Attempt to strong-arm Congress a sign of weakness

[struggle4progress]

By Amber Phillips
April 27

Suing a committee chairman and his own accounting firm. Telling people who don’t work for him anymore that they can’t testify to Congress. Having his personal lawyer tell the Treasury Department not to release Trump’s tax returns to Congress. These are all actions President Trump has taken against Congress in the past few days, evidence that he’s going full-court to stop lawmakers from investigating him ...

Past presidents have negotiated behind the scenes with Congress when they don’t want to turn over information. They’ve relied on influential allies on Capitol Hill to help make their case. Trump is forced to take the most extreme measures because he doesn’t have enough soft power to do that, Huder argues. As a result, Trump is forcing himself into high-profile legal and political battles he has a real risk of losing ...

Trump spent nearly all of his political capital at the beginning of this year trying to get Congress to fund a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. He failed when enough Republicans joined with Democrats to pass a spending bill that didn’t include the amount of money he wanted. The longest shutdown in federal government history failed to win over lawmakers to Trump’s side — or any new money for his wall ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/27/could-trumps-attempt-strong-arm-congress-actually-be-sign-his-weakness/?utm_term=.39367097b3d5

[struggle4progress]

1. Avoiding a lot of deals

By Jackson Diehl
Deputy Editorial Page Editor
April 28 at 7:10 PM

... the Trump administration lately has been doing its best to avoid making deals.

The possibilities in foreign policy for a master negotiator are legion: There are Iran and North Korea with their nuclear programs; Venezuela, whose bankrupt regime presides over a major humanitarian crisis; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which Trump once described as ripe for a “deal of the century” ...

Take the case of Iran. When he withdrew the United States from the multilateral deal limiting Tehran’s nuclear program, Trump said he was “ready, willing and able” to negotiate a new accord and confidently predicted that the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was “going to want to make a new and lasting deal.”

Nearly a year later, Trump has done less bargaining with the Islamic republic than any president in the past 40 years. Not only is his administration not known to be talking with the regime about its nuclear program or its aggressions in the Middle East; it also has taken only minimal action to free the several U.S. citizens that Iran has unjustly imprisoned.

Instead, U.S. policy seeks to apply crushing pressure to the regime without offering it a way out ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/for-a-man-who-considers-himself-to-be-a-dealmaker-trump-is-avoiding-a-lot-of-deals/2019/04/28/fe397d88-676a-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html?utm_term=.67553409f580

[struggle4progress]

2. Kushner's alleged Middle East peace plan is preposterous

MAR. 19, 2019
Matt Stieb

For her new book Kushner Inc., journalist Vicky Ward interviewed some 220 people to better understand the roles of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump within the tumultuous White House. Ward found that the power couple is quite power hungry, demanding to travel free on the State Department’s dime and skirting around the “no’s” of former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

... Kushner Inc. also contains alleged details of the president’s son-in-law’s labyrinthine plan to permanently end conflict in the Middle East ...

According to Ward, who spoke with “multiple people who saw drafts of the plan,” Kushner proposed a geopolitical version of the multi-destination NBA player swap, in which Jordan would give territory to the Palestinian authority, and “in return, Jordan would get land from Saudi Arabia, and that country would get back two Red Sea islands it gave Egypt to administer in 1950.”

So, the alleged plan would involve no less than five countries (plus Palestine) coordinating to give aid or renegotiate boundaries in the most politically convoluted region on the planet ...

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/new-book-details-kushners-ridiculous-middle-east-peace-plan.html