>50% of the decisions Donald Trump has made this week are identical to ones you would expect him to make if he was purposefully trying to further hinder Republican election hopes

You could probably make that case for his entire first term. It's like he is a Manchurian candidate from the blue team for Putin.

Trump claims picture ID is required to buy groceries
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-claims-picture-id-is-required-to-buy-groceries/ar-BBLkDIL?ocid=spartanntp

Not collusion but conspiracy?

https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/2018/07/31/forget-collusion-conspiracy-s-the-watchword-in-mueller-filings#gs.M1iIIZU

Not collusion but conspiracy?

https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/2018/07/31/forget-collusion-conspiracy-s-the-watchword-in-mueller-filings#gs.M1iIIZU

Republican lawmakers, awkwardly stuck between two of the party’s most influential forces, are scrambling to adjust. On Monday, GOP senators privately deliberated about the path the Koch network has charted and its implications, according to two Republicans familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

In a private meeting at the Capitol, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) recounted his visit to the Koch conference to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other GOP senators and aides, and described the frustration he encountered over Trump’s trade policies and conduct, the Republicans said.

Some senators in the meeting struggled to make sense of the Koch network’s new strategy of limiting its work for GOP candidates.

“These guys want to change the direction of the country. They don’t understand how hard that is,” McConnell said, according to one of the Republicans

“The donor class controlled the Republican Party — that is, until the rise of Trump. The Kochs see that being ripped away, thus the open contempt for the president and his movement,” said former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

Trump’s critics, however, said the fissures within the Republican Party have only grown over the past year, and they called the split a sign of wider unease.

“The Kochs are rather appalled at what they’re seeing from Republicans who they helped elect in 2010, 2014 and 2016 — and who promised to be fiscally responsible and support free markets,” said conservative activist Erick Erickson, who has worked with Koch-affiliated groups and who will host a conservative summit this week in Austin that is partly sponsored by the Koch Institute.

While much of Trump’s agenda, such as the GOP-authored tax law and a sweeping rollback of regulations, has heartened the party’s business wing and libertarian-leaning leaders, there remains resistance to Trump’s raw populism and economic nationalism, which many traditional Republicans have argued for decades is the antithesis of conservative principles.

This rift is one of my favorite stories going right now. From the details provided off the record here, it sounds like the Republican Party is trying to whine the donor class back into supporting them with no change to the status quo.

Also: who quotes Steve Bannon in a Republican Party power struggle story in 2018?



It’s really interesting to me that the president’s rally last night was essentially a QAnon coming out party, and the Koch brothers are trying to push against deficits and tariffs....so the Republican Party has a meeting to discuss the grave implications of the Koch brother proposals. That’s where they are in 2018.

And now a kid In one of the detention centres has died.