Trump is not a decisive leader who "tells it like it is." |
Biden-Harris Spokesperson Sarafina Chitika released the following statement:
Source: "Biden Team Slams Trump After Hidden Camera Clip Attacking Biden And Kamala Harris — ‘New Rock Bottom!’" by Tommy Christopher - Mediaite - Jul 4th, 2024 {V}iolent crime in America, homicides in particular, which surged during the last year of the Trump administration — a year of low immigration — has plunged over the past two years. Far from facing a crime “epidemic,” America has been highly successful in recovering from the Trump crime wave. America produced more energy in 2023 than ever before. In fact, we’ve become a major energy exporter, for example selling Europe vast quantities of liquefied natural gas that helped it reduce dependence on Russian supplies after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Source: "What Does the G.O.P. Have Against America?" By Paul Krugman - NY Times - July 11, 2024 Mr. Trump has said that shoplifters should be shot; suggested that his supporters might commit violence if the Supreme Court ruled against him; and refused to rule out political violence if he were to lose in November. He plans to deputize local law enforcement officers to carry out mass deportations of migrants. Source: "A Trump Ally Is Training 75 Armed Citizens. Is That a Militia?" By Corey Kilgannon - NY Times - July 11, 2024 Mr. Trump once declared NATO “obsolete,” threatened to exit the alliance and more recently said he would let the Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to any member country he deemed to be insufficiently contributing to the alliance. Source: "As NATO Convenes, Leaders Worry About a Hole in Its Center" By David E. Sanger and Lara Jakes - NY Times - 7/9/24 To be sure, no amount of lead is considered safe to consume. Lead is a neurotoxin known to cause irreversible long-term organ damage, lower IQs, higher risk for miscarriage, asthma, cardiovascular disease, impotence, and elevated blood pressure. Although lead was banned from new water service lines in 1986, it’s estimated that more than 9 million such lines still carry drinking water to homes and businesses throughout the country. Under the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule Improvements proposal, water utilities would be required to replace all lead-containing lines within 10 years. The proposal from the Biden administration differs from rules put out in the waning days of the Trump term that allow up to 30 years for service line replacement, triggered only when lead levels test higher than 15 parts per billion. The new proposal, which would largely supplant the Trump rules, calls for stricter monitoring, enhanced public education, and the 10-year pipe replacement mandate regardless of lead levels. Already, 15 Republican state attorneys general have argued that the proposed rules infringe on states’ rights and chase “speculative” benefits. On the other side, 14 Democratic attorneys general said that the EPA should find more ways to ensure pipes are quickly replaced in low-income areas. Source: "Debate flares over how quickly to replace many lead service lines" - By Sandy West - NPR - JULY 8, 2024 As Jonathan Bernstein, a political scientist, notes in a post for his Substack newsletter, Trump “utterly failed” at the “most important thing for presidents to do in order to succeed: collecting information. Trump didn’t read. He didn’t pay attention during briefings. He didn’t care about policy. He didn’t even bother, as far as anyone can tell, to learn the basic rules of the constitutional system.” Source: "The Lazy Authoritarianism of Donald Trump" By Jamelle Bouie - NY Times - 6/21/24 Since the coronavirus outbreak, Trump and his senior aides have been deliberately misinforming the public — 28 falsehoods or dubious claims, by CNN’s count. The president said cases were “going very substantially down,” when they were growing exponentially. He said anyone who wanted a virus test could get one, when there were massive shortages. He said, “This is a flu,” though Covid-19 has a fatality rate ten times greater than the flu. In that bizarre appearance at the C.D.C. a week ago, Trump wore a silly campaign hat, patted himself on the back, and spoke nonsense about his medical expertise. It was like showing up at a funeral in beach clothes and asking what time is happy hour. And what to make of that picture your president retweeted of him fiddling, presumably while Rome burns, with a tag line: “My next piece is called … Nothing can stop what’s coming?” The man is sick in the head. Source: "Trump Should Just Stop Talking about Coronavirus" By Timothy Egan - NY Times - March 13, 2020 For three years Donald Trump led a charmed life. He faced only one major crisis that he didn’t generate himself — Hurricane Maria — and although his botched response contributed to a tragedy that killed thousands of U.S. citizens, the deaths took place off camera, allowing him to deny that anything bad had happened. Now, however, we face a much bigger crisis with the coronavirus. And Trump’s response has been worse than even his harshest critics could have imagined. He has treated a dire threat as a public relations problem, combining denial with frantic blame-shifting. His administration has failed to deliver the most basic prerequisite of pandemic response, widespread testing to track the disease’s spread. He has failed to implement recommendations of public health experts, instead imposing pointless travel bans on foreigners when all indications are that the disease is already well established in the United States. And his response to the economic fallout has veered between complacency and hysteria, with a strong admixture of cronyism. His big idea for the economy is a complete payroll tax holiday. According to Bloomberg News, he told Republican senators that he wanted the holiday to extend “through the November election so that taxes don’t go back up before voters decide whether to return him to office.” That is, he apparently said the quiet part out loud. This would be an enormous move. { . . .} Yet it would be very poorly targeted: big breaks for well-paid workers, nothing for the unemployed or those without paid sick leave. Democrats, by contrast, have proposed a package that would actually address the needs of the moment: free coronavirus testing, paid sick leave, expanded unemployment benefits and an increase in federal matching funds for Medicaid programs, which would both help states meet the demands of the crisis and sustain overall spending by relieving the pressure on state budgets. The White House, however, is having none of it, with an official accusing Democrats of pushing a “radical left agenda.” I guess sick leave equals socialism, even in a pandemic. What we’re seeing here is a meltdown — not just a meltdown of the markets, but a meltdown of Trump’s mind. When bad things happen, there are only three things he knows how to do: insist that things are great and his policies are perfect, cut taxes, and throw money at his cronies. Now he’s faced with a crisis where none of these standbys will work, where he actually needs to cooperate with Nancy Pelosi to avoid catastrophe. What we saw in Wednesday’s speech was that he’s completely incapable of rising to the occasion. We needed to see a leader; what we saw was an incompetent, delusional blowhard. Source: "It’s a MAGA Microbe Meltdown" By Paul Krugman - NY Times - March 12, 2020 As a candidate, Mr. Trump once boasted that in eight years he would eliminate not just the annual deficit but the entire national debt. Instead, the debt has increased by about $3.5 trillion since he took office, despite a healthy economy. The president attributed that largely to his spending increases on the military, disregarding his tax cuts or domestic spending increases. His insistence contradicted his own acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who told an audience last month in Britain that Republicans cared about the deficit when a Democrat was president. “Then Donald Trump became president, and we’re a lot less interested as a party,” Mr. Mulvaney said. Mr. Trump repeated a claim that President Barack Obama tried to meet with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, only to be rebuffed, an unsubstantiated assertion that he has previously aired and that seems to have been pulled out of thin air. Source: "In Biden’s Hometown, Trump Says He’s Ready to Face Off Against Him" By Michael Crowley NY Times - March 5, 2020 As he began his own run for the White House, candidate Trump repeatedly promised that golf would never make it onto a President Trump’s schedule. “I love golf, but if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again. I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again,” he told a rally audience in February 2016, referring to his courses in Scotland and Miami. “I don’t ever think I’d see anything. I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.” Yet after three years in office, Trump has spent two-and-a-half times as many days on a golf course as Obama had done at the same point in his first term. If Trump plays golf both Saturday and Sunday, he will have played 248 times. Obama by his 1,123rd day in office had played 92 times. President Donald Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago on Friday evening for the 29th golf-related trip of his presidency to his for-profit Palm Beach, Florida, resort, raising his total taxpayer golf tab to $133.8 million. And because Trump insists on playing at courses he owns, the cost to taxpayers has been nearly four times as high as it was for Obama. More than two-thirds of Trump’s golf outings involve seven-figure trips aboard Air Force One, mainly to Florida and New Jersey, but also to Los Angeles, Ireland and Scotland. Obama, in contrast, played most of his golf on courses at military bases within a short drive of the White House. What’s more, Trump’s insistence on playing at courses he owns and profits from has put at least a few million taxpayer dollars into Trump’s cash registers in the form of hotel room and restaurant charges for the White House staff and Secret Service agents who accompany him. That figure translates to 334 years of the presidential salary that Trump and his supporters frequently boast he is not taking. The Washington Post found recently that Trump’s business has charged the Secret Service as much as $650 a room per night at Mar-a-Lago ? more than three times the normal rate that federal employees are supposed to spend in South Florida ? and $17,000 a month for a cottage at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, resort. During an early Mar-a-Lago visit, White House employees ran up a $1,006 bar tab, which taxpayers also paid. The president is the sole beneficiary of the trust that now owns his family business. He promised during his campaign that he would separate himself from the Trump Organization should he win, but reneged on that pledge even before taking office. Source: "Trump’s 29th Trip To Mar-a-Lago Brings Golf Tab To 334 Years Of Presidential Salary" By S.V. Date - Huffpost - 2/14/2020 {. . . }Mr. Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr., {. . . } was convicted of seven felonies in a bid to obstruct a congressional investigation that threatened the president. The president also accused the prosecutors who had secured a conviction against Mr. Stone of engaging in an “illegal” investigation. He incorrectly accused Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding over the Stone trial, of placing his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in solitary confinement. Mr. Manafort, who was convicted of monetary fraud in a case that grew out of the special counsel’s investigation, at one point had a jail cell to himself but was not in solitary confinement, and Judge Jackson was not involved in his placement. And Mr. Trump compared the Stone case to the Russia investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. “Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress,” Mr. Trump said, without evidence Source: "After Trump’s Attacks on Justice Dept., Barr Says He Will Not ‘Be Bullied’" By Katie Benner - NY Times - Feb. 13, 2020 “The Democrat controlled House never even asked John Bolton to testify,” he incorrectly asserted on Twitter. “It is up to them, not up to the Senate!” Revelations about a manuscript of John R. Bolton’s forthcoming book on his time as President Trump’s national security adviser have cranked up pressure on senators to subpoena him to testify in the impeachment trial. But they raise another natural question: Could the Democratic House simply subpoena Mr. Bolton itself if the Senate refuses? Republicans also know this and have begun to suggest it is the House, not the Senate’s responsibility, to call Mr. Bolton. Even Mr. Trump had the idea Monday morning, misrepresenting the fact that the House did request Mr. Bolton’s testimony during its inquiry. Source: "Could the House call Bolon itself? Yes, but Democrats want to wait." By Nichola Fandos - NY Times - 1/27/2020 Mini Mike Bloomberg is spending a lot of money on False Advertising. I was the person who saved Pre-Existing Conditions in your Healthcare, you have it now, while at the same time winning the fight to rid you of the expensive, unfair and very unpopular Individual Mandate..... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2020 President Trump was not in Washington when the Affordable Care Act passed and established a right to health insurance for Americans with pre-existing health conditions. His first legislative priority as president was a bill that would have repealed key parts of Obamacare and weakened such protections. His Justice Department is arguing in court that the entire law should be overturned. His tweets Monday morning, describing himself as “the person who saved pre-existing conditions,” contradict this record. The president was not in Washington and not in politics when the Affordable Care Act was written, debated and passed in 2009 and 2010. The health law established consumer protections for Americans who buy their insurance, including a rule that health insurers must offer coverage to anyone who wishes to buy it, with prices varying only by region and the age of the customer. Before Obamacare, some states protected people with pre-existing conditions in this way, but most did not. Americans with prior illnesses like cancer, asthma, even acne, often had trouble buying insurance for themselves and their families. One state that did protect people with pre-existing conditions was New York, where the media executive and presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg currently resides and where Mr. Trump did at the time. (Mr. Bloomberg’s recent television advertisements, which attack Mr. Trump’s health care record, appear to have prompted the tweets.) President Trump’s first legislative priority after his election was to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Republicans in Congress voted on several different bills, but each of them had provisions that would have substantially eroded the current protections for Americans with prior health conditions, by weakening the regulations that make such insurance available, affordable and useful. The bills would have weakened rules that require insurance to cover a standard set of health benefits, for example, and would have established policies that would have raised prices for people with a history of health problems. Such a change would cause many changes and could set off widespread disruption throughout the health system. Among the changes, the protection for pre-existing conditions in Obamacare would go away if the courts agreed with the White House’s legal position. Source: "To the Contrary, Trump Has Tried to Weaken Protections for Pre-existing Conditions" By Margot Sanger-Katz - NY Times - Jan. 13, 2020 Mr. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” but proceeded to install various lobbyists, corporate plunderers and other vested interests in key cabinet and agency positions. Mr. Trump railed against President Obama’s relatively infrequent golf outings. Mr. Trump’s golf habit is so consuming it inspired a website (TrumpGolfCount.com) and has cost taxpayers $110 million and counting. The problem is Mr. Trump never switched from politics to leadership and governing. All of government, it’s increasingly clear, is his personal plunder. Source: "Is Trump the Force for Change America Wanted?" - Letter to the editor from Douglas Fischer, Bozeman, Mont. Via NY Times - 11/22/2019 Mr. Trump has tried to present himself as an advocate for whistle-blowers, falsely claiming that he had been behind legislation to protect them. “To think I signed the Whistleblower Protection Act!” Mr. Trump tweeted on Monday, misstating what he had signed. Source: "Trump Has Considered Firing Intelligence Community Inspector General" by By Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt - NY Times - 11/12/2019 Trump, who according to a Times investigation is wealthy partly because of fraud, pledged to fight corruption and “drain the swamp.” Since then, he has lost more first-term cabinet members to scandal than any president in history. Trump is a hero of many evangelical Christians who previously emphasized the importance of personal values and restoring “honor and dignity” to the White House. Meanwhile, he is on his third wife, has cheated on all three and has been accused of sexual misconduct by 25 women. And Trump tweeted a supporter’s praise likening him to “the second coming of God.” Since taking office, Trump has made more than 13,400 false or misleading statements, according to a Washington Post database. The Post found that he has recently accelerated his falsehoods to a rate of 22 per day, more than one per waking hour. “I’m not going to have time to go play golf,” Trump said before his election. In fact, he has visited golf clubs approximately 224 times since taking office, including more than three months in total at Mar-a-Lago. These vacation trips have cost taxpayers more than $100 million. But we should never get accustomed to all this. Let’s not let ourselves be numbed by the daily drip into accepting a level of Trumpian dysfunction that should always be unacceptable. Source: "Don’t Let Trump Make You Numb to What’s Unacceptable" By Nicholas Kristof - NY Times - Nov. 6, 2019 Mr. Trump, who promised to eliminate deficits by cutting spending and growing the economy, has allowed them to swell under his watch by enacting sweeping tax cuts and boosting government spending. The United States federal budget deficit jumped 26 percent in fiscal 2019 to $984 billon, reaching the highest level in seven years as the government was forced to borrow more money to pay for President Trump’s spending and tax cut policies. The deficit is expected to top $1 trillion in 2020 as a slowing global economy and festering trade tensions weigh on economic growth in the United States. Source: "Federal Budget Deficit Swelled to Nearly $1 Trillion in 2019" By Alan Rappeport - NY Times - 10/25/2019 In one of many such warnings about deficits, citizen Trump used the March 2013 debt crisis in Cyprus as an occasion to tweet: “Watching the madness in Cyprus? If our government keeps spending trillion dollar deficits, that could happen here.” In 2016, as a candidate, Mr. Trump said he could eliminate the national debt in about eight years. Yet as president, Mr. Trump has piled on about $3 trillion to the debt, bringing the total to $22.9 trillion. What’s amazing is that he has managed to increase deficits at a time of historically low unemployment and relative peace, when one would expect the national balance sheet to improve. Republicans are noticeably silent. Whereas the anti-establishment populism of the Tea Party put pressure on Republicans to address the problem, Mr. Trump’s brand of populism has moved the party in the opposite direction. In July, when a caller to Rush Limbaugh expressed concern about the return of $1 trillion deficits under Mr. Trump, the radio host, who has always had his hand on the pulse of his audience, responded: “Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore. All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it’s been around.” Despite Mr. Trump’s campaign boasts about wiping out the debt, as president he has adopted an instant-gratification mentality. In addition to backing a $1.5 trillion tax cut without offsetting reductions in spending, Mr. Trump has pushed for increased military spending and has opposed any serious reforms to entitlements. He signed a spending bill that crashed through the limits put in place by the 2011 debt ceiling deal, which was the crowning achievement of the Tea Party. Source: "Trump’s Deficits Are an Existential Threat to Conservatism" By Philip Klein - NY Times - 10/29/2019 In trying to undermine the impeachment inquiry, the president and his allies have repeatedly called witnesses “Never Trumpers,” spread rumors and conspiracy theories and described the process as a coup. In more than 55 tweets over 47 days, The New York Times found, Mr. Trump claimed falsely that elements of the original whistle-blower’s account had fallen apart or proven incorrect. The president has also encouraged reporters to reveal the whistle-blower’s identity, without doing so himself. Source: "Trump’s Twitter War Room Aims Its Punches at Decorated Colonel" By Mike McIntire and Nicholas Confessore - NY Times - Nov. 6, 2019 It seemed in many ways like nothing new: another high-ranking Republican official offering a dubious assertion about the potent political powers of President Trump. But a claim from the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel — that Mr. Trump helped lift Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky from a 17-point deficit in the polls to nearly even in Tuesday’s election — took the president’s practice of crediting himself to a new level. “No one energizes our base like @realDonaldTrump,” Ms. McDaniel said in a late-night tweet on Tuesday. She also included the polling deficit, which did not match up with the vast majority of public polls or internal surveys conducted by campaigns in the weeks before the election or with the Republican Party’s own recent surveys. The tweet left the impression that the gap in the polls was fairly recent. Ms. McDaniel’s selective presentation of the facts hews closely to the playbook of a president who sees his brand as all about winning — and who has no qualms about engaging in what he long ago coined euphemistically as “truthful hyperbole” if he thinks it helps him. Other Republicans on Wednesday echoed Ms. McDaniel’s comment, which aligns with the effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to build up and maintain an aura of political invulnerability that does not always match reality. {P}ublic polls conducted in Kentucky over the last 13 months showed the race moving in either direction within a single-digit margin — close but fluid. None showed anything close to a 17-point advantage for Mr. Beshear. Source: "Republicans Claim Trump Closed a 17-Point Gap in Kentucky. That’s Not Quite What Happened." By Jeremy W. Peters and Maggie Haberman - NY Times - Nov. 7, 2019 Mr. Trump, who campaigned for president on the oft-repeated pledge to “drain the swamp,” initially favored charismatic former politicians with a flair for the dramatic All are gone, replaced by lobbyists — less camera-ready but more familiar with the inner workings of their agencies, if only because they spent years trying to influence them. The pattern holds throughout the agencies trusted to provide for the common defense, promote clean air and water, care for public lands and waters, and safeguard energy supplies and nuclear weapons. A ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations analysis this week found Mr. Trump brought in 281 former lobbyists since the start of the administration. His cabinet now includes a former coal lobbyist running the Environmental Protection Agency, a former oil and gas lobbyist in charge of the Department of Interior, a top lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon leading the Defense Department — and, if he is confirmed, an automobile lobbyist at the Energy Department. That might seem like business as usual for Americans who accepted candidate Trump’s description of Washington as rife with influence peddlers and profiteers. But it might actually be worse than usual. Because of the extraordinarily high rate of turnover that is a hallmark of the Trump administration “Trump’s rhetoric about draining the swamp, I don’t think anyone really took seriously,” said Tim LaPira, a professor of political science at James Madison University who studies Washington’s revolving door. Source: "New Energy Secretary Fits Trend: Cabinet Dominated by Lobbyists" By Lisa Friedman - NY Times - Oct. 18, 2019 Mr. Trump claimed that when he was elected, he put “all the stuff in trusts,” referring to the family business, the Trump Organization, and has left running the business to his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. In fact, Mr. Trump remains closely tied to his real estate empire, and has resisted calls to sell his assets and put the proceeds in a blind trust, arguing that he is under no legal obligation to do so. Source: "Trump Dismisses ‘Phony Emoluments Clause,’ Defending Doral" By Annie Karni - NY Times - Oct. 21, 2019 Nine days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, one of his lawyers, Sheri A. Dillon, released a document detailing how Mr. Trump would avoid conflicts of interest after he was sworn in, even if he was not prohibited under law from taking actions that would benefit his family financially. “President-Elect Trump, as well as Don, Eric, and Alan are committed to ensuring that the activities of The Trump Organization are beyond reproach, and that the Organization avoids even the appearance of a conflict of interest, including through any advantage derived from the Office of the Presidency,” Ms. Dillon wrote in the six-page document, referring to Mr. Trump’s two oldest sons and Alan Garten, the chief legal officer at Trump Organization. Mr. Trump himself, in late August, at the end of the Group of 7 summit in France, first confirmed publicly that the Trump family resort in Doral, Fla., was being considered for the June 2020 gathering. The acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said on Thursday that Mr. Trump was the first to recommend the Doral resort as a site for the Group of 7. He said the Doral would be the least expensive, because the Trump family will offer the hotel “at cost,” meaning it will not profit from the event. But a Trump Organization spokesman on Friday declined to explain how the company is going to determine what “at cost” means or how it will calculate what part of a hotel bill paid by a foreign government official is considered profit. At least three different lawsuits are pending in federal court that are testing if Mr. Trump is violating the Constitution’s emoluments clauses by continuing to own, through a trust, the collection of hotels, golf courses and resorts that at times are taking payments from foreign government officials and the United States government. “He is certainly digging deeper in his failing defense by violating the Constitution in plain sight, in real time,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that involves more than 200 House and Senate Democrats. “It is really absolutely striking.” Source: "Trump’s Choice to Bring G7 to His Own Resort Would Violate Conflict-of-Interest Law, if He Weren’t President" By Eric Lipton - NY Times - Oct. 18, 2019 Donald Trump promised struggling working-class voters that he heard their frustrations and would act. He did: He pushed through a tax cut that made income inequality worse. In 2018, for the first time, the 400 richest American households paid a lower average tax rate than any other income group, according to new research by two economists. Those billionaires paid an average total rate of 23 percent in 2018, down from the 70 percent their 1950 counterparts paid. Meanwhile, the bottom 10th of households paid an average of 26 percent, up from 16 percent in 1950. The class warfare against struggling Americans has unfolded in many dimensions aside from tax policy — factory closings and lack of job retraining, corporate greed and irresponsibility, assaults on labor unions, stingy social welfare, mass incarceration and so on — and we’ve seen the results in rising “deaths of despair” from drugs, alcohol and suicide. America’s richest men now live almost 15 years longer than the poorest men — roughly the same gap in life expectancy as exists between the U.S. and Nigeria. As for the wealth tax, {, , ,} we already have a wealth tax — the property tax — that hits widows on Social Security with an illiquid asset (the family home). If these widows can figure it out, tycoons can as well. Source: "Should We Soak the Rich? You Bet!" By Nicholas Kristof - NY Times 10/12/19 On the campaign trail in 2015, Donald Trump said it was “disgusting” that a big corporation could escape taxation by using bookkeeping tricks to shift profits out of the United States. Now the Trump administration is thinking about making it easier to play those tricks. Bloomberg reported this week that the Treasury Department, in a development sure to gladden the hearts of the corporate class, was considering a rollback of rules written by the Obama administration to prevent the very kinds of shenanigans Mr. Trump once condemned. The potential rewrite of the tax rules governing corporate profits is an example of both tendencies. Corporations dislike the Obama-era rules, which cracked down on the practice of sending profits to a foreign branch, lending the money back to the home office and then writing off the interest expense. Under the rules, the government can prevent companies from treating those transfers as loans, and thus from claiming the resulting tax benefits. These changes in regulatory policy are part of a clear pattern. The Trump administration has worked assiduously to reduce federal protections for consumers, workers and the environment, making the United States a dirtier and more dangerous place in which to live. Source: "Making America Worse" - NY Times - 10/12/19 “No, I didn’t — I didn’t do it,” Mr. Trump told reporters, when asked whether he had conditioned the aid on the promise of an investigation of Mr. Biden. He said he hoped that the transcript of a July 25 {2019} phone call he had with {Ukrainian President} Mr. Zelensky would be released, claiming that it would exonerate him. “And I hope you get to see it soon,” he said. But then the president angrily denied that he had committed to releasing the document, arguing that making the transcript public would set a bad precedent, and he waffled repeatedly over whether he would authorize its disclosure. Source: "Trump Denies He Tied Ukraine Aid to Corruption Investigation of Biden" By Michael Crowley - NY Times - Sept. 23, 2019 He also did not mention that he had changed his explanation for withholding the money from just a day before. On Monday {9/23/19}, he linked his decision to block the aid to his concerns about corruption in Ukraine, citing Mr. Biden as an example. By emphasizing instead his overall concern about foreign aid, { . . . }Mr. Trump said earlier that he held up American aid to Ukraine that has become the subject of scrutiny because European countries have not paid their fair share to support the country { . . . } he was advancing a rationale less tied to his demand for an investigation. Source: "Trump Says He Will Release Transcript of Call With Ukraine’s President" By Michael Crowley and Peter Baker - NY Times - Sept. 24, 2019 {A}lmost two months after the back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio, when Mr. Trump said he wanted to pass “very meaningful background checks,” warnings from gun rights advocates and Republican lawmakers about the political blowback that would result from doing that have led to indecision about what to do and what the time frame is for sharing it. On the international stage, Mr. Trump has seemed most conflicted about how to respond to Iran’s attack on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, threatening to order “the ultimate option” one moment, and then warning that getting involved in Middle East wars was a mistake the next Mr. Trump also appears to be tempering his aggressive vows to impose a ban on all flavored vaping products. In an announcement last week in the Oval Office, with the first lady, Melania Trump, by his side, Mr. Trump declared that “we can’t allow people to get sick, and we can’t have our youth be so affected.” But days afterward, Mr. Trump sent out a tweet that raised questions about his commitment to a ban that his administration is forging ahead with. “Let’s get counterfeits off the market, and keep young children from Vaping!” Mr. Trump wrote, making the implicit argument that vaping was a good alternative to cigarettes and shifting the focus to counterfeit products. “On some things, he has strong opinions, but on many things, he doesn’t. If you don’t have some core organizing principles, other than your own political well-being, it’s easy to get lost.” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama. Despite wanting to give the impression that he is decisive, said one person close to Mr. Trump, part of his holdup is that the president constantly changes his mind and equivocates. Source: "For Trump, a Time of Indecision" By Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman - NY Times - 9/19/2019 In a recent interview on Fox News, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Richard Trumka, said workers were suffering, and criticized the White House’s inaction on the minimum wage. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump had said he supported hiking the federal minimum wage, currently at $7.25 an hour, to $10. “He’s opposed every increase in the minimum wage,” Mr. Trumka said. “He’s changed the regulation to take overtime away from a couple of million people. He’s proposed trillion-dollar cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. He’s rolled back health and safety standards toward workers.” Source: "Warren and Biden Join U.A.W. Picket Lines as Democrats Use Strike to Court Labor" By Stephanie Saul - NY Times - Sept. 22, 2019 {I}n the wake of drone and missile strikes on key Saudi oil facilities earlier this month,{. . . } which shook global energy markets, Mr. Trump has alternated between threats of fierce military action and calls for patience and restraint. Source: "Trump, at U.N., Blames Europe for His Delay of Ukraine Aid" By Michael Crowley - NY Times - Sept. 24, 2019 |
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