Radio America Online News Bureau

President Trump

McCabe in Trouble, Trump’s Tariffs, Schumer Plays the Race Card

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America are glad to see the inspector general at the Justice Department taking his job seriously as reports surface that his forthcoming report will be highly critical of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.  While they sympathize with President Trump’s desire to fix trade imbalances, they fear new steel and aluminum tariffs will have a negative impact on American consumers and the economy.  And they slam Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for announcing his opposition to a judicial nominee because the nominee is white and President Obama’s previous nominees were black.

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Trump Embraces Dem Gun Plans, Hicks Hits the Bricks, Economy Booming

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America unload on President Trump for even saying he wants to see most aspects of the Democrats’ gun control agenda in a comprehensive bill and for apparently having little regard for due process rights.  They also discuss the resignation of White House Communications Director Hope Hicks and how the West Wing seems to be in a constant state of turnover.  And they close with good economic news, as new reports show wages rising – especially for low-income workers – and that the number of jobless claims filed last week were the fewest since 1969.

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Mona Gets it Right, Broward Sheriff Flailing, NBC vs. Ivanka

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America applaud conservative columnist Mona Charen for speaking the hard truth that too many on the right are willing to look the other way on President Trump’s personal behavior – and even the Roy Moore story – in an effort to achieve political goals.  They also rip Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel for looking at the litany of mistakes and missed opportunities for authorities to stop the Stoneman Douglas shooting and flippantly concluding, “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, then O.J. Simpson would still be in the record books.”  And they shake their heads as NBC interviews Ivanka Trump at the Olympics and asks her whether she believes her father’s accusers.

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White House Listening Session, Town Hall Targets Rubio, Trebek Takes on Politics

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America applaud President Trump for hosting a dignified event on school shootings that included a wide variety of opinions from many anguished families.  They also slam CNN for letting it’s town hall on guns turn into an endless onslaught against Marco Rubio, because he will not support an “assault weapons” ban, with one student even telling Rubio he feels like he’s looking at the shooter or down the barrel of an AR-15 when he sees Rubio.  And they shake their heads at the news “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek is scheduled to moderate a debate later this year in the Pennsylvania governor’s race.

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Immigration Stalemate

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The U.S. Senate rejected multiple attempts at immigration reform legislation, suggesting it is unlikely Congress can reach a deal this year that tightens up the nation’s immigration system and also clarifies the future for those holding legal status under the expiring DACA program.

President Trump announced last year that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program would expire in March 2018.  DACA is the 2012 initiative taken by President Obama to grant legal status to people in the U.S. who were brought here illegally as children.  Roughly 700,000 enrolled in DACA.

In announcing the end of DACA, President Trump made it clear he wanted Congress to address the issue through legislation and use the opportunity to make changes in immigration law such as ending the visa lottery and significantly reducing chain migration, by which family members can be sponsored by new citizens to come to the U.S.

Democrats want nothing to do with that approach, insisting only a “clean” DACA fix of simply granting legal status and a pathway to citizenship is acceptable.

In January, Democrats ended a brief government shutdown after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised to allow debate on the issue in the weeks to come.  That promise was kept last week, but no bill was able to get the 60 votes needed to end debate and proceed to a final vote.

There is little likelihood that stalemate will be broken anytime soon.

“It’s unclear what will happen now, probably not much,” said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Only 39 senators voted for the bill most closely resembling President Trump’s wish list.  He wants a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million people, which includes DACA recipients and those who qualify but never enrolled.  Trump would also scrap the visa lottery and limit the chain migration policy to spouses and minor children.

He also wants $25 billion to secure the border and begin constructing major portions of a border wall.

The highly-touted “bipartisan” bill sponsored by Republicans Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., fell six votes short of the 60-vote threshold.  It kept the 1.8 million number in place as well as $25 billion in border security.

However, Camarota says it fell far short in reforming the legal immigration system.

“It did not have any ending or phasing out of the chain migration categories.  And it had other things, like how priorities on enforcement would move forward and it seemed it was going to make it more difficult to enforce the law in some other areas.  So while the border might be more secure, the interior might be less secure,” said Camarota.

So why did the bill Camarota considers weaker than the Trump-backed measure get 15 more votes in a GOP-controlled Senate?  Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, says many in his party are now to the left of Barack Obama on immigration, at least compared to the parameters Obama imposed on DACA.

Camarota sees Cruz as hyperbolic in that comparison given that Obama wanted legal status and a pathway to citizenship for 10-11 million people in the U.S. illegally.  But he says Cruz does bring up an important point.

“His basic insight is not ridiculous.  If you’re the party of enforcement against amnesty, the president was agreeing to a pretty generous amnesty of 1.8 million.

“I think the reason he did that, and this is the way politics works and you have to decide what you think of it.  He thought it was the only way he could get the things that he wanted, like the reform of the legal immigration system and the wall.  The hope was that this trade-off would go through, but some of his own party and the Democrats didn’t want it,” said Camarota.

And what do the Democrats want?

“The Democrats are pretty unified that they want to keep immigration (numbers) as high as possible, letting the most number of people in and increase it.  (They want) as expansive an amnesty as possible and tend to not want to spend more on enforcement.  There are a lot of Republicans who tend to support that agenda,” said Camarota.

While the Center for Immigration Studies likes Trump’s efforts to limit chain migration, Camarota says the group has major misgivings about the president’s willingness to place the so-called Dreamers on a path to citizenship.

“One of the reasons you want to reform the chain migration system or give citizenship to DACA members is that pretty quickly it means they might be able to sponsor their parents, and the parents are the ones who brought them here.

“The whole idea of a DACA amnesty was that we’ll do this for people who aren’t to blame, but eventually it means amnesty for everyone who is to blame unless you end those categories.  Don’t allow people to sponsor their parents to come in or don’t give citizenship to the DACA recipents,” said Camarota.

With just two weeks until DACA is rescinded, Camarota says the courts may end up having a critical say in how this debate plays out.

“Although the DACA program is ending so people will not be able to renew, more than one judge as ruled – crazy as it may sound – that although it was a discretionary policy and that’s how it was sold, that the administration can’t end the program,” said Camarota.

“If, which seems likely, the administration can overcome the ridiculous judicial activism that says they can’t end the program, then it would put more pressure on Democrats and then we might see some meaningful reform,” said Camarota.

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Free Speech and the Russia Indictments

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The Justice Department announced the indictment of 13 Russians on charges of attempting to defraud the United States by meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign, but a former federal prosecutor says the charges may have a chilling effect on free speech here at home and around the globe.

On Friday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the indictments handed down from a grand jury connected to the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian activities during the race for the White House.

While all 13 Russians face defrauding charges, some of them also face wire fraud and bank fraud charges as well.

However in addition to the indictments, Rosenstein also announced that any Americans participating in the operation did so unwittingly.  Many media outlets immediately went wall-to-wall with breathless coverage of the news, but former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy isn’t sure what the bombshell is.

“I don’t think there was any doubt that the Russians were trying to meddle in our election because I think they meddle as much as they can in all our elections.  In fact, this indictment says this particular scheme to meddle in the elections goes back about five years.  So it’s long before there even was a Donald Trump campaign,” said McCarthy.

McCarthy further says there is a big gray area about what sort of foreign involvement in American politics is legal and what is not.  In this case, he says the indictments suggest Mueller sees the Russian bot activity as an in-kind political contribution.

He also says the plan is deeply frowned upon by the Justice Department, which cannot properly register those involved in the plot as foreign agents since they operate anonymously.  The State Department also has reason to be furious since the Russians came to the U.S. on visas, giving very different reasons for being here.

But while McCarthy urges the government to prosecute visa fraud as aggressively as possible, he says the Mueller indictments might create more problems than they solve.

“I don’t really understand the point of this.  I don’t even know if these people are prosecutable.  I don’t know that there’s a chance you actually get these people physically into a federal criminal court in the United States,” said McCarthy.

However, he says the long-term impact of this could create problems for the United States.

“It seems to sweep into it, potentially, a lot of behavior that Americans engage in and may result in retaliation on the part of foreign governments on activities that are pretty important to the spreading of American messages that we want to spread throughout the world,” said McCarthy.

And he says political involvement on the internet could also be greatly impacted by Friday’s actions.

“You’re talking about regulation of political expression of a variety that a lot of Americans engage in.  It seems like they’re doing this as a sweeping prohibition on a theory that these government agencies have had their missions frustrated by the way that this scheme took place,” said McCarthy, noting that such freedom could be at risk all for a case that may never be tried.

McCarthy painted another unsettling scenario.

“Are we now saying that every time that somebody champions a candidate or a cause in social media that that’s an in-kind campaign contribution and that if you’re doing it anonynously or under a pseudonym that you’re defrauding the United States?” asked McCarthy.

“It would seem to me that that would be absurd, but it’s less absurd after reading this indictment than it would have been before,” said McCarthy.

In addition to the actual charges announced Friday, McCarthy says it is significant that Mueller and Rosenstein conclude that no Americans knowingly collaborated with Russian attempt to cause mischief in the campaign.  They also pointed out that the bots stirred up partisans on both sides, certainly in the wake of the elections.

“It does say that to the extent Americans were involved in this it was “unwitting,” which means that if that’s the full extent of it, there obviously can’t be a collusion conspiracy because you can’t collude – I mean collusion is a nonsense word legally anyway.

“To be a criminal conspirator, you have to have an agreement to violate the law and that’s not something that someone can do unwittingly,” said McCarthy.

So much like every other development in this case, both sides of the Russia debate see vindication in Friday’s developments.

“Anybody who was interested in championing something that I think should have been beyond dispute – namely that the Russians tried to meddle in our elections – they get to say, ‘See, Russians meddle in elections.’

“And anybody who had a political interest in saying that Trump didn’t collude, they can now come away and say, ‘See, this thing shows there’s no collusion,'” said McCarthy.

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GOP Hopes Brighten, Russia & the Midterms, Valentine’s Day Blame Game

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America welcome a new Politico/Morning Consult poll showing more Americans now plan to vote for a Republican congressional candidate than for a Democrat, which is a big swing since in recent weeks.  They also roll their eyes as Democrats and pundits fret that President Trump hasn’t given specific orders for the FBI to thwart Russian attempts to meddle in the midterm elections, when FBI Director Christopher Wray says they are on the case because it is their job after all.  And they look at the Valentine’s Day tradition of columns by liberal women blaming men for their own relationship frustrations and the decline of modern romance.

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Trump’s Infrastructure Approach, Media Fawn Over North Korea, CNN & Corker

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America are leery in general that any infrastructure bill can avoid becoming a huge waste of money but they are glad to see President Trump asking states to play a major role in funding the plan.  They also unload on the mainstream media for writing glowing reviews of Kim Jong-Un’s sister and how she is supposedly executing a diplomatic masterpiece at the Olympics.  And they rip the press for falling for the supposedly charming North Korean cheer squad, when they’re really slaves of a regime that will punish them and their families if they make any mistakes.  And they roll their eyes at CNN for reporting that Sen. Bob Corker is thinking about reconsidering his retirement, even as Corker’s office says there is nothing to the story.

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Kurtz Talks Media vs. Trump

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Media critic Howard Kurtz says the mainstream media are in grave danger of irreparably damaging their credibility by so blatantly and viscerally attacking President Trump on a daily basis, and he says those reporters are actually doing the president they loathe a huge political favor.

Kurtz is a longtime media analyst and columnist.  He hosts “Media Buzz” on the Fox News Channel and is the author of the new book, “Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War over the Truth.”

Kurtz says mainstream journalists effectively declared war on Trump from the moment his campaign started in 2015.

“There was something about Donald Trump that just gets under their skin.  First, they just wrote him off.  He was a clown.  He was a sideshow.  He was never going to win the nomination, and of course he wasn’t going to win the election,” said Kurtz.

Since getting elected, the media have only intensified the negative coverage.

“Many journalists try to be fair but the overwhelming tone from most news organizations and many journalists is negative to the point that it’s almost a tsunami of negative coverage.  I think there’s something cultural there, there’s something visceral, there’s something about Donald Trump that just has made them change the standards they used in the past,” said Kurtz.

Kurtz also points out that this media wear goes in both directions, with Trump frequently blasting what he considers “fake news,” sometimes mentioning reporters by name.  Kurtz believes Trump “punches down” against the media too often and that some rhetoric goes too far but he says Trump’s frustration with the coverage of his presidency is understandable.

“I didn’t agree with Steve Bannon when he said the press was the opposition party, but sometimes we do a pretty good imitation.  It’s not just opposing the policies.  It’s all the personal stuff, attacking his family.  There’s a lot in the book about all the horrible unfair press she gets because some social moderates and liberals think she should change her dad’s mind on every single subject,” said Kurtz.

And he says the onslaught often devolves into petty matters.

“Trump cheats at golf.  Trump had two scoops of ice cream.  Trump eats pizza with a fork.  It’s just relentless, and it’s fueled by celebrities that also say very harsh things about him,” said Kurtz.

In the book, Kurtz is clearly pained by journalists shedding all pretense of objectivity and seeing it as their duty to combat the president and his administration.

“But the mainstream media, subconsciously at first, have lurched into the opposition camp, are appealing to an anti-Trump base of viewers and readers, failing to grasp how deeply they are distrusted by a wide swath of the country,” wrote Kurtz.

“I am increasingly troubled by how many of my colleagues have decided to abandon any semblance of fairness out of a conviction that they must save the country from Trump,” he added.

Kurtz then details the impact this incessant hostility against Trump is having on journalism as a whole.

“My greatest fear is that organized journalism has badly lost its way in the Trump era and may never fully recover.  Even if the Trump presidency crashes and burns – in which case the press will claim vindication – the scars of distrust might never heal,” writes Kurtz.

In our interview, Kurtz expanded on those concerns.

“I hope I make the case in this book that there’s a real imbalance among some journalists who just think it’s their mission to stop Donald Trump from what he’s doing and maybe to knock him out of office.  I think the damage is very real, really troubling, and it’s not good for he country,” said Kurtz.

However, the great irony, says Kurtz, is that this perpetual media venom over every action Trump takes only helps the president.

“It enables him to dominate and drive the news agenda every day.  Also, many of his supporters out there in the country not only have more sympathy for the guy they see as their champion when he gets overwhelmingly negative coverage, but they also believe the elite media in New York, D.C., L.A. and so forth, look down on them and view them condescendingly.  There are examples in the book of how that’s pretty true,” said Kurtz.

Trump often has a strategy to his media battles, rather than just shooting from the hip or the lip as his critics conclude.  In June 2017, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski ridiculed Trump on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” including jokes about his small hands.  Trump fired back on Twitter.

“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!” tweeted Trump.

While the media reacted in horror and others found it unbecoming of a president, this passage from Kurtz’s book reveals that Trump accomplished his real goal.

“Trump asked Anthony Scaramucci what he thought of the tweets against Mika and Joe: ‘I know what you’re going to say – unpresidential.  Then what?’

“I don’t think you needed to go there,” Scaramucci said.

“‘Is Korea off the TV?’ Trump asked.  Yes, the Mooch replied.  North Korea’s nuclear buildup had been eclipsed

“Is health care off the TV?”  True, the impasse over the Senate bill had faded.

“Sounds good to me,” said Trump.

The investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections dominates mainstream media coverage.  Kurtz says some developments warrant major coverage but most do not.

“It’s a perfectly legitimate story.  There’s a special counsel.  There have been indictments and guilty pleas, but every incremental development gets hyped like it’s the next Watergate,” said Kurtz.

He says in the media rush to convict Trump of heinous crimes, they are failing to corroborate critical accusations and losing credibility in the process.

I think there’s too law a bar and I think there’s too much of a trigger finger when it comes to this president.  CNN had three high-profile mistakes involving the president last year.  One of them was about Anthony Scaramucci, who later became communications director for about 10 minutes, and three journalists got fired over that,” said Kurtz.

CNN also reported that Trump and his son, Donald Trump, Jr., received copies of Wikileaks releases of hacked emails before they went public.  That was also not true.  ABC News suspended reporter Brian Ross for stating that Trump campaign officials met with Russian officials, when the meeting actually happened during the transition period.

However, Kurtz asserts that Trump operates a bit recklessly as well.

“There’s a term that some of his advisers have coined called ‘defiance disorder.’  What that means is they all get together and say, ‘Sir, you can’t do this.  Don’t do this.  It’ll be political suicide, don’t do it,’ he does it anyway because he’s Donald Trump and nobody tells him what to do,” said Kurtz.

Kurtz also says Trump’s constant blasting of the media could wear thin on his marginal supporters.

“I think it really excites the people who really like this president and think they’re viewed with disdain by the elite media, but I don’t think it helps him expand his base beyond that 38-40 percent that are very loyal to Donald Trump,” said Kurtz.

But long term, Kurtz says the the media is doing themselves the greatest damage.  He says the initial results of higher ratings for MSNBC and CNN and higher digital subscriptions for the New York Times show the open hostility is paying off in the short term.  So he expects the negative barrage to continue.

“I don’t see any daylight there.  I don’t think it’s good for the country.  I think there’s damage on both sides, but I particularly worry about my profession, which I love,” said Kurtz.  “There’s going to come a day when Donald Trump is no longer in the White House, but I think it’s going to be hard for us to get much of this credibility back,” said Kurtz.

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Clinton Crony Looms Large, Trump Embraces Shutdown, Parades & Priorities

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America relish enjoy watching the credibility of the Steele dossier implode even further now that disreputable Clinton fixer Sid Blumenthal is being implicated for feeding information to Steele.  They also shake their heads as President Trump says he would love a government shutdown unless he gets his way on border security just weeks after Republicans successfully convinced Americans that funding the government should not be contingent upon passing an immigration bill.  And they have no problem honoring the U.S. military with a parade as President Trump wants to do, but Jim says there are more pressing national security concerns, including long-term funding and pay raises.

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