The president’s effort to help get tax reform passed by the end of this year is in full swing. Tuesday night Donald Trump held a bipartisan dinner at the White House with three Republican senators on the Senate Finance committee and three moderate Democrats up for reelection next year in swing states. The Democrats—Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, and Joe Manchin—each issued anodyne statements afterward about looking forward to working together on something on tax reform.
As White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday, Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin are making the case on Capitol Hill this week in meetings with lawmakers, as is Vice President Mike Pence. Their goal seems to be the same as President Trump’s: find Democratic support, particularly in the Senate, for tax reform legislation.
Here’s how Marc Short, the legislative affairs director at the White House, put it Tuesday morning at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor: “We don’t feel like we can assume that we can get tax reform done strictly on a partisan basis.”
That’s a lesson from Obamacare repeal, and also a key distinction. Repeal and replace was pretty much a nonstarter for congressional Democrats, and there was no real effort by Capitol Hill Republicans (nor by the White House) to court them. Most Democrats aren’t likely to support a tax reform proposal, particularly one pushed by the hated Trump administration, but there are more than just three Democratic senators who might be gettable for a plan that’s conservative but not too conservative.
The last major Republican tax cuts made it through with Democratic support in 2003. The Republicans’ narrow margin in the Senate, not dissimilar to the party’s slim majority today, meant George W. Bush had to court three Democrats to make up for the three Republicans who defected and voted against the tax cuts. Bush was successful. Can Trump, who has so antagonized Democrats that anything associated with him has become toxic for them, succeed in the same way? The White House seems willing to try.
Big Tech’s Big Problem—Ben Smith at BuzzFeed has an insightful analysis of how the political winds have shifted against Silicon Valley’s biggest firms recently, with figures left, right, and center sounding the alarm against Google, Facebook, and their peers.
“Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders both want big tech treated as, in Bannon’s words in Hong Kong this week, ‘public utilities.’ Tucker Carlson and Franklin Foer have found common ground. Even the group No Labels, an exquisitely poll-tested effort to create a safe new center, is on board,” Smith writes.
Speaking of Silicon Valley, be sure to read my colleague Tony Mecia’s analysis of Apple’s big Tuesday announcement of the iPhone X (pronounced “ten”!) in light of the company’s drop in total sales last year. Tony points to the lack of a market-changing innovation on the scale of the Macintosh desktop, the iPod, or the iPhone since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 as a problem for the company.
“Since CEO Tim Cook took over after Jobs died of cancer in 2011, the company has refined products such as Apple TV and launched the Apple Watch,” he writes. “It is moving into areas such as artificial intelligence and perhaps even self-driving cars, as are its competitors. Yet while sales of new products are increasing, Apple still relies to an enormous extent on the iPhone: Almost two-thirds of Apple’s revenue comes from iPhone sales. And that proportion has generally been rising over the last decade.”
Marc Short put another nail in the coffin of “comprehensive immigration reform” Tuesday, admitting the White House is not committed to requiring Democratic concessions on border security before supporting a reauthorization of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Here’s more from my colleague Andrew Egger:
Interview of the Day—John Cleese, at Vulture, on political correctness and more.
Changes in Communications— The White House announced Tuesday that interim communications director Hope Hicks would continue in that role permanently. Hicks, a longtime aide to the president whose tenure with Trump predates his presidential campaign, took on the role after Anthony Scaramucci’s 11-day stint this summer.
According to Bloomberg, which first reported the change, the White House staff sees Hicks as a strong leader because, as one of Trump’s most trusted aides in a tempestuous administration, she is secure in her White House standing.
In addition to Hicks’s new role, the White House announced Raj Shah, a communications staffer who was previously at the RNC, will now be the principal deputy press secretary, the job held by Sarah Huckabee Sanders before she was elevated to the top press secretary post. Another comms staffer, Steven Cheung, was named “director strategic response.” Finally, Fox News mainstay and Republican strategist Mercy Schlapp was officially named as “senior advisor for strategic communications.” Schlapp’s husband, Matt Schlapp, is the president of the American Conservative Union.
Song of the Day—“Dead Flowers” by the Rolling Stones.
