Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse



At a time when Washington is promoting private investment in roads, bridges and other infrastructure, a 21-mile stretch of highway in Indiana provides what critics say is a cautionary tale.

The project, a partnership between the state and private investors, was signed by Vice President Mike Pence in 2014 when he was the state’s governor. It is two years behind schedule and only 60% built. The state is in the process of taking it over and will have to issue debt to finish it.
 


Prominent Texas pastor Robert Jeffress on Tuesday said that God wants President Trump to “take out” North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “When it comes to how we should deal with evil doers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary—including war—to stop evil,” Jeffress said in a statement. “In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un.” Military experts have warned that such an effort would likely result in tens of thousands of deaths in an all-out war.

Jeffress’ comments come as North Korea is threatening to strike the U.S. territory of Guam following Trump’s warning that any further threats from the rogue regime would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Jeffress gave a sermon the morning on Trump’s inauguration in January, and once criticized Mitt Romney by calling Mormonism a cult.
 


President Donald Trump says his base of support is “bigger and stronger than ever before.” But his claim is contradicted by a steady stream of recent polling that shows the share of Americans that approve of Trump’s job performance is shrinking, along with the share of Americans most enthusiastic about his presidency.

However you measure the president’s base, it has diminished, not increased, in the 7 months he’s been in office. It’s a slide he’ll need to reverse to avoid dragging down the GOP in the midterms — and to have a more credibleshot at reelection.

A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows Trump’s approval rating slipping to the lowest point of his young presidency. While he’s confounded the polls before, it’s the trendline that should be most worrisome to the White House.

Only 40 percent of registered voters approve of the job Trump is doing as president, the new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows, down from a high-water mark of 52 percent in March. And the percentage who approve strongly — one way to measure the size of Trump’s most fervent supporters — is also at a new low: just 18 percent.

That fits with other surveys conducted over the past few weeks, all of which show Trump at or near the low-water marks for each pollster. And there is evidence Trump’s backslide has eroded some of his electoral base: The president has lost ground with Republicans and the independent voters that propelled him to victory.

Trump’s approval rating among self-identified Trump voters is at 81 percent, down from 86 percent last week. And among Republican voters in the new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, the president is at 76 percent, down slightly from 79 percent last week.
 


In 2014, an amateur cyclist named Bryan Fogel had an eccentric idea for a film: He had just participated in a prestigious and grueling alpine stage race called the Haute Route in the Alps and had finished in 14th place. He decided to spend the next year not just training, but also doping. He meant to come back and run the race again the following year. He meant to not get caught for the doping. He expected the doping would vault him into the group of elite leaders who had finished above him. The performance difference, he believed, would prove that the group of cyclists who finished ahead of him were doping as well—and getting away with it. And he meant to reveal what he’d done.

It was a great premise for a documentary, but Fogel’s film did not go according to plan. For one thing, his doping effort failed to put him among the leaders. But the film, released last week on Netflix under the name Icarus, took a strange turn for another reason too: the only person Fogel could get to supervise his doping regime just happened to be supervising Russian President Vladimir Putin’s doping regime as well. And midway through the filming of Icarus, this scientist—Grigory Rodchenkov—thus found himself at the center of the Russian Olympic doping scandal. Rodchenkov defected, cooperated with investigators, and revealed the depths to which Putin’s government had gone to win Olympic medals. A documentary that was supposed to be about one man’s quixotic doping scheme came to be about a whole country’s menacing one.
 


FBI agents raided the Alexandria home of President Trump’s former campaign chairman late last month, using a search warrant to seize documents and other materials, according to people familiar with the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Federal agents appeared at Paul Manafort’s home without advance warning in the predawn hours of July 26, the day after he met voluntarily with the staff for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The search warrant was wide-ranging and FBI agents working with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III departed the home with various records.

The raid came as Manafort has been voluntarily producing documents to congressional committees investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. The search warrant indicates investigators may have argued to a federal judge they had reason to believe Manafort could not be trusted to turn over all records in response to a grand jury subpoena.

It could also have been intended to send a message to President Trump’s former campaign chairman that he should not expect gentle treatment or legal courtesies from Mueller’s team.
 

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