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investmart007 · 7 years ago

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Commercial Real Estate Finance Veterans Launch 3650 REIT

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Commercial Real Estate Finance Veterans Launch 3650 REIT

NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES and CHICAGO and MIAMI/ April 6, 2018 (STLRealEstate.News) — Commercial real estate finance industry veterans and co-founders Justin Kennedy, Toby Cobb and Jonathan Roth today announced the launch of 3650 REIT, a national commercial real estate portfolio lender building long-term relationships based on tailored capital solutions, reliable execution and responsive client service.

For more than 20 years, 3650 REIT principals have played leading roles in CRE debt markets with track records of success across lending, mortgage banking, capital markets and loan servicing. 3650 REIT leverages this experience and its long-term capital to offer clients a reliable portfolio lending and servicing experience. 3650 REIT advantages start with its private REIT structure and premier institutional shareholders, including funds managed by TPG Sixth Street Partners (“TSSP”), a global credit and credit-related investment firm with over $20 billion in assets under management.

“Starting with our long-term REIT capital base, we built from the ground up to provide a materially different and consistently aligned borrower experience,” said Justin Kennedy. “3650 delivers what sponsors and intermediaries have been asking for – a stable portfolio lender focused on long-term relationships and reliable performance from origination through maturity.”

“Strong sponsors deserve a relationship with a lender committed to the same long-term outcomes they seek, namely enhancing the cash flow and value of their properties,” said Toby Cobb. “3650 delivers a responsive, efficient and transparent origination and servicing experience through the term of each loan and across all of our sponsor relationships.”

“The 3650 portfolio lending approach marks a return to bespoke capital solutions and responsive asset management,” said Jonathan Roth. “Our team’s experience in all facets of real estate debt and equity offers borrowers and equity partners a platform focused on creative problem-solving and top-notch customer service.”

“For more than 30 years I have enjoyed challenging conventional thinking in and around the commercial real estate industry,” said Jack Cohen, the industry veteran and former CEO of Cohen Financial, who joins 3650 REIT as a Managing Partner. “For too long, the market has too often failed in responding to the needs of both sponsors and mortgage bankers. At 3650, we have built a new platform and process from the ground up, combining the best of portfolio lending and the capital markets into one relationship-oriented, outcome-focused lending and services platform.”

Together with Cohen, Peter LaPointe will lead the 3650 REIT servicing and relationship management platform as President of Asset Services. “A critical lesson learned over the years is that CRE assets require hands-on management as markets and technologies change. With this in mind, strong sponsors seek a lender with responsive servicing and asset management that truly understands the “bricks and mortar” dynamics in their local markets,” said LaPointe, a 22-year veteran with prior origination and servicing leadership roles at LNR and Bayview Financial. “Timely and efficiently responding to sponsors’ commercially justifiable needs in protecting and growing value at their properties is the top priority for the 3650 relationship servicing team,” added Cohen.

“I have been originating in this space since 1994,” said Ken Dickey, the 3650 REIT Managing Partner leading fixed rate originations. “For nearly that entire period, strong sponsors have sought the loan product and service package 3650 is built to deliver. We have created a better platform and process and from that starting point will deliver better outcomes for our sponsors and intermediaries.”

With offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami (HQ), the fast-growing 3650 REIT team includes 26 professionals, the majority of whom have more than 20 years of experience. 3650 will also leverage the complementary capabilities of its sister companies Grass River Property and Grass River Capital which continue their respective Miami-based CRE equity and debt investment and service activities.

3650 REIT portfolio investment products include: •Long-term, first-lien mortgages on stabilized properties (5 to 10-year, fixed rate) •Bridge financing, including senior secured, mezzanine and preferred equity •Opportunistic investments •Relationship-focused loan servicing and asset management

About the Principals

Justin Kennedy

3650 REIT Co-Founder Justin Kennedy brings 32 years of CRE experience, including finance, investment, distressed assets and development. In 2013, Kennedy and Cobb co-founded 3650 REIT’s CRE development affiliate, Grass River Property, a leading South Florida developer and manager of mixed-use, urban-infill and transit-oriented properties. In partnership with leading institutional partners, Grass River owns 14 development and equity investments totaling more than 1.8 million SF. Prior to Grass River, Kennedy and Cobb served as Co-CEOs of LNR Property LLC. Mr. Kennedy led the firm’s strategic direction and investment activities across LNR’s global CRE debt, equity and distressed assets platforms. Prior to LNR, Mr. Kennedy served 11 years at Deutsche Bank as Managing Director and Global Head of Real Estate Capital Markets. Prior to Deutsche Bank, Mr. Kennedy was Head of CMBS Trading at Goldman Sachs and a member of the firm’s Principal Investment Group. He spent the first eight years of his career in the real estate development business in California and Colorado. Mr. Kennedy holds an A.B. in Economics from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from UCLA.

Toby Cobb

Mr. Cobb, Co-Founder, has 28 years of experience in commercial real estate investment and finance. In 2013, Cobb and Kennedy co-founded 3650 REIT’s CRE equity and development affiliate, Grass River Property, a leading South Florida developer. Prior to Grass River, Cobb and Kennedy were Co-CEOs leading the restructuring, management and eventual sale of LNR Property, LLC. Mr. Cobb built and led LNR’s loan origination platform, as well as leading its primary loan servicing and distressed assets servicing platforms which are among the largest in both the U.S. and Europe. Prior to LNR, Mr. Cobb was Managing Director and Co-Head of US Commercial Real Estate at Deutsche Bank leading fixed rate and GSE originations and its loan servicing platform. Prior to Deutsche Bank, Mr. Cobb played leading roles in CRE investment banking groups at DLJ and Citicorp Securities. Mr. Cobb holds a B.S. in Economics and Finance from Southern Methodist University, and an M.B.A. in Finance and International Business from New York University. Mr. Cobb is the Chairman, Emeritus and Board Member of the Master of Real Estate Development and Urbanism program at the University of Miami and a Trustee of the ULI.

Jonathan Roth

Mr. Roth, Co-Founder, brings 30 years of experience originating, structuring and servicing CRE debt and equity investments. Previously, Mr. Roth served as President of Canyon Partners Real Estate LLC. During his 18-year tenure at Canyon, Mr. Roth was instrumental in building a fully-integrated investment advisor as well as the formation and the investment activities of several investment vehicles which collectively invested approximately $5.6 billion in over 200 transactions. Prior to joining Canyon, Mr. Roth was a partner specializing in complex real estate transactions at the international law firm of Loeb & Loeb. Mr. Roth has served on multiple philanthropic boards and works with several leading medical institutions, including the USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine, UCLA Medical Center and Cedars Sinai Hospital. Mr. Roth currently sits on the Board of Governors for Cedars Sinai Hospital and the Advisory Board of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, and the Board of Advisors for the Finance and Audit Committee of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center Board. Mr. Roth holds a B.A. in English Literature from UCLA, and a J.D. from Loyola Law School.

Jack Cohen

Mr. Cohen has 37 years of experience in CRE finance, mortgage banking and loan servicing. From 1990 to 2015, Mr. Cohen served as Chief Executive Officer of Cohen Financial. Cohen Financial has been recognized since 1978 as a leading commercial mortgage banking and loan servicing enterprise and today is a unit of SunTrust Bank. Under Cohen’s leadership the “high touch” loan servicing platform grew to in excess of $35 billion. Mr. Cohen holds a B.A. in Economics from Claremont McKenna College and a B.S. in Civil Engineering and a M.S. in Construction Management from Stanford University. Mr. Cohen is a past Chairman of the Commercial Real Estate Finance Council, a past Board Member of the Mortgage Bankers Association and its Commercial Board of Directors, a past Trustee of Pitzer College, and a member of Urban Land Institute, MBA, and CREFC.

Ken Dickey

Mr. Dickey has 26 years of CRE lending and relationship management experience and leads the 3650 REIT fixed rate originations platform. Previously, Mr. Dickey was Managing Director and led origination for the CRE lending platform at The Bank of New York Mellon (“BONY”). Prior to BONY, Mr. Dickey served as President of Deutsche Bank Mortgage Capital where he worked together with Kennedy and Cobb for more than 10 years. During his tenure at Deutsche Bank, its fixed rate lending operations originated and distributed over 900 loans with principal balance over $12 billion. Prior to Deutsche Bank, Mr. Dickey served as Head of Origination for the Real Estate Capital Markets Group of First Union National Bank. Prior to First Union National Bank, Mr. Dickey played a lead origination role at DLJ. Mr. Dickey holds a B.A. in International Affairs from Lewis and Clark College.

Peter LaPointe

Mr. LaPointe has 21 years of experience in CRE loan origination and servicing, equity investment and development, and distressed assets acquisitions and management. In 2013, Mr. LaPointe joined Cobb and Kennedy during the formation of 3650 REIT’s affiliate, Grass River Property. Prior to Grass River, Mr. LaPointe served as President of LNR Archetype Financial Institution Services, a CRE debt investment and servicing division of LNR Property, LLC. Prior to LNR, Mr. LaPointe was a Managing Director at Bayview Financial, LP (“Bayview”) leading its CRE investment, lending and loan servicing businesses. Prior to Bayview, Mr. LaPointe was a senior manager with Republic Financial Corporation of Denver, Colorado, a specialty finance company sponsored by Cargill Financial Services Corporation. Mr. LaPointe holds a B.S. from Ithaca College and a J.D. from Roger Williams University, where he was a member of the law review.

About the Team

The fast-growing 3650 REIT team of 26 seasoned professionals also includes:

Andy Parower – Chief Credit Officer. Andy has over 30 years of CRE lending, investment and asset management experience, including at AIG and NY Life.

Malay Bansal – Head of Trading and Structuring. Malay previously held senior capital markets and trading roles at Bank of New York Mellon, Freddie Mac, and Merrill Lynch.

Mark Jefferis – General Counsel. Mark’s prior experience includes serving as Counsel at Sidley Austin LLP and as a Global Finance Associate at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP.

Randi Yezer – Head of Underwriting. Randi previously worked at Bank of New York Mellon and Deutsche Bank.

Ken Margala – Managing Director, Originations. Ken’s prior experience includes positions at Bank of New York Mellon and CCRE.

Jake Stahler – Managing Director, Originations. Jake’s prior experience includes positions at Bank of New York Mellon and Deutsche Bank.

Ernie Iriarte – Director, Originations. Ernie previously held positions at Bank of New York Mellon and CCRE.

Will Pierce – Vice President. Will joins 3650 REIT after four years working in its affiliate companies.

Ben Whittington – Vice President, Originations. Ben previously worked at Bank of New York Mellon and Wells Fargo.

Paul Garner – Vice President, Originations. Paul’s prior experience includes positions at SL Capital and CCRE.

Michael McCabe – Vice President, Originations. Michael previously worked at Five Mile Capital Partners.

Shin Bowers – Senior Associate, Originations. Shin’s prior experience includes positions at CBRE Global Investors and Fortress Investment Group.

Zach Merves – Associate, Originations. Zach previously worked at Bank of New York Mellon.

About 3650 REIT

3650 (“Thirty-Six Fifty”) REIT is a fully integrated, national CRE investment and services firm headquartered in Miami with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Newport Beach. For more than 20 years, 3650 REIT principals have played leading roles in the evolution of CRE debt markets with track records of success across CRE lending, mortgage banking, capital markets, loan servicing and distressed credit management. 3650 stands for the firm’s commitment to borrowers and equity partners: 3,650 days to service and asset manage each ten-year loan with the goal of helping borrowers and equity partners maximize cash flow and grow value in the rapidly evolving CRE landscape. The firm was co-founded by Toby Cobb, Justin Kennedy and Jonathan Roth. For more information visit: www.3650REIT.com

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SOURCE: news provided by STL.Properties via PRNewswire.com, published on STL.NEWS by St. Louis Media, LLC (PS)

#3650 REIT #Commercial Real Estate #commercial real estate finance industry veterans #stl.properties #STLRealEstate.News

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the-record-newspaper · 7 years ago

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Candidates lined up for North Wilkesboro’s mayoral, commissioners races

Incumbent mayor faces newcomer

By JERRY LANKFORD

Record Editor

In North Wilkesboro a well-seasoned incumbent mayor is facing an opponent new to the political arena this election season.

Robert Johnson, 74, owner of Johnson-Wood Electric, is seeking his third term as mayor. He was first elected to the town board as a commissioner in 1983, served three four-year terms, then took off for six years. In 2001, he was re-elected to town board for two more four year terms as commissioner. He was first elected mayor in 2009. He has also been a member of the High Country Council of Governments Board, which consists of seven-counties, for nearly a decade and served as chairman for two years.

His challenger is Adam Higdon, 43, a telecommunicater for Wilkes County 911 Center.

Both candidates were submitted a list of questions by The Record. The following are their responses:

Question 1: Why are you running?

Johnson: “I’m running because I care about the town and its citizens having a public servant, which is what I am as an elected official. That is what I stand by. That’s what we are when elected. That’s our duty and it’s in the oath we take. When I started my tenure as a public servant, I did it because I had experiences with town official at that time not representing the people from top to bottom – the upper income to lower income. Favoritism was being used to the advantage to those who have. That was part of what I experienced being a citizen. At that time I decided I would get involved to institute a change.

Higdon: “I hope to accomplish a better way of life, provide additional opportunities, establish population growth and ensure a future for younger generations. I have always worked with the public and look forward to continuing to serve my community.”

Question 2: What qualifies you to hold the post?

Johnson: “Having the experience that I have serving on the board, I feel gives me the qualifications I need to run.”

Higdon: “During my past work experience I have assisted the public with their needs for 20 years. My most recent role requires a strong ability to fully listen to the needs of all individuals and determine the best course of action to assist and improve the situation.”

Question 3: If elected, what are your goals?

Johnson: “The first one would be getting the water intake project done so that our children and grandchildren can have a source of good, clean water for the rest of their lives. Another goal I have is getting sewer under U.S. 421 on the 115 overpass to provide sewer for future growth of businesses and the Lynnwoode area. Some people feel like you’re grasping at straws when you bring it up, but I want to try to help make something happen at the old North Wilkesboro Speedway.”

Higdon: “My goals are to focus and improve the infrastructure for our citizens. I would also like to ensure that we have public involvement, we need to have an intake process to allow input from our citizens. We could prioritize and implement their ideas to ensure we are focused on common goals.”

Question 4: What are the main issues facing the town?

Johnson: “The main issue I foresee is to continue our streetscape on Main Street. Also I want us to help those who would have interest in opening a store downtown. We are working on those issues and are trying to be a good neighbor to those who have an interest in these projects.”

Higdon: We continue to see businesses and our younger generation leave our area. We need to develop a strategic plan to help our economic growth and renew North Wilkesboro to its former glory.

Question 5: What would like to see done with the $15 million lease payment made by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center on its lease of WRMC?

Johnson: “We have a plan that the manager has developed. We’re kind of following his and the administration’s advice on how to use it. We’re planning on using about half and putting the rest in an interest bearing account and have it for future use. The other half, we had department heads prioritize needs. Projects like street paving, sidewalk repairs, water and sewer improvements and recreation for young and senior citizens. Our citizens also need to give their input, not just the people of North Wilkesboro, but all of Wilkes. They’ve made the hospital what it is today. It’s not about me it’s about us.”

Higdon: “My first priority would be improving the infrastructure, we have the opportunity to make improvements that will benefit all of our citizens. The $15 million lease payment, if used properly could ensure that we have the ability to support and supply necessary services to attract new businesses.”

Six running for two seats on North Wilkesboro board

By JERRY LANKFORD

Record Editor

In North Wilkesboro, two incumbent town commissioners will face four challengers for their up-for-grabs seats on the town board during the Nov. 7 elections.

Commissioner Debbie Ferguson, 64, a retired registered dietitian, is seeking her fourth elected four-year term.

Fellow incumbent Bart Hayes, 57, a business consultant, is running for his third four-year term.

The challengers are:

Angela J. Day, 47, a real estate broker and 17-year owner of Ivy Ridge Traditions in Downtown North Wilkesboro.

Rob Horn, 37, a firefighter for the Town of North Wilkesboro and a mechanic.

Michael Parsons, 58, owner of Michael’s Jewelry in Downtown North Wilkesboro.

Larry S. Taylor, 48, lead instructor of Communications at Wilkes Community College.

The following are the questions submitted to the candidates and their responses:

Question 1) Why are you running?

Ferguson: “I find the work of serving the people of the town to be rewarding and hope to have the support to be elected to one more term of office. The town board has been working on a number of projects that I would like to be able to able to see come to fruition such as assuring the town citizens have a reliable and adequate source of water for the future, completion of the Municipal Services complex, the ongoing revitalization of our downtown area, to wisely direct the use of the funds received from the long term lease of our hospital to name a few projects.”

Hayes: “I want to see this water intake project through I want to see us make water more readily available to all the citizens of Wilkes while not being done on the backs of the residents of North Wilkesboro. We looking to sending water east toward Ronda and with the hospital funds, we need to make sure they are secure for generations to come.”

Day: “I am deeply committed to growing and promoting North Wilkesboro. I want to work with town staff, community leaders, and citizens to create a unique destination that draws visitors, family, and businesses to North Wilkesboro.”

Horn: “I just want to serve the town. I want to do what I can to help out.”

Parsons: “As a North Wilkesboro Commissioner I hope to help lead the town and community forward as together we face the challenges of smaller towns and work to solve them. I will strive to earn the trust of the citizens of North Wilkesboro and serve their interests.”

Taylor: “I run because of the current board’s willingness to disregard open meetings and public records law. This shows it lacks basic competence and commitment to service. Transparency is vital to accountability in government. Protecting the public’s right to examine actions, is vital. A strong effort to establish both visibility and clarity of intent are needed for this board.”

Question 2) What qualifies you to hold the post?

Ferguson: “I feel qualified to hold the post after serving effectively for the past 12 years as a town commissioner. The town has come through the very difficult years of the recession and the work we have been doing seems to be resulting in positive changes within the town. The UNC School of Government, the expert advisors for elected boards in North Carolina, say that communities having continuity in the elected leadership benefit from having experienced leaders. I am able to provide continuity to our board. Prior to being elected to the position of commissioner, I served about 15 years on the Planning Board and simultaneously worked as a founding member of what is now the North Wilkesboro Downtown Partnership. I have served as the town's appointed member to the hospital board for nine years.”

Hayes: “I’m a successful business owner. I have a passion for the community and experience on the board. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve talked to the guy sweeping the floor to presidents of corporations and have had successful interface with all of them.”

Day: “I am a member of the North Wilkesboro Planning Board as well as a 15-year volunteer and two-term Board President of the Downtown North Wilkesboro Partnership, which has allowed me to work within groups whose goals are for the benefit of North Wilkesboro.”

Horn: “I’ve had numerous different leadership positions in my life. I feel I have good-decision making skills. I want to do the best that I can for the town.”

Parsons: “I have owned and operated a small business for 32 years in the same location downtown. Learning to adapt to changing times, and maintaining my principles have given me valuable skills. Also, my time on the planning board has provided me with significant insights into the workings of city government.”

Taylor: “My career and education required me to develop strong analytical problem solving skills. This skillset makes me well-suited to the work of local political service.”

Question 3: “If elected, what are your goals?

Ferguson: “My goals for the town are to work to assure a safe and adequate water supply to meet the town's needs for the future, to help develop goals and parameters to assure that the income from the long term lease of the hospital is used to benefit as many of our citizens as possible, to complete a Municipal Services complex that will meet the needs of the Police and Fire Departments for the next 50 years, to encourage ongoing revitalization of our downtown and historic neighborhoods and to assure that the town employees have what is needed to adequately do their jobs for the town. I would like to work to encourage citizen involvement in the various opportunities to serve the town as volunteers on the committees now available and committees that could be formed to benefit the town and to serve as a point of entry for serving as prepared elected officials in the future. Some of the opportunities available are in Planning and Zoning, the Board of Adjustments, the Housing Authority, Parks and Recreation, the Downtown Partnership.”

Hayes: “I want to see the two towns continue to work closely together and toward further conversations about combining the towns. If we were one town of 10,000 people, we would be more marketable to the outside world. Our ability to attract businesses and build tax base would be greater. Grant funding for projects would be more easily obtained. Sometimes it’s like we’re pulling the rope in two directions. The outside sees us as two towns that bicker. If we worked together we could do so many great things in regards to enhancing quality of life.”

Day: The following are four of my 19 goals included in my agenda to encourage further growth in North Wilkesboro: First - Promote Downtown North Wilkesboro as a prime location to incubate businesses. Second - Establish a Historic Preservation Committee to preserve the numerous historic buildings and assure North Wilkesboro retains its character and history. Third - Identify existing parks and public lands to renovate and serve as gathering places for family outings and recreation. Fourth - Support expanded police and fire facilities and maintain up-to-date training and equipment.”

Horn: “I’d like to see North Wilkesboro have a better economic presence. I’d like to see more business come back into town and to see our commerce grow.”

Parsons: “If elected I would like to see the water intake project move forward. I feel we have a need in this project for future growth of the town. If elected we need to address the need for building a new fire station. The existing facility is no longer viable to meet the needs of the fire department and allow future growth. I would also like to see the promotion of the town as great community to live and raise a family. I would work with any and all means available to create that environment. I would work to engage the community to keep an open dialog either face to face, at public meetings or through digital interaction. I feel that the free flow of information is never a bad idea.”

Taylor: “If elected, I will push for compliance with state law and Constitutional principles in the handling of town business.”

Question 4: What are the main issues facing the town?

Ferguson: “One of the most significant issues facing the town is the need to recruit young professionals to live in our town. I believe we can have a positive impact on this matter by creating a clean, attractive downtown area. My hope is that the town can continue to purchase, renovate and sell derelict properties that the private market cannot afford to renovate with our current economic conditions. Hopefully, the initial funds can be turned over for the next building purchase and restoration and eventually, the private market will be able to absorb the costs of renovation and business operation without town intervention. The young families we hope to recruit often want to live near the downtown area with restaurants, shopping and recreational opportunities within walking distances. Focusing on creating this environment may be a key to growing the population of North Wilkesboro.”

Hayes: “Our biggest challenge is tax base. We’ve lost nearly all our industry. But we still have quality of life, and a friendly small town atmosphere. It’s a good place to live. And we’re working diligently to make it a good place to do business.”

Day: “It is not as simple as a list of issues. We need to invest in our community to assure families will make North Wilkesboro their home. The development of additional housing is a must, along with prioritizing public safety, road maintenance, public parks and gathering places, and bolstering tourism.”

Horn: “We just need to make sure money is spent in the right places and not haphazardly.”

Parsons: “Growth and economic development is the primary concern for all small communities. Finding jobs and opportunities that will keep our young people here, or wanting to come back is vital. Finding areas that we can attract to help with these issues is paramount. Other issues we need to address are infrastructure and building property values.”

Taylor: “North Wilkesboro has a budget in the millions of dollars. This board will soon be involved with contracts and projects that put these and other public funds to task. This means the public has literally millions of reasons to want transparency in the decision-making process. With this much public money floating around, residents are, or should be much more concerned with the cavalier nature of this board’s handling of business. It is time for residents to consider holding their town board to a higher professional standard. I offer them the opportunity to start now.”

Question 5: What would like to see done with the $15 million lease payment made by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center on its lease of WRMC?

Ferguson: “At this point, the town board has set up policies and procedures, required by General Statutes, to properly invest the $15 million dollar lease payment for the short term, while the board is determining how to best utilize the money. At our 2017 Board Retreat there was discussion about spending a portion of the money in the short term, perhaps a third of the money within 5 to 10 years, and the remainder of the funds be placed in long term investments. The short term spending could be used to boost programs to help regain some of the public investment that has been lost in North Wilkesboro as the economy has declined in rural NC communities over the past 15 to 20 years. The remainder of the funds could be protected for long term needs and fiscal stability. The town manager, with the help of the town staff, has developed a list of short and long term goals for North Wilkesboro. I hope the mayor and commissioners can develop a list of long and short term goals as well, then merge the two lists to develop one set of long and short term goals to present to the public at public hearings. With the help of experienced facilitators, the public could prioritize the presented goals and offer new ideas for consideration to the board. I believe public input is critical to utilize the funds responsibly.”

Hayes: “The hospital is where it’s at because of the generosity of many citizen all over Wilkes County, not only North Wilkesboro. The money from the hospital should be used on things to improve quality of life for everyone in the county and not supplement the general fund of the town. There are conservatives and liberals alike who feel the same way.”

Day: “The decision of how to utilize the $15 million lease payment should not be made by one group without citizen’s input. We need to bring together a working committee made up of commissioners, town staff, and citizens to prioritize the Town’s needs. I would like to see continued investment in neighborhoods, repaving, identification and renovation of land for additional public parks, pedestrian friendly streets and sidewalks, and continued support of the police and fire departments.”

Horn: “I would need more details about our options before I could answer that. I’d like to see it utilized to benefit the town.”

Parsons: “The money received from the hospital lease is a great boost to our town. I am for being responsible and using the money wisely. Recently the board proposed that at least half or more of these funds be set aside in approved governmental investments. I feel saving these funds is the correct method to allow the town to have future funding. The balance of these funds should be allocated on a priority of need to repair or replace much needed infrastructure. The projects are North Wilkesboro's responsibility; so, these funds should be wisely used.”

Taylor: “The revenue from the hospital lease should be used to create on-going support for a variety of community improvement and maintenance projects that affect the image and residential experience of the town without creating financial burden. I would favor and recommend a shorter-term rotating investment strategy that could be manageable by our own finance officials. This might offer smaller but still substantial consistent yields without wasteful management fees. Such an approach could and should promote public input in funding choices and keep the principle ever near for sudden emergency investment need.”

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oldguardaudio · 7 years ago

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Oliver Stone agrees with Pres Trump and Putin – election intervention is FAKE NEWS

FAKE NEWS uncovered at HoakAndChange.com

Mullet Wrapper @ Hoax And Change

Listen to The Big Idea

Trump marginalizes experts, debases expertise

Newly named White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci listens Friday to press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders speak in the briefing room. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

BY JAMES HOHMANN with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve

THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump, the first president in American history to take office with no prior governing or military experience, has appointed someone with no professional communications experience to be White House communications director.

Making his debut on the Sunday shows, former hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci said his new boss still does not accept the consensus of professional analysts and case officers across the intelligence community that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election.

“He basically said to me, ‘Hey, you know … Maybe they did it, maybe they didn’t do it,’” Scaramucci said on CNN.

These two things are not unrelated. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the knowledge and wisdom of experts while elevating nonexperts who lack relevant experience into important jobs across the federal government. This gets less attention than other story lines, but it has been a hallmark of the president’s first six months in power.

Party planner Lynne Patton, who helped plan Eric Trump’s wedding but had no professional experience in housing, was appointed last month to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s office for the region that covers New York and New Jersey.

Last week Trump nominated someone who is not a credentialed scientist to be the Agriculture Department’s chief scientist. Sam Clovis has described himself as “extremely skeptical” about the expert consensus on climate change. The post he’s been tapped for has been occupied by a string of individuals with advanced degrees in science or medicine.

News broke Friday that Trump will nominate a prominent coal lobbyist, Andrew Wheeler, to serve as the No. 2 at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Glacier National Park Superintendent Jeff Mow speaks about forest fires in Montana in 2015. Trump appointees in Washington blocked him from talking with Mark Zuckeberg when he visited the park the weekend before last. Mow’s 26-year career with the Park Service has included roles as law enforcement ranger, chief ranger and superintendent at seven Park Service sites before he took the top job at Glacier. He is known as a climate expert who frequently tells visitors that the retreating ice sheets at Glacier are evidence of a climate undergoing rapid change. (Aaric Bryan/The Daily Inter Lake via AP)

— Meanwhile, the Trumpists have actively taken steps to prevent experts from doing their jobs. The EPA removed several agency websites in April that contained detailed climate data and scientific information, including one that had been cited to challenge statements made by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. One of the Web pages that was shuttered had existed for nearly two decades and explained what climate change is and how it worked.

The weekend before last, Trump’s political appointees at the Interior Department abruptly removed two top climate experts from a delegation scheduled to show Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg around Glacier National Park.

— The administration is heavily populated with people who lack qualifications that would have been prerequisites to get the same jobs in past Republican and Democratic administrations. It starts at the top: No one not named Trump seriously believes that the president’s daughter and son-in-law could have gotten their plum West Wing jobs if not for nepotism.

Jared Kushner purportedly proposed to Russia’s ambassador the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin last December, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring by the U.S. government.

The president, for his part, didn’t want any professionals from the government, including the Russia expert on the National Security Council, to sit in on his meeting with Vladimir Putin. The Russians also reportedly recommended that a note taker be present, but Trump refused.

The White House spin on CBO, annotated

— Previous presidents have worked the referees, but Trump has taken it to a whole new level. He’s declared war on any ref who calls him for fouls.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the revised Senate Republican health-care bill would increase the number of uninsured people by 22 million people over the next 10 years if it passed. Knowing the numbers would be abysmal, the administration placed an op-ed preemptively dismissing the independent forecast. “Although the media and the political left will certainly seize on it, the CBO’s estimates will be little more than fake news,” wrote Marc Short, Trump’s director of legislative affairs, and Brian Blase, a special assistant to the president for the National Economic Council.

Trump attacked federal judges who found that his travel ban was unconstitutional. Then he criticized professional lawyers in his own Justice Department for pursuing a “watered down” version of the ban that could withstand judicial scrutiny.

The day after he took office, the president personally pressured the head of the National Park Service to back up his overinflated claims about the size of his inauguration crowd. He also vented that the agency had tweeted a picture that showed how relatively few people actually turned out.

The director of the independent Office of Government Ethics, a persistent critic of the Trump administration’s approach to ethics, stepped down last week nearly six months before his term was scheduled to end. Walter M. Shaub Jr. drew the ire of administration officials when he challenged Trump to fully divest from his business empire and chastised Kellyanne Conway for promoting Ivanka Trump products from the White House briefing room.

In an administration characterized by its embrace of what Conway notoriously called “alternative facts,” the systemic effort to sideline experts who challenge Trump has been a feature, not a bug. But none of this is terribly surprising in the context of the campaign: Trump said he knew more about war than the generals. He cast doubt upon the medical community consensus that vaccines do not cause autism. And he said a federal judge of Mexican descent couldn’t objectively adjudicate a fraud lawsuit against Trump University because of his heritage. Speaker Paul Ryan called this “the textbook definition” of a racist statement at the time.

— Trump’s embrace of experts and expertise is situational. Candidate Trump often claimed that the government’s unemployment rate was “totally fiction,” even though the economists who tabulate it are insulated from political pressure. “Don’t believe these phony numbers,” Trump said at a rally last year. “The [real] number is probably 28 [percent], 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.”

But when there was a good jobs report in March, which showed the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent, then-press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump now believes the same numbers. “They may have been phony in the past, but they are very real now,” Spicer said.

Trump calls for increased defense spending

— In a new book entitled “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters,” Tom Nichols describes Trump’s victory last November as “undeniably one of the most recent—and one of the loudest—trumpets sounding the impending death of expertise.”

The president defended his lack of specific policy knowledge during a rally on the eve of the Wisconsin primary in 2016. “They say, ‘Oh, Trump doesn’t have experts,’” Trump said. “You know, I’ve always wanted to say this: … The experts are terrible! They say, ‘Donald Trump needs a foreign policy adviser.’ … But supposing I didn’t have one, would it be worse than what we’re doing now?”

Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island, believes the “death of expertise and its associated attacks on knowledge fundamentally undermine the republican system of government.”

“The abysmal literacy, both political and general, of the American public is the foundation for all of these problems. It is the soil in which all of the other dysfunctions have taken root and prospered, with the 2016 election only its most recent expression,” Nichols writes. “Americans have increasingly unrealistic expectations of what their political and economic system can provide. This sense of entitlement is one reason they are continually angry at ‘experts’ and especially at ‘elitists,’ a word that in modern American usage can mean almost anyone with any education who refuses to coddle the public’s mistaken beliefs. When told that ending poverty or preventing terrorism is a lot harder than it looks, Americans roll their eyes. Unable to comprehend all of the complexity around them, they choose instead to comprehend almost none of it and then sullenly blame experts, politicians and bureaucrats for seizing control of their lives.”

Professionals in every industry report that laypeople increasingly challenge their know-how. “No area of American life is immune to the death of expertise,” writes Nichols, who worked for the late Republican Sen. John Heinz (Pa.) early in his career. “Doctors routinely tussle with patients over drugs. Lawyers will describe clients losing money, and sometimes their freedom, because of unheeded advice. Teachers will relate stories of parents insisting that their children’s exam answers are right even when they’re demonstrably wrong. Relators tell of clients who bought homes against their experienced advice and ended up trapped in a money pit.”

The 252-page book is packed with illustrations. “What I find so striking today is not that people dismiss expertise, but that they do so with such frequency, on so many issues, and with such anger,” Nichols laments. “It may be that attacks on expertise are more obvious due to the ubiquity of the Internet, the undisciplined nature of conversation on social media, or the demands of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. But there is a self-righteousness and fury to this new rejection of expertise that suggest, at least to me, that this isn’t just mistrust or questioning or the pursuit of alternatives: it is narcissism, coupled to a disdain for expertise as some sort of exercise in self-actualization.”

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Jared Kushner. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:

— Jared Kushner plans to detail to Congress in closed-door sessions four meetings he had with Russian lawmakers during the 2016 campaign and transition period, according to a breaking report from The Washington Post’s Phil Rucker. The first son-in-law will “deny any improper contacts or collusion … Kushner describes his interactions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and other Russian officials as typical contacts in his role as the Trump campaign’s liaison to foreign governments, according to an 11-page prepared statement he plans to submit for the record, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post … In his testimony, which will be submitted to the congressional committees before he answers questions from lawmakers, Kushner says he has had only ‘limited contacts’ with Russian representatives and denies any wrongdoing.

‘I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government,’ Kushner writes. ‘I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.’”

More from Phil’s story: “[Kushner] writes that his first meeting with a Russian official was in April of 2016 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where Trump delivered a major foreign policy speech, the execution of which Kushner says he oversaw. Kushner writes that he attended a reception to thank the event’s host, Dimitri Simes, the publisher of The National Interest, a foreign policy magazine, where Simes introduced Kushner to four ambassadors, including Kislyak. … Kushner denies having had any other contact with Kislyak during the campaign, disputing a report by Reuters that he had had two phone calls with the ambassador. … Kushner also describes attending a June 2016 meeting organized by his brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr., with a Russian attorney. He says it was listed on his calendar as ‘Meeting: Don Jr. | Jared Kushner.’ He writes that he arrived at the meeting late, and when he got there the Russian lawyer was talking about a ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children. ‘I had no idea why that topic was being raised and quickly determined that my time was not well-spent at this meeting,’ Kushner writes. …‘Reviewing emails recently confirmed my memory that the meeting was a waste of our time and that, in looking for a polite way to leave and get back to my work, I actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after I had been there for 10 or so minutes and wrote, ‘Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get our of meeting.’ ”

Kushner slated to meet behind closed doors with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee today, as lawmakers question him in the intensifying Russian probe. He will also meet privately with members of the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. Devlin Barrett reports: “The Senate Judiciary Committee had planned to question Donald Trump Jr. and [Paul Manafort] this week, but that has been delayed indefinitely while the committee continues to negotiate with the men’s attorneys … Some lawyers not involved in the case expressed surprise that, given the potential legal pitfalls of the criminal investigation, Kushner or any other Trump advisers would take the risk of talking to Congress … ‘It’s a very difficult tightrope to walk,’ said Justin Dillon, a former federal prosecutor … ‘He has to balance the political fallout from taking the Fifth Amendment with the potential criminal fallout of talking.’ Dillon predicted anything Kushner tells the committee will be shared with Mueller.

“The Kushner interview also comes after the president and his legal team have discussed his power to pardon those close to him and even himself. Dillon said the possibility of a future pardon could affect Kushner’s overall legal strategy. ‘No one who has paid any attention to this administration should doubt that if Kushner ever needs a pardon, he will get one,’ he said.”

Nine dead in Texas in case of suspected smuggling

GET SMART FAST:

Texas authorities are investigating a suspected human-trafficking operation after at least 39 people were found packed into a sweltering tractor-trailer in San Antonio. Officials said nine of the victims have already died of the severe heat, and many others — some as young as 15 — were rushed to the hospital in extremely critical condition. (Avi Selk and Eva Ruth Moravec)

Employees of the hospital treating Charlie Gard have received death threats. Great Ormond Street Hospital, where the terminally ill child has received treatment, said in a statement, “Thousands of abusive messages have been sent to doctors and nurses whose life’s work is to care for sick children.” (CNN)

Officials in California are working to thwart an aggressive wildfire near Yosemite National Park. Authorities said the fire has scorched more than 119 square miles, and could take two more weeks to contain. (AP)

Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) former primary rival called on him to resign. Kelli Ward, who is now running to unseat the other Arizona senator Jeff Flake, said in a statement that McCain’s cancer is “both devastating and debilitating” and he “owes it to the people of Arizona to step aside.” She then suggested that the governor may appoint her to fill McCain’s seat if he does resign. (Kristine Phillips)

Florida police said they will seek possible criminal charges for a group of teenagers who mocked and laughed at a disabled man as he drowned.Authorities said the five teens — who posted a video of the man’s tragic death to social media earlier this month — could be charged under a little-known statute that penalizes anyone who fails to report a death. (Alex Horton)

A Florida man is recovering after he contracted flesh-eating bacteria through blisters during a hike in New Hampshire earlier this summer. He had checked himself into a hospital shortly after returning home from the trip, his family said — and then spent the next month fighting for his life. (Cleve R. Wootson Jr.)

The price of college is growing at the lowest rate in decades. Tuition costs increased by just 1.9 percent in the past year, largely mirroring overall inflation. (Wall Street Journal)

More than 60 percent of cancer patients are older adults — but according to a new FDA analysis, just 40 percent of patients who participate in cancer clinical trials are over the age of 65. Researchers said the underrepresentation could make it difficult to assess how effective — or harmful — certain treatments could be among that age group. (Judith Graham)

Almost half of millennials think that chief executives should get involved in advocacy. According to a new survey, 47 percent of millennials believe that chief executives have a responsibility to weigh in on pressing social issues compared to just 28 percent of older Americans. (Jena McGregor)

Jordan Spieth won the British Open on Sunday, netting the 23-year-old Texan a third major title. He credits his caddie — a former sixth-grade math teacher — for helping him keep a cool head. (Chuck Culpepper)

Michael Phelps didn’t really race a shark. Much to the disappointment of many viewers, Phelps swam the 100-meter freestyle alongside a computer-generated great white — who did, in fact, win the race. (Scott Allen)

Scaramucci, senators discuss presidential pardon

TEAM TRUMP CAN’T GET ITS STORY STRAIGHT:

— “The White House offered conflicting views Sunday of whether [Trump] supports the Russia sanctions legislation in Congress, with his top spokesmen contradicting one another just days after launching plans for a more effective messaging strategy,” David Nakamura and Ashley Parker report. “Speaking on ABC’s ‘This Week,’ [SarahHuckabee Sanders] said that despite opposing Congress’s initial attempt to impose sanctions on Russia, the White House supports the Russia sanctions bill that congressional leaders announced Saturday. ‘The administration is supportive of being tough on Russia, particularly in putting these sanctions in place,’” Sanders said. ‘“The original piece of legislation was poorly written, but we were able to work with the House and Senate, and the administration is happy with the ability to do that and make those changes that were necessary, and we support where the legislation is now.”

But newly minted communications director Anthony Scaramucci said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that he did not know how the president felt about the bill: “You’ve got to ask [Trump] that,” he said. “It’s my second or third day on the job. My guess is that he’s going to make that decision shortly.” (“My bad,” Scaramucci later told the New York Timesin a text when asked about the different comments. “Go with what Sarah is saying as I am new to the information.”)

“The result was a team that still looked uncertain about how to characterize the president’s position on a significant matter that has been central to his first six months in office,” our colleagues write. “Trump brought Scaramucci, who had been a fierce defender of the president on cable news shows, into the West Wing to help shore up a press shop that he believed was doing a poor job of defending him and explaining his message to the public. However, historians said presidents often make the mistake of conflating a messaging problem with their real challenge — a political crisis.”

— And Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow also appeared to contradict Scaramucci on whether Trump has been discussing his power to issue pardons: “We have not, and I continue to not, have conversations with the president of the United States regarding pardons,” Sekulow said on ABC’s “This Week.” But on “Fox News Sunday,” Scaramucci said he and Trump had discussed his pardoning authorities as recently as last week. “I’m in the Oval Office with the president last week, we’re talking about that — he brought that up,” Scaramucci said. “There’s nobody around him that has to be pardoned,” he added. “He was just making the statement about the power of pardons.”

— On “Fox News Sunday,” Scaramucci spoke out against a stream of White House leaks that have outraged the president and his top aides, vowing to “take dramatic action to stop those leaks” in his new role. “Something is going on in the White House that the president does not like, and we’re going to fix it,” he said.

— Meanwhile, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said the media is “too focused” on Russia, telling CNN’s Brian Stelter that the investigation is “not a big story.” CNN Money’s Jill Disis reports: “’You look at his job through the lens of Russia. I look at his job through the lens of America,’ she told Stelter on ‘Reliable Sources.’ She added: ‘You’ve got this disproportionate, out of whack, unequal coverage on Russia with nothing there.’ Conway claimed the media had not devoted enough attention to the country’s opioid epidemic, the policy at the heart of the health care debate in Congress, the stock market, and the job market. Stelter told Conway that ‘it sounds like you should be an assignment editor.’ ‘Why would I want that?’ she shot back. ‘I’m counsel to the president.’

— Scaramucci is also reportedly working to mend Trump’s incendiary relationship with CNN. BuzzFeed News’ Steven Perlberg reports: “In a transcript of comments Scaramucci made Sunday on a hot microphone between appearances on Fox News, CNN, and CBS News … Scaramucci described his mindset when he took the lectern at his first press briefing on Friday … ‘In the back of my mind I have to call on CNN and send a message to [CNN President Jeff] Zucker that we are back in business,’ Scaramucci said, according to the transcript … He referred to Zucker having ‘helped me get the job by hitting those guys,’ a reference to the network’s decision to force the resignation of three employees over a retracted Russia article that mentioned Scaramucci.According to the transcript, Scaramucci — who was filming the interviews remotely — joked that Zucker is ‘not getting a placement fee for getting me the job.’ Scaramucci confirmed to BuzzFeed News that he made the comments and said that some of his colorful remarks were jokes.”

— … And some Washington insiders are wondering how much longer Reince Priebus will stick around as chief of staff. Axios’s Jonathan Swan reports: “President Trump knew that appointing [Scaramucci] as communications director would humiliate Reince, who fought hard against it. … If we’ve learned anything so far about this President, it’s that in real life he actually hates saying ‘you’re fired.’ So what might it take for Reince to quit? Reince has very few true allies inside the building. At this point, they don’t stretch much further than his personal assistant and the RNC holdovers on the press team. … It’s unclear at this point how he survives much longer, and the breeziness with which the President humiliates him has even his enemies wincing in sympathy.”

Will Trump sign a new Russia sanctions bill? White House, senators respond.

THERE’S A BEAR IN THE WOODS:

— Trump’s stance on a Russia sanctions bill took on renewed urgency Friday after a deal was brokered to end a weeks-long stalemate in Congress over the legislation. Mike DeBonis and Karoun Demirjian report: “The House [is] preparing to vote next week on a bill that would prevent President Trump from lifting measures against Moscow. House leaders agreed to vote on an expanded version of the bill after adding sanctions aimed at freezing North Korea’s nuclear program and draining the government of revenue to fund it. … The version of the bill posted on a House website just before midnight Friday addresses House procedural concerns about in which chamber the bill would originate, removes the provision that blacklists energy companies from entering into oil development projects if any Russian firm is involved, and delays defense and intelligence sector sanctions while asking the administration to clarify which Russian entities would fall within those sectors.”

— Europe is already planning some form of retaliation if the U.S. enacts [congressional] sanctions [against Russia], which could leave European companies vulnerable to intervention farther down the road. Politico’s Ryan Heath reports: “The biggest affected interest would be the mooted Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, itself a source of political controversy in the EU, though the Commission note says ‘the impact would in reality be much wider.’ Germany and Austria lashed out at the proposed sanctions in June, accusing the U.S. of politicizing its economic interest in selling shipments of liquefied natural gas to Europe, which would compete with projects like Nord Stream 2 or the Southern Gas Corridor from the Caspian.”

— Both Trump and Putin had sought to avoid further sanctions. The New York Times’ David E. Sanger reports: “How [the new sanctions] happened is a story of two global leaders overplaying their hands. Mr. Putin is beginning to pay a price for what John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, described last week as the Russian president’s fateful decision last summer to try to use stolen computer data to support Mr. Trump’s candidacy. For his part, Mr. Trump ignited the movement in Congress by repeatedly casting doubt on that intelligence finding, then fueled it by confirming revelation after revelation about previously denied contacts between his inner circle and a parade of Russians. … With the new sanctions, [Putin’s election interference] now also appears to have set back his long-term strategy: to get out from under a sanctions regime that, along with low oil prices, has stunted his country’s economy.”

— Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) called Sunday on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, following reports that he discussed campaign matters with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak last year. Tory Newmyer reports: “’What I do know is what I read, which is that I guess someone in Kislyak’s position can sometimes distort what he says when he is reporting back to build himself up,’” Franken said on CNN’s “State of the Union”. ‘I also saw in those reports that Kislyak isn’t that type. And it seems to me that since [Sessions] hasn’t been terribly truthful regarding these things that it’s more likely that what Kislyak was saying was the case.” Franken said he believes the panel’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley, also wants the attorney general to testify on the matter.

— Kislyak concluded his assignment as Russian ambassador to the United States this weekend. The AP reports: “The Russian Embassy in Washington announced on Twitter that Kislyak’s tenure ended on Saturday. Kislyak’s successor has not been announced, although it is widely expected to be Anatoly Antonov, a deputy foreign minister and former deputy defense minister seen as a hardliner regarding the United States.”

— “Local and state government agencies from Oregon to Connecticut say they are using a Russian brand of security software despite the federal government’s instructions to its own agencies not to buy the software over concerns about cyberespionage,” Jack Gillum and Aaron C. Davis report: “The federal agency in charge of purchasing, the [GSA], this month removed Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab from its list of approved vendors. In doing so, the agency’s statement suggested a vulnerability exists in Kaspersky that could give the Russian government backdoor access to the systems it protects, though they offered no explanation or evidence of it. The GSA’s move on July 11 has left state and local governments to speculate about the risks of sticking with the company or abandoning taxpayer-funded contracts, sometimes at great cost. … Kaspersky also has been purchased for use by the federal government in recent years, including the Bureau of Prisons and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”

— Meanwhile, “[Jared Kushner] secured a multimillion-dollar Manhattan real estate deal with a Soviet-born oligarch whose company was cited in a major New York money laundering case now being probed by members of Congress,” the Guardian’s Wendy Dent, Ed Pilkington and Shaun Walker report. “[Lev] Leviev, a global tycoon known as the ‘king of diamonds’, was a business partner of the Russian-owned company Prevezon Holdings that was at the center of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit launched in New York. Under the leadership of US attorney Preet Bharara, who was fired by Trump in March, prosecutors pursued Prevezon for allegedly attempting to use Manhattan real estate deals to launder money stolen from the Russian treasury. … [In 2015,] Kushner paid $295m to acquire several floors of the old New York Times building at 43rd street in Manhattan from the US branch of Leviev’s company, Africa Israel Investments (AFI), and its partner Five Mile Capital. The sale has been identified as of possible interest to the Mueller investigation.”

Sen. Susan Collins talks to reporters as she walks through the Senate subway last week. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

THIS IS THE WEEK (OR IS IT?) ON HEALTH CARE:

— Mitch McConnell appears determined to hold a vote on health care this week, even as support for the measure, as well as which specific measure will be voted on, remain unclear. Amy Goldstein reports: “Central questions include whether enough Senate Republicans will converge on any version of their leaders’ health-care plan and whether significant aspects of the legislation being considered can fit within arcane parliamentary rules. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) indicated on Sunday that the majority party may not have enough support to prevail on even a first step — a routine vote to begin the floor debate. … [McConnell will be] bringing to the floor an anti-ACA bill passed by the House this spring and allowing senators a sort of free-for-all for substituting in either of the Senate measures or new iterations. ‘We are still on track . . . to have a vote early this week,’ a McConnell spokesman said on Sunday. ‘The Senate will consider all types of proposals, Republican and Democrat.’”

The bill’s two most consistent Republican opponents, Sens. Susan Collins and Rand Paul, reiterated their criticisms of the legislation yesterday: “Lawmakers ‘don’t know whether we’re going to be voting on the House bill, the first version of the Senate bill, the second version of the Senate bill, a new version of the Senate bill or a 2015 bill that would have repealed the Affordable Care Act now and then said that somehow we’ll figure out a replacement over the next two years,’ Collins said. ‘I don’t think that’s a good approach to facing legislation that affects millions of people and one-sixth of our economy,’ she added. Her sentiment was echoed by [Paul], who contends that the main GOP proposal the Senate has been considering does not go far enough to undermine the ACA. ‘The real question is, what are we moving to? What are we opening debate to?’ Paul said on CNN’s ‘State of the Union.’”

— The White House is already preparing for the worst. Politico’s Eliana Johnson and Josh Dawsey report: “White House aides are already considering how to distance President Donald Trump from Congress and how to go after the Republicans who vote no — an idea the president seems fond of, according to people who have spoken to him. Several people said he plans to keep up the fight, no matter how this week’s vote goes. … Meanwhile, those close to [McConnell] say they are frustrated that the president has shown little focus on his political agenda, particularly health care. … White House officials and lawmakers alike worried that a setback on healthcare would snowball, making tax reform and an infrastructure bill more difficult.”

— McConnell’s proposal, much like Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s (R-Wis.)’s legislation, represents “a profound misreading of the Trump base, which directed most of its 2016 election anger at economic elites and Washington’s continued inability to boost middle-class fortunes,” the Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey writes. “After rolling into office with winning slogans targeting ‘Obamacare’ … [Republican leaders in Congress] either missed or ignored lessons of Trump’s jaw-dropping, populist-fueled victory. Trump himself understood the pitfalls, when he promised during the campaign that, while repealing Obamacare if he won office, he would not touch Medicare and Medicaid and would not roll back ACA protections for people with preexisting conditions. It was a bundle of contradictions rolled into a pitch, but it proved persuasive to his voters.”

IN THE REAL WORLD:

— “When Health Law Isn’t Enough, the Desperate Line Up at Tents,” by the New York Times’s Trip Gabriel: “As the sun set in the mountains of southwest Virginia, hundreds of hurting souls were camped out or huddled in vehicles, eager for an early place in line when the gates swung open at 5 a.m. for the nation’s largest pop-up free clinic. The Remote Area Medical Expedition, held at a county fairground in Appalachia over three days ending Sunday, drew more than 2,000 people who endured high heat and long waits for basic health services. It was a dispiriting reminder that as Congress flails around for health plans that could cost millions of people their insurance, many more don’t have much or any insurance or access to medical care to lose.”

— “Fear of Medicaid cuts looms at school that serves students with disabilities,” by Mandy McLaren: “At [St. Coletta Special Education Public Charter School in Southeast Washington], where all students have special needs, tiny pieces of progress can add up to life-changing trajectories. The school relies on funding from Medicaid to employ a cadre of therapists. But with each twist in the health-care debate on Capitol Hill, staff members wonder whether their Medicaid dollars could be at risk. … Cuts to Medicaid would affect schools across the District, but St. Coletta would be especially hard-hit. Each of the school’s 250 students is intellectually disabled, and most require multiple types of therapy. … Overall, Medicaid reimbursements account for only 5 percent of St. Coletta’s annual budget, but the school says those funds — more than $750,000 annually — make it possible to provide services not available at other D.C. public schools.”

Chuck Schumer speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill. (Zach Gibson/Bloomberg)

DEMOCRATS’ STRATEGY:

— Meanwhile, Democrats seem to be drifting even more leftward on health care, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) saying yesterday on ABC’s “This Week” that single-payer is an option. Politico’s Kevin Robillard reports: “The left wing of the party, including many followers of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, has pushed for the party to adopt a more populist economic message, including single-payer health care. Asked if single-payer was on the table, Schumer responded: ‘Sure.’ ‘Many things are on the table. Medicare for people above 55 is on the table. A buy-in to Medicare is on the table. A buy-in to Medicaid is on the table,’ he said.”

— Schumer’s comments came just one day before his party’s planned rollout of a new economic agenda that the Democrats are calling “A Better Deal.” Ed O’Keefe and David Weigel report: “The campaign-style motto [was] panned by some liberal activists as details began to trickle out ahead of the Monday rollout[.] … [The plan] is scheduled to be unveiled Monday at an event in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, where the party hopes to defeat incumbent Rep. Barbara Comstock (R). But some lawmakers, aides and outside advocates consulted on the new agenda said that it is expected to focus on new proposals to fund job-training programs, renegotiate trade deals and address soaring prescription-drug costs … It is also expected to endorse long-held Democratic principles, including “a living wage” of $15 per hour and already unveiled spending plans for infrastructure that would expand broadband Internet access into rural counties.”

— House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wrote a Post op-ed ahead of the rollout entitled, “Americans deserve better than the GOP agenda, so we’re offering a better deal:” “What motivates us is that the costs of living keep rising, but families feel their incomes and wages aren’t keeping up. Special interests are given special treatment, while hard-working Americans are ignored. Working people from the heartland to the cities are struggling in a rigged economy and a system stacked against them.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell talks about working through part of the recess. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

IF YOU READ ONE STORY ABOUT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY –> “Republicans are in full control of government — but losing control of their party,” by Sean Sullivan and Robert Costa: “Six months after seizing complete control of the federal government, the Republican Party stands divided as ever — plunged into a messy war among its factions that has escalated in recent weeks to crisis levels. Frustrated lawmakers are increasingly sounding off at a White House awash in turmoil and struggling to accomplish its legislative goals. [Trump] is scolding Republican senators over health care and even threatening electoral retribution. Congressional leaders are losing the confidence of their rank and file. And some major GOP donors are considering using their wealth to try to force out recalcitrant incumbents. … The intensifying fights threaten to derail efforts to overhaul the nation’s tax laws and other initiatives that GOP leaders hope will put them back on track. ‘It’s a lot of tribes within one party, with many agendas, trying to do what they want to do,’ [said] Rep. Tom MacArthur …”

“Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill have described the dynamic between the White House and GOP lawmakers as a ‘disconnect’ between Republicans who are still finding it difficult to accept that he is the leader of the party that they have long controlled. [And] some donors say they are weighing whether to financially back primary challengers against Republican lawmakers unwilling to support Trump’s aims …”

— Epitomizing the stalled Republican agenda, as well as the divide between Trump and the congressional GOP, is infrastructure. The NYT’s Glenn Thrush reports: “An ambitious public works plan, arguably [Trump’s] best chance of rising above the partisan rancor of his first six months in office, is fast becoming an afterthought — at precisely the moment Mr. Trump needs a big, unifying issue to rewrite the narrative of his chaotic administration. Infrastructure remains stuck near the rear of the legislative line[.] … It awaits the resolution of tough negotiations over the budget, the debt ceiling, a tax overhaul, a new push to toughen immigration laws — and the enervating slog to enact a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. … Unlike the transformative 20th-century efforts the president likes to cite at his rallies, any plan that eventually emerges will not rely exclusively on federal funds.”

THE NEW WORLD ORDER:

— ICYMI –> “How ISIS nearly stumbled on the ingredients for a ‘dirty bomb,’” by Joby Warrick and Loveday Morris: “On the day the Islamic State overran the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014, it laid claim to one of the greatest weapons bonanzas ever to fall to a terrorist group … But the most fearsome weapon in Mosul on that day was never used by the terrorists. Locked away in a storage room on a Mosul college campus were two caches of cobalt-60, a metallic substance with lethally high levels of radiation. In terrorists’ hands, it is the core ingredient of a ‘dirty bomb,’ a weapon that could be used to spread radiation and panic. Why the Islamic State failed to take advantage of its windfall is not clear. [But] more certain is the fact that the danger has not entirely passed. … ‘Nearly every country in the world either has them, or is a transit country’ through which high-level radiological equipment passes, said Andrew Bieniawski, [vice president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative]. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a global problem.’”

— “Behind the front lines in the fight to ‘annihilate’ ISIS in Afghanistan,” by Max Bearak: “The operation against the Islamic State in Khorasan — or ISIS-K, as the Syria-based group’s Afghan contingent is known — is now into its fourth month of unremitting warfare. The U.S. military has pledged to ‘annihilate’ the group by year’s end, and the redoubled assault has contributed to a spike in U.S. airstrikes to levels not seen in Afghanistan since President Barack Obama’s troop surge in 2012. One in five of those strikes is against ISIS-K, despite it controlling only slivers of mountainous territory. The battle is lopsided, but each day the front line here in Achin district moves back only slightly. Both local intelligence officials and the U.S. military believe that ISIS-K is replenishing its stock of fighters almost as quickly as it loses them. A sense that this may be an indefinite mission has set in.”

SOCIAL MEDIA SPEED READ:

The president had an active weekend on Twitter. From Saturday, Trump targeted The Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos of Amazon):

Trump’s spelling errors continued with “council:”

He returned to his preferred social media platform yesterday, complaining about the Russia probes, his own party and the media:

But he did take a break from Washington this weekend:

From a New York Times reporter:

From an editor at the Weekly Standard:

Some of Anthony Scaramucci’s old tweets that conflict with the president’s views made the rounds on Twitter over the weekend. From a House Democrat:

On Merrick Garland, the Supreme Court nominee who never received a hearing:

A former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton responded to the Russia tweet:

Scaramucci eventually took to deleting some of his past tweets, including the one that mentioned climate change:

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Scaramucci also mentioned that he went to Harvard Law at least twice on the Sunday shows. From a Post columnist:

From a Democratic senator on this week’s heath-care vote:

Sen. John McCain is still at work:

And Sen. Angus King sent a message to McCain, his friend from across the aisle:

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski at the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

GOOD READS FROM ELSEWHERE:

— New York Magazine, “Donald Trump Is Not Invited to the Wedding: Joe, Mika, and their star-crossed relationship with the president,” by Olivia Nuzzi: “In the deranged reality-television solar system that contains the press and the new presidency, Scarborough and Brzezinski deliver black comedy with a lot of plot. Astonishingly, for the first time in American history, the president is as likely to take time out of his schedule to lance news personalities as he is to condemn the country’s foreign adversaries. … And so contemplating the existence of the people yammering on TV is no superficial task, for they’re yammering directly into his head. ‘He watches, says he doesn’t watch, and then he freaks out with what he sees,’ Scarborough told me. ‘We think it’s in the best interest of the country for him to stop watching our show.’ … But why, exactly, their previously cozy relationship with the president had changed, and what the nature of that coziness was to begin with, depends a lot on which side you ask …”

— The Atlantic, “The Man McMaster Couldn’t Fire,” by Rosie Gray: “Washington got its first real look at [Ezra] Cohen-Watnick when he was identified as one of two White House sources who provided House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes with evidence that former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the ‘unmasking’ of the names of Trump associates in intelligence documents. … Despite that early controversy, Cohen-Watnick retains one of the most consequential intelligence jobs in the nation, and his influence is rising. He is in the thick of some of the most important policy fights at the White House[.] … Yet what we don’t know about Cohen-Watnick far outstrips what we do.”

— Wall Street Journal, “Lawyers Hope to Do to Opioid Makers What They Did to Big Tobacco,” by Jeanne Whalen: “The legal front widening against makers of opioid painkillers has something in common with landmark tobacco litigation of the 1990s: attorney Mike Moore. As Mississippi’s attorney general in 1994, Mr. Moore filed the first state lawsuit against tobacco companies, saying they harmed public-health systems by misrepresenting smoking’s dangers. … Now Mr. Moore is a private attorney encouraging states to sue pharmaceutical companies, alleging they helped spark an addiction crisis by misrepresenting the benefits and addiction risks of opioid painkillers.”

— Politico, “Meet the lab-coat liberals,” by David Siders: “Dismayed by President Donald Trump’s perceived hostility to climate science and other areas of research, a surge of scientists is entering the public arena and running for political office for the first time. … The handful of scientists who have formally announced their candidacies so far — and the others who are preparing to join them — have cast themselves as a counterforce to the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate science and de-prioritization of innovation funding. But they are also stretching the boundaries of the scientific field into unfamiliar terrain. Researchers traditionally avoided wading into politics. Now, amid winds of anti-intellectualism, they are testing whether a significant number in their ranks can break through.”

— The New Yorker, “The Mothers Being Deported by Trump,” by Sarah Stillman: “A regular theme of the Trump Administration’s messaging on immigration has been to present undocumented ‘bad hombres’ as an immediate threat to the safety and cohesion of the American family unit. But some of Trump’s immigration policies, in themselves, have endangered families across America. … While [Obama’s] Administration deported more than three million people … the cases documented here reflect changes from the previous Administration’s enforcement priorities—mothers, for instance, who’d been picked up under Obama and qualified for temporary legal relief, only to face swift removal, or its threat, under the new Administration.”

HOT ON THE LEFT:

“The Easily Scared NRA Blames Black Lives Matter For ‘Racial Hatred’” from HuffPost: “The Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality has inspired so much ‘racial hatred’ that white people in America should fear for their lives, a correspondent for the [NRA’s] streaming network said … In a segment produced for the American gun lobbying organization’s online channel, conservative host Grant Stinchfield said race relations are deeply strained in the country after [Obama’s] presidency. ‘But nowhere is near as bad as it is in South Africa where white families are being tortured and killed almost every day in racist violence.’ … He then turned the segment over to [correspondent] Chuck Holton … Violence in South Africa is ‘kind of a warning for what could happen in the [U.S.] …’ Holton said. ‘This racial hatred that is being forced on the American culture by the Black Lives Matter crowd.’”

HOT ON THE RIGHT:

“New York Times requests apology from Fox on ISIS story,” from Politico: “The New York Times on Sunday took the unusual step of requesting an apology from a competitor, asking ‘Fox & Friends’ to retract a report that the Times was to blame for the 2015 escape of an ISIS leader. Fox subsequently updated the story on its website with the NYT letter. ‘I am writing on behalf of The New York Times to request an on-air apology and tweet from Fox & Friends in regards to a malicious and inaccurate segment “NY Times leak allowed ISIS leader to slip away,”’ wrote Danielle Rhoades Ha, vice president of communications for the Times. The ‘Fox & Friends’ report, which aired Saturday, apparently spurred a tweet by President Donald Trump. ‘The Failing New York Times foiled U.S. attempt to kill the single most wanted terrorist, al-Baghdadi,’ the president wrote later Saturday. ‘Their sick agenda over National Security.’”

DAYBOOK:

Trump will have a lunch with the vice president and a meet-and-greet with “victims of Obamacare” before delivering an afternoon statement on health care. He will then leave for a speech at the 2017 National Scout Jamboree in West Virginia.

After his lunch with Trump, Pence will participate in the Obamacare meet-and-greet and introduce Trump before his health-care address.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Anthony Scaramucci on Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s promotion to press secretary: “I think Sarah does a great job. She’s an incredibly warm person. She’s incredibly authentic. … Sarah, if you’re watching, I love the hair and makeup person that we had on Friday, so I’d like to continue to use the hair and makeup person.”(Some viewers quickly took issue with the comment, arguing that it implied Sanders’s appearance was connected to her job performance. Scaramucci laterclarified that he was talking about himself: “For the record, I was referring to my hair and make up and the fact that I like the make up artist. I need all the help I can get!”)

NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:

— The rain from the weekend may continue today. The Capital Weather Gang forecasts: “We’ll have variable skies today with some showers possible in the morning and perhaps another round with some thunder in the afternoon – especially in our eastern areas. Assuming intervals of sunshine materialize, many of us hit at least 90 degrees, otherwise upper 80s might do it.”

— The Nationals beat the Diamondbacks 6-2, but fans were worried by pitcher Stephen Strasburg’s early exit from the game. (Chelsea Janes)

— Virginia’s gubernatorial candidates emphasized their differences in the race’s first debate Saturday. Laura Vozzella reports: “Their differences started with Trump. [Ralph] Northam, Virginia’s lieutenant governor and a pediatrician, said he had no regrets about a TV ad in which he called the president a ‘narcissistic maniac.’ ‘I stand by what I said,” he said. “I believe our president is a dangerous man. I think he lacks empathy. . . . And he also has difficulty telling the truth.’ [Ed] Gillespie … is an establishment figure who has largely tried to keep Trump at arm’s length. But in recent days, he has touted his ability to work with the president and on Saturday questioned whether Northam could do the same. ��What are you going to do — call the White House, “Please put me through to the narcissistic maniac?’ Gillespie said.”

— Washington mourned a legend, Jim Vance, the city’s longest-serving local news anchor. Matt Schudel writes: “Mr. Vance, who won or shared more than a dozen local Emmys, rose to prominence at a time when home rule and self-governance opened doors for a new black elite in the District. He defied the staid standards of broadcasting with his bushy Afro hair style in the 1970s and by refusing to wear makeup on the air.”

VIDEOS OF THE DAY:

Stephen Colbert offered Russians a taste of American culture:

Stephen Gives Russians A Taste Of American Culture

Jimmy Fallon explained Donald Trump Jr.’s one request before testifying to Congress:

Trump and Kushner to Testify on Russia, Fidget Spinners Explode – Monologue

A suicide bombing in Kabul killed at least 24:

Suicide bomb in Kabul leaves at least 24 dead

Thousands took to the streets in Berlin for Christopher Street Day parade for LGBTQ rights:

Thousands flood Berlin streets for Christopher Street Day

And the Post laid out why beer gardens have become so popular in the United States:

Three reasons for the beer garden boom

Daily Dose of Media Bias, here it is. Donald Trump, the first president in American history to take office with no prior governing or military experience, has appointed someone with no professional communications experience to be White House communications director. Daily Dose of Media Bias, here it is. Donald Trump, the first president in American history to take office with no prior governing or military experience, has appointed someone with no professional communications experience to be White House communications director.

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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Trump’s courtiers bring chaotic and capricious style to White House

Two weeks in, the new administration resembles the court of a Renaissance king, with favorites infighting and Steve Bannon a Cardinal Richelieu in cargo pants

After 15 days of chaotic activity when he made heads spin around the world, President Donald Trump flew from Washington on Friday for the Florida mansion he calls the Winter White House, leaving behind a faintly traumatised US capital.

The exhausting first two weeks of the Trump presidency were bookended by an obsessive fixation with his inaugural crowd size and his use of a usually solemn speech at the national prayer breakfast to continue a feud with Arnold Schwarzenegger over ratings for The Apprentice.

The turbulent character of the early days has looked little different from the insurgent campaign that propelled him to the Oval Office as he has escalated tensions with Mexico, flouted diplomatic norms with Australia, picked fights with members of his own party and signed a flurry of executive orders that have already reshaped perceptions of America on the global stage.

At the center of it all has been a cast of characters jockeying for Trumps ear, creating a struggle for power that has manifested in a mix of chaos, leaks and uncertainty.

The Trump White House already bears more resemblance to the court of a Renaissance king than to most prior administrations as favorites come and go, counselors quarrel over favor and policy decisions are often made by whim or without consultation.

Steve Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs rightwing ideologue, now chief strategist and counselor to the president has been virtually ever present in the Oval Office since inauguration day, bringing to the center of American politics the apocalyptic worldview that turned his Breitbart website into a magnet for conservatives who thrilled to its sensationalist headlines and vented their anger in its comments section.

Steve Bannon (right) and the national security adviser, Michael Flynn, sit in on Donald Trumps testy phone call with the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

A Cardinal Richelieu in cargo pants, he guides many key ideological decisions, giving Trumps early policy moves the look of a Breitbart daily news list. His loyal ally Stephen Miller, a 31-year-oldformer Capitol Hill staffer, has proved to be a lightning rod for criticism as Trumps ban on refugees and immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries swiftly unravelled.

Miller, the policy director and speechwriter, was a staffer for Jeff Sessions the Alabama senator who was a relatively obscure immigration hawk until Trump and Bannon adopted him as the intellectual force at the back of their rightwing radicalism.

Sessions, who has been nominated to be Trumps attorney general, has a reactionary record on race, voting rights and immigration. He opposes same-sex marriage, and when Trump was caught on tape talking of grabbing women by the pussy, Sessions called it a stretch to characterize that as sexual assault.

Miller often served as Trumps warm-up man on the campaign trail, whipping up rallies as crowds chanted build the wall, and wrote Trumps speeches, attempting to mold the candidates stream of consciousness into complete sentences. Miller, with Bannon, was responsible for the American carnage inauguration speech which delivered Trumps dark vision of the country he was inheriting from Barack Obama.

On the other side is Reince Priebus, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, who could hardly be further removed in personality and style: mild where those around him are brash. As chief of staff, he should be the gatekeeper, but has struggled to assert himself. He has already been briefed against, including a memorable quote this week in the Washington Post, in which an anonymous official said of him: A little bit of under-competence and a slight amount of insecurity can breed some paranoia and backstabbing, adding: We have to get Reince to relax into the job and become more competent, because hes seeing shadows where there are no shadows.

Another who is visibly struggling is Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary who also came on board from the RNC. The daily face of the administration behind the lectern in the Brady press briefing room, his side parting, and pocket square precision have not been matched when he opens his mouth the typically hour-long sessions slide from attempts at false bonhomie to bitter personal attacks on individual journalists. Often shouting, this week he got into another Alice in Wonderland battle with the facts when he denied that Trumps immigration ban was really a ban, even though it was pointed out to him by reporters that, both he and the president himself had repeatedly used the word to describe one of the first signature policies of the new administration.

But the president himself called it a ban, a reporter said. So is he confused, or are you confused?

Im not confused. The words that are being used to describe it are derived from what the media is calling it. He has been very clear that it is extreme vetting.

Perhaps the most high-profile person from Trumps orbit, Kellyanne Conway, remains precisely that: a public face of the administration whose primary role appears to be hopscotching between the news networks almost as performance art.

The pollster had worked on the conservative right with the National Rifle Association, Newt Gingrich and Trumps own vice-president, Mike Pence, before bringing a steely professionalism to Trumps campaign. Her forceful, combative style with television inquisitors has been mostly impressive although her use of the phrase alternative facts to justify the Trump White House view of the world will probably hang around her neck for years to come.

All the while in the background lurk Trumps daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka walk to board Marine One at the White House on Thursday. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

As Trumps wife Melania has disappeared from public view, opting to remain in New York City where their 10-year-old son Barron attends school, Ivanka has served as a de facto first lady. She visited Dover air force base with her father on Wednesday to honor the first US service member killed under Trumps watch.

Kushner, who ran much of the Trump campaign, is one of his father-in-laws closest advisers, somehow elevated from Manhattan property deals to security clearance at the heart of government and a seat in the situation room.

So far he has been scarcely visible popping up to fill out the chorus line behind Trump in Oval Office photocalls as the president flourishes another executive order. Yet when a special forces raid in Yemen that led to the death of an American soldier was approved, Kushner sat with Bannon and Priebus while Trump made the decision.

The growing influence of Bannon has sounded alarm bells across Washington, even among Republicans. While most lawmakers from Trumps own party are reticent to insert their opinion into his staffing decisions, his decision to elevate the former Breitbart CEO to the National Security Council was met with concern for potentially insulating the president from experienced professionals in favor of his political allies.

It sounds problematic to me, said Lindsey Graham, a senator from South Carolina who was a vocal critic of Trumps during the presidential campaign.

The National Security Council has been driven by professional folks. Ive never seen a situation where someone whos more from the political realm has a permanent seat. I dont think thats a good precedent.

James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma who sits on the Senate intelligence committee, said Bannons appointment was obviously a political position in the middle of a body that is usually distinctly non-political.

Obviously the president can choose how hes going to have the inner workings of his White House, he said. Itll be of interest to us just how it operates.

But the unveiling of the first major Bannon-driven policy, framed as a matter of urgent national security, was nothing short of tumultuous.

Last Friday, Trump ended the first week of his presidency by temporarily suspending all refugee admissions to the US and placing a moratorium on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, spiraling the US government into days of chaos that played out globally.

The executive order, shaped by Bannon and Miller, made good on Trumps campaign promise to crack down on Muslim immigration to the US. Chaos ensued at airports across the country, as officials acting upon the administrations order hadnt a clue how to implement it. Green card holders and interpreters who served alongside the US military in war-torn countries were swept up in its broad implications, and even young children were detained for hours.

It was soon revealed that neither John Kelly nor James Mattis, the new secretaries of homeland security and the defense department, had been fully briefed in advance. Nor had congressional leaders, with even the House speaker, Paul Ryan, telling reporters days later that he only learned of what was in the travel ban as the policy was being issued.

Stephen Miller: Hes really clicked with the president and understands how the president wants to articulate and frame things, one former Trump adviser said. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Miller, the architect of the order, was sent out to defend the ban on national television as a split-screen carried the widespread protests prompted by the dramatic shift in policy.

But despite Millers vigorous justification for what the White House dubbed as extreme vetting, the damage had been done. A number of Republicans, who might have otherwise supported Trumps action had they been involved in the process, sharply criticized the administrations handling of the ordeal and called for swift changes.

The botched rollout of the travel ban, according to a veteran of Capitol Hill and Republican campaigns, was emblematic of the challenges posed by the current power structure surrounding Trump.

There are not enough people of that ilk with the requisite experience to successfully operate the federal government, said the strategist, who requested anonymity to speak more freely.

At the same time, the scope of the decisions that have to be made by the executive branch of the US government is so vast that you have to delegate power.

The tension surrounding the travel ban and its immediate aftermath also laid bare the fissures emerging between the various factions within the White House.

As Bannon and Miller called the shots behind the scenes, crafting a policy that played directly to Trumps base, Priebus and Spicer found themselves tasked with cleaning up the mess.

Miller did, however, face the heat when MSNBC host Joe Scarborough launched into a stinging rebuke on his morning talkshow regularly watched by Trump himself.

Youve got a very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your cabinet agencies to go to hell, Scarborough said, before addressing Miller plainly.

By the time youre 35, maybe youll know how Washington and the White House really works.

If youre still around, he added. I hope youre not.

Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon share a lighter moment in the Oval Office. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Some close to Trump defended Miller, framing the outrage over the travel ban as driven by negative media coverage. Jason Miller, a former adviser to Trump, no relation to Stephen Miller, said the young aide had developed a unique understanding of Trump and his appeal on the campaign trail.

Steve really understands the economic populism movement both from his time working in conservative politics and being on the campaign trail, Jason Miller told the Guardian.

Hes really clicked with the president and understands how the president wants to articulate and frame things.

Jason Miller also contested reports of dysfunction inside the West Wing, deeming many of the leaks from within the administration as the work of government officials who never wished for Trump to get elected.

Are some people getting their knickers in a twist because of the changes? Yeah, he said. But these are the things the president said he was going to fight for and advocate.

The core team at Trumps side inside the Oval Office, Miller added, was unlikely to change.

Trumps campaign was nonetheless rocked by repeated shakeups. And the Trump White House is expected to be no different, where staffers of even the most even-keeled presidents are prone to burn out after only a few years.

To some observers, those surrounding Trump are ultimately powerless in the face of a president who obsessively drives his own image.

Referring to Trumps contentious call with the Australian prime minister, Lindsey Graham said the incident was a precise example of where regardless of those standing at his shoulder, the words of the president of the United States really matter.

Eventually hes the president. Hes the guy on the phone, Graham said.

And to the extent that politics is music, hes off key.

The inner circle

Steve Bannon: Trumps dishevelled chief strategist has brought his rightwing Breitbart website agenda to the seat of power and has been a virtual ever-present in the Oval Office.

Steve Miller: an ex-Capitol Hill staffer who has risen from role as Trumps election rally warm-up man to writing the American carnage inauguration speech and botching the chaotic roll-out of the immigration ban.

Reince Priebus: the chief of staff who came from within the Republican party machine to try to professionalise the freewheeling Trump operation. Already facing questions over his ability to control.

Jared Kushner: the son-in-law with security clearance. Property deals in Manhattan swapped for a role in the conversation when the US launched a raid in Yemen.

Ivanka Trump: daughter stepped in on first lady duties, joining her father aboard Marine One when he went to honour the return of a fallen US Navy Seal killed in the Yemen commando raid.

Kellyanne Conway: combative defender of the Trump administration on the airwaves certain to be forever remembered for proposing alternative facts.

Sean Spicer: clean-cut, well-scrubbed but not very polished. The White House spokesman rapidly defaults to rage in the briefing room. Period.