It was Pelosi's day, so Trump tried to photobomb it

Split the screen

He hasn't gotten his wall, and on Thursday President Donald Trump was having a tougher time than usual getting attention. The breaking news was on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where Democrats formally assumed majority control of the House and a triumphant Nancy Pelosi reclaimed the speaker's gavel.

Suddenly, White House reporters received alerts that an unscheduled briefing would be held in five minutes. Did something big happen? Cable networks pivoted to cover it live, the White House briefing room came up on TV screens and Trump himself made his first-ever appearance at its podium. 

 "I just want to start off by congratulating Nancy Pelosi on being elected speaker of the House. ... Hopefully, we're going to work together and we're going to get lots of things done. ... And I think it's actually going to work out.  I think it'll be a little bit different than a lot of people are thinking."

He introduced three border patrol agents who agreed with him that "walls work." After nine minutes, he left without taking any questions, and neither did press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, so it wasn't a real briefing.

Pelosi's House Democrats moved forward to pass a plan to reopen government without funding Trump's wall. The Republican-led Senate won't act on it because Trump won't sign it. "I would call it political theater, not productive lawmaking," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.

The White House has invited congressional leaders back for another meeting on Friday, the 14th day of the partial government shutdown. They made no progress two days earlier.

"There is no amount of persuasion he can use" to get her to fund his wall, Pelosi said in an interview that aired Thursday on NBC's "Today." She added: "We can go through the back and forth. No. How many more times can we say no?" For more on the shutdown, see Newsday's story by Laura Figueroa Hernandez.

The 'I' words

With House Democrats ready to open multiple probes and the results of special counsel Robert Mueller's still to come, Pelosi held out the possibility of impeachment proceedings against Trump down the road.

"We have to wait and see what happens with the Mueller report," Pelosi said in the "Today" interview. “We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason.” She also said it remains an " open discussion" whether the Justice Department could constitutionally indict a sitting president.

In her speech to the House, she promised Democrats would be "champions of the middle class" and outlined an agenda in sharp contrast with Trump's. She spoke of background check legislation for gun purchasers, ending discrimination against LGBTQ Americans and protecting “Dreamers,” who were brought as children to this country illegally. “We must also face the existential threat of our time: the climate crisis,” she said. For more, see Tom Brune's story for Newsday.

Janison: Swamp things

If Trump aimed to avoid the odor of special-interest coziness in his executive branch, you wouldn't know it from the company he keeps, writes Newsday's Dan Janison. There's an open border between the government and big business.

His new acting Defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, spent 31 years at Boeing. The EPA's interim director and likely nominee to lead the agency in the longer term, Andrew Wheeler, worked for one of the nation’s largest coal-mining companies and lobbied for chemical and big-oil interests, according to published reports. HHS Secretary Alex Azar came from the drug industry. The interim Interior chief, David Bernhardt, was an oil-industry lobbyist.

The website OpenSecrets.org in July linked to the profiles of 164 former lobbyists serving in the Trump administration and noted 18 former staffers who went the other way and became lobbyists despite a Trump order early on barring executive branch employees who leave from lobbying for five years.

Glitch hunt

Trump the other day called the stock market's big drop a "glitch," but after Apple blamed its revenue woes on falling demand in China, triggering another swoon on Wall Street, one of his top economic advisers acknowledged that the trade war is damaging U.S. businesses with interests in China.

"It's not going to be just Apple," White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett told CNN. "I think that there are a heck of a lot of US companies that have a lot of sales in China that are basically going to be watching their earnings be downgraded next year until we get a deal with China."

Trump again tweeted a fantasy that "The United States Treasury has taken in MANY billions of dollars from the Tariffs we are charging China and other countries that have not treated us fairly." In reality, the tariff costs are usually borne by the U.S. companies importing the goods and are often passed on to American consumers.

Higher bar to charge bias?

The Trump administration is considering a far-reaching rollback of civil rights law that would dilute federal rules against discrimination in areas including education and housing, The Washington Post reported.

A recent internal Justice Department memo directed senior civil rights officials to examine where “disparate impact” regulations written to implement the 1964 Civil Rights Act might be changed or removed. Under the concept of disparate impact, actions can amount to discrimination if they have an uneven effect even if that was not the intent.

Conservatives have argued that proving discrimination should require proof that it was done on purpose.

Trust and vilify

Days after his op-ed charging Trump has come up short as president for such traits as "honesty and integrity, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told reporters "I look forward to being able to have a trusting relationship with the president and others despite differences from time to time."

Romney and his Trump-allied niece, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, both said there were no hard feelings between them. McDaniel tweeted Wednesday Romney's criticism of Trump was "disappointing and unproductive."
“I love my uncle. My tweet yesterday had nothing to do with family,” McDaniel said. Romney said his niece had a "right to express that viewpoint" and her tweet was "probably more civil than it might have been across the Thanksgiving dinner table."

What else is happening:

• The Trump administration is considering Jim Webb, a former Democratic senator and Reagan-era secretary of the Navy, to be the next defense secretary, The New York Times reported. Webb's views align with Trump on disengaging from the Middle East and confronting China.
• Rudy Giuliani went on Twitter to tell witches not they should not feel insulted by his client's description of the Mueller investigation as a "witch hunt." He wrote: "There is no reason for the witches to be offended because Witch Hunt derives from, for example, the Salem Witch Hunts where people were executed unjustly."
• The U.S. national debt has risen by more than $2 trillion since Trump took office, according to Treasury Department data released Thursday. It was $1.974  trillion at the end of 2018. As a candidate, Trump promised to "get rid of" the national debt, saying he could do it over eight years.
• An immigrant working at Trump's New Jersey golf resort says managers removed her name from a list to be vetted by the Secret Service after she reminded them she was undocumented, The New York Times reported. Investigators are looking into allegations that management knew some of its workers were in the U.S. illegally.
• Bernie Sanders and top aides are offering apologies as some of his 2016 campaign staffers face allegations of sexual harassment. "Of course, if I run again, we will do better next time," Sanders told CNN.
• A change in the Democratic 2020 calendar could put Sanders and candidates with similar grass roots followings at a disadvantage against rivals like Joe Biden, Politico reports. Several states that caucused in 2016 will hold primaries instead, which helps candidates whose support base is broader, even if not as intense.
• Some pro-Trump Republicans worry that a challenge in Republican primaries could damage Trump's re-election prospects and they want the rules changed to make it harder to do, The Associated Press reports. But RNC officials say rules can't be changed before the 2020 national convention.