Tag: Donald Trump

Under Trump, ‘permanent campaign’ takes on a whole new meaning

The following article by James Pindell was posted on the Boston Globe website March 16, 2017:

Pres. Trump at Nashville Rally March, 2017 ANDREA MORALES/GETTY IMAGE

Consider it another way that Donald Trump has changed American politics: The once-subtle art of the so-called permanent campaign practiced by the past six US presidents is dead. There is nothing subtle about the ways Trump has campaigned since winning the White House in November. He never stopped campaigning, never stopped raising money, and never stopped attacking his opponents.

Where his predecessors tried to walk a careful line, suggesting that the presidency was above politics, Trump might be the one finally calling a spade a spade.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama didn’t file paperwork to run for reelection until April and May of their third year in office. Trump filed the day he was sworn in. Neither Bush nor Obama aired television ads until the election year. Trump’s super PAC has already aired a few of them. And this week, as if there was any doubt what Trump was up to, his supporters could sign up to attend what are officially called campaign rallies in Tennessee and Kentucky via Trump’s campaign website. Continue reading “Under Trump, ‘permanent campaign’ takes on a whole new meaning”

Trump’s budget cuts hit his base — rural voters

The following article by Victoria McGrane was posed on the Boston Globe website March 16, 2017:

Some of the biggest losers in President Trump’s proposed budget are the rural communities that fueled his stunning White House victory.

Funding that keeps rural airports open, grants that help build rural water and sewer projects, and money for long-distance Amtrak lines that serve rural communities would all disappear under Trump’s budget blueprint released Thursday.

Trump also wants to kill the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps people, including seniors on fixed incomes and the working poor, to pay their heating bills. It’s a particularly prized resource in New England, with its brutal winters. Continue reading “Trump’s budget cuts hit his base — rural voters”

The Gilded President

The following article by Kenneth T. Wash was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website March 17, 2017:

President Donald Trump prefers to be sealed inside his White House bubble of isolation and adoration.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Donald Trump is enjoying the most ostentatious lifestyle of any president in a half century and perhaps in U.S. history. Even the richest presidents of the past, including John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, had a sense of limits in showing off their wealth. Not Trump. He loves to display his gilded lifestyle and vast fortune, exemplified by his glittering homes at Mar-a-Lago in Florida and Trump Tower in Manhattan. He is shattering the norms of how America’s top leader behaves and operates, and it could set precedents, both good and bad, for how presidents operate in the future. One impact could be in reducing transparency in how the president makes decisions, where he gets his ideas, and whom he turns to for advice.

Details of Trump’s presidential lifestyle are gradually emerging. Politico found that Trump “is sticking to his comfort zone,” spending most nights either at the White House, sometimes alone, or at Mar-a-Lago during his golf-filled weekends. He has visited a few other places, such as a Boeing plant, a Florida elementary school and military bases but the people he is in contact with are generally the rich and the nation’s elites, including business executives and members of Congress. He still loves to address big, adoring crowds as he did during the campaign and which he did again in Nashville this week. He is animated by the energy of his supporters, which is common among presidents. The difference is that Trump often seems sealed inside the White House bubble of isolation and adoration and he likes it there. The information he gets about the wider world is usually drawn from cable TV news shows and friends around the country, especially in New York, who communicate with him via his cellphone and emails, White House officials and Trump’s friends say. Continue reading “The Gilded President”

Statement from DFL Chairman Ken Martin on Trump’s First Budget Blueprint

March 16, 2017

“Last Night, Donald Trump made his first budget blueprint public and it’s a disaster.

“Republicans have always said that they want to see our country run like a business but our government is set up to help people, not turn a profit. To meet their bottom line, Trump’s Administration proposes deep cuts to programs that provide help that no state alone can. Programs like medical research, environmental protections, WIC grants, and money for state water projects.

“Trump’s budget pulls money from international and cultural programs, before and after-school programs, rural water infrastructure, federal subsidies for rural airports, and dumps it into a $54 billion dollar increase of defense spending. Cutting these vital programs that so many vulnerable Americans rely upon does not and will not make America great. Trump’s inexperience in government and blindness toward the benefits of governmental programs have combined into one of the most dangerous federal budget blueprints of our lifetime.

“This Trump budget has failed that moral test of government in more ways than I can begin to count. Budgets are a reflection of priorities and clearly Trump and the Republicans could care less about the prosperity of families, comfort for our seniors, progress for the working class, protection of our environment, or the future of our country.”

Bannon And Trump Have Quietly Installed An Alt-National Security Council Operating Inside The White House

The following article by Jefferson Morley was posted on the National Memo website March 15, 2017:

Less than a month after much-admired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster took over from Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser, Trump’s alter-ego Steve Bannon appears to be more in control of U.S. foreign policy than ever.

There is little sign McMaster will be able to restore traditional U.S. foreign policy commitments to NATO and the European Union, and every indication that Bannon’s shadowy Strategic Initiatives Group, denounced by two national security experts as “dangerous hypocrisy,” is driving U.S. policy. Continue reading “Bannon And Trump Have Quietly Installed An Alt-National Security Council Operating Inside The White House”

Devin Nunes confirms it: The evidence of Trump Tower being wiretapped just doesn’t seem to exist

The following article by Chris Cillizza was posted on the Washington Post website March 15, 2017:

Here is a brief list of people who have said that President Trump’s allegation that President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign is simply not true: Continue reading “Devin Nunes confirms it: The evidence of Trump Tower being wiretapped just doesn’t seem to exist”

If you’re a poor person in America, Trump’s budget is not for you

The following article by Steven Mufson and Tracy Jan was posted on the Washington Post website March 16, 2017:

Trump’s budget slashes or abolishes programs that provide support to low-income Americans (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

If you’re a poor person in America, President Trump’s budget proposal is not for you.

Trump has unveiled a budget that would slash or abolish programs that have provided low-income Americans with help on virtually all fronts, including affordable housing, banking, weatherizing homes, job training, paying home heating oil bills, and obtaining legal counsel in civil matters. Continue reading “If you’re a poor person in America, Trump’s budget is not for you”

If We Don’t Act Now, Fascism Will Be on Our Doorstep, Says Yale Historian

The following article by Steven Rosenfeld was posted on the AlterNet website March 13, 2017:

Timothy Snyder warns: History gives us a bunch of cases where democratic republics became authoritarian regimes.

How close is President Donald Trump to following the path blazed by last century’s tyrants? Could American democracy be replaced with totalitarian rule? There’s enough resemblance that Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who studies fascist and communist regime change and totalitarian rule, has written a book warning about the threat and offering lessons for resistance and survival. The author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century talked to AlterNet’s Steven Rosenfeld.

Steven Rosenfeld: Three weeks ago, you said that the country has perhaps a year ‘to defend American democracy.’ You said what happens in the next few weeks is crucial. Are you more concerned than ever that our political culture and institutions are evolving toward fascism, resembling key aspects of the early 20th-century European regimes you’ve studied? Continue reading “If We Don’t Act Now, Fascism Will Be on Our Doorstep, Says Yale Historian”

Trump’s Lies Are No Laughing Matter For The Press

The following article by Eric Boehlert was posted on the National Memo website March 14, 2017:

Appearing at the annual Radio and Television News Correspondents Association dinner in March 2004, just as his reelection campaign was gearing up, President George W. Bush continued the black-tie evening’s tradition and set aside some moments in his address to poke fun at himself.

The punchline that year: Bush couldn’t find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of the mass destruction; the WMDs that had served as the rationale for launching the invasion of Iraq one year earlier.

As the lights at the Washington Hilton ballroom dimmed, Bush narrated a “White House Election-Year Album,” and photos flashed on the screen behind him. One slide showed Bush in the Oval Office, searching under a piece of furniture. “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere,” he told the audience. The slideshow continued with him checking different parts of his office. “Nope, no weapons over there,” he said, “Maybe under here.” Continue reading “Trump’s Lies Are No Laughing Matter For The Press”