the staff, they’re going to stop leaking.” Where “they” are clearly White House staffers who have been identified as leaking to the media.
When you step back and remind yourself where “they” came from, you recognize this staff is primarily made up of former RNC staff brought into the White House by Reince Priebus the former head of the RNC and now Chief of Staff.
When you step back further you find yourself reminded what ideology those same RNC staffers carried before following Priebus to the White House. Then we quickly realize these are Scott Walker/Ted Cruz type GOPe loyalists who have no affinity for the populist approach of Trump.
There’s the problem that has existed in nuanced form from the outset of the decision to keep Reince Priebus inside the Trump administration as a bridge to the parties legislative and political apparatus in DC.
(more…)

The “Big Ugly” Preparation – President Trump has announced Anthony Scaramucci as the new White House Communications Director. Mrs. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is also announced as the permanent White House Press Secretary. Former Press Secretary Sean Spicer is released from his duties; Spicer will finish out August and then exit the White House.
Video from today’s Press Briefing follows:

.
This communications transition must be considered against the backdrop of an executive office accepting the intransigent nature of the DC Administrative State, the Deep State and financial interests, has finally reached a point where direct conflict is unavoidable.
President Trump’s election was the disruption the American electorate voted for. The DC based Administrative state will not allow this disruption.
The middle-class economic agenda, the primary focus of the Trump administration, is now being intentionally blocked by the UniParty and their lobbying financiers in the professional political community.
The UniParty decision to impede healthcare reform is, necessarily, also carrying the motive of specific intent to derail the sequential tax reform policy.
The down-stream budgetary impact from retaining ObamaCare will destroy the U.S. economy. The multinational corporations and multinational banks are positioned favorably toward this endeavor.  They have built this position over decades.
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A recent article written by Roger Ailes confidant Michael Wolff affirms one of the more transparently obvious hidden secrets in the 2015/2016 presidential race and election.

Fox News owner/mogul Rupert Murdoch was intensely against the candidacy of Donald Trump. So much so that Murdoch instructed former President of Fox News, Roger Ailes, to shape favorable coverage toward anyone other than Donald Trump, including a request to tilt toward support for Hillary Clinton.

New York – […] It was Ailes’ tacit support of Trump that, in part, made his removal from Fox all the more urgent for the Murdochs. And it was not just the liberal sons who were agitated by Ailes’ regard for Trump, but also the father, whose tabloid, the New York Post, helped create Trump, but who found him now, with great snobbery, not of “our” conservative class. (“When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Murdoch senior tweeted the day after Trump officially declared himself a candidate.)
Murdoch instructed Ailes to tilt to anyone but Trump, Ailes confided to me before he was fired, even Hillary. (Ailes, for his part, characterized Murdoch’s periodic efforts at interference as similar to Nixon’s instructions to bomb this or that country — best ignored.)

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