The president's contempt for mainstream polling and the media may come back to haunt him in November. Several top Republican operatives working on the midterm elections told me Trump's fanciful "red wave" predictions could depress Republican turnout and, ironically, serve to make any blue wave even bigger.
What we're hearing: One of those strategists told me he's detecting something interesting — and concerning — from focus groups of Trump voters. "You have Trump-MAGA loyalists, and their friends on Fox, who have reached a point of not believing polls and media people telling them things are going wrong, that I believe is actually causing the Republicans problems," the strategist told me, granted anonymity in order to be candid.
Several top White House officials thought then and think now that President Trump made an epic error in rolling over to cooperate with Robert Mueller in the early stages of the special counsel investigation.
Why it matters: Trump himself tells associates [Updated] that he thought then and thinks now that he personally has nothing to lose because he personally did nothing wrong. Who’s right might very well decide the fate of the Trump presidency.
Unless it's improbably interrupted, the bull run on Wall Street will become the longest on record this week, and — if most analysts are right — the party will continue for some time yet.
The big picture: If there is something to worry about, it's that the run is not self-propelled. Instead, it relies largely on the rocket fuel of unusually low interest rates and, most recently, the corporate tax bonanza. Crucially, italso seems to have done little to salve the profound popular mistrust in institutions and the leadership class, who put in motion the series of calamities that continue to hound the U.S. and the world — the Iraq war, the financial crash, and the everyone-for-themselves economy.
