Tag: Trump sleaze

Friends Recall Hearing Trump Accuser’s Claims in 1997

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Amy Dorris recently went public with accusations that Donald J. Trump assaulted her at the U.S. Open that year. Two friends say she told them the same story shortly after she attended the event.

Three weeks ago, a news story caught the attention of Dawn Capp, a Texas math teacher. A former model had accused President Trump of assault, the latest in a long line of sexual misconduct complaints against him. At the United States Open tennis tournament in 1997, the woman told The Guardian, he groped and forcibly kissed her.

Ms. Capp voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. But she immediately believed the story, she said in a telephone interview, because she had heard it more than two decades ago from Amy Dorris, the woman making the allegation and one of Ms. Capp’s oldest friends.

The Trump campaign has called Ms. Dorris’s account “totally false.” “This is just another pathetic attempt to attack President Trump right before the election,” Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement. Continue reading.

Former model accuses Trump of assault during 1990s tennis tournament

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A former model on Thursday became the latest woman to accuse President Trump of assault, telling the Guardian that Trump groped and kissed her against her will outside a bathroom at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in 1997.

Amy Dorris, who was 24 at the time of the alleged incident, told the Guardian that her encounter with Trump left her feeling “sick” and “violated,” and that she had struggled for years with whether she should speak publicly, including before the 2016 election.

Dorris did not return calls from The Washington Post, but her account was corroborated by her mother, Katherine Dorris, who said Dorris confided in her about the incident at the time it happened. Separately, a friend of Amy Dorris, Caron Bernstein, told The Post that Dorris had authorized her to speak on her behalf and to confirm that the details in the Guardian piece were accurate. Continue reading.

Here are 10 things Donald Trump has done that are at least as bad as calling veterans ‘losers’

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Donald Trump has turned the Gish gallop into the Trump torrent, spewing out both lies and scandal at a rate that seems to make the national media incapable of maintaining a thought for long enough to have an impact. At the moment, there’s a lot of focus on Trump’s calling military veterans “losers” and “suckers,” on his denigration of John McCain, and on how he turned up his nose at having veterans march in his dictator-style military parade because “nobody wants to see” the wounded and amputees.

But this too shall pass. Jared Kushner may have once advised Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman to keep his head down until a little thing like a brutal international assassination of a journalist blows over, but Donald Trump has a different strategy—he’ll just find something worse to talk about. And if you think there can’t possibly be anything worse … you’ve clearly been asleep for the last four years.

So, before the current outrage is replaced by the newer, more disgusting outrage, here’s a quick reminder of what Trump has done, in order of most outrageous… Continue reading.

In new book, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen describes alleged episodes of racism and says president likes how Putin runs Russia

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President Trump’s longtime lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, alleges in a new book that Trump made “overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election” and that the future commander in chief was also well aware of Cohen’s hush-money payoff to adult-film star Stormy Daniels during that campaign.

In the book, “Disloyal: A Memoir,” which was obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its Tuesday publication date, Cohen lays out an alarming portrait of the constellation of characters orbiting around Trump, likening the arrangement to the mafia and calling himself “one of Trump’s bad guys.” He describes the president, meanwhile, as “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

The memoir also describes episodes of Trump’s alleged racism and his “hatred and contempt” of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s only African American president. Continue reading.

Historian explains the huge mistake ‘increasingly desperate’ evangelicals make in backing Trump

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The latest Pew Research poll shows that 72% of white evangelical Protestants approved of Donald Trump’s work as president in June, and 59% strongly approved. That number was slightly lower than his approval earlier in the year. But about 82% of white evangelicals said they would vote for Trump, even higher than the proportion who voted for him in 2016. 35% say that Trump has been a “great President” and 34% say he has been “good”. No other religious subgrouprates Trump positively.

His pronounced support for the evangelical political agenda has been obvious since he became a candidate. In January 2016, he told Iowa evangelicals at Dordt University, a Christian college in Sioux Center, in his typically egotistical phrasing, “We don’t exert the power that we should have. Christianity will have power. If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else.”

Why didn’t an irreligious and publicly immoral candidate present moral difficulties to a religious group which has traditionally emphasized the close connection of faith and character? Many skilled researchers and analysts have tried to understand how people who profess such devotion to Jesus and the Bible could see Trump as their prophet. I have no better explanation than anyone else. Continue reading.

How the G.O.P. Stretched Hard to Defend Trump on Race and Gender

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Never before has a convention by a major party felt compelled to call such a diverse array of speakers to defend the character of a sitting president.

The Republican convention this week marked an extraordinary effort to recast President Trump’s image on issues of race and gender, with the party stretching to find African-Americans who would testify that Mr. Trump is not racist, and lining up women to describe him as sensitive and empathetic — qualities he rarely displays in public.

This vouching for Mr. Trump, as he was nominated for a second term, was without precedent. Never before has a convention by either major party felt compelled to call such a diverse array of speakers to defend the character of a sitting president.

And it was done with a crucial political goal in mind: making a divisive leader appear more palatable to white moderate voters, who have turned against the Trump-led G.O.P. in recent elections, while also trying to peel away some nonwhite voters from Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee. Continue reading.

‘The whole thing was a sham:’ RNC features Trump at naturalization ceremony

The Republican National Convention featured a naturalization ceremony that President Trump presided over. A ceremony that turned heads as hundreds of thousands of immigrants await their own ceremonies and are falling victim to backlogs. It was considered a stunt by some activists as the Trump administration continues to separate migrant families, turn away asylum seekers at the border and is still trying to dismantle DACA. MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez is joined by Alida Garcia of FWD.US and Lindsay Toczylowski, the Executive Director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. View the video here.

As Trump appointees flout the Hatch Act, civil servants who get caught get punished

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A Defense Logistics Agency employee was suspended for 30 days without pay last fall after giving his office colleagues a PowerPoint presentation that displayed the words, “Vote Republican.”

An Energy Department worker was forced to resign in January after admitting she gave a woman running for Congress a tour of a federal waste treatment plant so the candidate could show her expertise to potential voters.

Another civil servant began a 120-day suspension without pay from the Food and Drug Administration in July after creating a Facebook page with his name and photograph to solicit political donations and then co-hosting a fundraiser. Continue reading.

Trump Leverages Powers of Office as He Seeks to Broaden Appeal

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In an abrupt swerve from the dire tone of the convention’s first night, President Trump staged a grab-bag of gauzy events and personal testimonials aimed at female and minority voters. His program blurred the lines between campaigning and governing.

President Trump made a bid to sand down his divisive political image by appropriating the resources of his office and the powers of the presidency at the Republican convention on Tuesday, breaching the traditional boundaries between campaigning and governing in an effort to broaden his appeal beyond his conservative base.

In an abrupt swerve from the dire tone of the convention’s first night, Mr. Trump staged a grab-bag of gauzy events and personal testimonials aimed in particular at female and minority voters. In videos recorded at the White House, Mr. Trump pardoned a Nevada man convicted of bank robbery and swore in five new American citizens, all of them people of color, in a miniature naturalization ceremony.

Where the convention on Monday emphasized predictions of social and economic desolation under a government led by Democrats, the second night speakers — including three from Mr. Trump’s immediate family — hailed the president as a friend to women and a champion of criminal justice reform. There was no effort to reconcile the dissonance between the two nights’ programs, particularly the shift from Monday’s rhetoric about a looming “vengeful mob” of dangerous criminals into Tuesday’s tributes to the power of personal redemption. Continue reading.

Trump breaks with precedent on second night of convention

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President Trump broke with precedent on the second night of the Republican National Convention, granting a pardon and participating in a naturalization ceremony at the White House in videos that aired Tuesday during the prime-time event.

Speeches from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and first lady Melania Trump also pushed the boundaries of rules surrounding the mix of politics and governance.

Several portions of the convention used the White House as a backdrop for Trump to put his presidential powers on full display in an election year that has him trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden as he fights for a second term. Continue reading.