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President Donald Trump is heading to Capitol Hill Tuesday to have lunch with Senate Republicans, as the White House and its GOP allies try to coalesce around a message ahead of the midterm elections, the Associated Press writes.
Senators expect Trump to discuss the economy and his upcoming summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, two topics Republicans believe are crowd-pleasers among the electorate they need to motivate in November. Some senators also want to talk about trade. Republicans are increasingly relying on the president to help protect the GOP’s slim 51-49 majority in the Senate this fall, AP says.
Trump is also expected to press Republicans to change rules to speed up consideration of his nominees for vacant court seats and executive posts, the Hill reports. It’s taken an average of 84 days to confirm Trump’s nominees, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a non-partisan group that tracks confirmations. That is far longer than the four presidents who preceded him.
Also read: How immigrants help Republicans win elections.
Cook’s message to Trump: Tariffs are the wrong approach to China, Apple CEO Tim Cook says he told President Trump when the two met in the Oval Office in late April. “I felt that tariffs were not the right approach there, and I showed him some of the more analytical kinds of things to demonstrate why,” Cook said in an interview on “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations,” on Bloomberg TV.
Cook said he also urged Trump to find a solution for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.
Stormy Daniels’ lawyer threatens to sue: USA Today reports that adult film star Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti has threatened to sue the Daily Caller and its reporters individually for defamation, according to an email published by one of the conservative news site’s reporters. “Let me be clear. If you and your colleagues do not stop with the hit pieces that are full of lies and defamatory statements, I will have no choice but to sue each of you and your publication for defamation,” reads an email purportedly from Avenatti to reporter Peter J. Hasson.
Avenatti didn’t specify which stories from the Daily Caller he believes are defamatory, USA Today said. The site notes it recently published a story on his “questionable history,” which the article asserts “is littered with lawsuits, jilted business partners and bankruptcy filings.”