McConnell (R-Ky.) told Trump that Congress might end up passing a resolution disapproving the emergency declaration, the people said — which would force the president to contemplate issuing his first veto ever, in the face of opposition from his own party.

McConnell delivered the message during a face-to-face meeting with the president Tuesday at the White House, according to the Republicans, who requested anonymity to describe the encounter. The two men met alone and conversed with no aides present. Their meeting was not publicly announced.

The majority leader’s comments to the president came amid rising GOP concerns over the fallout if Trump were to declare a national emergency that would allow him to circumvent Congress and use the military to build new stretches of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump increasingly appears prepared to take that route, saying Friday that “I think there’s a good chance we’ll have to do that.”

Trump teased the possibility of making a definitive statement on the topic during his State of the Union address, telling reporters to watch the Tuesday speech closely. “I think you’ll find it very exciting,” the president said.

...

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a top McConnell confidant, said this week that he is opposed to a national emergency declaration, in part because of what it might embolden a future Democratic president to do.

“We’ve certainly tried to communicate that to him,” said Cornyn, referring to Trump. “And so, he understands our concerns as we’ve expressed them. But I don’t know if he shares those same concerns.”

"In its latest push for regime change in Venezuela, the White House on Monday slapped
sanctions on the regime’s state-owned oil firm, Petroleos de Venezuela.

To lift the sanctions, according to Mnuchin, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro must
transfer power to opposition leader Juan Guaidó. With the backing of the international community, Guaidó named himself the country’s interim president last week—creating a standoff between the United States and the current Venezuelan regime.

When asked on Monday whether President Donald Trump was considering sending military forces to facilitate the regime change in the region, National Security Advisor John Bolton replied that “all options are on the table.”

In announcing the sanctions, Mnuchin called PdVSA “a vehicle for embezzlement” for the Maduro regime. The state company, however, has also been a vehicle to funnel donations into the president’s political operations. According to a Federal Election Commission (FEC) report last year, Citgo Petroleum—an American subsidiary of PdVSA—donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration ceremonies.

A month before Trump assumed power, the Venezuelan government also gave the Russian owned company Rosneft 49.9 percent of Citgo’s shares for a $1.5 billion loan."

A climate science skeptic with a history of botched research is the latest controversial addition to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Scientific Advisory Board.

John Christy, a climate scientist from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, was one of eight people added on Thursday to the panel, which provides scientific advice to the EPA’s director. Another 21 experts, many drawn from industry and state agencies, were also added to related advisory committees.

...

“I’m skeptical of the conclusions that can be drawn from climate models,” Christy told BuzzFeed News. “I think there is a rush to judgment that every time something happens it’s because of global warming.”

...

In congressional testimony on climate change, Christy has touted his own estimates of atmospheric temperatures despite his record of mistakes, drawing complaints of “political grandstanding” from NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt in a 2016 analysis finding distortions in the data that Christy presented to lawmakers.

By phone, Christy dismissed past corrections of his team’s temperature estimates as “talking about things from 10 years ago.”

...

“He has made many statements before Congress and elsewhere that are at odds with the scientific evidence because of his personal value system. He is not an appropriate appointee for this advisory panel, unfortunately,” said Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was one of Christy’s graduate school supervisors.

“You mentioned all the economic indicators are going up,” a reporter asked. “Why, then, is the — are U.S. deficits and the financial debt increasing at a time when the economy —”

Trump jumped in.

“Well, the trade deals won’t kick in for a while,” he said. “You know, number one, the USMCA” — the revised version of NAFTA that Trump’s administration negotiated with Canada and Mexico — “hasn’t even been approved yet. It has to go before Congress and get approved. Now, it should get approved quickly.”

Before NAFTA, Trump said, “we had huge surpluses with Mexico. With NAFTA, we have huge deficits. We lose $100 billion a year on trade with Mexico. Does that sound good? And this has been going on for many years. So I stopped it. I stopped it a lot.”

You probably noticed that Trump took a question that’s obviously about the federal budget deficit and gave an answer that dealt with the country’s trade deficits. Both are deficits, sure, but they relate to each other in about the same way that a tuning fork relates to a dinner fork. The term “deficit” describes something similar in each case, and they can even share similar properties, but the two are by no means equal.

...

Trump was asked if the tariffs he had imposed on China might remain in effect indefinitely even if the United States and China reached a broader trade agreement, as Trump hoped.

“Yeah, sure,” Trump replied. “We have 25 percent now on $50 billion. And by the way . . . that’s a lot of money pouring into our Treasury, you know. We never made 5 cents with China. We’re getting, right now, 25 percent on $50 billion. And then I was putting 25 percent at a later date, which date came and went — 25 percent or $200 billion.”

Now, it is true that tariffs can generate revenue for the government. In 2017, the U.S. government generated $34.9 billion in “customs duties,” taxes paid on the import of products into the country. That made up just under 1 percent of all of the taxes collected that year. (The bulk came from income taxes.)

If you’re curious, assuming that the U.S. government collected 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese products, that would be another $12.5 billion in revenue, but that’s probably not a fair assumption. The percentage of revenue that would constitute is about 1.3 percent.

But, as The Washington Post’s Heather Long pointed out when Trump suggested in August that tariffs would pay down the debt, it’s not the Chinese paying those tariffs — it’s the person or company doing the importing.

...

“The country — we took it over and owed over $20 trillion,” Trump said, referring to the national debt. “As you know, the last eight years, they borrowed more than it did in the whole history of our country. So they borrowed more than $10 trillion, right? And yet we picked up $5.2 trillion just in the stock market. Possibly picked up the whole thing in terms of the first nine months, in terms of value. So you could say, in one sense, we’re really increasing values. And maybe, in a sense, we’re reducing debt.”

There is no sense in which rising stock market valuations reduces the federal debt. The way the federal debt is reduced is either by cutting federal spending or increasing federal revenue, including through raising taxes. As president, Trump has made overtures at the former and rejected the latter, meaning that the nearly $20 trillion debt Trump inherited has now topped $21.5 trillion.

"And yet we picked up $5.2 trillion just in the stock market. Possibly picked up the whole thing in terms of the first nine months, in terms of value. So you could say, in one sense, we’re really increasing values. And maybe, in a sense, we’re reducing debt.”