In blustery interview, a Fed-up Trump spills his gut

The best and brightest of them all

When it's going good, grouses Donald Trump, he doesn't get enough credit. He complained to authors of a just-published book about conservative Republicans who don't give him respect he's due: "If my name weren’t Trump, if it were John Smith, they would say I’m the greatest president in history and I blow Ronald Reagan away.” 

But when the stock market slumps or General Motors announces 14,000 layoffs, does the buck stop with him? Trump's fingers pointed elsewhere for those setbacks in a Washington Post interview: It's because the Federal Reserve chairman he picked, Jerome Powell, has presided over a rise in interest rates. 

“I’m doing deals and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump said. “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” 

Trump also credited his smarts, whatever part of him they come from, for his confident brushoff of a new report by government scientists warning of a looming global-warming catastrophe. 

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence, we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s at a record clean,” he said.

Speaking of climate change. Trump is doing a slow burn that may signal at least a temporary chill in Trump's feelings for Vladimir Putin after Russia attacked and seized three Ukrainian navy ships and their crews. The two presidents were supposed to meet at this week's G-20 summit meeting in Argentina.

“Maybe I won’t have the meeting. Maybe I won’t even have the meeting. . . . I don’t like that aggression. I don’t want that aggression at all,” Trump said. For a full transcript of the interview, click here.

President Repo Man

Earlier Tuesday, Trump threatened to cut off GM's government "subsidies" as punishment for plans to close four U.S. plants. 

"The U.S. saved General Motors, and this is the THANKS we get!" Trump tweeted.

It wasn't clear what, if any, subsidies GM gets, or what Trump could do on his own without Congress. Trump referred to subsidies "for electric cars," but those are tax credits of up to $7,500 that go to consumers, not manufacturers, under rules that apply to all automakers offering such vehicles.

Janison: The truth isn't out there yet

Special counsel Robert Mueller's accusation that Paul Manafort broke an agreement for leniency by lying to investigators looks like a major development in the Russia investigation, but what does it mean? As Newsday's Dan Janison writes, there are speculations, theories, spin, confusion, presumption and interpretation, including airy, vague and mutually exclusive scenarios from legal experts and other observers. 

Is Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, looking at harsher penalties for his financial fraud conviction or is he closer to winning a presidential pardon by not giving Mueller what he wants? Does Mueller have so much evidence from other sources that he doesn't have to rely on Manafort, or has it gotten harder for the special counsel to connect the dots?

All good questions. The answers will have to come later.

Trump seethes at Manafort siege

The latest twist in the Manafort case set off a Trump tweetstorm in which he denounced Mueller as "a conflicted prosecutor gone rogue.”

Though Trump didn't name Manafort, the tweets suggested he was getting punished not for allegedly lying but for refusing to provide false statements about others. “Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie,” Trump said. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told CNN the president has "been upset for weeks about what he considers the un-American, horrible treatment of Manafort."

There are also new questions about how much Trump's Twitter shrieks and Giuliani's parroting of them were fueled by information leaked by Manafort's defense lawyers to his own legal team, according to a New York Times story. The defense coordination is considered highly unusual because it has existed between a purportedly cooperating witness (Manafort) and a possible subject of investigation (Trump).

Manafort was a player in several key episodes under investigation, including the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Donald Trump Jr. hosted a Russian lawyer expected to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton.

While Trump has made his sympathies for Manafort clear many times, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday said she was unaware of any discussions about a presidential pardon. But Giuliani told The Wall Street Journal that a pardon shouldn't be ruled out "at the right time."

For more, see Candice Ferrette's story for Newsday.

Wiki-ed game

Mueller's office has emails indicating Trump confidant Roger Stone knew months in advance that WikiLeaks had obtained hacked Democratic emails that could help the Trump campaign, according to CNN and NBC News.

A middleman was right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, according to court papers drafted by Mueller's office for a plea deal that Corsi  now says he won't agree to because he didn't knowingly lie to investigators.

Corsi also said, according to The Wall Street Journal, that Stone asked him to help create "a cover story" for a tweet that hinted at a forthcoming WikiLeaks dump. Stone denied it

Sticking to the wall?

Trump signaled in The Washington Post interview that he might back off from a threat to let a partial government shutdown happen if Congress doesn't approve $5 billion for his Mexican border wall by a Dec. 7 deadline.

“We need Democrat votes to have a wall,” Trump said. “Now, if we don’t get it, will I get it done another way? I might get it done another way. There are other potential ways that I can do it. You saw what we did with the military, just coming in with the barbed wire and the fencing, and various other things.”

Senate Democrats held to their support for a bipartisan $1.6 billion deal agreed to earlier this year, but didn't shut the door on providing $5 billion spread over two years.

Cuomo's big dig

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is due to meet with Trump and his transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, Wednesday in a new bid to overcome resistance to $11 billion in federal funding for the Gateway Tunnel project, reports Newsday's Yancey Roy.

Cuomo said Gateway is critical not only to New York and New Jersey, but also to the entire Northeast rail corridor.

He also said in a WNYC radio interview that he is “ruling” out a run for president in 2020.

MAGA-nolia state

With a late assist from Trump, Republican Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith overcame a Democratic challenge from Clinton-era Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and her racially tone-deaf gaffe about public hangings to win a runoff election.

That sets the GOP Senate majority at 53-47 in the next Congress, a gain of two seats.

Trump's Afghan failure

More than a year after announcing it, the president's strategy for success in Afghanistan has resulted only in a persistent stalemate. Seventeen years into the war, three U.S. servicemen were killed in a bombing Tuesday. He tweeted jokes about an election official in Florida, but nothing about the slain soldiers. Appropriate gestures were farmed out to the first lady.

In a Washington Post interview the president offered a rationale for the American presence echoing that of ex-President George W. Bush whom Trump mocked in the 2016 campaign: "Every expert that I have and speak to say if we don't go there, they're going to be fighting over here."

Migration nation

Spokesmen for migrants who crossed into Mexico from Central America and want to seek asylum as refugees in the United States are making two arguments: That they face violent death if they return home and that they want their appeals to be heard.

As to the recent disorder that prompted tear gas from border patrol officers, they said in a statement at a news conference: "We wanted to be recognized as a big group of people who wants to be heard so international laws can protect us as we migrate and seek better lives."

But at the same time, The Wall Street Journal reports: "Hundreds of Central American migrants who traveled in caravans to Tijuana are requesting assistance to go back home or filing for asylum in Mexico rather than seeking to legally enter the U.S., Mexican authorities said."

What else is happening:

• House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is expected to win backing from her caucus Wednesday to be her party’s nominee for House speaker and the party's most powerful counterweight to Trump. But the size of the vote against her will tell whether the opposition could still mount a challenge in January, reports Newsday's Tom Brune.
• Ivanka Trump defended her use of private emails while in transition to a White House job. She made the remarks during an ABC News interview.
• Former FBI Director James Comey told a Boston public radio station that while acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker "may not be the sharpest knife in our drawer," it's unlikely he would go outside the law to derail the Mueller investigation.
• While the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to fast-track taking up cases such as its transgender military ban  and ending DACA, it sees no reason to rush a decision on whether Whitaker's appointment was legal. Let the lower courts weigh in, Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote to the justices.
• More than 2,300 migrant teens are now being held in a detention camp in the west Texas desert, The Associated Press reports. The Trump administration waived FBI fingerprint background checks for staff at the tent city, which heightens the risk that a person with a criminal history could have access to the children, according to a government watchdog's memo.
• The Trump administration and a bloc of Republican senators are making a last-ditch attempt to pass a criminal justice revamp bill, including lower mandatory sentences for some drug crimes, in the lame duck session, Politico reported.
• Trump, speaking of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, said in The Washington Post interview that "one reason" to stay "is Israel," but “oil is becoming less and less of a reason because we’re producing more oil now than we’ve ever produced."