President Trump’s controversial plan to impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum is about to become a reality, as Trump reportedly wants to sign the order establishing the new policy as early as Thursday afternoon.
Trump is moving forward with the tariffs despite a rising tide of domestic and international efforts to dissuade him: 107 House Republicans signed a letter urging the president to reconsider in order “to avoid unintended negative consequences to the U.S. economy and its workers,” and the European Union threatened to respond with tariffs of their own, unveiling a list of American-made items they would tax if Trump doesn’t back down. The E.U.’s slate of potential tariffs underscores the political gamesmanship of the fight: many of the targets, from orange juice to cranberries to bourbon, seem to have been selected to put the squeeze on industries in politically sensitive regions.
Despite Trump’s eagerness, the White House may need to push the final order later than Thursday, as administration lawyers are reportedly still sculpting the final document. Moreover, many of the details remained in flux as of Wednesday, with the Trump administration still clarifying what exemptions and carve-outs they would include in the tariffs. When the plans were first announced last week, Trump said they did not intend to provide exemptions to our trading allies, such as Canada. But by Wednesday afternoon, Trump had apparently decided that giving a conditional exemption Canada and Mexico would give America leverage on another trade issue: the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“Our good friends north and south of the border, Canada and Mexico, are going to be given an opportunity to negotiate a fair trade deal for NAFTA, which would be a great bonus for what President Trump is doing,” Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro told Fox Business Wednesday. “If they get that, they won’t be receiving the tariffs.”
The unanticipated question of new tariffs has taken the wind out of the sails of another White House focus from last week: what to do to improve school safety in the aftermath of last month’s school shooting in Florida. On Thursday afternoon, President Trump will hold another event supposedly related to that discussion: a White House roundtable with members of Congress and representatives of the video game industry. In the White House’s previous events focusing on preventing school shootings, Trump has pointed to violent TV and video games as contributors to aggression and desensitization in children.
Asked whether Trump thinks video games are “too violent,” press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday that “It’s certainly something that should be looked at and something that we want to have the conversation about.”
The White House has not yet announced who from the video game industry will be attending the meeting, but the Entertainment Software Association, a video game lobbyist group, will be represented. It’s not hard to see why industry executives wouldn’t be wild about showing up: they have pushed back strongly against the notion that their products encourage violent behavior, and they are apprehensive of becoming a White House scapegoat on the issue.
“We have to look at the Internet because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds, and their minds are being formed. And we have to do something about maybe what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it,” Trump said last month. “And also video games. I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence in video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.”
Mueller Watch—Whatever comes of the Mueller investigation, one thing’s for sure: President Trump’s approach to handling it won’t win him any prizes for discretion. The New York Times reported Thursday that Trump has “asked key witnesses about matters they discussed with investigators” on two occasions in recent months. From the Times:
Trump’s reported behavior here appears to fit the same category as many of his other interactions with the Russia probe: unusual and perhaps inadvisable, but not illegal. If nothing else, it shows that Trump remains suspicious about Mueller’s investigation into his campaign’s activities during the 2016 election, and that he continues to view Mueller with a wary and adversarial eye.
2018 Watch—Leading up to Tuesday evening’s Texas congressional primaries, many hyped the contests as an early barometer of Democratic momentum going into the 2018 midterms. Instead, the results ended up pretty much Texas standard: Ted Cruz coasted to his second nomination, picking up more than twice as many votes as his eventual Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke.
But one lower-profile Democratic primary made for a bizarre bit of political theater, as a House of Representatives candidate named Laura Moser, a progressive in the style of Bernie Sanders, qualified for a primary runoff in Texas’ Seventh District, despite strong opposition from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
The DCCC tried to sink Moser’s candidacy in the weeks leading up to the election by publishing an opposition memo against her, calling her a “Washington insider who begrudgingly moved to Houston to run for Congress.”
“Democratic voters need to hear that Laura Moser is not going to change Washington,” the memo said.
Maybe the DCCC is right to believe that Moser couldn’t win a campaign in Texas. But it’s a strange world we live in where the campaign arm of the House Democrats try to knock off a (female!) challenger by calling her a “Washington insider.”
Must-Read of the Day—In the magazine this week, Jay Cost takes a look at the crowded field of Democrats lining up to try to unseat Donald Trump in 2020—and takes us through all the reasons why the fight to pick their challenger might get messy:
Song of the Day—“Holland, 1945,” Neutral Milk Hotel
