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Donald Trump has one big blessing to count this Thanksgiving, despite the scandals ricocheting around his White House. The US economy's almost supernatural resilience is keeping him in the game with the 2020 election looming.

A general rule of US politics is that a strong economy all but guarantees reelection for a first-term President. And while Trump hasn't consistently produced the 4% growth rates he promised, a projected expansion of around 2% for 2019 isn't bad in fact, it's better than most US competitors. But 2020 might be a wild card.

Trump takes a victory lap every time the Dow leaps into new territory, but his approval ratings aren't keeping up the way they should. The CNN poll pegged him at just 42% perilous territory for a President seeking a second term. While the impeachment drama has not seemed to damage his viability, Trump has never enjoyed majority approval, largely because he alienates so many voters with his scorched earth approach.

Dark clouds are also looming. Several US regional Federal Reserve banks predict growth may dip below 1% in the fourth quarter. Experts warn Trump's trade war with China is also a drag meaning he may be tempted by a deal that he can bill as a big win, even if it's fairly modest. And manufacturing, a vital economic driver in Midwestern states that Trump must win, is beginning to hurt.

If the economy stays strong, it can be a launchpad for a narrow Trump election victory. If it dips, he could be in trouble. If there's a recession, he's likely toast.

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Donald Trump has one big blessing to count this Thanksgiving - CNN

There is one good thing about President TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump puts Kushner in charge of overseeing border wall construction: report Trump 2020 national spokesperson gives birth to daughter New McCarthy ad praising Trump includes Russian stock footage MORE going into 2020. It is that he is consistent. Consistency in some philosophies connotes reliability. His divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, bullying mockery of others during campaign rallies, combative foreign policy, his rejection of diplomacy, and his demand for unequivocal loyalty have seriously disturbed the political establishment. This is an establishment that, in the minds of Americans on both the right and the left, has become consumed by its own interests.

Despite the disappointment and feelings of grievances, Americans have come to expect a certain level of civility in political life. They expect prevarications and empty promises masked by the warm embrace of civility. Both civility and character have been political standards that Americans have used to judge the body of politics in this country.

These guiding principles have become the critical appropriation and embodiment of traditions that have shaped the character and shared meaning of a people in these United States. Political communication should be grounded in our personal narratives. Citizens do not emerge from a historical vacuum. They arise from particular traditions. As such, some are taught to speak authoritatively yet compassionately, and they take action responsibly with the aim of serving the collective good.

Trump clearly does not abide by these standards. He questions the very legitimacy and agency of tradition and its meaning in the United States. He is a creature unwedded to basic conservative or liberal doctrines and is unconcerned with orthodoxy. From his view and that of his supporters, Washington tradition has not worked, and it is that grievance toward the status quo that has given Trump sustenance today. The peculiarity of this phenomenon is not relegated to just the political right. Similar sentiments are growing on the left and have given rise to Senator Bernie SandersBernie SandersSaagar Enjeti: Bloomberg exposes 'true danger' of 'corporate media' Doctor calls for standardizing mental fitness tests for elected officials Warren: Bloomberg is betting he 'only needs bags and bags of money' to win election MORE, Senator Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth Ann WarrenWhy Democrats are not actually serious about uniting the nation Warren: Bloomberg is betting he 'only needs bags and bags of money' to win election Bloomberg campaign chief: Trump is winning 2020 election right now MORE, and other emerging progressive stars in the Democratic Party such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

Americans have far deeper issues than partisan divides. Though their grievances are disparate, they share one commonality in their dislike for all things closely aligned with the elite media, politicians, and business. This is one of the reasons for the cultish following of the president, who can do no wrong in the eyes of his worshippers. It does not bother them because Trump exposes the disguise of civility, just as Sanders and Warren do. They stick it to the man by castigating political elites.

As for African Americans and members of other racial minority groups, we have fared no better or worse under Trump than we have under previous administrations. We may have felt better under President Obama because of symbolic racial pride, but we agree that many expectations fell short. The economy did well under President Clinton, but we acknowledge the dangerous crime bill and tough law enforcement stances that decimated the black community. The point is simple in that feeling good or having pride in our national leader does not necessarily yield good results.

What Trump says and does, through his rhetoric and behavior, can be brutally honest. While it may wound the vanity of some, he has complete disregard for business as usual. We must ask ourselves if we would rather have a president who does not care about political civility and tells it like it is or a president who is polished and hides the truth. Whatever you think about Trump and his supporters, it appears there is a growing number of Americans on both sides seeking a leader who is a street fighter, someone who will voice their grievances on center stage.

Americans are accustomed to the former civil politician. They smile at you, look you in the eyes, and tell you what you want to hear to make us feel comfortable. Whether we are willing to admit it or not, everything about the status quo before Trump signaled comfort. We were living in a country devoid of disruptive change. The reality was that it was business as usual, but those dynamics have been changing under the leadership of Trump. Despite the disdain some have for him, a similar movement has taken place on the left. The country needed Trump to shake things up.

In the blockbuster hit The Dark Knight, the Joker said to district attorney Harvey Dent, Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos? It is fair! Trump is indeed fair to Americans because his disruption brings a shared level of chaos to the elites on all sides.

Quardricos Driskell is an adjunct professor of legislative politics with the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management. Shermichael Singleton is a Republican strategist and a political analyst.

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Why America needed Donald Trump | TheHill - The Hill

President Donald Trump has tapped his son-in-law, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, to oversee construction of the ballyhooed border wall the president has promoted since the onset of his presidential campaign, The Washington Post reported.

The move further expands Kushner's already large portfolio, which includes working on a Middle East peace deal, overhauling the legal immigration and criminal justice systems, pushing trade policy, modernizing the federal government and taking a lead role on Trump's 2020 reelection campaign.

The Post reported that Kushner leads biweekly West Wing meetings focused on the wall's progress, officials familiar with the matter said. Kushner is pushing both U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Army Corps of Engineers to seize hundreds of parcels of private property so that the government has a chance to meet Trump's goal of building 450 miles of wall along the southern border by the end of next year, with aides telling the Post it is paramount to Trump that 400 of those miles be completed by Election Day.

Trump defended his border wall efforts in a Tuesday tweet, saying it's "wrong" to say the new wall is not being built when old barriers are being replaced. Since Trump took office, the vast majority of wall construction has been for replacement border fencing, not a new wall in places where it didn't exist previously.

Trump resorted to pulling funding from the Defense Department after Congress refused to appropriate money for the project. The Pentagon said in September that it would use $3.6 billion in military construction money to build the wall, in addition to previously making $2.5 billions of counter-drug money available.

Trump declared a national emergency at the border in February in a bid to circumvent Congress and fund wall construction. The border wall was one of Trump's earliest campaign promises during the 2016 election. He initially said it would be paid for by Mexico.

Allan Smith is a political reporter for NBC News.

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Kushner reportedly overseeing construction of Trump's border wall - NBC News

There are two very big lies that President Donald Trump and his sycophants have used, through aggressive, bombastic repetition, to shape the public debate about impeachment, and about Trumps legitimacy more broadly.

The first big lie is that the people elected Trump and that the constitutional provision of impeachment would invalidate their choice. In fact, Trump is president only because a constitutional provision invalidated the choice of the American people. Trump lost the popular vote and might have lost the Electoral College without Russian interference and yet many Democrats and pundits have been bullied into accepting the fiction that he has democratic, and not just constitutional, legitimacy.

The second big lie is that Russia didnt help elect Trump, and that the president has been absolved of collusion. Its true that the report by Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, did not find enough evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy between Trumps campaign and Russian state actors. But the Mueller report found abundant evidence that the campaign sought Russian help, benefited from that help and obstructed the FBI investigation into Russian actions. His investigation resulted in felony convictions for Trumps former campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, personal lawyer, first national security adviser and longtime political adviser, among others.

Had public life in America not been completely deformed by blizzards of official lies, right-wing propaganda and the immovable wall of Republican bad faith, the Mueller report would have ended Trumps minoritarian presidency. Instead, something utterly perverse happened. Democrats, deflated by the Mueller reports anticlimactic rollout, decided to move on rather than keep the focus on Trumps world-historic treachery. Republicans, meanwhile, started screaming about a Russia hoax ostensibly perpetrated on their dear leader. Among them was the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who in 2016 was surreptitiously recorded telling his congressional colleagues that he thinks President Vladimir Putin of Russia pays Trump. Swear to God, he said at the time.

This brings us to where we are now. Democrats understand that the Ukraine scandal is an outgrowth of the Russia scandal as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last month, with Trump, all roads seem to lead to Putin. Yet theyve made the political calculation that reopening the broader story of how Trump has been compromised by Russia is a political loser.

Rather, its Republicans, with their heroic capacity for shamelessness, who want to talk about Russia. Theyve set out to investigate the investigators, trying to make efforts to uncover the truth about Trumps Russia connections, rather than the connections themselves, into a scandal. And now theyre trying to expand their big lie about Russia to cover Ukraine as well. The president, McCarthy said last month, was trying to get to the bottom, just as every American would want to know, why did we have this Russia hoax that actually started within Ukraine.

Because Republicans have been so successful in shrouding the origins of the Russia investigation in a miasma of misinformation, I hope some talented filmmaker makes a movie out of the new book by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump. Simpson and Fritsch are co-founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that investigated Trump during the 2016 campaign, first for the conservative Washington Free Beacon, and then for a lawyer for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

It was Fusion GPS that hired British ex-spy Christopher Steele to look into Trumps Russia connections, and it sits at the center of countless pro-Trump conspiracy theories. When Republicans controlled the House, Fritsch told me Monday, The only bank records that were subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee were ours.

Crime in Progress is the best procedural yet written about the discovery of Trumps Russia ties. It demolishes a number of right-wing talking points, including the claim that the Steele dossier formed the basis of the FBIs counterintelligence inquiry into Trump. But it also makes plain what many Republicans knew before the 2016 election, even if theyve now pretended to forget it. For years, Trump was financially entangled with organized crime as well as with Kremlin-friendly oligarchs, and by keeping those entanglements secret, he gave Putin leverage over him from the moment he took office.

Write Simpson and Fritsch, In the end, the Mueller probe sidestepped the question that so unnerved Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele in the summer of 2016: Was the president of the United States under the influence of a foreign adversary? Republicans have used all the power at their command to defame people whove asked this question. Perhaps thats because otherwise theyd have to take seriously all the evidence that the answer is yes.

Michelle Goldberg is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.

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Michelle Goldberg: The Republicans' big lies on Trump and Russia - Salt Lake Tribune

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives to greet Boyko Borissov, Bulgaria's prime minister, not pictured, at the South Portico of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Monday, Nov. 25, 2019.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

President Donald Trump won a temporary victory at the Supreme Court this week, when a majority of the justices voted to temporarily halt a subpoena issued by Congress for his financial records.

That move was largely expected. In fact, the subpoena had already been halted by Chief Justice John Roberts in order to give the court time to consider the issue. The court's move on Monday evening extended that freeze with a vote from the full panel.

The subpoena was issued by the Democratic-led House Oversight Committee in April to Trump's longtime accounting firm Mazars USA, and seeks a wide variety of financial documents including both personal and business records.

Trump has bucked recent precedent by refusing to voluntarily disclose his financial records. He is the first president in more than four decades not to release his tax returns.

The real action happens next. In its order, the court gave the president until Dec. 5 to file his formal appeal, known as a petition. The fact that the panel asked for the president's filing so soon likely means that the court intends to rule on the matter in its current term, which ends in June.

The president's petition will ask the court to review a decision against him issued by a 2-1 vote of a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., in October.

The court is already weighing whether it will review a separate decision over the president's financial records issued by a federal appeals court in New York. The three-judge panel in that case ordered Mazars USA to turn over the president's financial records to the Manhattan district attorney.

Experts expect that the court will agree to take the cases, but it's not clear if the president will ultimately prevail. It takes four justices on the nine-member panel to agree to hear a case. The court currently has a 5-4 conservative majority, including two Trump appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

If the court agrees to take the cases, it will likely hear oral arguments some time between February and April. The cases will join what is already a packed term of cases on issues involving guns, abortion, and the DACA program that protects 700,000 "Dreamers," which could focus attention on the court's new conservative majority during a contentious election year.

The court generally releases its most high-profile opinions in June. In May, Trump wrote in a post on Twitter that he hoped the fight for his tax returns would be "part of the 2020 Election." He's likely to get what he asked for.

The top court has never settled the specific legal questions at the heart of the two cases involving the president's financial records, according to Marty Lederman, a former Justice Department attorney.

It has not had the opportunity to do so. No president has ever asked the court to review a subpoena for his personal papers that predate his time in office, or for one issued by a state prosecutor targeting him in a criminal investigation.

But Lederman said he expects that the justices will ultimately rule against the president. In the two cases that most closely resemble Trump's appeals, involving Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, the Supreme Court voted unanimously against the commander in chief.

The first case, U.S. v. Nixon, arose out of the Watergate scandal that ultimately doomed Nixon's presidency. The court rejected Nixon's claims of immunity on the basis of "executive privilege," and ordered him to deliver tape recordings as part of a court proceeding against some of his closest aides.

In the second, Clinton v. Jones, the court considered whether Clinton was immune to a sexual harassment suit brought against him while he was in office. The court rejected Clinton's claim of immunity, though it noted that there could exist exceptional circumstances in which such immunity could exist.

In both cases, justices voted against the president who appointed them, including three Nixon appointees and two Clinton appointees. Those Clinton appointees, Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well as Justice Clarence Thomas, who was on the court in Clinton v. Jones and was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, remain on the bench.

Ashwin Phatak, who serves as counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, said that some of the broader propositions from the Nixon and Clinton cases are relevant in Trump's battles.

"If the court rules in favor of the president, that would be a sea change in how people think about this issue of presidential immunity," he said.

But Elizabeth Slattery, a legal researcher at The Heritage Foundation who hosts the popular "SCOTUS 101" podcast, said that Trump is looking to distinguish the current case from those past rulings. The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank.

Slattery said that a point in the president's favor is the appearance that Congress is attempting to add a qualification to the presidency namely, the disclosure of personal financial information.

"Congress cannot expand or alter the qualifications for the office of the president," she said.

And, she said, congressional subpoenas are not the method that the Constitution provides for probing a sitting president.

"It all comes back to the fact that impeachment is the way that Congress can investigate, not through pseudo law enforcement tools," she said.

Ultimately, if the court takes the cases, the deciding vote could be Roberts, who is known to care about the court's reputation and, alongside Kavanaugh, occupies the panel's ideological center.

Trump has faced major challenges to his presidency at the end of each of the last two Supreme Court terms, and in each case, Roberts has written the court's 5-4 opinion.

In June of 2018, Roberts sided with the majority to uphold an iteration of the president's travel ban. But the next year, Roberts flipped sides in a case involving the Trump administration's attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, effectively killing the proposal.

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The Supreme Court halted a subpoena for Trump's financial records. Here's what happens next - CNBC