The White House turned off the external lights Sunday night as protests raged nearby, and the unusual reaction served as a metaphor for President Donald Trump’s leadership during the latest crisis.
The president was also whisked away to an underground bunker as Washington, D.C., police fired tear gas at protesters, who set fire to prominent structures across the city as part of nationwide demonstrations against police brutality.
President Trump took to Twitter on Monday morning to complain about a “heavily biased Democrat Poll” — the latest sign he is feeling the pressure as his fortunes sag five months before November’s election.
The poll from ABC News and The Washington Post showed Trump losing to likely Democratic challenger Joe Biden by 10 percentage points. The poll is not a notable outlier among recent surveys, nor is there any objective evidence that it is biased.
The results point to the electoral perils Trump faces as unrest about racial injustice explodes across the nation while voters grapple with the coronavirus crisis and its economic impact. Continue reading.
“When you see a sight like that, it’s incredible,” Trump said of the SpaceX launch, after alluding to the protests over the killing of George Floyd.CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — On a day of chaos across the country, President Donald Trump and his top aides orchestrated a brief escape from their problems on the ground.
Eager to recapture the nation’s attention with the momentous launch of NASA’s SpaceX capsule — the first attempt to send American astronauts into space from U.S. soil in almost a decade — Trump made his second trip to the Kennedy Space Center this week, after the initial launch was postponed Wednesday because of inclement weather. The historic feat offered Trump the patriotic backdrop he’s been yearning for — on the heels of troubling developments this week surrounding the deadly coronavirus outbreak and the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American who died in the custody of police in Minneapolis.
“As we usher in a new era of space exploration, we are reminded that America is always in the process of transcending great challenges. Nothing — not even gravity itself — can hold Americans down or keep America back,” Trump said at a small reception on the Kennedy Space Center campus after the successful launch of the Falcon 9 rocket. Continue reading.
Trump’s tone has lurched between support for the frustrated crowds and cheerleading a sterner approach to law enforcement.President Donald Trump has spent much of his adult life building his brand around racial divisions.
So much of Trump’s business and political career has hinged on moments of racial strife: from the full-page ads he took out to condemn the Central Park Five in New York in the 1980s to the groundwork he laid for his own presidential bid by promoting the Obama “birther” conspiracy theory to his refusal in 2017 to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.
Now, as protesters swarmed the White House for a second night, Trump’s tone lurched between support for the frustrated crowds and cheerleading a sterner approach to law enforcement. Continue reading.
In cities across the country, protests turned violent as local authorities called for calm.President Donald Trump reacted to the protests and incidents of vandalism and violence ripping through several American cities by threatening to invoke the power of the federal government and the military, tossing the equivalent of a lighted match into a national uproar over an African-American man’s death at the hands of police.
“Crossing State lines to incite violence is a FEDERAL CRIME!” Trump tweeted on Saturday afternoon. “Liberal Governors and Mayors must get MUCH tougher or the Federal Government will step in and do what has to be done, and that includes using the unlimited power of our Military and many arrests.”
Mayors have been sharply critical of Trump’s leadership amid the burgeoning crisis that has now spread to some two dozen cities, accusing him of deepening America’s divides. “There’s been an uptick in tension and hatred and division since [Trump] came along,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a news conference on Saturday. “It’s just a fact.” Continue reading.
It was the murderous dictator Joseph Stalin who supposedly said that one death was a tragedy, one million deaths a mere statistic. One hundred thousand deaths are difficult to get one’s mind around. The toll in our nation from covid-19, as it reaches that horrific milestone, must be seen as a catastrophe — and an indictment.
The long Memorial Day weekend gave the pandemic an indelible visual image: President Trump, wearing a ball cap but no mask, enjoying himself on his Northern Virginia golf course. Last week, you will recall, Trump declared it was “essential” that Americans be able to spend Sunday at church services. He chose to head for the links instead.
Primary blame for those 100,000 deaths must go to the killer itself — the novel coronavirus that spreads so easily, overwhelms defenseless immune systems and turned New York hospitals into charnel houses. But not all of covid-19’s victims had to die. Some responsibility must be laid at the feet of a president who ignored the threat until it was too late, who failed to mount an adequate response and who still, after so many lonely deaths and socially distanced funerals, insists that the enemy will somehow just magically disappear. Continue reading.
In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote secretly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the potential need for “quick action” toward the development of atomic weapons.
After Roosevelt received a scientific briefing, he is said to have called in his military aide, Gen. Edwin “Pa” Watson. “Pa! This requires action!” FDR said.
Thus began what would become the Manhattan Project, a sprawling collaboration among the military, academics and corporations, ultimately employing 130,000 and spending the then-extraordinary sum of $2.2 billion in successfully building the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oak Ridge, Tenn., worked on uranium; Chicago worked on plutonium; Hanford, Wash., built reactors; Los Alamos, N.M., designed bombs; and Alamogordo, N.M., held testing. Continue reading.
