Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has spent the past six months in limbo.
Shanahan became the acting head of the Defense Department in January, and President Trump announced his intention to nominate him for the full role about a month ago. Yet Shanahan is still waiting for an official nomination to the post, and it may be because Trump is looking to swap him for someone else, NBC News reports.
Trump gave Shanahan some blandly high praise when announcing his intention to nominate him as defense secretary last month, and it seems the president's enthusiasm has only waned from there. While in Normandy for a D-Day remembrance ceremony last week, Trump "asked at least three people what they thought of Shanahan and if they had any suggestions for different candidates." four people tell NBC News. Army Secretary Mark Esper, who Trump previously discussed as a possible DOD secretary nominee, was reportedly mentioned.
NBC News asked Trump on Tuesday about Shanahan's nomination, and Trump responded by saying he "put it out officially" a few weeks ago, but Shanahan still "has to go through the process." Still, White House officials reportedly said Trump would send Shanahan's official nomination to Congress back on May 18, while two defense officials thought it was coming last week, NBC News reports.
It's not unusual for Trump to change his mind on nominees or even withdraw them once they've already been sent to Congress — take Herman Cain and Ron Vitiello, for example. Kathryn Krawczyk
One of President Trump's oldest and closest friends is on the outs with the commander-in-chief, Politico reports.
Tom Barrack, a wealthy investor, has been by the president's side since the late 1980s, and that remained the case early on in Trump's tenure in the Oval Office when Barrack served as the chair of Trump's 2017 inauguration fund.
Now, though, the two reportedly no longer speak, current and former White House officials say. The falling out reportedly has something to do with Barrack's role in the inauguration, which is under investigation by prosecutors. The U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn is investigating whether Barrack violated laws requiring lobbyists to register when they work for foreign interests. The prosecutors have placed a particular emphasis on whether the inauguration let foreigners from the Middle East use straw donors to donate to the inauguration.
"The last thing Trump needs is to be closely associated with one more person facing scrutiny and potential ethical issues," said a person who knows Barrack.
However, other sources told Politico that the fracturing of their friendship began before the inauguration fund and is actually a result of something much simpler. A former White House official said that Barrack "is the kind of guy who would tell" Trump "things he didn't want to hear, so Trump stopped talking to him." Another source close to Trump said the president just "got tired" of Barrack, who he felt was trying to involve himself too much in the administration.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Barrack said that the relationship between the two "remains unchanged." But whatever the case may be, Politico notes the old pals could rekindle their friendship at any moment, as the president as been known to "turn on friends and allies, only to bring them back into the fold months or years later." Read more at Politico. Tim O'Donnell
Trump says Anthony Scaramucci was responsible for '11 days of gross incompetence' at the White House
Journalist Mark Halperin was able to land more than 75 interviews with Democratic strategists for a new book, and the women who accused him of sexual misconduct aren't happy.
Halperin, who was fired from NBC News in 2017 after numerous women accused him of sexual harassment or assault while he worked at ABC News, had landed a deal with Regan Arts to publish a book titled How to Beat Trump: America's Top Political Strategists on What It Will Take, Politico reports. For the project, Halperin reportedly spoke with more than 75 Democratic strategists, including President Obama's former senior adviser David Axelrod and former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile.
Now Regan Arts and the Democrats who participated in the book are under fire, including from Halperin's accusers. "The fact that so many people spoke to him sets the whole #MeToo movement back," Eleanor McManus, who sought out Halperin for career advice but claims he sexually harassed her during their meeting, told CNN. "And it shows they are enabling him and re-traumatizing the victims." McManus told CNN that Halperin has never apologized to her.
Another one of Halperin's accusers, Dianna Goldberg May, told The Washington Post that those who are "supporting Mark by speaking with him are on the wrong side of history."
Axelrod on Twitter said he "did not in any way mean to excuse [Halperin's] past, egregious behavior and, in retrospect, I regret responding at all." But other Democrats defended their participation, with Brazile telling The Daily Beast that "we are still angry at" Halperin but that "I wanted to go on the record with my answers about how to defeat Trump." Amanda Renteria, Hillary Clinton's former political director, also told the Beast that "women and people of color are worse off when our voices and experiences are left out of campaign histories like this."
Halperin in 2017 apologized for "aggressive and crude" behavior but denied allegations of assault. Brendan Morrow
U.S. unemployment is still near record lows and consumer spending is strong, but there are a mounting signs that the long U.S. economic expansion is coming to an end. Along with slowing growth in other major economies and the brief flash of an inverted yield curve last week, The Wall Street Journal and the Indianapolis Star highlight another economic bellwether pointing toward recession: The flagging recreational-vehicle industry in Elkhart County, Indiana, the "RV Capital of the World."
"Economists like to use the RV industry, which dominates the manufacturing city on the very northern edge of Indiana, as a barometer for the health of the U.S. economy," the Star reports. "And the news coming out of Elkhart is giving some plenty of reason to be worried." Local economists largely blame President Trump's trade war with China.
Trump and his top economic advisers dismissed such concerns on Sunday, going on TV to insist that there's no recession looming, the U.S. economy is strong, China is paying for the tariffs, and if there is a slowdown, it's the Federal Reserve's fault.
Trump, privately "agitated in discussions of the economy," has publicly "unleashed what is by now a familiar response: lashing out at what he believes is a conspiracy of forces arrayed against him," Maggie Haberman writes at The New York Times. "He has insisted that his own handpicked Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, is intentionally acting against him. He has said other countries, including allies, are working to hurt American economic interests. And he has accused the news media of trying to create a recession" by "overstating the damage his trade war has caused."
Aides tell the Times that "Trump understands that presidents face harder re-election battles in a bad economy." But "the economy may be more important for Trump than it is for other presidents," writes CNN's Stephen Collinson, "given that its current health is one of the few policy areas where polls show he has majority support." Peter Weber