I just saw Trump on MSNBC, from Fort Myers, saying there would be no agreement on DACA that didn’t include funding for his wall.

“We have to have an understanding…that the wall will be funded,” the president said on the Ft. Myers’ tarmac. “Otherwise we’re not doing any deal.”

“If we don’t have the wall,” he said, “we’re doing nothing.”

This is a shift from what he said earlier this morning, before he left Washington for Florida. Earlier this morning, he just said “strong border security” without making the wall a condition. The wall would be funded later, he said.

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Josh Marshall wrote, also before Trump got to Fort Myers —

The word this morning is that leaders Pelosi and Schumer say Trump agreed to make DACA law as part of a deal that upped funding for “border security” but not for a wall. But Trump came out and said there’s no deal. So it’s all a mess and a big dispute.

I think if you look closely, that’s not quite what happened….

…The Democrats came out of the meeting last night saying they’d agreed to make DACA law as part of a bill that would include border security but not a wall. The White House put out a different statement that didn’t say quite the same thing but very conspicuously did not mention the wall.

Was this a “deal” or “agreement”? The Dems didn’t say they had a “deal”, which I take to mean they’d hashed out the specifics and terms. They said they’d agreed to do this kind of legislation: DACA plus Border Security minus Wall. This is basically a semantic difference. The words (deal or agreement) can mean anything you want them to. The key thing in my mind is that if you look closely, I don’t see where they’re really disagreeing on what happened. If Trump or the White House had come out this morning and said, “No way. The price for DACA is the Wall,” that would be a major disagreement. They have not done that.

However, what he was saying in Fort Myers just now was that they had to agree to fund the wall some time in the future, or the deal or agreement or whatever is off.

Let’s just say that Trump has a bad case of the flip flops, and not just about DACA. Today, Gail Collins writes that Trump shifts positions on tax cuts almost hourly. His only written tax plan, which he insists that Congress enact immediately, fits on one page.

Still, Trump is ready to roll. Details, schmeetails. “With Irma and Harvey devastation, Tax Cuts and Tax Reform is needed more than ever before,” he tweeted. “Go Congress, go!” Negative thinkers pointed out that the hurricane devastation required federal spending, not revenue reduction. Also that “is needed” was grammatically — tragic.

Plus, again, the no-plan thing. “It’s really important for people to understand — the administration is urging Congress to vote fast on a proposal that doesn’t exist,” said Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center. The center made a rather heroic effort to figure out what the consequences would be if you cobbled a proposal out of all the tax stuff Trump has mentioned, and concluded it would add about $8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.

People keep calling Trump a deal-maker, but the truth is he doesn’t do deals. A “deal” means that two or more parties have agreed to terms for their mutual benefit, and that they all intend to abide by those terms. Trump has a long and well-known history of getting people to agree to his business plans by making promises he doesn’t keep and had no intention of keeping when he made them. Such an arrangement is not a “deal”; it is a “grift.”

Let’s look at some good news. Paul Waldman writes that Democratic politicians are finally embracing single payer.

While some of us have been predicting for a few months that support for some version of single payer health care would gradually become the default position for those seeking the 2020 presidential nomination — and thus for the party as a whole — it’s happening faster than one might have thought.

A bunch of potential candidates, including Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, have moved from their previous position — a somewhat vague support of single payer in the abstract — to becoming co-sponsors of Bernie Sanders’ single payer bill, which is set to be released this week. Today Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who’s up for reelection next year, added her name to the list, and so did Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, joining a number of others. A single payer bill in the House is cosponsored by more than half the Democratic caucus (though Nancy Pelosi is notably holding off).

I know some people will argue that a few of these politicians — Harris and Booker in particular — are just trying to kiss up to the progressive left. And what’s wrong with that, I say? It means they are taking us seriously, instead of brushing us off as unicorn lovers.

For starters, it would be better if we referred not to “single payer” but to “universal coverage,” since the latter is the real goal, while the former is just one way to achieve that goal (see Harold Pollack for more on this). One big question about Sanders’ plan is whether it will be the kind of “Medicare for all” he’s advocated in the past, or something like “Medicare for all who want it,” which would retain a role for private insurance. There are multiple paths to universal coverage, and no one who is serious about the complex policy questions involved believes that a true single payer plan is the only way to get a system that does what we want it to. But that reality may be powerless in the face of the fact that “single payer” is a simple two-word slogan that people are already rallying around.

This is right; we might have to be careful about the “single payer” slogan.  It’s also the case that the same person who might say yes to a program labeled “single payer” might say no to the same program labeled “socialized medicine.” We also will have to fight off the inevitable “but it will raise taxes” arguments and explain that people will end up with more money in their pockets, anyway. We have a lot of educating to do.

One thing we can say, however, is that Democrats probably don’t need to be too paralyzed by fear of the inevitable Republican charge that it would represent big government controlling your life. As Republicans discovered when they tried to kick millions of people off Medicaid and undermine the program, the American public is perfectly fine with the government helping to give people health coverage. Medicare and Medicaid are both extremely popular with their recipients, who in total now number about 130 million….

… But single payer offers Democrats something extremely powerful: an ambitious policy change that will motivate their own voters to haul themselves to the polls.

Wow, actually promising to work for something grand that we’ve wanted for several years, instead of telling us that we’re naive and unpragmatic and believe in fairies and unicorns? What a concept!

McClatchy reports today:

A major construction company owned by the Chinese government was hired to work on the latest Trump golf club development in Dubai despite a pledge from Donald Trump that his family business would not engage in any transactions with foreign government entities while he serves as president. …

… The companies’ statements do not detail the exact timing of the contract except to note it was sometime in the first two months of 2017, just as Trump was inaugurated and questions were raised about a slew of potential conflicts of interest between his presidency and his vast real estate empire.

Now, let us consider the emolument clause of the U.S. Constitution — Article I, Section 9, paragraph 8.

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Is Trump in violation of the emolument clause? Peter Overby recently reported on NPR:

Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, sued President Trump three days after he took office, saying he is “submerged in conflicts of interest” because of foreign governments’ spending at the D.C. hotel.

The Constitution doesn’t ban foreign emoluments outright. It empowers Congress to approve them or not, and lawmakers have passed judgment on foreign gifts to lesser officials for more than 200 years.

Trump could agree that the hotel spending amounts to emoluments, and ask for congressional consent. But last January his lawyer, Sherri Dillon, said he doesn’t have to.

“No one would have thought, when the Constitution was written, that paying your hotel bill was an emolument,” she said at a press conference. “Instead, it would have been thought of as a value-for-value exchange. Not a gift. Not a title. And not an emolument.”

The Justice Department agrees, arguing in the CREW case that the hotel transactions are business transactions, unrelated to the president’s office, and thus not emoluments.

However, the Constitution is an 18th century document, and the language has changed. So what did emoluments mean in the 18th century? John Mikhail, a professor at Georgetown Law School, investigates.

Mikhail told NPR he and his researchers looked at all the known dictionaries between 1604 and 1806 that define emolument — 40 books in all. He said only three gave definitions in ways favorable to Trump, “kind of a narrow, even technical meaning, tied to the salary or official duties of an office,” while the other 37 used “a broader meaning that would encompass sort of the profits of ordinary market transactions.”

Almost all of the dictionaries used the word profit in their definitions. The two other go-to words were advantage and gain.

In the CREW case, the Justice Department cites two dictionaries that also used the words office and employ. “They had selected, maybe cherry-picked even, a couple of dictionary definitions,” Mikhail said.

An online search of Founding Fathers’ papers at the Library of Congress failed to produce any indication the Constitution’s Framers had consulted either of those dictionaries, he added.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has accused Trump of violating the emoluments clause more than 20 times, and that was before today’s McClatchy report.

Blumenthal said Trump “has never sought the consent of Congress” for the profits from deals in the more than 20 countries where he has business operations.

Just one example he offered: Trump has sought — and obtained — valuable trademarks from China’s government but did not clear those transactions with Congress.

Today’s example might or might not fit; back to McClatchy —

Trump’s partner, DAMAC Properties, awarded a $32-million contract to the Middle East subsidiary of China State Construction Engineering Corporation to build a six-lane road as part of the residential piece of the Trump World Golf Club Dubai project called Akoya Oxygen, according to news releases released by both companies. It is scheduled to open next year. …

…Meredith McGehee, chief of policy, programs and strategy at Issue One, which works to reduce the role of money in politics, said doing business with a foreign entity poses several potential problems for a president, including accusations that a foreign government is enriching him, gaining access to or building goodwill with him and becoming a factor in foreign policy.

The Trump Organization agreed to not engage in any new foreign deals or new transactions with a foreign entity — country, agency or official — other than “normal and customary arrangements” made before his election.

The China State Construction Engineering Corporation is not just a Chinese-based company; the government of China is the principal owner. McClatchy also notes that CSCEC appears in the Panama Papers.

Meredith McGehee, chief of policy, programs and strategy at Issue One, which works to reduce the role of money in politics, said doing business with a foreign entity poses several potential problems for a president, including accusations that a foreign government is enriching him, gaining access to or building goodwill with him and becoming a factor in foreign policy.

The Trump Organization agreed to not engage in any new foreign deals or new transactions with a foreign entity — country, agency or official — other than “normal and customary arrangements” made before his election.

But Trump ignored calls to fully separate from his business interests when he became president. Instead, he placed his holdings in a trust designed to hold assets for his “exclusive benefit,” which he can receive at any time. He retains the authority to revoke the trust.

McGehee said Trump clearly knew foreign arrangements could be problematic because he outlined a list of restrictions, although vague ones, for his company to follow while he served as president. But more importantly, she said, the writers of the U.S. Constitution knew they could be too.

The Emoluments Clause in the U.S. Constitution says officials may not accept gifts, titles of nobility or emoluments from foreign governments with respect to their office, and that no benefit should be derived by holding office.

Back to NPR:

But going back to the word in question: “It’s clear in the 1780s this was a very broad term, understood by most people,” Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer at the dictionary publisher Merriam Webster, told NPR. “As often happens, the definition that is the broader one, which happens to be the one that was in most common use in the 18th century, is the one that has sort of fallen away.”

Cato Institute senior fellow Walter Olson said in an interview that Congress may have the final say on the definition. “At that point, the mood that Congress has, whether it is mad at the president or indulgent toward him, is going to make a lot of difference.”

In other words, if they ever do get in the mood to impeach him, they’ve got a ready-made issue close at hand.

James Hohmann writes that immigration has become a litmus test for Democrats. One of the reasons the Dream Act, which passed in the House in 2010, failed in the Senate is that five Democrats voted no. If Senate Dems had unanimously voted yes, it would have passed.

But of those five, only one, John Tester of Montana, is still in the Senate. and now Tester supports DACA and the dreamers. Apparently in 2010 he got slammed for that no vote.

Hohmann continues,

Understandably, most of the media’s coverage of the Trump administration’s Tuesday announcement has focused on cleavages in the Republican ranks. The president has placed his adopted party in a bind by putting the onus on Congress to protect the 800,000 “dreamers” with a legislative fix in the next six months. Reflecting the fraught politics, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) — who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — backed a bipartisan bill yesterday that would shield young immigrants from deportation and give them a pathway to citizenship.

— The untold story, though, is the degree to which Democrats are now in lockstep on what not long ago was an issue that divided them. Not a single Democrat in either chamber of Congress has expressed support for getting rid of DACA.

— This is part of a larger lurch to the left in the Democratic Party on a host of hot-button issues. No matter where you’re from, it is harder than ever to be a Democratic candidate who is against gun control, abortion rights or single-payer health insurance. That doesn’t mean you cannot be, but one risks losing major donors and drawing the ire of the progressive grass roots – even if you represent a red state.

This is a hopeful sign, I think. Maybe the Dems have gotten the message they have to actually stand for something. And it shows us the progressive grass roots are having an impact.

But I also want to point out that just over a month ago, Democrats were having an internal pissing contest over “litmus tests,” which are supposed to be bad, say some people.

This is from The Hill, July 31:

Democrats will not withhold financial support for candidates who oppose abortion rights, the chairman of the party’s campaign arm in the House said in an interview with The Hill.

Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said there will be no litmus tests for candidates as Democrats seek to find a winning roster to regain the House majority in 2018.

“There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates,” said Luján, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman. “As we look at candidates across the country, you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America.”

Author Lindy West responded (August 2, the New York Times):

I relate to the flailing panic that is no doubt undergirding such a morally putrescent idea. Nineteen hyenas and a broken vacuum cleaner control the White House, and ice is becoming extinct. I get it. I am desperate and afraid as well. I am prepared to make leviathan compromises to pull us back from that brink. But there is no recognizable version of the Democratic Party that does not fight unequivocally against half its constituents’ being stripped of ownership of their own bodies and lives. This issue represents everything Democrats purport to stand for.

To legislatively oppose abortion is to be, at best, indifferent to the disenfranchisement, suffering and possibly even the death of women. At worst it is to revel in those things, to believe them fundamental to the natural order. Where, exactly, on that spectrum is Luján comfortable placing his party?

I’m mostly with West on this, although it’s also the case that if, hypothetically, an anti-choice Democrat won his primary and had a chance at knocking Ted Cruz out of the Senate, I’d say fund him. But the larger point is that there’s a natural tension between people extolling the “big tent” and those who say the Democratic Party brand means nothing any more.

In years past we’ve seen, time and time again, Democrats being their own worse enemy. We watched many of them vote to allow George Bush invade Iraq. We watched some of them fight against the Affordable Care Act, causing it to be watered down. For a long time the Party pretty much surrendered the field to the Right on gun control. Too many Democrats have been squishy on unions. And, of course, Democrats as well as Republicans have a long history of votes to help the corporate interests that donate to their campaigns.  See also “Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more” by Robert Reich.

Too many Democrats still think that appealing to blue collar voters means moving right on social and cultural issues. This is phony. I say we can stand firm on social and cultural issues and move left on economic issues and labor. Even in “red” districts. We’re not winning those districts, anyway; at least show the voters they have a choice other than Republican or Republican Lite.

“Big tents” are grand, but IMO the problem the Dems have had is that they made the hypothetical big tent so big that the party itself became meaningless. Maybe they’re learning.

I haven’t little to add to what has already been written about Trump’s abrupt ending of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, except for the obvious: This is just Trump getting his jollies by being an abusive son of a bitch. There is no other purpose served by ending DACA.

Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker:

On Tuesday morning, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump Administration was ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (daca), the Obama-era policy that protects close to a million undocumented immigrants who grew up in the U.S. Many Americans, including the President, refer to the beneficiaries of the policy as Dreamers, but at a press conference in Washington, Sessions called them by a different name. They were, he said, “a group of illegal aliens” who were taking jobs away from citizens, contributing to “lawlessness,” and threatening the country’s “unsurpassed legal heritage.” The decision to end daca wasn’t personal, he insisted. “This does not mean they’re bad people or that our nation disrespects them or demeans them in any way,” he said. It was just a matter of “protecting the integrity of our Constitution.” President Barack Obama, who created daca by executive action—without congressional approval—had “unilaterally” granted Dreamers “amnesty.” Sessions’s tone suggested that he believed these words were as abhorrent to his listeners as they were to him. “We simply can’t admit everyone who comes here,” he said. Then he took a drink of water, and praised Donald Trump. “The President has delivered to the American people,” Sessions said.

Since daca was implemented, in 2012, its beneficiaries, who came to the U.S. as small children, have been living in the country under “lawful status.” They’ve been able to obtain work visas and driver’s licenses, and were free from the immediate fear of arrest and deportation. But daca does not grant citizenship. “It’s a temporary, stopgap measure,” Obama said when he first announced the policy. Yet years have passed and Congress never formalized Dreamers’ status, despite the fact that a majority of Americans, across ideological lines, supported both their citizenship and their right to remain in the country. Ninety-seven per cent of daca recipients are in school or in the workforce, and—per the conditions of the program—not one of them has a criminal history.

Josh Marshall, Trump Wishes Dreamers Luck as He Tosses Them Out of the Plane

Jennifer Rubin, And Trump didn’t have the nerve to make the announcement himself

Greg Sargent, Don’t be fooled by the scam that Trump will pull today on DACA

James Hohmann, DACA decision highlights chasm between Trump’s compassionate rhetoric and reality

Roberto G. Gonzales, DACA’s beneficiaries landed good jobs, enrolled in college, and contributed to society

Amy Davidson Sorkin writes at the New Yorker:

The problem is not that President Trump does not realize that Harvey is huge; a number of his tweets on the storm have contained the word “Wow,” and he called it “epic” and “historic,” adding that “Texas can handle anything!” But the enormity of the situation does not seem to have organized his thoughts beyond declarations of how it will be matched by the greatness of his Administration and its allies. On the flight to Texas, on Tuesday morning, he had retweeted a message from Brazoria County, which consisted of a red box containing the words “notice: The Levee at Columbia Lakes has been breached!! get out now!!” Get out to where? What are the practical consequences of a breach? Trump didn’t say. (Vox has a more technical breakdown of the levee situation.)

In Corpus Christi, speaking to Governor Abbott, Trump began by acknowledging that it wasn’t time for congratulations, but offered a prediction that Houston would soon be better than ever: “We’ll congratulate each other when it’s all finished.” Later in the day, at a briefing at a control center in Austin, he said that his team’s coördination had been “incredible—everybody’s talking about it,” then offered this observation on the challenge that they faced: “Nobody has ever seen this much water. . . . The water has never been seen like this, to this, to the extent. And it’s, uh, maybe someday going to disappear. We keep waiting!”

Trump seems to think that once the water goes away, everything will just go back to normal.

What will be harder is persuading not only Trump but the Republican Party that Harvey has a reality that reaches beyond the borders of this storm, and involves major policy issues. Both Senators Cruz and Cornyn voted against a major emergency-relief bill allocating funds for rebuilding and recovery after Superstorm Sandy. Cruz, in particular, has misrepresented that bill’s contents and its purpose, saying that two-thirds of the money in it wasn’t really related to Sandy but was, rather, pork and other wasteful government spending. (Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact checker, gave Cruz three Pinocchios for that.) Cruz and others, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, also complained that the bill wasn’t really for emergency spending because it covered things like improving forecasts and repairing damaged infrastructure in a way that protected it against the next storm. This time, for the congressional Republicans, as much as for Trump, the emergency can’t stop when the rain does.

Here’s Glenn Kessler’s fact check of Cruz’s claim.

I think most Americans are looking at Texas and thinking it’s going to take a ton of money to put things right. I have read that up to a million cars are ruined. I have read that 80 percent of people whose homes were damaged or destroyed have no flood insurance. We’re hearing about exploding chemical plants and who knows how much petroleum and other toxic things being released into the water. So far I haven’t heard an assessment of how many businesses have been shut down and how many jobs are lost. I haven’t heard an assessment of repairing roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

And most of the issues involved in all these things deal with policy matters that Republicans don’t like to deal with. They want the private sector to somehow take care of it all.

Speaking of the private sector, there’s a pernicious pattern of disasters being used as opportunities for all kinds of political patronage and profit. See Naomi Klein, “How Power Profits From Disaster.”

One of those moments arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, as I watched hordes of private military contractors descend on the flooded city to find ways to profit from the disaster, even as thousands of the city’s residents, abandoned by their government, were treated like dangerous criminals just for trying to survive.

I don’t think we ever got an honest assessment of how much taxpayer “recovery” money was lost to waste and fraud after Katrina, and a lot of that money disappeared into the pockets of contractors, sub-contractors and various middlemen. People’s lives were put on hold for months and years waiting for help. The Bush Administration was colossally inept, but does anyone think the Trump Administration is going to do better?

On top of that — while everyone’s been focused on Hurricane Harvey, wildfires are raging through the Pacific Coast states. Home owners are getting evacuation orders. Yosemite National Park is threatened.

On top of that, there’s a category 3 hurricane out in the Atlantic named Irma that might strike the Atlantic coast next weekend. That’s not certain though.

On top of that, North Korea.

So, shit’s getting real, and Republicans plan on converging in Washington this month to cut taxes for rich people.

Back to Amy Sorkin:

If the tragedy of Harvey is not met properly and consistently, on a national level and with an eye toward a long-term commitment, it could mean the decline and fall of a great American city.

Today’s Republicans have absolutely no grasp of what “properly and consistently, on a national level and with an eye toward a long-term commitment” even means, and Trump is incapable of commitment except to himself. Twelve years ago, Republicans were perfectly content to leave New Orleans to rot. And they largely got away with it. Somehow, I don’t think they’ll get away with letting Houston rot.

See also:

Donald Trump in Houston: “Have A Good Time Everybody”

He Can’t Even Fake It

And an old Mahablog post, What Is Evil?

Earlier this week it was revealed that Robert Mueller is working with  New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, which opens up the possibility that the investigation will eventually result in state as well as federal criminal charges. Presidents can’t pardon state offenses. There also are reports that Mueller is working with the IRS Financial Crimes Unit, which usually works on tax evasion and money laundering cases. Heh.

Today we’re learning that Mueller has in his possession a letter composed by soulless creep Stephen Miller and Trump himself to justify James Comey’s firing. Andrew Prokop writes at Vox,

When President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey back in May, his administration at first offered a laughably implausible pretext. The claim was that Comey’s ouster had nothing to do with the Russia investigation, and that Trump was merely accepting the Justice Department’s recommendation to fire Comey because he had been too tough on Hillary Clinton in the email investigation.

But that wasn’t the initial story. The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman report that Trump and White House aide Stephen Miller first drafted a different letter recommending Comey’s firing — a letter that White House counsel Don McGahn blocked because he found it to be “problematic.”

It’s not yet known what, exactly, the letter said or why the White House counsel found it to be so troublesome. But the Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman, Carol Leonnig, and Ashley Parker report that it is several pages long and mentions “Trump’s frustration that Comey was unwilling to say publicly that Trump was not personally under investigation in the FBI’s inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.”

Obstruction of justice, anyone? See also Bob Mueller has an unreleased Trump letter about firing James B. Comey. Here’s why that’s big.

Josh Marshall writes about the time at which this letter probably was written.

What happened that Sunday night on Air Force One? What am I talking about? Let’s look at the timeline. We know from abundant reporting that in early May (May 6th-7th) President Trump spent the weekend at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. He apparently stewed over that weekend about Comey and came back to Washington Sunday night determined to fire him. He proceeded to do just that. He called in Rosenstein and Sessions the next day (Monday), got Rosenstein’s recommendation memo and promptly fired Comey on Tuesday (May 9th).

This we all know. But that Sunday evening return flight from New Jersey was also the night something kind of odd happened. Air Force 1 left Morristown at 8:02 PM and landed at Andrews at 8:40. But unlike what normally happens, the President didn’t get off the plane. Just before 9 PM Jared and Ivanka got off the plane with their kids. Jared put Ivanka and the kids into a silver minivan and got back on the plane. He got off the plane again at 9:07 and then got back on the plane a couple minutes later. The press pooler for that night filed an update at 9:18 PM updating colleagues and noting that there’d been no explanation what the hang up was or why the President was still on the plane.

Stephen Miller also was one of the people on the plane.

How worried is Trump? Hard to say from a distance of course, but there are stories yesterday that Trump out-of-the-blue called Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley and pledged his support for ethanol. Grassley is a senator from Iowa, so he likes ethanol subsidies. But note that Donald Trump, Jr., had just agreed to be interviewed by … the Senate Judiciary Committee.