Here’s what happened this week under President Donald Trump that you may have missed.
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One of the most high-profile Cabinet positions for a president is the head of the Justice Department, who wields immense prosecutorial power for the government. The Senate votes to confirm the president’s pick, and lawmakers are usually pretty deferential, especially when the Senate is led by the same party.
But Trump is struggling this week to get his pick for attorney general, Todd Blanche, through a Republican-controlled Senate. Rather than vote to confirm Blanche for the job he is already doing in an acting capacity, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) are holding back their votes. They are concerned that Blanche will green-light the controversial “anti-weaponization” fund popular with Jan. 6, 2021, rioters and that Blanche is giving Trump and his family broad tax immunity.
These are just two senators, and Republicans have pushed back on Trump’s nominees before, such as when Trump first nominated former congressman Matt Gaetz to be attorney general.
But Senate Republicans have a narrow enough majority that these two holdouts matter — particularly because they sit on the committee weighing Blanche’s nomination — and the situation raises questions about how much power Trump will continue to have over his party. All presidents hit lame-duck status at some point, and Trump isn’t negotiating from a place of strength right now: Polls show he is extraordinarily unpopular right now, and Republicans are going into midterm elections that could bring big losses for their party.
Trump started the week in Michigan asserting the economy under him is doing well.
But the economy slowed this spring into summer, government data released at the end of this week finds. The economy grew 1.5 percent from April to June, below economists’ expectations of at least 2 percent, The Washington Post’s David J. Lynch reports.
Consumers have been spending, which always buoys the U.S. economy. But that could get harder to do as people’s tax refunds fizzle, gas prices go up again with the fighting in the Middle East and Trump puts tariffs on products from dozens of countries. Persistent inflation is also starting to worry consumers, investors and businesses.
“It’s an economy that’s doing okay,” Brian Bethune, an economics professor at Boston College, told Lynch. “It’s not overheating. It’s not underheating.”
There’s pressure on the Federal Reserve to do something to avoid the overheating in particular. The independent central bank can make it costlier to borrow money by raising interest rates, which can bring down spending and cool off inflation. But the Fed voted this week to leave interest rates unchanged despite rising costs. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, a Trump ally, argues he will use alternative strategies to try to bring costs down.
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But three dissenting members of the Federal Reserve warned Friday that could be a mistake. “The longer that high inflation persists,” Beth M. Hammack of the Cleveland Fed said in a statement, “the more challenging and costly it can be to bring it back down.”
(A note on the reliability of government economic data: Trump fired the head of labor statistics last year after a jobs report and alleged without evidence it had been manipulated. But the government has continued to compile data on the economy that outside economists find reliable.)
As Spain is dealing with a sudden, dramatic rush of tens of thousands of migrants onto its soil, the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants already in the U.S. is ramping up.
The Supreme Court recently ruled that Trump could cancel temporary humanitarian protections to migrants from countries deemed dangerous.
That’s coming to fruition this week, with more than a million migrants mostly from Haiti losing their temporary protected status and jobs. There are mass layoffs at airports, nursing homes and schools, all places where Haitians have filled essential jobs for years. The Trump administration argues these protections are a way to override immigration laws. Opponents argue that while imperfect, the temporary status has helped revive small towns with hard workers.
The change in employment from the end of TPS is so rapid that it could disrupt summer travel or schools preparing to welcome students back, The Washington Post reports.
“These are people who have helped Springfield really come back,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) told CBS News this week. Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield of eating cats and dogs. “The Haitians … came there because there were jobs that were not being filled by other people.”
Also this week, tens of thousands of immigrant children who arrived in the country as unaccompanied minors could soon have to face judges alone. A federal grant providing children attorneys expires Friday.
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
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