Friday Reads: another day fighting the overwhelming need to scream …

Good Afternoon!

The only success story from the first 100 days of Trump is the state of the Trump Family Syndicate’s financial position. But, wasn’t that the goal all along? Matthew Yglesias–writing for VOX–follows the first family of grifting.  Yes, even Shakedown Barbie is in on the action.

…Trump isn’t failing. He and his family appear to be making money hand over fist. It’s a spectacle the likes of which we’ve never seen in the United States, and while it may end in disaster for the Trumps someday, for now it shows no real sign of failure.

The Trumps have unprecedented conflicts of interest

During the campaign and for much of the transition, Trump liked to at least vaguely allude to the idea that as president, he would separate himself from his business empire and do something to provide the public with transparency on his taxes. Since winning, he’s made clear that’s not going to happen. The day-to-day management of the companies is in the hands of his two oldest sons, while his oldest daughter and her husband (both of whom run substantial businesses in their own right) serve as high-ranking officials in the White House.

But don’t just take my word for it. Multiple reports have found that no meaningful separation exists:

• Derek Kravitz and Al Shaw reporting for ProPublica have confirmed that the terms of the trust in which the Trump Organization is held allow the president to pull money out of the company at any time.
• Eric Trump says he is giving his father regular updates on the state of the Trump Organization, on a “probably quarterly” timeline but with no specific commitments.
• Donald Trump Jr. is not only a top executive at the Trump Organization but also does surrogate interviews on behalf of the president.

Beyond that, of course, there’s the fundamental reality that everyone knows Trump owns properties like the Trump National Golf Club or Trump Tower because they have his name slapped on them.

Trump is even profiting from his golfing weekends

To an extent, this allows Trump to simply funnel money directly into his own pockets. Like many previous presidents, he golfs. And like all presidents who golf, when he hits the green, he is accompanied by Secret Service agents. The agents use golf carts to get around the courses. And to get their hands on the golf carts, they need to rent them from the golf courses at which the president plays. All of this is fundamentally normal — except for the fact that Trump golfs at courses he owns. So when the Secret Service spends $35,000 on Mar-a-Lago golf cart rentals, it’s not just a normal security expense — Trump is personally profiting from his own protection.

The Secret Service has, similarly, paid $64,000 for “elevator services” in Trump Tower. This is a fairly normal kind of expense for the agency, paying a building money to defray the inconvenience of taking elevators offline so they can be inspected for security purposes. But, again, there is nothing normal about the president personally profiting from the security procedure.

When Trump’s sons fly around the world doing business deals, they too are protected by Secret Service agents whose bills the federal government covers — even if they are staying at Trump properties.

There is something grating about this, especially from a president who is making a big show of donating his salary to charity. Trump is directly pocketing what could easily amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in direct payments from the Treasury, while simultaneously claiming to be serving for free. What’s more troubling, however, is indirect financial entanglements into which we have little real visibility.

It’s now easy to funnel money into the first family’s pockets

Ivanka Trump, for example, was granted five trademarks by the Chinese government on the very same day she had dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Also on that day, Ivanka’s father decided to break his campaign pledge to officially designate China as a currency manipulator. That decision, by all accounts, reflected the growing clout inside the White House of National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and his key ally Jared Kushner, who happens to be Ivanka’s husband and in a position to directly gain or lose from China’s decisions regarding his wife’s trademark applications.

The most bizarre thing I’ve read about recently is the sudden need to treat Ivanka Trump like a serious person instead of Paris Hilton on steroids funded by taxpayers.  She’s as much of a dim bulb as her father.

At some point during her Berlin sojourn, Trump spoke to Mike Allen, the political journalist. Allen ran an item on Axios with the headline “Ivanka Trump’s new fund for female entrepreneurs,” illustrated with a photograph of Trump grazing her fingers on one of the slabs that make up Berlin’s Holocaust memorial. “Ivanka Trump told me yesterday from Berlin that she has begun building a massive fund that will benefit female entrepreneurs around the globe,” Allen wrote. He added that contributors would include companies and governments—Canada, Germany, “and a few Middle Eastern countries” had already made “quiet commitments”—and that “President Trump is a huge supporter of his daughter’s idea, and she has consulted with World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim about how to pull it off in a huge way.” Double huge. It sounded a lot like the Clinton Foundation, or like any number of corporate or N.G.O. initiatives, except that Ivanka Trump’s office is in the White House. This raised a flurry of questions: What about conflicts? Would this be a for-profit operation or a shakedown one? In a few hours, it became clear that it was neither of those—because “Ivanka Trump’s new fund” was a complete misnomer. This would be a World Bank project, as spokesmen for the White House and the bank emphasized. Trump would not be involved in raising money, managing it, or deciding how it would be spent. But the World Bank wanted everyone to know that it was very, very grateful to Ivanka for promoting the fund, or “facility,” as it would be called. It was kind of her idea.

And, who knows, maybe Ivanka Trump deserves some credit. But it’s worth noting, as Bloomberg pointed out, that the World Bank has set up similar “facilities” in the past. The idea that the World Bank or the I.M.F. needs Ivanka Trump to tell it that a lack of access to financial and capital markets is an issue for women in the developing world is a bit like her father saying that NATO needed him to tell it that terrorism is a problem. (Which he has, indeed, suggested.) But maybe the make-believe about Ivanka coming up with world-changing ideas is harmless, if it means that her father will look kindly on the World Bank—although a report, this week, in the Washington Post about the conditions in a Chinese factory run by the contractor who makes her brand’s clothes (extremely low wages and long hours) does not quite fit into the picture.

This is embarrassing on so many levels. I’m embarrassed as a woman, as an economist, and as an American. Shakedown Barbie is on the world stage, the taxpayer teat, and the front pages of newspapers because of NEPOTISM. She has nothing to offer.  Her business is a sham. She’s a lousy designer.  So, now she basically is being paid to whisper sweet nothings from foreign countries into Daddy’s ear.  That basically sounds like the entire grifting scheme of every Trump “advisor”. Step one:  Flaunt Access.  Step two:  get on the Federal payroll.  Step three: set up a secret offshore bank account. Step four: Visit all you friends all over the world and shake it like a Polaroid. Step five: Live safely knowing the Republicans in Congress will do nothing but try to rescind the ACA one more time.

I’ve no doubt she thinks she is qualified. Politics is not really all that different from advertising, right? You promote handbags; you promote nice causes. Women entrepreneurs, friendship between nations, edgy earrings — whatever. These are all part of a lifestyle that everybody wants, and it’s a lifestyle that Ivanka Trump has been selling, for profit, for most of her life.

But when Trump appeared on a podium in Berlin this week, purportedly to discuss women in the workforce, she did not seem qualified. On the contrary, she provided a shocking reminder of the damage that the Trump lifestyle brand will do (and has already done) not just to America’s “image” but to America’s reputation as a serious country, even to America’s reputation as a democracy.

Why was she there at all? The other panelists — the Canadian foreign minister, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and German Chancellor Angela Merkel — raised no eyebrows, because their official functions explain themselves. But Trump was there as “first daughter,” a notion which the moderator of the panel — another impressive woman, the editor of a business magazine — at one point asked her to explain. “The German audience is not that familiar with the concept,” she said. “. . . Who are you representing, your father as president of the United States, the American people or your business?”

Trump has enough media training to know what to deny. “Certainly not the latter,” she said quickly (only to contradict herself, a few moments later, by saying, as she is no doubt accustomed, “Speaking as an entrepreneur . . .”). But the question never got a real answer. As everyone in the room knew perfectly well, Trump was not on the panel because she is an entrepreneur, or because she represents the American people or even because she speaks for her father, which is far from clear. She was on the panel because Merkel, ever the pragmatist, realizes President Trump is not interested in history, ideas, policy or any of the other things that have long tied the United States to Germany. To maintain its deep political and economic relationship with this American administration, Germany therefore needs to be solicitous of Trump’s daughter.

Trump voters appear to be willing targets of scams and snake oil salesmen.  They probably think Ivanka is a rocket scientist instead of the heir apparent to a series of money laundering and ponzi schemes.

President Trump’s voters are sticking with him — even if they are starting to think he’s not keeping some important promises.

That’s the takeaway from a new poll conducted for Priorities USA Action, a Democratic advocacy group tracking the attitudes of U.S. voters about his first 100 days in office. The analysis, provided to USA TODAY, offers some insights into why Democrats in Congress may see little political risk in continuing to oppose the president’s agenda.

While 67% of Trump voters say he’s met their hopes and expectations, for the first time, a plurality (43%) say there are some important promises not being kept. That’s a 10-point swing from just two weeks ago. Just over a third say he’s kept all of his important promises so far. It’s a potential warning sign considering Trump’s 41% overall approval rating — in line with other national surveys — is already historically low.

In a speech on the hallowed ground of Gettysburg, Pa., just 18 days before his surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump gave one of the most important speeches of his campaign in outlining a list of 28 campaign promises. By big margins, Trump voters identified six key promises he made as part of a 100-day action plan that he has yet to deliver.

These include replacing Obamacare with a plan that covers everyone at a lower cost; a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to modernize America’s roads, bridges and airports; banning foreign lobbyists from raising money for U.S. elections; naming China a currency manipulator and introducing legislation to provide a new child care tax credit to help working parents.

I’ve never seen such mass delusion in my lifetime. Paul Krugman says we’re living in the Trump Zone It’s akin to the Twilight Zone which we’ve been saying for what seems like decades.  He likens working for the Trump Adminstration to the family and town afraid of Billy Mummy who would send every one he hated to cartoon land.  That’s a disturbing image but undoubtedly an apt one. Trump is the monster child.

And now you know what it must be like working in the Trump administration. Actually, it feels a bit like that just living in Trump’s America.

What set me off on this chain of association? The answer may surprise you; it was the tax “plan” the administration released on Wednesday.

The reason I use scare quotes here is that the single-page document the White House circulated this week bore no resemblance to what people normally mean when they talk about a tax plan. True, a few tax rates were mentioned — but nothing was said about the income thresholds at which these rates apply.

Meanwhile, the document said something about eliminating tax breaks, but didn’t say which. For example, would the tax exemption for 401(k) retirement accounts be preserved? The answer, according to the White House, was yes, or maybe no, or then again yes, depending on whom you asked and when you asked.

So if you were looking for a document that you could use to estimate, even roughly, how much a given individual would end up paying, sorry.

It’s clear the White House is proposing huge tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, with the breaks especially big for people who can bypass regular personal taxes by channeling their income into tax-privileged businesses — people, for example, named Donald Trump. So Trump plans to blow up the deficit bigly, largely to his own personal benefit; but that’s about all we know.

So why would the White House release such an embarrassing document? Why would the Treasury Department go along with this clown show?

Unfortunately, we know the answer. Every report from inside the White House conveys the impression that Trump is like a temperamental child, bored by details and easily frustrated when things don’t go his way; being an effective staffer seems to involve finding ways to make him feel good and take his mind off news that he feels makes him look bad.

Trump is no longer amused by his job. Most of us are definitely not amused by the way he’s doing it other than those in Trumplandia that still think he’s going to chase of rogue Mexican banditos, stop unqualified women and black people from taking the jobs of noble white men, and send Muslim terrorists back to the Syrian desert.  Did I miss anything?

More than five months after his victory and two days shy of the 100-day mark of his presidency, the election is still on Trump’s mind. Midway through a discussion about Chinese President Xi Jinping, the president paused to hand out copies of what he said were the latest figures from the 2016 electoral map.

Here, you can take that, that’s the final map of the numbers,” the Republican president said from his desk in the Oval Office, handing out maps of the United States with areas he won marked in red. “It’s pretty good, right? The red is obviously us.”

He had copies for each of the three Reuters reporters in the room.

Trump, who said he was accustomed to not having privacy in his “old life,” expressed surprise at how little he had now. And he made clear he was still getting used to having 24-hour Secret Service protection and its accompanying constraints.

“You’re really into your own little cocoon, because you have such massive protection that you really can’t go anywhere,” he said.

Yes, you read that right.  It’s the election map all over again.

Meanwhile, first quarter economic performance was extremely “slugglish” and mostly because of lack of buying from households and businesses.  You can watch the stock market behave oddly as much as you want and say, wow, they feel great about life.  That’s probably investors thinking they’ll never pay any taxes again.  What these statistics shows is uncertainty and the desire to hang on to your money. My own personal index of how bad it will get is based on how many people I know start asking me is it time to change their IRA compositions. Believe me, I’ve been asked … over and over … and over now.

The U.S. economy grew at its weakest pace in three years in the first quarter as consumer spending barely increased and businesses invested less on inventories, in a potential setback to President Donald Trump’s promise to boost growth.

Gross domestic product increased at a 0.7 percent annual rate also as the government cut back on defense spending, the Commerce Department said on Friday. That was the weakest performance since the first quarter of 2014.

The economy grew at a 2.1 percent pace in the fourth quarter. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast GDP rising at a 1.2 percent pace last quarter. The survey was, however, conducted before Thursday’s advance data on the March goods trade deficit and inventories, which saw many economists lowering their first-quarter growth estimates.

I’m ending with good news.  Fox news is under a Federal Probe.  It’s also falling apart at the seams.

Financial crimes experts from the United States Postal Inspection Service are now involved, according to four sources connected to the investigation.

Mail fraud and wire fraud cases are part of the USPIS purview.

Investigators from both the USPIS and the Justice Department have been conducting interviews in recent weeks — including with some former Fox staffers — to obtain more information about the network’s managers and business practices, the sources said.

The existence of the federal investigation was revealed in February. At the time Fox News and its parent company 21st Century Fox said they had not been subpoenaed, but a spokeswoman said, “we have been in communication with the U.S. Attorney’s office for months — we have and will continue to cooperate on all inquiries with any interested authorities.”

Contacted about this story, the Justice Department and the USPIS had no comment. 21st Century Fox also declined to comment.

In February the investigation was reported to be focusing on settlements made with women who alleged sexual harassment by former Fox News boss Roger Ailes, and questions about whether Fox had a duty to inform shareholders about the settlement payments.

The investigators have been asking “how the shareholder money was spent; who knew; and who should have known,” one of the sources said.

But, CNNMoney has learned, the settlement payments are not the only thing they are examining.

Investigators have been probing possible misconduct by Fox News personnel and asking questions about the overall environment at the network.

Investigators have also been asking questions about mysterious confidants of Ailes — people who were known inside Fox as “friends of Roger.”

The entire network may be work reworked but it will still, undoubtedly, spew right wing shit.  Would a woman really take charge of the cesspool of misogyny?

The Murdochs may be preparing for a leadership change at Fox News. Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Rupert Murdoch and his sons James and Lachlan, CEO and co-chairman of Fox News parent 21st Century Fox, have quietly put out feelers for a new head of Fox News. And the preference, according to two sources familiar with the Murdochs’ thinking, is that the new leader be female.

The move comes as pressure is building on Bill Shine, a 20-year Fox News veteran whom Rupert Murdoch elevated to co-president, with Jack Abernethy, of Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network in the wake of the ouster of founding CEO Roger Ailes last summer. Shine runs the programming arm of the media empire, while Abernethy, also a longtime Fox News executive, runs the business side of the company, including ad sales, finance and distribution. On April 24, a few days after the network dismissed Bill O’Reilly, Rupert Murdoch took Shine and Abernethy to lunch at the Central Park South eatery Marea; the outing was interpreted as a public show of support and chronicled on multiple media sties.

In December, Shine and Abernethy announced a new head of human resources. Abernethy is credited with recruiting Kevin Lord, a veteran of NBC and General Electric who most recently worked at the digital media company Tegna. On April 10, they announced the hiring of a new CFO, Amy Listerman, formerly of NBCUniversal and Scripps Networks Interactive; she is due to begin work on May 1. Former CEO Mark Kranz, who was forced out last August, has reportedly been granted immunity in exchange for his cooperation with a federal investigation into the structuring of payments to women who complained of sexual harassment.

The Murdochs have been feeling increased pressure to make good on their public statements to foster “a workplace based on the values of respect and trust.” Putting a woman in the top spot at Fox News would send a distinct message given the issues that have been roiling the network. The feelers are external; though it’s possible that someone could get promoted from within.

Okay, that’s about all I can take reading for today. Just reading about what’s going on makes me want to scream. 

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?