Donald Trump sits down with three New York Times reporters in a 50-minute interview in which he blasted Jeff Sessions, Jim Comey, Robert Mueller, Rod Rosenstein. It seems that all of them had apparently treated him unfairly. He said he wouldn’t have hired Sessions as attorney general if he’d known he would recuse himself on the Russia investigation. The recusal, Trump said, was “extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.” Now, everyone is waiting to see if Sessions will resign.
Excerpts from The Times interview with Trump: Let’s just say that it’s a must-read.
Meanwhile, the Trump-Russia investigations continue. Jared Kushner is expected to testify in a closed-session hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday. Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort have been invited to testify in a public hearing July 26 before the Senate Judiciary Committee. If they refuse, the committee has said it will issue subpoenas. Via The Washington Post.
A very tough diagnosis for a very tough man: John McCain has brain cancer. It’s not clear what that means for his immediate future in the Senate, but McCain is faced with a very aggressive kind of cancer, the same kind that killed Ted Kennedy. The good wishes have been pouring in. Barack Obama tweeted to McCain on his fight with cancer: “Give it hell.” Via The Washington Post.
At a White House lunch with Republican senators, Trump changed his mind on health care reform and wants Republicans to pass something, although he doesn’t seem to have any clear vision as to what that something might be. Just the day before, he was saying it was time to let Obamacare die. Now he’s threatening — playfully? — senators like Nevada’s Dean Heller who have opposed the Republican bills. By the way, the latest CBO score on the GOP plan to repeal and delay — just one possibility — has 32 million people losing their health care coverage. Via The Washington Post.
GOP senators have held their own late-night get-together Wednesday to try to find a way to repeal and replace Obamacare. As of deadline, they were still looking. Via Politico.
Ezra Klein: Why can’t Trump, who prides himself as the great closer, make a deal on health care? That’s easy. How do you make a deal when you don’t know anything about the topic, don’t know any of the details of your own bill, can’t make any trade-offs because you have no idea what anyone on either side wants. Via Vox.
Is the nuclear deal with Iran slipping away? Robin Wright writes in The New Yorker that the Iranian nuclear deal is to foreign policy for Trump what Obamacare is to domestic policy. He opposes both, but doesn’t seem to have an alternative for either.
If the Democrats are going to take back the House, which is their best chance to regain a toehold on Washington power in 2018 midterm elections, it’s going to take a comeback in the gender gap. The latest polls seem to show that it might be happening. Via The Atlantic.
From The National Review: The problem with the left, says those from the right, is that progressives are too annoying. Some are calling it “the hamburger problem,” because, supposedly, progressives spend all their time thinking about stopping people from eating quarter pounders.
Photo by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr: Creative Commons
