President Trump’s Best of Weeks, Worst of Weeks

It was President Trump’s best of weeks and his worst of weeks. It was his best of weeks in that

• The President instantly won the hearts of conservative Republicans by pardoning Scooter Libby, the innocent casualty of a previous lawless Special Counsel, Lawrence Walsh. President George W. Bush should have pardoned Libby but didn’t;
• The President made good on his vow to punish Syria’s Assad for poison gassing his own people. The retaliation was done with the help of US allies France and the UK;
• The President issued an executive order for welfare reform “to get more Americans back to work while protecting and strengthening the safety net for the truly needy” (hat tip: Nicomachus);
• Trump “instructed his economic advisors to consider rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).” This would “would reaffirm America’s commitment to Asia…That’s why Japan is already welcoming the possibility with open arms….If the U.S. remains outside the TPP, it will only strengthen China,” Axios reports;
• The President could now reopen the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) — a trade pact between the US and the European Union. This is “the largest bilateral trade initiative ever negotiated,” Wikipedia reports. If resumed, it would thwart Chinese plans to play the Europeans off against the US in the aftermath of the US tariffs levied on China;
• “U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence said on Saturday he was leaving a summit of Latin American countries in Peru very hopeful that the United States, Mexico and Canada were close to a deal on a renegotiated NAFTA trade pact,” CBC reports. Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz and two other senators have written the President suggesting a provision be added to NAFTA that would help US innovation and competitiveness by streamlining regulation. This could “be included as an annex that applies only to the U.S., so that neither Mexico nor Canada would need to agree. The Nafta vehicle would allow Republicans to multiply the Trump administration’s deregulatory wins, further bolstering the economy” and it would “guard against regulatory incursions by future Democratic presidents,” Kimberly Strassel reports in the Wall Street Journal;
• 

  Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) acthng head Mick Mulvaney

  The President’s acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Mick Mulvaney, brought home to the Democrats what fools they had been in making the CFPB fully independent of Congress. “For the second straight day, the acting director has told a congressional panel that he can just sit in front of them all day and ignore their questions, and there’s nothing they can do about it.” (hat tip: Eaglebeak)

But it was also the President’s worst of weeks, as the home and office of his personal attorney Michael Cohen were searched by the FBI pursuant to a court-ordered criminal investigation. According to the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, the  investigation in the “Southern District of New York, involving Michael Cohen and apparent hush-money payoffs, is a serious peril for Trump….No wrongdoing has been established at this point. But the SDNY investigation is a serious matter.”

But with the economy strong — and likely to become even stronger if trade expands rather contracts in a trade war — a growing percentage of American voters will have the President’s back. As an op ed columnist in the Washington Post notes, “The Michael Cohen raid could backfire.”

Click here to go to the previous Founders Broadsheet post (“Trump administration split over goal of tariffs vs Chinese imports”)