White House

While his jabs might delight hard-core supporters, they also come with risks in states like Missouri, where there is a tight Senate race.

COLUMBIA, Mo. — He called Nancy Pelosi “an MS-13 lover.” He deemed Maxine Waters a “low-IQ person.” He dubbed Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.”

President Donald Trump has never been shy about branding his female political enemies with personal and demeaning insults. But here in Missouri, where Claire McCaskill is facing off against Josh Hawley in one of the closest Senate races in the country, Trump has held his tongue.

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“She’s been saying such nice things about me, but you know what, she’ll never vote for me,” Trump said, casting McCaskill as a “far-left Democrat.”

The president, already reviled by millions of women who have rallied against him in record numbers, finds himself in the position of facing off against an army of powerful female Democrats — both incumbents like McCaskill and newcomers like Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who is among the wave of women seeking higher office in the wake of Trump’s presidency.

Indeed, one of the ironies of Trump’s presidency, which oozes a uniquely Trumpian brand of macho bravado, is that it unleashed a new generation of women who are running for office in record numbers. And of the 24 Senate Democrats up for reelection, 11 of them are women, including several in tight elections.

Yet Trump’s verbal attacks on female candidates aren’t applied equally across the board. While his jabs might delight hard-core supporters, they also come with risks, especially in states like Missouri, where McCaskill has served as a senator for nearly 12 years, winning over moderates and surviving as other state Democrats went extinct.

“There are certain women who seem to irk him and so he raises them in all sorts of settings as representative of the Democratic Party,” said Kelly Dittmar, a professor at Rutgers University-Camden who studies gender in politics.

Trump has often responded to this historic moment with rage, launching deeply personal and sarcastic attacks on the women he sees as his enemies. During the 2016 presidential primaries, he dismissed opponent Carly Fiorina by declaring, “Look at that face. Would anybody vote for that?” And during the general election, he recapped a debate with Hillary Clinton by noting, “When she walked in front of me, believe me, I wasn’t impressed.”

Since then, he has granted nicknames to many of his female adversaries. In Trump’s lexicon, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is “sneaky Dianne” and Rep. Jacky Rosen, running for the Senate in Nevada, is “Wacky Jacky.” On Thursday, Trump called Abrams “not qualified” to be governor, adding “look at her past, take a look at her history, take a look at what she wants to do and what she has in mind for the state.”

But some of the women in the tightest Senate races haven’t had to endure such an intense upbraiding. While New York Democrat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is a “lightweight,” Trump has mostly avoided memorable insults when stumping in North Dakota for Kevin Cramer, who is running against Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.

One possible explanation for the kid-glove treatment: Democrats in tight races have avoided going after Trump aggressively, a tactic that — intended or not — shields them from the hot-tempered president’s wrath.

“The direct attacks tend to be against the women who have been the most vocal against him,” Dittmar noted.

McCaskill, for her part, has at times avoided even saying Trump’s name as she is out campaigning, focusing instead on local issues and her ability to work effectively with politicians of all stripes. McCaskill even went on Fox News last week to insist she was not one of the “crazy Democrats.”

“The crazy Democrats are people who walk in restaurants and scream at elected officials’ faces,” she said.

Her campaign even aired a radio ad recently that featured two men chatting.

“Claire’s not one of those crazy Democrats. She works right in the middle and finds compromise,” one man says.

Trump on Thursday night argued that though McCaskill might be sane, her voting record aligns with with “the crazy Democrats.”

“Don’t listen to what Claire says,” Trump told the crowd. “Just look at how she votes. She votes with the crazy Democrats and they have gotten crazier.”

Trump’s critics say there’s a marked difference between the way he talks about his male and female opponents.

“He has one playbook for women and one for men. He attacks women on their looks, their intelligence and mental stability,” said Christine Matthews, president of the public opinion research firm Bellwether, adding that his habit of attacking women is “tiresome” and “immature.”

Publicly, Republicans argue that Trump is just being Trump, asserting that his brash broadsides are what makes him appeal to so many conservatives. And they counter that he’s an equal opportunity attacker, noting that he has lambasted men too.

But some GOP strategist have privately worried that the president is alienating women with his rheotric — a recent survey from PBS, NPR and Maris found that only 33 percent of women approve of Trump’s job performance, compared to 46 percent of men. Young women are especially turned off by the president. A CBS News poll over the summer showed that 70 percent of women aged 18 to 35 were dissatisfied or angry about the Trump presidency.

Trump brushed off such concerns Thursday night, sarcastically addressing the polling.

“Women want security and that’s why we’re doing well with women,” Trump said.

“Women are smart — they’re smarter than the men,” he added, before holding his hand up to the side of his mouth as if he were telling a secret to the crowd: “But don’t say I said it.”

But the numbers don’t back up Trump’s boasts. While Trump frequently brags about how well he did among women the 2016 election, he only received 41 percent of their vote. And Trump’s remarks about women have hurt him with college-educated white women, particularly in light of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination fight, during which Trump mocked Christine Blasey Ford after she accused Kavanaugh of sexual harassment. According to polling, 58 percent of college-educated white women believed the Senate should have rejected Kavanaugh.

But it remains unclear whether Trump’s mouthy midterm roadshow will make a significant difference on the final results.

Though Dittmar said Trump’s antics are unlikely to shift the opinions of the already-dug-in electorate, she added that his harsh critiques can be used as a tool to fundraise and to encourage voters to show up at the polls on Tuesday.

“I don’t think it necessarily changes a lot of minds,” Dittmar added. “We’re three years in now and we’re sort of accustomed to this. He’s done and said all of these things before.”

Foreign Policy

The president says he’s waging a ‘maximum pressure’ campaign, but a group of prominent Republican senators is pushing him to overrule his Treasury secretary and punish Iranian banks.

Democrats at home and allies abroad have slammed President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran as recklessly dangerous. But some prominent Republicans are making the case that Trump’s policy is actually too soft.

That’s the argument of several hawkish GOP senators who plan to introduce legislation later this month that would force Trump to dramatically increase U.S. economic pressure towards Tehran, in what would amount to a high-stakes showdown between the Trump White House and Senate Republicans over foreign policy.

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Their goal is to make Trump side with his national security adviser, John Bolton, and overrule Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who argued for a more cautious approach.

Led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R.-Tex), the lawmakers — who typically cheer Trump’s foreign policy moves — expect that Trump will disappoint them when he rolls out new Iran sanctions Friday. The State Department has scheduled a Friday morning call on the subject. Refusing to be associated with a policy he opposes, Bolton dropped off the call, during which Mnuchin and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will brief reporters, according to two sources familiar with the conversations. An NSC spokesman declined to comment on internal deliberations.

The legislation, which Cruz is expected to introduce in the weeks following the midterm election, and which is likely to be cosponsored by two other leading GOP foreign policy hawks — Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) —will press Trump to cut off several Iranian banks from the global banking network known as SWIFT, an acronym for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which banks worldwide use for international transactions. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) is expected to drop a companion bill in the House.

It’s an attempt to reverse the outcome of an internal administration debate in which Mnuchin prevailed over Bolton on the question of whether to apply SWIFT sanctions against Iran as part of Trump’s larger squeeze the Islamic regime’s economy.

Trump has said that his overall goal is to force Iran to renegotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, from which he withdrew against the objection of several major U.S. allies earlier this year. He has also threatened Iran with severe “consequences” if it seeks a conflict with the U.S.

Under similar Congressional pressure, the Obama administration cut off Iranian banks from SWIFT several years ago, but ended those penalties as part of the nuclear deal.

Bolton argued internally that the new sanctions, set to go into effect late Sunday, would only have teeth if they blocked Iranian banks from the SWIFT network. That would make it nearly impossible for those banks to conduct international business.

But Mnuchin resisted Bolton’s efforts, arguing that preserving access for Iranian banks is necessary to keep humanitarian aid flowing into the country and to prevent a number of European nations, which opposed the U.S. exit from the Iranian nuclear deal, from forming an alternative network to SWIFT that could include Iran, Russia, China — and to which the U.S. would have no visibility.

As a result, the new sanctions package is not expected to include demands on SWIFT, according to four Republicans familiar with the administration’s internal deliberations.

As GOP hawks demand tougher action on Iran, former Obama administration officials warned that even the non-SWIFT sanctions Trump is expected to impose on Iran’s oil and gas industries could lead to war.

“The Trump Administration has laid out unachievably high objectives for changes in Iran and its policies,” Jarrett Blank, the former deputy lead coordinator and State Department coordinator for Iran nuclear implementation at the U.S. Department of State said in a statement released Thursday by the left-leaning group Diplomacy Works.

“The outcome will at best be U.S. isolation and failure and at worst conflict with Iran,” he added.

Some foreign policy experts expressed distress — but not surprise — that lawmakers are making plans to take on the White House even before the administration has announced its policy.

“There was a sense that those who are advocates of a more judicious approach to handling that particular dimension had won out,” said Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. “I am not surprised to see there is noise from the Hill because it may in fact be intended to try to press the administration to reverse the decision even before it’s announced.”

Some of the Cruz bill’s supporters believe his legislation is intended, at least in part, to generate headlines that will draw the president’s attention to the dispute among his advisers — it is not clear whether he personally signed off on the non-SWIFT sanctions or understood that a more Draconian approach was open to him — and incentivize him to overturn it. That is something the president can do by fiat at any point.

“I think the objective of the legislation is partly to attract his attention when his strongest supporters in the House and in the Senate are saying ‘Mr. President, you’re not being tough enough on Iranian banks,’ that will attract his attention,” said Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has worked closely with the administration on foreign policy but supports the forthcoming bill. “Another objective is to demonstrate to SWIFT’s board of directors that Congress will continue to pursue the expulsion of sanctioned banks from SWIFT as they forced SWIFT to do in 2012.

The Cruz legislation would impose mandatory sanctions on SWIFT officials if they refused to disconnect Iranian banks that were sanctioned before the JCPOA went into effect. Republican supporters of the legislation say it could pass the Senate as an attachment to the National Defense Authorization Act or any other appropriations bill if Republicans hold the upper chamber on Tuesday.

Its prospects to become law are less clear if the Democrats take the House on Tuesday. Its proponents are hopeful that AIPAC, the influential pro-Israel lobbying group, will support it — and pressure pro-Israel Democrats into doing so as well. “If SWIFT provides services to sanctioned Iranian banks we believe appropriate action should be taken,” an AIPAC official told POLITICO on Thursday.

Under U.S. pressure, SWIFT cut off access to Iranian banks six years ago, a move credited in part with weakening the Iranian economy and helping bring the mullahs to the table to negotiate the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

“The administration’s maximum pressure campaign will not succeed if the Islamic Republic remains connected to SWIFT,” Cruz wrote in an August letter to Mnuchin that was co-signed by 15 other GOP Senators.

Skeptics of the Cruz legislation say that access to SWIFT may be key to ensuring Iran continues to comply with the nuclear deal even though the U.S. has torn it up.

“The Iranians were quite specific in citing SWIFT access as an absolute requirement of any nuclear deal, it was very high on their list of priorities,” Maloney said. “For that reason, it looms very large on the side of the Europeans as a point of leverage they can preserve with the Iranians. If they can protect SWIFT that is going to try to help them persuade the Iranians to sit tight and abide by their obligations under the nuclear deal even as the United States is not.”

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— Shara Tibken (@sharatibken) November 1, 2018