"Saudi Arabia is once again a radioactive political football in the U.S., and President Donald Trump can't resist grabbing it," Politico reports. Trump's implication Sunday that Saudi Arabia would dictate the U.S. military response to Saturday's aerial attack on a Saudi oil facility "prompted fury in Washington, where the Saudis have faced an increasingly hostile climate in recent years," in fact "almost as politically charged as in the years immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when it was revealed that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis."
Trump administration officials have said Iran is behind the attack on the major oil facility, though Trump and Saudi Arabia are publicly less definitive on the culprit. In a telephone briefing Monday, Brian Hook, Trump's special representative to Iran, told congressional staffers that Saudi Arabia views the attack as "their 9/11," CNN and The Washington Post report, citing two people familiar with the call.
The comparison to the Saudi-linked terrorist attacks, less than a week after the 18th anniversary of 9/11, "rankled several staffers," the Post reports. People also felt the comment was inappropriate, CNN reports, "because there have been no reported deaths as a result of the Saudi oil field strikes yet nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in New York, Washington, and outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in the 9/11 attacks." An official used the same 9/11 comparison on Trump during a briefing on the Saudi oil explosions, a source tells The Daily Beast, and Trump appeared "unmoved."
"From an American perspective, it seems like a trivialization of the tragedy of 9/11, and perhaps offensively so," Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, explains to The Daily Beast, "but from a Saudi point of view it is a way of explaining their shock to Americans." Peter Weber
The Trump administration has decided to take on Big Showerhead.
Under a new proposal from the Department of Energy, the definition of a showerhead would be changed so manufacturers are able to work around the current requirement that no more than 2.5 gallons flow through per minute. "If adopted, this rule would undo the action of the previous administration and return to Congressional intent, allowing Americans — not Washington bureaucrats — to choose what kind of showerheads they have in their homes," Department of Energy spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes told The Hill via email.
The standards are in place in order to save water and reduce energy consumption, but President Trump has gone on the record multiple times saying he is more concerned about how a low-flow showerhead affects his tresses. During an event in July, Trump mused, "Showerheads — you take a shower, the water doesn't come out. You want to wash your hands, the water doesn't come out. So what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair — I don't know about you, but it has to be perfect. Perfect." Catherine Garcia
On Wednesday, health officials in the United States reported 1,493 deaths due to the coronavirus, the highest total since mid-May.
According to data compiled by The Washington Post, the nationwide seven-day average of newly reported deaths has been above 1,000 for 17 days in a row, after steadily going up for most of July.
Texas on Wednesday reported 324 new COVID-19 deaths, the state's highest single-day total. Over the last four weeks, the seven-day average death toll has more than tripled in Washington and doubled in Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia, where this week the average daily case count has also been slowly increasing. Catherine Garcia
The State Department's inspector general has found that during his tenure, Ambassador to Britain Woody Johnson has made inappropriate and insensitive comments about religion, race, and sex.
In a report released Wednesday, the office wrote that "offensive or derogatory comments, based on an individual's race, color, sex, or religion, can create an offensive working environment and could potentially rise to a violation of Equal Employment Opportunity laws."
The office also said it found that Johnson's "demanding and hard-driving" management style hurt morale, and if he thought a staffer was being too cautious or resistant to "suggestions about what he felt strongly, he sometimes questioned their intentions or implied that he might have them replaced. This caused staff to grow wary of providing him with their best judgment."
Johnson, the co-owner of the New York Jets, had no diplomatic experience when he took on the role in August 2017. The inspector general's office said it has asked the State Department's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs to conduct a further review and to take action, but the agency said it doesn't think this is necessary. Catherine Garcia
Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, shared a stark warning on Wednesday about the Islamic State in Syria.
McKenzie participated in a virtual United States Institute of Peace forum, and said that in parts of western Syria, "conditions are as bad or worse" than they were prior to the terror group's rise in 2014, and "we should all be concerned about that." This region is controlled by the Syrian government, and insurgents there have a degree of freedom to move around. There is barely a U.S. presence in western Syria, McKenzie said, and the United States does not believe the regime will do anything to try to push back against the militants.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, it's been difficult to transfer people out of Syrian refugee camps. One camp, al-Hol in northeastern Syria, has as many as 70,000 inhabitants, and it can be easy to radicalize people in these conditions, McKenzie said. "As young people grow up, we're going to see them again unless we can turn them in a way to make them productive members of society," he added. "We can either deal with this problem now or deal with it exponentially worse a few years down the road." Catherine Garcia
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) appeared for the first time as Joe Biden's vice presidential candidate on Wednesday, speaking at an oddly quiet audience-free event in Wilmington, Delaware.
When the former vice president announced Harris as his running mate on Tuesday, he reflected on her relationship with his late son Beau. Harris herself, who worked with Beau when she was California's attorney general and he was Delaware's, used a few of the first moments of her speech to pay tribute to Biden's son. He was the "kind of guy who inspired people to be a better version of themselves," she said, and "when I asked him where'd he get that ... where did this come from, he would always talk about his dad."
After running through plans to revamp the criminal justice system, promote clean energy, and expand access to health care, Harris moved on to criticize President Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic. "This virus has impacted every country. But there's a reason it has hit America worse than any other advanced nation. It's because of Trump's failure to take it seriously from the start," she said. "This is what happens when we elect a guy who just isn't up to the job. Our country is in tatters. And so is our reputation around the world."
Instead of jumping to tamp down on early outbreaks of COVID-19, Harris said, Trump "pushed miracle cures he saw on Fox News." Aside from his coronavirus response, Harris criticized Trump's handling of the economy. "He inherited the longest economic expansion in history from Barack Obama and Joe Biden," she said. "And then, like everything else he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground." Summer Meza