President Donald Trump hosts Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a round of golf today, while First Lady Melania Trump hosts Madame Akie Abe in DC.
The relationship between the Trump’s and the Abe’s goes back quite a while and is rooted in a genuine friendship.  The president and prime minister are strong competitors on trade and economic policy; however, the competition is founded on respect.

Prime Minister Abe’s economic policies are rooted in the growth process taught by Edwards Demming.  If you follow their professional business ideology, it is easy to see how President Trump and Prime Minister Abe would face-off around a standard of excellence.
When combined the economies of the United States and Japan account for approximately 30 percent of all global gross domestic product.
This is really old-school business stuff.  Each leader, is essentially an economic policy coach for his country; creating strategies and championing growth in a challenge to see who can succeed the most.  They respect each-other, but this is old school. PM Abe isn’t about to concede to a deal where Japanese growth is ceded; however, he will not cheat to achieve success (unlike Xi).  So friendly adversarial negotiations continue.  Good stuff.
Meanwhile First-Lady Melania Trump and Madame Akie Abe toured some of the historic sites in the capital, including the Washington Monument and US National Arboretum.
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Tonight President Donald Trump is holding a massive ‘Make America Great Again’ rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin at the Resch Center. President Trump is expected to highlight the U.S. economic growth, jobs and continued success following a first quarter GDP result that exceeded all expectations.
The President will speak at approximately 7:00pm CDT / 8:00pm EDT with ongoing event festivities and speakers earlier.  UPDATE: Video Added

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A shooting at at synagogue in Poway, California, has left one woman dead and three others wounded on the last day of Passover.  Four people -a young girl, two adult men, and an older woman- were injured. [AP News]
A 19-year-old man armed with an “AR-type assault weapon” opened fire at Chabad of Poway shortly before 11:30 a.m. on Saturday according to San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore. Saturday is Shabbat, or the Jewish Sabbath.  An off-duty border patrol agent fired shots at the suspect’s car as he fled the scene but did not injure him.

San Diego Police Chief David Nisleit said the suspect called authorities to let them know he’d been involved in the shooting and to provide his location. The suspect, described only as a 19-year-old white man from San Diego, then pulled his car over and was arrested by a police canine officer who was on the way to the scene.

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The rather alarming aspect here is the multiple layers of editorial review and approval this had to pass through.  This is not simply an example of bad judgement, this is a clear reflection of the ideology within the publication.  Not a single person involved in the process saw a problem with it, until after it was published.  Quite remarkable.

From the international edition of the New York Times: A blind kippah-wearing President Donald Trump being led around -or leading- a dog depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (enlarged below)
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In an effort to keep the Daily Open Thread a little more open topic we are going to start a new daily thread for “Presidential Politics”. Please use this thread to post anything relating to the Donald Trump Administration and Presidency.

This thread will refresh daily and appear above the Open Discussion Thread.

President Trump Twitter @POTUS / Vice President Pence Twitter @VP

Sarah H Sanders Twitter @SHSanders45

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. THY WILL BE DONE, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but DELIVER US FROM EVIL.
For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

The 2016 anti-Trump effort and 2017 soft-coup was not just an assembly created by Obama officials; there was/are a significant number of mutually aligned republican politicians willfully blind to the effort.
As a consequence, we see the administrative state holding a vested interest in retaining the originating Russia premise.
With President Trump openly stating “coup” and “overthrow“, those who participated in the coup and overthrow need to protect their involvement by substantiating the background lie they used to carry out the cover-up operation.  We note the media outlets used by the intelligence community never change. Cue the predictable:

New York Times – The F.B.I. director warned anew on Friday about Russia’s continued meddling in American elections, calling it a “significant counterintelligence threat.”
[…]  “We recognize that our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game,” Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said Friday in a speech in Washington, citing the presence of Russian intelligence officers in the United States and the Kremlin’s record of malign influence operations.

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Can’t make this stuff up folks…. as if on cue.
Vice President Mike Pence responds to Senator Grassley and Senator Johnson’s speculation that FBI agents wanted to use Pence’s chief of staff to infiltrate President-elect Trump’s transition team in 2016:

“I was deeply offended to learn that two disgraced FBI agents considered infiltrating our transition team by sending a counter intelligence agent to one of my very first intelligence briefings only 9 days after the election,” Pence said in a statement to Axios. “This is an outrage and only underscores why we need to get to the bottom of how this investigation started in the first place.”
“The American people have a right to what happened and if these two agents broke the law and ignored long-standing DOJ policies, they must be held accountable.” (more)

Next up: Deep State (IC) deploys Washington Post and New York Times remind everyone how intense the 2016 Russian election interference was…. In 3, 2, 1..

In 2015 CTH outlined candidate Trump’s economic positions and how they would impact the economy.  We anticipated that MAGAnomics would be reversing three decades of federal reserve monetary policy. After about a year of analysis, in 2016 CTH presented a theory: “A new Dimension in Modern Economics“.
The theory was based on a likelihood of what would happen if MAGA economic Policy was shifted to favor Main St over Wall St.  One aspect we presented was how Federal Reserve monetary policy would be oddly disconnected from its ability to influence inflation.
Today National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow appears on CNBC to discuss the latest first quarter GDP growth rate of 3.2% and the status of the U.S. economy.   Kudlow notes the rate of inflation is disconnected from the GDP growth.

CTH 2016[…]  Understanding the distance between the real Main Street economic engine and the false Wall Street economic engine will help all of us to understand the scope of an upcoming economic lag; which, rather remarkably I would add, is a very interesting dynamic.

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Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Madam Akie Abe will be having dinner tonight with President Donald Trump and First Lady to celebrate Melania’s birthday.  The prime minister and the president are close personal friends and will likely play golf tomorrow.
The Trump-Abe relationship existed for many years prior to becoming U.S. President. Their respect for each-other is genuine.  Abe and Trump are competitors on trade and economics and their strategies within that competition are actually fun to watch. The long-standing friendship underpins a very genuine alliance of U.S-Japanese interests.
In advance of the dinner tonight PM Abe and President Trump meet in the Oval Office ahead of a bilateral delegation meeting to discuss trade and regional matters. They also take questions from the media [Video and Transcript Below]

[Transcript] 4:35 P.M. EDT – PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you very much. It’s an honor to have my friend, Prime Minister Abe — Japan. We have many things to discuss, including trade, including some of the numbers that just came out this morning. We had a very big number at 3.2 GDP for the first quarter — usually the worst quarter. That also included the little bit of a dispute we had during the quarter. So 3.2 is far above expectation. I guess many people were thinking it would be in the ones, maybe between one and two. And 3.2 is great.
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