Delusions and Lies
Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan at Axios:
President Trump often gets agitated — and stirred to action — by random things he hears on TV or from shoot-the-bull conversations with friends.
Why it matters: It drives staff nuts because they are responding to things that are either inaccurate, highly distorted or flat-out don't exist.
- Exhibit 1: Trump tells people Amazon has gotten a free ride from taxpayers and cushy treatment from the U.S. Postal Service. His real estate buddies tell him — and he agrees — that Amazon is killing shopping malls and brick-and-mortar retailers.
- Exhibit 2: "Per two senior administration officials, Trump continued to rail privately about the omnibus bill, and has become convinced of things that aren’t true about it," the N.Y. Times' Maggie Haberman tweeted yesterday.
- Exhibit 3: Trump officials like Gary Cohn who favor free trade have felt like "Groundhog Day" trying to explain trade deficits to him.
- Exhibit 4: Trump's conviction that the Paris climate deal is "killing" the U.S., when in reality it's a voluntary and pretty toothless agreement.
Ari Berman at Mother Jones:
Defending the Trump administration’s controversial decision to add a question about US citizenship to the 2020 census form, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Tuesday, “It’s something that has been included in every census since 1965, with the exception of 2010, when it was removed.”
That’s wrong. The citizenship question was removed from the decennial census form in 1950 and hasn’t been used since. It is asked on the annual American Community Survey, which reaches about 15 percent of US households, but Sanders didn’t give any indication that she was referring to that survey. And the question wasn’t removed from that survey in 2010.
