I’ve been thinking that Trump doesn’t fire people personally because he has an aversion to doing the actual firing as opposed to doing the reality show firing. You can tell he tries to make people so uncomfortable in their jobs that they’ll quit before he gets around to firing them. What I didn’t realize is that the president’s ability to fill a position under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act hinges around vague language that describes when the president can make his own appointments in case of vacancies, and firing someone doesn’t seem to be one of those cases. So it’s in his best interest if they quit. Crazy.

But I digress. Here’s what happened this week…

Russia:

1. We learn through Russian media that Trump invited Putin for a White House visit when he congratulated Putin on his electoral victory.
2. After opening arguments, Paul Manafort‘s lawyers withdrew part of their civil suit. Manafort says Mueller is overreaching in his investigation, but a court document shows that Rod Rosenstein gave Mueller authority to investigate Manafort’s relations with Russia and with the Ukraine. The judge doesn’t think Manafort has much of a case.
3. The first prison sentence comes down in the Mueller investigation. It’s short — Alex van der Zwaan, the son-in-law of a Russian oligarch, gets 30 days in prison and a $20,000 fine for lying to the FBI.
4. Konstantin Kilimnik is identified as the Russian agent with whom Manafort and Rick Gates had contact during the 2016 campaign.
5. The State Department says that the expelled Russian diplomats can be replaced on a case-by-case basis. Expelling diplomats doesn’t change the agreement that outlines the number of Russian diplomats allowed in the states, so they can ramp it back up.
6. While Mueller says Trump is a subject of the Russia investigation, he also says Trump is not a target. What this means is that Trump is anywhere between a witness and a suspect, and we don’t know which side he’s closer to. So this doesn’t tell us much.
7. Mueller’s team questions two Russian oligarchs traveling to the U.S., searching at least one of their phones. Mueller also requests an interview with a third oligarch who has not traveled here. He’s looking into whether Russians illegally funded Trump’s campaign or inauguration.
8. In his last public statement as national security advisor, H. R. McMaster says we haven’t done enough to punish Russia for its increased global aggression. Just hours before that, Trump said that no one has been tougher on Russia than him.
9. But then, the U.S. sanctions 24 Russian oligarchs and government officials, including a few with ties to the Trump campaign. The sanctions also target about a dozen companies owned by the oligarchs.
10. A newly released email shows that on the day Roger Stone went on InfoWars and predicted leaks about the Clinton Foundation, he emailed Sam Nunberg to say he had dinner with Julian Assange the night before. This indicates he had knowledge of the documents hacked by Wikileaks, but Stone now claims that he didn’t meet with Assange and flight records would prove it.
11. Mark Zuckerberg says it’s reasonable for anyone on social media to expect that their data has been scraped in some way. And of course it is. We get warnings all the time about the info people are scraping and we choose to ignore it.
12. Facebook estimates that Cambridge Analytica could have accessed information from up to 87 million users. They’ll start notifying Facebook users whose information was accessed.
13. Mueller plans to issue a series of reports on his investigation. The first is about whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice and should be released this summer.

Courts/Justice:

1. A federal judge dismisses a lawsuit against Massachusetts’s assault weapon ban, saying that right to own the banned guns and ammunition isn’t guaranteed by the second amendment.
2. Florida officials appeal a court order directing them to create a new process to restore rights to former felons.

Healthcare:

1. The Department of Health and Human Services removes information from its website about low-cost and no-cost women’s health issues, specifically around breastfeeding issues and cancer.
2. A federal judge orders the government to stop blocking undocumented women from getting access to medical appointments, counseling, and procedures (including abortions).
3. The surgeon general issues a nationwide advisory to give more people access to naloxone, along with training on how to use it. Naloxone reverses the effects of opioid overdose.

International:

1. Despite a public commitment that we won’t leave Syria hanging, Trump says we’ll be out of there soon and he freezes funds to help stabilize the area.
2. Assad launches another chemical attack on Syrian rebels, killing at least 40 and injuring at least 500. And now it’s up to John Bolton to come up with our next steps. Oyveh.
3. Trump‘s announcement about Syria takes his military staff by surprise. A day after Trump says we’ll be out of Syria soon because ISIS is almost defeated, the White House says that we remain committed to fighting ISIS in Syria.
4. Russian and Chinese military leaders meet, to show America their close ties with each other and to reaffirm those ties.
5. A delivery truck drives into a crowd in Germany killing two people and injuring 20. The driver, a German citizen, kills himself. There are no ties to ISIS so far.
6. The Department of Homeland Security says it found cell tower simulators—called stingrays—last year in DC. Foreign spies and other criminals can use these to track people and to intercept communications, and hardly anything has been done to combat them.

Legislation/Congress:

1. Chicago bans a long list of semi-automatic weapons.
2. I can’t believe this had to be done. State legislators in New York pass a law making it illegal for police officers to have sex with people in their custody.
3. South Carolina representative Ralph Norman took out his loaded pistol and laid it on a table during a meeting with constituents while they were discussing gun violence. South Carolina’s Democratic party calls for an investigation. Never point your gun—loaded or not—at anything you don’t want to shoot. And it’s probably never a good idea to shoot your constituents.
4. Representative Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) resigns over using taxpayer money for sexual harassment lawsuit payouts.
5. While Marco Rubio has been telling Parkland students that he supports raising the purchase age for certain weapons to 21, he’s also been pushing to end a similar law in DC.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

1. Trump tweets that DACA is dead and again blames Democrats in Congress. He encourages Republicans in Congress to stem the ‘massive influx’ of people and drugs over the border.
   Background: Trump rescinded DACA in fall of 2017 and gave Congress until March to fix it. The only reason it’s still going is that it’s held up in the courts. It’s possible this tweet storm stems from recent CBP data showing a major uptick in border crossings in March, which seems typical for every year except 2017.
2. Adding a citizenship question to the census (which the administration wants to do) will likely hurt these states the most: Nevada, Texas, California, New Jersey, Arizona, Florida and Maryland. The census is the backbone for all sorts of government programs and for government representation. Tying the census to any kind of federal law enforcement inhibits full census reporting because people are afraid they’ll be reported to the DOJ.
   Background: Information from the 1940 census was secretly used in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II under the Second War Power Act.
3. Seventeen states, DC, and six cities sue to get the question dropped.
4. Trump announces he’ll send National Guard troops to help guard the border. From what he says, this seems like a reaction to Fox & Friends’ shady reporting about a caravan of immigrants traveling through Mexico to storm our borders. The caravan is actually an annual human rights protest march in which some people request asylum in Mexico and the U.S.
   Background: Bush spent $1.2 billion sending National Guards troops to help border patrol, and Obama spent $110 million on the same. But neither of them did it in reaction to a hyped up news story.
5. In a tax roundtable:

• • Trump doubles down on his theme of Mexicans-as-rapists through a misunderstanding of the caravan in Mexico. He later says women are “being raped at levels never seen before” in response to reports that women and children travel in numbers as a safety measure.
  • Trump tells a story, clearly designed to heighten people’s fear of immigrants, about how young girls never see their parents again after they’re “cut up” by immigrant gang members.

6. Trump takes credit for getting Mexico’s president to break up the caravan, saying he pressured Mexican officials in a conversation on Monday. The White House later says this conversation never took place. And also, the caravan didn’t break up.
7. The Trump administration institutes quotas for immigration judges to speed up processing.
8. Police shoot and kill another black man. This guy was holding a pipe, which I guess is more easily mistaken for a gun than a cellphone is.
9. Though Native Americans only make up 10% of the Department of the Interior’s staff, 33% of the staff that Ryan Zinke reassigned are Native Americans.

Climate/EPA:

1. Michigan says it’s done giving away free water to residents of Flint. They say the water has been up to par for two years. But they’re still replacing the contaminated pipes so you can see why residents are wary.
2. Michigan, home of what is probably the largest clean water disaster in the U.S. (see above), approves Nestle’s request to increase the amount of water they pump out of the state. Over 80,000 people commented against the move during the public comment period.
3. The EPA scraps the fuel mileage targets for passenger cars and SUVs that were put in place under Obama to help combat global warming. They also plan to challenge California’s right to set their own targets, which was established under the Clean Air Act due to the state’s history of smog problems. Even if we back off of our standards, the rest of the world won’t, and we’ll have to play catch-up at some point.
4. The Justice Department sues California over a state law that limits the federal government’s right to buy or sell federal land in the state.
5. The administration is looking into rescinding a rule that protects endangered wildlife in order to give agricultural and mineral interests more freedom and access to use land that is currently off limits.
6. Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior, picks Susan Combs to oversee federal wildlife policy. This is only important because she opposes the Endangered Species Act and has spent the last several years fighting it.
7. Last week, I wrote about Scott Pruitt paying $50 a night for a room in a lobbyist’s DC apartment, which then turned out to be a whole apartment. This week, we learn that his daughter stayed with him there as well while she was interning at the White House. And also:

• • He paid about $2,150 less than the going rate in DC.
  • The ethics committee signed off on the agreement, but now say he didn’t give them complete information.
  • The condo is partially owned by the wife of the head of Enbridge Inc., whose pipeline-expansion project was approved last year by the EPA under Pruitt. The head of Enbridge has been a long-time fundraiser for Pruitt.

  • He didn’t always pay his $50, and he wouldn’t leave the apartment when his agreement was up.
  • He wanted to spend $100,000 a month on a private jet subscription.
  • His security detail is more than three times as large as his predecessor’s (and his predecessor’s was part-time, unlike Pruitt’s full-time detail).
  • He tried to get his security to use sirens to get through traffic so he wouldn’t be late for dinner.
  • He used an obscure provision in the Safe Drinking Water Act to give massive raises to some of his friends that he hired at the EPA, and then refused to take responsibility in a Fox interview.
  • Several EPA officials who confronted Pruitt about his spending were reassigned, were demoted, or requested new assignments because of the work environment.

8. A federal judge dismisses Exxon Mobil’s lawsuit against states attorney generals, allowing the lawyers to continue investigating whether Exxon knew about climate change and lied to the public to cover it up.
9. A district judge rules that officials must take climate change into account when making certain infrastructure decisions.
10. Indonesia declares a state of emergency after an oil spill caused by a leak in a pipeline in Borneo. The spill has spread across an area larger than Paris and is now heading out into the open ocean. The spill caused the death of 5 fisherman caught when clean-up workers sparked a fire.

Budget/Economy:

1. On Monday, Trump hits back at people who fact-checked his tweet storm about Amazon last week, maintaining that Amazon is bad for the USPS and that they don’t pay taxes.
   Background: Trump isn’t concerned about the USPS. He hasn’t even appointed a board of governors yet for the post office, so they’re running on a temporary emergency committee with limited powers. Also, the Trump campaign spent over $150,000 at Amazon for office supplies. So there’s that.
2. And on Monday, stocks continue to dive on a tech sell off as Trump keeps up his criticism of Amazon. But then stocks recover on Tuesday. And then they’re down… and then…
3. The market volatility continues throughout the week, with pretty major fluctuations. According to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, investors aren’t reading the Fed’s moves correctly. Vanguard founder Jack Bogle says he’s never seen anything like it. Bloomberg says that the market had it’s worst April start since 1929, however it looks to be recovering.
4. China retaliates against Trump’s announced tariffs by placing tariffs of their own on 128 American goods, estimated at about $3 billion.
5. Trump raises the tariff ante by threatening tariffs on an additional $50 billion of Chinese goods, and China threatens tariffs on another $50 billion worth of American goods. Both sides say they don’t want a trade war though.
6. Agricultural organizations express concerns over potential trade disagreements, noting that the current situation will definitely cut into hog farmers’ bottom lines. Trade agreements have generally been good for farmers. When Trump pulled out of TPP, Japan instated emergency tariffs on U.S. beef of 50%. When Trump threatened NAFTA, Mexico increased their corn imports from Brazil. The price of soybeans also dropped this week on the threat of greater trade disputes.
7. Teachers in Oklahoma walk out of classes in protest. They’re looking for better salaries and school funding. Kentucky teachers protest as well, and Arizona teachers are working on a date to start their protest.
8. Mick Mulvaney, the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recommends weakening the bureau’s responsibilities and requiring congressional approval for CFPB rules. Instead of being an independent and apolitical agency, Mulvaney says the director should report to the president and that it should be funded by Congress and not the Fed.
9. Trump and Kevin McCarthy (Majority House Leader) are working to rescind some of the funding agreed upon in the bipartisan spending bill earlier this year. Trump had tried to get a line-item veto for the bill, but the Supreme Court ruled that out in a court case 20 years ago.

Elections:

1. One of the GOP candidates for Lieutenant Governor in Idaho says that maybe if we pushed women with the death penalty, they would stop seeking abortions. Don’t vote for this guy!
2. In tax roundtable, Trump goes off script and says millions of people vote multiple times, specifically in California. Trust me, we can barely get anybody to vote once in CA, much less get them out there to do it again and again.
3. Many Republicans in Congress see keeping control of the House in the midterm elections as hopeless, so Mitch McConnell is focused on keeping control of the Senate.
4. A review of news subscriptions shows that Trump did better in areas where there’s a “news desert.” In other words, where there weren’t enough news outlets to quickly fact check what Trump said, people tended to believe him more.

Miscellaneous:

1. Another woman files a suit to nullify a non-disclosure agreement related to Trump. She says she faced harassment while working on Trump’s campaign (to clarify, not from Trump himself).
2. At the White House Easter Egg Roll, which is largely attended by kids, Trump takes a moment to talk up the U.S. economy and military might.
3. Trump tweets about his latest polls, calling Obama ‘Cheating Obama’. Probably the first president to accuse a predecessor of cheating.
4. Trump calls the (hardworking men and women of the) FBI and DOJ an embarrassment to our country.
5. The former head of the VA, David Shulkin, says he was never asked to tender a resignation letter and never did so, which he offers as proof that he was fired.
6. A shooting at YouTube’s headquarters sends three people to the hospital. The shooting, a female, was upset about YouTube’s new monetization policies.
7. Trump will once again skip the White House Correspondents‘ dinner.
8. A fire on the 50th floor of Trump Tower takes the life of one person living there, a death that might have been prevented if fire sprinklers had been installed in the upper residential floors. Six firemen were also injured. A minor fire broke out two months ago on the roof of the building.
9. Trump steps into the fire story a little too quickly, and, before news breaks of the man’s death, tweets:

“Fire at Trump Tower is out. Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!”

10. The Department of Homeland Security has a new media plan. They plan to compile a list of journalists and media influencers, and to monitor what the people on the list put out to the public.
11. Sources say that Trump conferenced in Lou Dobbs to senior-level meetings during his first year in office, often interrupting officials to let Dobbs advise him.
12. Todd Johnson, a Trump campaign manager in New Mexico and Defense Department appointee, resigned after it was discovered he posted controversial and false stories about Obama, like birtherism and how Obama is the anti-Christ. He also posted anti-Muslim propaganda.
13. Twenty-six email domains managed by the Executive Office of the President were tested for security compliance, and 18 were found to be out of compliance. Only one had fully implemented the security protocol. But her emails!!!
14. Trump says he didn’t know anything about Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, which would mean that Cohen committed fraud.
15. Robert Mercer, a major funder of Breitbart and the Trump campaign, gave Secure America Now $2 million. Secure America Now is an extreme-right organization that bought anti-Muslim ads to place on Facebook and Google in 2016. The ads were micro-targeted to voters who would be receptive of them.
16. Ronny Jackson is up for a military promotion, which means if he takes the job as head of the Veteran’s Administration, it could cost him nearly $1 million in lifetime retirement benefits.
17. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) requests an explanation from Sinclair Broadcasting’s chairman about forcing their anchors at local stations to read propaganda statements.
18. Fun fact: Sinclair’s contracts include a clause that penalizes employees for quitting, which might be discouraging anchors from protesting the propaganda pieces. Also, these clauses are likely not enforceable.

Polls:

A new poll shows that:

• 48% of Americans trust CNN more than Trump.
• 45% trust MSNBC more than Trump.
• 30% trust Fox News more than Trump.
• 75% of Republicans trust Trump more than CNN.
• 72% of Republicans trust Trump more than MSNBC.
• 35% of Republicans trust Trump more than Fox News.

• Trump’s support among women fell from 41% to 35% this month.
• Trump’s support among men rose from 50% to 53%.