President Trump is heavy on the plans and light on the specifics.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Trump confirmed he was considering adding more countries to his travel ban, said he would impose tariffs on European automobiles, and added he was working on a middle-class tax cut. Not that he said which ones, when that would happen, or just what the cut entailed, respectively.
Reports first indicated the Trump administration was planning an addition to its travel ban earlier this month. Trump told the Journal his administration does have plans to add more countries to the list later this month, but wouldn't say more. He also said his administration is "looking at many different things" when it comes to his longstanding — and now faded — push to oust Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
Trump went on to say he's still working on a trade agreement with the EU, saying "I'm going to put tariffs on them if they don't make a deal that's a fair deal." He was asked when that would happen but didn't answer, just saying "they know what the deadline is." And as for policies back in the U.S., Trump said "we're talking a fairly substantial… middle-class tax cut" that'll be revealed in 90 days. The plan's implementation dependent on him being reelected, Republicans holding the Senate, and the GOP taking back the House — the third bit being very unlikely in a presidential election year.
Read the whole interview at The Wall Street Journal. Kathryn Krawczyk
The Wuhan virus, which broke out in China last month and has so far infected more than 300 people and killed six, has reportedly reached U.S. shores, a federal source told CNN.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to announce Tuesday that a person in Washington state has been infected, making the U.S. the sixth country to experience the outbreak of the respiratory illness, along with China, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, and South Korea. The patient was hospitalized with pneumonia last week after having traveled to eponymous Wuhan, China, where the outbreak appears to have originated at a seafood and poultry market, The New York Times reports.
A lot remains unknown about the virus, although the latest development strengthens the hunch that it spreads from person to person. One of the most pressing questions, Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventative medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told the Times, is how frequent that human-to-human transmission is. Read more at The New York Times and CNN. Tim O'Donnell
Gallup revealed Tuesday that President Trump's approval rating during his third year in office set the record for the biggest partisan gap since the pollster began its records.
Republicans and Democrats are dramatically split — 89 percent of Republicans think Trump is doing a good job, compared to just 7 percent of Democrats. That 82-point difference is the largest ever, beating out the 79-point margin following Trump's second year in office. But what about the third subset, those pesky independents?
Trump's numbers don't crater among independents like they do with Democrats, and have improved over the last year — his 38 percent approval rating among non-affiliated respondents is higher than his 35 percent average rating to date, but they're still historically low. In the post-World War II era every other president has reached the 40 percent threshold among independents, with the lowest mark going to Jimmy Carter's 42 percent.
Overall, Trump checked in with a 42 percent approval rating during year no. 3, an uptick from his first and second years. It's not far behind the numbers averaged by former presidents like Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan at this point in their tenures, but it's still one of the lowest three-year averages during a first term since World War II. Only Carter's 37.4 percent trails. The poll was conducted over the phone from a random sample of 4,560 adults living in the U.S. by Gallup between Oct. 14, 2019 and Jan. 16, 2020. The margin of error is 2 percentage points. Read more at Gallup.
Prosecutors in Brazil have charged journalist Glenn Greenwald with cybercrimes, The New York Times reports.
The American journalist last year began publishing a series of stories at The Intercept that, as Columbia Journalism Review wrote, "sent shocks through Brazil" by appearing to show "that Sergio Moro, Brazil's justice minister and the former top judge in a major corruption investigation, colluded with federal prosecutors to convict prominent political figures." The Intercept said its reporting was based on "private chats, audio recordings, videos, photos, court proceedings, and other documentation" that was "provided to us by an anonymous source."
Brazilian prosecutors have now charged Greenwald "for his role in the spreading of cellphone messages that have embarrassed prosecutors," the Times reports. Prosecutors in a complaint claimed Greenwald is part of a "criminal organization" that hacked prosecutors' and other officials' cellphones.
The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill on Twitter called these charges "despicable, dangerous and a crime against journalism," and others journalists quickly spoke out in Greenwald's defense.
"Regardless of your personal feelings about Glenn, this is a regime with deep authoritarian tendencies personally targeting a critical journalist," Vox's Dylan Matthews tweeted. "It's a horrendous abuse of power that everyone should denounce."
Greenwald in a statement to The Daily Beast said he "did nothing more than do my job as a journalist — ethically and within the law," calling the charges "an obvious attempt to attack a free press in retaliation for the revelations we reported about Minister Moro and the Bolsonaro government." He added, "We will not be intimidated by these tyrannical attempts to silence journalists. I am working right now on new reporting and will continue to do so." Brendan Morrow
The Supreme Court won't consider a challenge to ObamaCare until after the 2020 election — if it considers it at all.
Even though a coalition of Democratic states asked the Supreme Court to quickly decide whether it would consider an appeal to a challenge to the Affordable Care Act, the court declined to do so, it said Tuesday. That doesn't affect the status of the ACA for the time being, but does deny Democrats a strategy they were likely to employ during the 2020 campaign season.
Texas introduced its lawsuit against the ACA in 2018 in an attempt to declare it unconstitutional, and a federal court ruled in Texas' favor. The judge in the case did let the ACA temporarily remain in effect because of the "uncertainty" that a likely appeal would bring. The Democratic attorneys general who appealed the case to the Supreme Court similarly requested a quick decision because dragging it out further "threatens adverse consequences for our nation's health care system," but the court denied that on Tuesday.
The uncertainty surrounding the appeal leaves Democrats still able to argue Republicans are trying to dismantle the ACA and its health care protections to people with preexisting conditions. This strategy paid off in 2018, Politico notes, though Democrats still "worry that Republicans could dodge political consequences if ObamaCare is ultimately struck down after the November election." Kathryn Krawczyk