White House Watch: Nunberg Goes Off

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on March 12.

One More Thing—In the magazine this week, our editors train a skeptical eye on the purported economic and national security benefits of protectionism:

The arguments for tariffs are almost exclusively political rather than economic. Tariffs are popular with certain demographics and with the specific companies and industries they protect, but they harm the wider economy. When the George W. Bush administration imposed tariffs on imported steel in 2002, American steelmakers took the opportunity of diminished competition to raise prices. U.S. manufacturers who bought steel for their products had to adjust to higher prices, and as a result 50,000 workers lost their jobs, according to a study by the economists Joseph Francois and Laura Baughman. Overall, when combined with other economic headwinds, the 2002 tariffs cost the American economy 200,000 jobs and $4 billion in lost wages in just one year. And the Bush tariffs, which were repealed after just 21 months, were far smaller and more targeted duties than the ones announced by Trump.
Tariffs also tend to sabotage our international objectives. Earlier this year when the Trump administration announced new levies on washing machines, the United States in essence picked a fight with a nation—South Korea—whose friendship we need to manage the problem of North Korea.

DACA Watch—The Trump administration’s March 5 sunset date for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, hyped for months as a deadline for congressional immigration reform, came and went practically unnoticed Monday. Congress, now occupied with potential gun legislation and the president’s proposed tariffs, as well as a bill to relax banking regulations, has not returned to the issue since they failed to find a workable compromise three weeks ago.

Thanks to a circuit court ruling last week that temporarily blocked the administration from pulling the plug on the program, the missed deadline does not present an immediate danger to DACA’s former beneficiaries, people brought to America illegally as children. But they remain on uncertain footing: the Trump administration is appealing the ruling, which they are confident will be overturned. If they win their appeal, Trump may direct the Department of Homeland Security to stop issuing DACA permits immediately. This would not immediately cause all DACA recipients to lose their legal status, but they would no longer be able to renew their 2-year permits when they expire, meaning that more would revert to illegal status every day.

In the meantime, the White House has continued to harangue Congress to pass an immigration fix. Read more...

Must-Read of the Day—Carve out the time today to sit down with Nahal Toosi’s remarkable new essay from this month’s Politico magazine about the ongoing human rights catastrophe in Myanmar, a country whose democratic overtures were supposed to make it a success story of President Obama’s foreign policy, but which has since erupted in anarchy, with military violence amounting to ethnic cleansing and displacement of entire peoples. The piece focuses on Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim population, nearly two thirds of whom have been forced to flee for their lives into neighboring Bangladesh, many of whom now live in squalid, overcrowded camps. It’s long, hard to read, and utterly necessary.

2018 Watch—Thad Cochran, the senior Republican from Mississippi, announced Monday that he would leave Congress at the beginning of next month due to his deteriorating health.

“I regret my health has become an ongoing challenge,” Cochran said in a statement. “I intend to fulfill my responsibilities and commitments to the people of Mississippi and the Senate through the completion of the 2018 appropriations cycle, after which I will formally retire from the U.S. Senate.”

In a statement, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell praised Cochran for his “unfailingly even keel, sober expertise, and respectful demeanor.”

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama is likely to take over for Cochran as the chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee. Cochran’s departure will trigger a special election in November, meaning both of Mississippi’s Senate seats will be in play. (David Byler says Republicans probably don’t need to worry.) Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant will appoint a replacement for Cochran in the interim.

Quote of the Day—“There are more complexities here than in brain surgery. Doing this job is going to be a very intricate process.” —Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson to the New York Times on the difficulties of running a government bureaucracy

Must-See TV—You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know Sam Nunberg’s name before Monday, as the Roger Stone associate hasn’t been in the news much since he was fired from the Trump campaign in 2015. But a subpoena from Robert Mueller brought the former Trump aide rocketing out of obscurity in a big way, as Nunberg aired a dizzying pile of grievances in a cable-news rampage that lasted most of Monday afternoon.

Nunberg told NBC’s Katy Tur that he would not cooperate with Mueller’s request that he turn over his past communications with various Trump campaign officials: “Why do I have to spend 80 hours going over my emails that I’ve had with Steve Bannon and with Roger Stone? Why does Bob Mueller need to see my emails when I send Roger and Steve clips and we talk about how much we hate people?”

Nunberg, who is no Trump fan, later aired his suspicions on CNN that Mueller has already uncovered damning information about the president: “I think Mueller has enough on Trump, he doesn’t need me to start giving him information on Roger Stone and Steve Bannon. They know something on him. I don’t know what it is, and perhaps I’m wrong. But he did something.” Read more...