64% of Republicans want to see Trump's tax returns

Justin Green
Apr 13

Featured

64% of Republicans want to see Trump's tax returns

Evan Vucci / AP

The big number: 80% of Americans want President Trump to release his tax returns, including 64% of Republicans, according to a MoveOn.org poll conducted by Global Strategy Group.

The shiny object: Trump shows no signs of changing his mind, so while this may help galvanize Democratic organizing for upcoming policy fights and the mid-terms, it's extremely unlikely that this will help voters see Trump's tax returns.

Why it matters: Media attention on the 120 marches planned on Saturday (more here from Jonathan Swan) may be focused on Trump's tax returns, but it will also see messaging on overall taxes and tax reform, which is a Trump priority for this summer. Republicans want to broadly cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, while Democrats oppose those efforts.

Methodology

More numbers:

67% of those polled said corporations "pay less than their fair share" in taxes, compared to 12% who said they do.
92% said the wealthy have too many tax loopholes, and 90% said corporations have too many loopholes.

Methodology: Nationwide online survey among 1,211 registered voters. Conducted April 5-9.

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Jonathan Swan
25 mins ago

Featured

Trump's Comey fight spooks Capitol Hill

Cliff Owen, Evan Vucci / AP

There is widespread concern among Congressional leadership about Trump's frame of mind in the wake of the Comey firing.

Senior Senate aide: "It has to stop ... never seen anything like this in my entire career."

House leadership source: "Lot of anxiety, don't know next shoe to drop."

Concerns we've heard

Here are the concerns we've heard from senior congressional sources.

Trump going after FBI director he just fired. Trump is supposed to be enacting an agenda, but is setting up a huge fight with someone who has nothing to lose.
White House is careening between crisis after crisis. "We need our asset out there every day barnstorming for tax reform, health care," the senate aide said.
Who can tell him no? Where is Reince, where are the adults?
Whose idea was it to blame Rod Rosenstein?
What an awful position this created for Richard Burr, the Senate Intel chair who has been working with Comey on this investigation.
What about the forgotten people? if they burn all this time on fights in DC, how can they deliver results to people in Trumpland?
Russia thing is self-inflicted. Root of it was Trump's Obama tweet. Very little sympathy for Trump from exasperated people.

Next up: Trump's morning Twitter targets

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Shane Savitsky
1 hr ago

Featured

Trump lawyers claim he has no Russian investors, debt

Evan Vucci / AP

President Trump's lawyers have released a letter stating that the last decade of his tax returns do not include "any income of any type from Russian sources," per the AP. The White House said the letter was in response to a request from Sen. Lindsey Graham regarding Trump's potential income from Russia.

Some exceptions: The letter notes that Trump received income from holding the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow as well as $95 million from a property sale to a Russian billionaire in 2008.

Blind trust: Without a release of Trump's returns, it's impossible to know with certainty if Trump's lawyers are presenting an accurate representation of his finances.

Mike Allen
5 hrs ago

Featured

Building walls — around Trump

Carolyn Kaster/AP

White House officials talk freely about putting "fences" around President Trump and his decision-making to protect him from his self-indulgent instincts.

The wall strategy has worked pretty well so far on national security. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster demanded and got control of the National Security Council, and set up a process for keeping SecDef Mattis, SecState Tillerson and Homeland Security Secretary Kelly in the loop — and, as importantly, keeping others outside it.

Keep reading ... words

Inside the defense wall, the principals work hard to present Trump with black-and-white options in brief, visual ways. The wall has successfully guarded against unforced international errors.

No such wall exists on the home front, which helps explain unexplainable mistakes like the handling of the Comey firing. So governing by grievance runs unimpeded.

An overnight AP headline captures the madness: "Trump contradicts White House."

Sound smart: The one idea floating for tighter control on domestic policy is an even bigger role for the Jared/Ivanka/Gary Cohn wing. BUT Trump so far has resisted an internal push for more order.

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Dan Primack
17 mins ago

Featured

Virtual reality startup raises half a billion dollars

Improbable Worlds, a London-based platform for third-party virtual reality and simulated world game developers, has raised $502 million in Series B funding. SoftBank led the deal in exchange for a minority stake, and was joined by return backers Andreessen Horowitz and Horizons Ventures.

Why it matters: This appears to be the largest "venture capital" investment ever in a European startup, let alone in the software space. It's also yet another massive check from SoftBank, which did this deal off its balance sheet instead of via Vision Fund (although don't be shocked if this, and some other recent SoftBank investments, get rolled into Vision once it closes).

Quotable: "AI gets all the press, [but] this idea of recreating reality is going to become something in the public consciousness that's as important, as significant, as artificial intelligence." ― Improbable CEO Herman Narula to Wired

Becca Rotenberg
1 hr ago

Featured

How a musical rhythm keeps seven planets in orbit

L. Calçada/ESO /AP

To understand how seven tightly-packed Earth-sized planets orbit around their star (Trappist-1) without colliding or falling into space, scientists turned their orbit into musical notes.

How: Astrologists found that the planets are in a resonant orbit and can continue as such for billions of years. The rhythmic pattern inspired astrophysicist and musician Matt Russo to assign each of them a musical note based on their orbital period, and the result was something similar to a drum progression.

What's next? Though Trappist-1 is the only planetary system whose planets orbit in resonance, this research could lead to a better understanding of how planets form and exist around other dwarf stars.

Christopher Matthews
1 hr ago

Featured

Economists stumped by slow American wage growth

Economists continue to ponder slow-growing wages for American workers, even as the unemployment rate falls to to historically low levels. In a note to clients this week, Bank of America economist Michelle Meyer points out that:

The unemployment rate is 4.4%;
Companies have the most job openings available since 2001;
Workers are quitting at the fastest rate since 2007.

"All else equal, this seems like an equation for"normal" pace of wage growth of 3.5-4.0%," she writes. Yet we're only seeing worker pay rise by roughly 2.5% per year.

Keep reading ... words

What gives? One theory is that due to increasing specialization and demand for higher education levels, it's become difficult for workers to switch jobs or careers to those that pay more. Evidence shows that such "job-to-job" transitions are happening at a lower rate today, relative to unemployment levels, than in the past.

Minimum wages, union activity: A primary driver of higher worker pay in recent years has been states and localities raising their minimum wages. Meyer points out that at an industry-specific level, retail and hospital workers have seen their wages rise faster than average, as many of these industries have been forced by local laws to raise pay. In addition, BofA analysts predict high wage increases in the airline industry as the result of new union contracts.

Location matters: Torsten Slok, Chief International Economist with Deutsche Bank Securities argues that the Federal Reserve might just have to be patient and tolerate a much lower unemployment rate than normal before it sees faster wage growth. " The unemployment rate in Maine and New Hampshire is around 3%, well below the national average of 4.4%," he emails. "And in those two states we have recently seen wage growth at 4% - 5%, well above the national average."

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Alayna Treene
1 hr ago

Featured

Google's Allo can now create cartoon-like characters of you

Google

Google's messaging app Allo has unveiled its newest interactive feature: automated technology that can create a Bitmoji-like illustration based on your selfie.

How it works: The user takes a selfie, and Google's neural network gets to work. The algorithm pinpoints the "qualitative features" of the user's face — such as hair style and eye color — then pulls from more than 563 quadrillion combinations to create a cartoon-like version of the user.

Thinking ahead: Google said in its announcement that it hopes to expand the feature's capabilities in the future and eventually create a "pack" of different styles. "This first style that launched today speaks to your sarcastic side but the next pack might be more cute for those sincere moments. Then after that, maybe they'll turn you into a dog," said Jennifer Daniel, Allo's Expressions Creative Director. The feature is currently only available on Android, but it should make its iOS debut "soon."

Dan Primack
1 hr ago

Featured

New trends: CEOs blame media for stock woes

Mark Lennihan / AP

Yesterday we noted how Time Inc. CEO Rich Battista blamed his company's poor Q1 earnings on "relentless media speculation" over the company's sale process. Then NantHealth CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong took a similar tact in explaining his company's travails (fun fact: Soon-Shiong once spent months pulling strings to appear on-stage at a Fortune conference, before bailing with one day's notice). And then came the capper yesterday, when Eddie Lampert said that Sears has been "unfairly singled out" by an "irresponsible" media.

Look, I know it's easy to blame the media for your own objective failings. In fact, it's quite en vogue right now. But that doesn't mean people can't see through your desperate deflections.

Dan Primack
1 hr ago

Featured

Apple's manufacturing fund invests $200 million in Corning

Apple

Apple this morning announced that it will invest $200 million into Corning as the first investment from its $1 billion Advanced Manufacturing Fund. Corning has long made the glass covers for Apple's devices, starting with the first iPhone 10 years ago.

Between the lines: President Trump has pushed Apple to bring more of its overseas manufacturing plants back to the U.S., so investing in partners that already have manufacturing operations is smart politics and good business.

Other notes ... words

Other notes, based on source conversations:

Don't view this deal as the template for future Apple AMF investments. Corning is a mature, publicly-traded company with which Apple has a longstanding commercial relationship. But the next deal could be for much less money and into a startup with which Apple has no existing ties. Or not. It's really agnostic on these issues.
The fund obviously isn't looking to lose money, but $1 billion is a relative drop in the bucket for Apple. The key is helping to finance future innovations that Apple may eventually be able to somehow leverage.
Still no official word on how this fund is structured, but it's worth noting that Apple COO Jeff Williams is the one quoted in the press release.

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Justin Green
2 hrs ago

Featured

Trump's Friday targets: Comey, press briefings and "Fake Media"

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

His six morning tweets, put together in one place:

Russia: "Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election... When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?"
The media: "The Fake Media is working overtime today!"
Press briefings: "As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!.......Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future "press briefings" and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???"
Jim Comey: "James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"

Get smart fast: Russia, briefings, Comey...

Shannon Vavra
3 hrs ago

Featured

EPA will stop blocking giant Pebble Mine project

Al Grillo / AP

The EPA and mining firm Pebble Limited Partnership have reached a settlement in their legal dispute over the proposed Pebble Mine near Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska:

Quick take: Pebble can file permit applications for the project to move forward, and the EPA won't block it anymore, although it may still be a few years.
Why it matters: Trump's commitment to supporting miners is shining through.
The backstory: Pebble sued the EPA in 2014 when the agency decided to block the mine project based on environmental and tribal sovereignty claims. That resulted in Congressional probes into EPA's claims to see if they were valid, but last year the EPA's Office of Inspector General found "no evidence of bias" in the assessment.

Axios
3 hrs ago

Featured

What Trump supporters are thinking

Chris O'Meara / AP

Frank Luntz, the Republican consultant and pollster (who can channel Trump partisans, but has also been critical of him), is quoted in the N.Y. Times ("Quote of the Day"!) on how people who are sympathetic to Trump believe he is once again being held to an unfair standard:

"In a word, they see him as their voice. And when their voice is shouted down, disrespected or simply ignored, that is an attack on them, not just an attack on Trump." — Frank Luntz

Keep reading ... words

Takeaways from the p. A17 article by Jeremy Peters, "Resentful of Criticism, Conservatives Dig In in Defense of the President" (online: "For Trump Supporters, the Real Outrage Is the Left's Uproar Over Comey"),

"More clearly than other recent Trump-induced uproars, the reaction to the Comey firing illustrated how many conservatives now justify their defense of the president as part of a fight against a rising tide of overreaction and manufactured hysteria by the left. Mr. Trump ... has helped stoke those resentments."
"On Facebook, Republicans shared the 1993 C-Span footage of Bill Clinton's announcement that he had fired William S. Sessions, the only other F.B.I. director to be dismissed ... [H]e had abused his federally funded travel privileges."
"Erick Erickson, the writer and radio host who has called for an independent investigation, ... called the cries of constitutional crisis 'hysterics': 'Russiaism is the new Birtherism.'"

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Alayna Treene
3 hrs ago

Featured

Trump teases getting rid of White House press briefings

President Trump took to Twitter today to address the critics that have been calling out the White House for its mixed messaging on FBI director James Comey, which has resulted in Trump considering a replacement for White House press secretary Sean Spicer.