Politico

There’s a clear culprit behind the shock ouster of the United States from the ongoing Women’s World Cup, at least in the mind of Donald Trump: President Joe Biden.

The top-ranked American women were defeated Sunday on penalty kicks by Sweden in the tournament’s round of 16, the earliest exit ever for the U.S. team. Trump, the former president and top-of-the-polls candidate for the 2024 Republican White House nomination, wrote on his social media platform Sunday night that “the ‘shocking and totally unexpected’ loss by the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team to Sweden is fully emblematic of what is happening to the our once great Nation under Crooked Joe Biden.”

It’s not the first time Trump has sparred with the nation’s top soccer stars. He was president in 2019 when the women’s national team won the previous Women’s World Cup and traded barbs at the time with star Megan Rapinoe, who had declared in advance that she would not attend any White House visit if her team won the tournament.

Rapinoe, playing in her final Women’s World Cup game, was among the American players to miss a penalty in Sunday’s game. Trump was quick to pile on to the U.S. star.

“Many of our players were openly hostile to America – No other country behaved in such a manner, or even close. WOKE EQUALS FAILURE. Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!! MAGA,” he wrote.

The economy is still on solid footing and the public still isn’t giving President Joe Biden much credit.

The Labor Department on Friday announced that 187,000 jobs were added to the economy in July. While that figure fell short of forecasts — the employment estimates from May and June were also revised down by a combined 49,000 — the unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent and wage growth accelerated.

Friday’s middle-of-the-road report reflects a gradual unwinding of tight labor conditions that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell says has helped keep prices elevated despite a rapid escalation in borrowing costs. It’s also a sign the Fed could still achieve the nigh-impossible “soft landing” — taming inflation without sending the economy into a tailspin — big banks and Wall Street economists are increasingly bullish on the possibility.

“The labor market data has been on a glide path to a soft landing the last several months, and today’s report continues us down that path,” Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights, said in a research note on Friday.

Biden’s hopes for a second term could well depend on it. But even as take home pay swells and spiking consumer prices tail off, the public remains anxious about what’s ahead.

CNN on Thursday released a poll taken last month showing that 63 percent of Americans disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy, with a majority of voters dissatisfied since late 2021. And even though recent economic indicators have suggested consumer confidence is improving, just 15 percent said the economy is in good condition and improving.

It’s at odds with a number of key economic indicators. The so-called misery index — the combination of the U.S. unemployment and inflation rates — has been falling for about a year. In June it hit its lowest level since March 2020. The economy is growing steadily, consumer spending has been robust and — despite losses in recent trading sessions — key stock market indices have notched significant gains since the start of the year.

Still, there are potential warning signs are showing up in manufacturing, banking and energy.

Manufacturing activity contracted in July for the ninth consecutive month, while manufacturing employment hit its lowest level since July 2020, according to the Institute for Supply Management.

A recent Fed survey showed banks expect to tighten credit standards across all loan categories in the second half of the year, after they pulled back on commercial and industrial lending. Deutsche Bank Research said the four previous times the survey showed such tightening were all associated with recessions.

The bigger threat in the near term is shaping up to be rising gasoline prices, driven in part by global oil supply cuts and a U.S. heat wave that’s curtailed refinery output (keep in mind refineries are essentially giant, volatile chemistry sets).

The national average gasoline price Thursday was $3.83, more than 29 cents higher than a month ago. Oil prices rose Thursday after Saudi Arabia extended production cuts ahead of an Opec+ meeting today.

“We’re going to be going from disinflation potentially back to inflation when we talk about the price of gasoline — that’s something that could happen as soon as September,” GasBuddy analyst Patrick De Haan told POLITICO in a recent interview about what’s happening at the pump. “[Fed officials] shouldn’t put their guard down when it comes to energy prices.”

Mongolia gets a rare slice of the Washington limelight on Wednesday when Vice President Kamala Harris meets with visiting Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erden.

It’s the first time a Mongolian prime minister has visited the United States since 2018, giving the country — whose population of 3.4 million is smaller than Brooklyn’s and whose 2021 GDP of $15 billion was about a quarter of Rhode Island’s — a platform in the U.S. for a day.

Harris and Oyun-Erden will discuss “our economic and commercial relationship … and a range of regional and global issues, including China and Russia,” said a White House official granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on the record.

The prime minister’s visit aims at “deepening the strategic partnership relationship” with the U.S. by “expanding political, economic, humanitarian and regional cooperation,” the Mongolian Embassy in Washington said in a statement. (He’ll also be meeting with officials from U.S. agencies including USAID and the International Development Finance Corporation).

That’s a bit vague, but the U.S. and Mongolia have some very concrete reasons to talk. Here’s what the meeting is really about:

Getting intel about the neighbors

Landlocked Mongolia is surrounded by Russia and China. That requires the flourishing multi-party democracy to balance cordial relations with Moscow and Beijing while also being able to ink a strategic cooperation agreementwith the U.S. and host trilateral meetings with Seoul and Washington in its capital, Ulaanbaatar.

Given Biden administration concerns that China may provide weapons for Russia’s war on Ukraine — and Mongolia’s positioning as a potential transshipment point for such supplies — expect Harris to press Oyun-Erdene for details of his recent contact with the Chinese and Russian leadership.

Oyun-Erdene met with Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in June and “has been having direct communications with Putin as well,” said Amar Adiya, a former official in Mongolia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry and the Canada-based publisher of the investment newsletter Mongolia Weekly. “Washington wants to hear about the conversations they’re having with those neighbors,” Adiya said.

Mongolia has resisted pressure from its neighbors to depart from its official policy of neutrality and align more closely with Moscow and Beijing since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And the U.S. has close links with Mongolia’s military — U.S. forces participated in the annual Khann Quest international military exercise outside of  Ulaanbaatar last month. But State Department concerns about the country’s “widespread” corruption and its network of rail and road routes linking China and Russia make it likely that Harris will press Oyun-Erdene for strict vigilance in preventing possible transfers of Chinese weapons to bolster Russia’s war effort.

Mining, and more mining

Mongolia’s huge reserves of minerals including lithium, copper and graphite will likely also come up. That’s because they’re essential to sustainable energy technologies including electrical storage batteries and solar and wind power. And Beijing is trying to secure access to the lion’s share of those materials from Latin America to Zimbabwe and Congo.

The Biden administration sent a delegation to Mongolia in June to talk up U.S. interest in getting a bigger slice of Mongolia’s exports of those materials. The visit didn’t land any deals, but the Biden administration sees Mongolia as a candidate for the Minerals Security Partnership, an initiative with 14 mostly Western countries to bolster sustainable investment in the mining, processing and recycling of critical minerals.

Mongolia “is very resource rich, but it hasn’t gotten the kind of U.S. and international investment that it could and that’s an important reason why the prime minister is visiting,” said Michael Klecheski, U.S. ambassador to Mongolia from 2019 to 2022.

Getting out the (Mongolian) vote

Mongolians will go to the polls in national elections inthe first half of 2024. And Ouyen-Erdene likely sees valuable political capital in photo ops with Harris and other senior government officials.

That might include pressing his hosts to express support for the Mongolia Third Neighbor Trade Act. That legislation — most recently introduced in the House in 2021— would boost the country’s economy by allowing duty-free export to the U.S. of some Mongolian apparel and textile products.

For Ouyen-Erdene, his Washington exposure “is very much for domestic consumption — to give more credibility to the prime minister by showing he’s on par with other world leaders,” said Adiya, the former Mongolian diplomat.

Direct flights from the U.S.

Flying from Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar to Washington, D.C., is a pricey test of long haul endurance. Expedia lists only three such flights, two of which have layover times of 10 to 19 hours.

Mongolia’s government is “really focused on” increasing flight availability and reducing layover times for travelers between the two countries, said Piper Campbell, U.S. ambassador in Ulaanbaatar from 2012 to 2015.

“One of the ways for Mongolia to get out of the realities of being a landlocked country is to increase their air connections — if [Ouyen-Erdene] came home with a commitment to that, or even have a commitment to towards a path towards that, that’s something that would be big for them,” Campbell said.

The Biden administration is listening. Ouyen-Erdene and Harris “will sign an Open Skies Agreement which will facilitate air services between Mongolia and the United States,” the White House official said.

The Mongolian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the flight path the prime minister took to get to D.C.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Monday that he supported a blockade by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) on hundreds of military promotions, asserting that the Pentagon was “violating the law” with its abortion travel policy.

The new policy — which pays the travel costs for service members who don’t have local access to reproductive health care, including abortions — is “not consistent with longstanding U.S. law,” DeSantis said Monday during an interview in New Hampshire with FOX News’ Bret Baier.

“I think it plays into a larger problem that we have seen in the military,” the Republican presidential hopeful added. “You have a lot of civilians forcing them to engage in political and culture issues that are detracting from [the] mission — this is one of them, but the pronouns and the drag queens and all those other things.”

Tuberville’s hold is set to leave the Army and Navy without Senate-confirmed nominees to replace retiring leaders by mid-August. The monthslong logjam has already left the Marine Corps with a temporary commandant — the first time in 100 years the branch has not had a Senate-confirmed leader — and has kept more than 270 military promotions in limbo.

DeSantis, who during the interview on Monday noted that his own experience in the military differentiated him from the crowded GOP field, said it was the Pentagon that picked the fight with Tuberville “by violating the law.”

“So I think that standing up for that is the right thing to do,” DeSantis said.

Both the Senate GOP and Alabama Republicans are split over Tuberville’s blockade, while President Joe Biden has warned that the hold will lead to “a growing cascade of damage and disruption.”

On Monday afternoon, the White House announced that the permanent headquarters of the U.S. Space Command would be in Colorado, instead of Tuberville’s home state of Alabama.

The move prompted outrage from lawmakers in Alabama, including Tuberville, who called the decision “shameful” in a statement on Monday evening.

Progressives were thrilled when Joe Biden said this past spring that he would explore new ways to kill off the debt ceiling for good.

Now they fear they’re getting the ultimate Beltway brush-off: An internal working group.

Two months after narrowly averting economic disaster, the White House is assembling a team dedicated to heading off yet another debt crisis come 2025. The group will study a range of legal and policy options, the administration said, in an effort to prevent Republicans from once again wielding the threat of catastrophic default to extract political concessions.

But there’s reason to be skeptical that concrete action will come soon, if at all. There’s no clear timeline for the project and little in the way of overt direction, outside of analyzing various theories for defusing the debt ceiling.

And for the growing cadre of lawmakers, economists and legal scholars still attuned to the issue, Biden’s decision to hand it off to a working group represents a decidedly mundane response to an urgent and existential dilemma.

“We are going to get pummeled on this over and over and over again,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who lobbied Biden earlier this year to simply ignore the debt ceiling on grounds that defaulting is unconstitutional rather than give in to Republicans’ negotiation demands. “So I hope it’s quick. I hope it’s decisive. We have the answer right in front of us.”

The group’s creation comes as Congress’ need to raise the debt limit has become a more common negotiating tool for the Republican majority, threatening U.S. creditworthiness and putting the global economy at risk. After weeks of tense negotiations this spring, Biden struck a deal with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to suspend the debt ceiling past the next election.

But the GOP’s steep demands — and the willingness among some in the party to default regardless of the outcome — has fueled calls for a workaround from Democrats spooked by the prospect of a more unpredictable rematch in 2025 if Biden wins reelection but Republicans control both the House and Senate.

“It feels like a threshold was crossed,” said Robert Hockett, a Cornell University professor who has studied legal justifications for ignoring the debt limit. “Some Democrats are finally waking up to that.”

White House counsel Stuart Delery and top economic adviser Lael Brainard are leading the administration’s working group, which aides and outside advisers to the White House characterized as a serious undertaking to vet every possible route for sidestepping future crises. In a sign of its openness to all options, the White House enlisted Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe to be among the first eight outside legal and economic scholars to meet with the group. Tribe was among the most vocal advocates for circumventing the debt crisis by invoking the 14th Amendment, which states that the “validity of the public debt” cannot be questioned.

Despite touting the final compromise, Biden came away from this spring’s debt ceiling talks troubled by how close the country had come to default — and persuaded of the need to search for an alternative, they said.

The president has repeatedly expressed openness to testing the popular liberal theory that the 14th Amendment invalidates the debt ceiling. That he’s created a working group, officials say, is not evidence that he’s backed off of that. Instead it’s a notable step for an institutionalist who just nine months ago called eliminating the borrowing limit “irresponsible.”

“It’s not a gimmick, it’s not designed to deal with a short-term political need,” said one economic adviser to the White House granted anonymity to freely discuss the group. “He genuinely wants to come up with a solution that might be saleable on Capitol Hill.”

Still, the administration faces an uphill battle in proving to progressive allies that the group is more than a kicking of the can.

The White House already consulted with experts throughout the most recent debt ceiling standoff, a process that did little to shake its belief that Congress needed to resolve the crisis. It rebuffed pleas from progressive lawmakers to deploy the 14th Amendment and ruled out other unilateral options — like minting a coin to pay for a debt ceiling hike. Though Biden signaled a desire to test the legal theory behind the 14th Amendment once the immediate standoff was over, the administration has not yet tried to do so.

Progressives said that if the administration spends months studying the issue only to come to the same conclusion that Biden is powerless on his own, it’ll be a waste of time. And they fear it will only further embolden the GOP to use the prospect of economic collapse as leverage.

“The debt ceiling was a bad idea when it was first put in place, and it has become the worst idea as the Republicans have figured out how to weaponize it,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “I’ll be very blunt. I don’t care how we get rid of the debt ceiling, so long as we get rid of it.”

The White House declined to comment about the group’s activities and timeline, with an official cautioning only that the process “will take some time.” It plans to hold a series of sessions with outside experts across a range of fields, as well as with lawmakers, though the first of those meetings hasn’t yet been scheduled.

Even the administration’s close allies don’t know what to expect. Jayapal, who received advance notice of the team’s creation, said she was still awaiting basic details like how long the group planned to work on the issue and what it hoped to produce.

Others said they didn’t even know the effort was in the works — a low-key approach that’s unnerved some lawmakers who welcomed the focus on the debt ceiling but questioned the point of conducting a drawn-out study.

“I don’t think we need a [working group] for that,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who argued the options for avoiding a debt ceiling battle are obvious, but that the group might be helpful to “build support for some of those answers.”

In the White House, officials portrayed the more rigorous approach as necessary to justify whatever solutions the administration settles on.

Biden would need to make a forceful case for any drastic action to a Democratic Party and broader public still fractured over the debt ceiling’s merits and the seriousness of the nation’s fiscal health.

“I agree that we should think about how to reform the debt ceiling, but I would have grave concerns about eliminating it completely,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “We would be fiscally unwise to remove the only action forcing movement without replacing it with something that would work at least as well for improving the fiscal situation.”

Several Democratic lawmakers have proposed legislation that would overhaul the debt limit and decouple it from the fate of the broader economy. Most, including Biden’s working group, are likely to agree those bills are the best way to eliminate the debt ceiling threat.

But with Congress deeply divided and Republicans making clear they view such standoffs as opportunities to win concessions, it may also be the least practical.

“It’s impossible for us to act like this is a reasonable Congress,” Jayapal said. “We just need to come to terms with that. We need to take it off the table because it’s hurting our faith and credit.”

President Joe Biden is getting into the habit of counting Hunter Biden’s 4-year-old daughter, Navy Joan Roberts, among his grandchildren.

In a conversation for a podcast episode released Monday, Biden said that he has seven grandchildren — not six. Though the reference to Navy was only implicit, it marks the first time Biden has cited that figure when talking about his family during an interview.

“I have seven grandkids, five of ’em old enough to talk on the phone, you know, every day I either text or call them,” Biden said during the episode of “On purpose with Jay Shetty.”

Biden first acknowledged that he is the grandfather of Navy, Hunter’s daughter from his affair with Lunden Roberts, in a statement on Friday.

The shift follows the conclusion of a messy court proceeding that settled in Arkansas last month. Roberts filed the suit against Hunter in 2019, which ultimately proved that he was the father through DNA testing. Court filings did not state the amount of child support Navy received — a contentious issue that flared up amid the paternity dispute. She will also receive some of Hunter’s paintings.

Biden had previously referred to his and first lady Jill Biden’s “six grandchildren.”

President Joe Biden on Friday for the first time publicly acknowledged his seventh grandchild, Navy Joan Roberts, the 4-year old daughter of his son Hunter.

Biden said in a statement that he and the first lady “only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”

“This is not a political issue, it’s a family matter,” Biden continued. “Our son Hunter and Navy’s mother, Lunden, are working together to foster a relationship that is in the best interests of their daughter, preserving her privacy as much as possible going forward.”

The statement was first provided to People magazine.

As someone who frequently talks about his close-knit extended family, Biden has been under scrutiny for failing to publicly acknowledge the girl. Since becoming president, he and Jill Biden have frequently described their “six grandchildren” but have never mentioned Hunter’s child from his affair with Lunden Roberts. In 2019, Roberts filed a lawsuit against Hunter, who was determined to be the father of her child through DNA testing.

Roberts and her daughter live in Arkansas, where Navy has grown up.

The public acknowledgement comes shortly after the bitter child support and paternity issues were resolved. As grandparents, Biden and the first lady were following Hunter’s lead during the proceedings, according to a source familiar with the situation granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.

The case settled in Arkansas last month after years of dispute. Court filings did not state the amount of child support but said she would also receive some of Hunter’s paintings.

Jonathan Lemire contributed to this report.