Year: 2017

Trump Already Raising Money for Re-Election

Buck Banks

$13.2 million

President Trump’s reelection campaign “is off to a quick start, pulling in $13.2 million through a trio of committees in the first three months of the year, while paying an unusually large staff of about 20 employees,” Politico reports. “The FEC reports for the three Trump committees suggested that much of their fundraising bounty came from the sale of branded merchandise sold around Trump’s inauguration and early presidency.”

Half of Americans Account for Only 3 Percent of Healthcare Spending

Buck Banks

3%

Washington Post: “The top 1 percent of health-care spenders use more resources, collectively, than the bottom 75 percent, according to a new study based on national surveys. Slice the data a different way, and the bottom half of spenders all together rack up only about 3 percent of overall health care spending — a pattern that hasn’t budged for decades. This creates a fundamental inequality in the country’s health spending that is the crux of the challenge policymakers face: They need a system that works for people who are ill, but is attractive to those who are healthy and spend little on health care.”

There’s No Point in Trying to Understand Trump

Buck Banks

“What on earth is the point of trying to understand him when there is nothing to understand? Calling him a liar is true enough, but liars have some cognitive grip on reality, and he doesn’t. Liars remember what they have said before. His brain is a neural Etch A Sketch. He doesn’t speak, we realize; he emits random noises. He refuses to take responsibility for anything. He can accuse his predecessor and Obama’s national security adviser of crimes, and provide no evidence for either. He has no strategy beyond the next 24 hours, no guiding philosophy, no politics, no consistency at all — just whatever makes him feel good about himself this second. He therefore believes whatever bizarre nonfact he can instantly cook up in his addled head, or whatever the last person who spoke to him said. He makes Chauncey Gardiner look like Abraham Lincoln.”

— Andrew Sullivan

A Fired Bannon’s ‘Kill Bill’ Scenario

Buck Banks

“I asked friends and foes alike to imagine how, should Bannon get the boot, the pugnacious populist might exact his revenge. … Taken together, their suggestions amount to an epic, Kill Bill-style revenge saga that starts with Bannon leaking personal dirt on his enemies to the tabloids, using the megaphone of Breitbart News to exacerbate divisions inside the administration, and siccing an army of internet trolls on his adversaries to harass and defame them. It ends with Bannon using Cambridge Analytica data to identify and primary their vulnerable allies in Congress, then releasing a ‘Where Trump Went Wrong’ documentary on the eve of the November midterms and finally—in this revenge fantasy’s epic climax—running against Trump himself in 2020.”

— Ben Schreckinger