Tag: Trump White House

Kudlow Floats Capital Gains ‘Tax Holiday’ For Rich As ‘Stimulus’

Donald Trump’s top economic adviser said the administration is considering pushing for a “capital gains holiday” in a new round of coronavirus aid.

“There may be a capital gains holiday,” Larry Kudlow, director of the U.S. National Economic Council, told Fox Business on Monday.

Cuts to capital gains disproportionately affect extremely wealthy individuals. In 2018, 69 percent of all reported capital gains went to the one percent of households with incomes above $750,000. Capital gains are already taxed at a much lower rate than regular income. Continue reading.

Fauci Back at the White House, a Day After Trump Aides Tried to Undermine Him

New York Times logoThe visit underscored a reality for both the president and his most prominent coronavirus adviser: They are stuck with each other.

WASHINGTON — A day after President Trump’s press office tried to undermine the reputation of the nation’s top infectious disease expert with an anonymously attributed list of what it said were his misjudgments in the early days of the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci returned to the White House on Monday.

The visit underscored a reality for both men: They are stuck with each other.

Dr. Fauci — who has not had direct contact with the president in more than five weeks even as the number of Americans with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has risen sharply in the Southwest — slipped back into the West Wing to meet with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, while his allies denounced what they called a meanspirited and misguided effort by the White House to smear him. Continue reading.

Inside the White House, a Gun Industry Lobbyist Delivers for His Former Patrons

New York Times logoThe Trump administration lifted a ban on sales of silencers to private overseas buyers that was intended to protect U.S. troops from ambushes. The change was championed by a lawyer for the president who had worked for a firearms trade group.

Michael B. Williams spent nearly two years helping to run a trade group focused on expanding sales of firearm silencers by American manufacturers.

But try as he might, he could not achieve one of the industry’s main goals: overturning a ban on sales to private foreign buyers enacted by the State Department to protect American troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Then Mr. Williams joined the Trump administration.

As a White House lawyer, he pushed to overturn the prohibition, raising the issue with influential administration officials and creating pressure within the State Department, according to current and former government officials. Continue reading.

Medical Schools Voice Support For Fauci Amid White House Attacks

The Association of American Medical Colleges is “concerned and alarmed” by the Trump administration efforts to undercut the U.S.’s top infectious disease expert.

The Association of American Medical Colleges released a statement Monday in support of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s come under fire by the White House for his dire warnings about the United States’ surging coronavirus case counts.

“The AAMC is extremely concerned and alarmed by efforts to discredit Anthony Fauci, MD, our nation’s top infectious disease expert,” the letter said. “Dr. Fauci has been an independent and outspoken voice for truth as the nation has struggled to fight the coronavirus pandemic.”

The letter follows White House statements to media outlets on Sunday attempting to discredit Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and was a fixture of the once-regular coronavirus task force briefings. Continue reading.

White House goes public with attacks on Fauci

The Hill logoTensions between the White House and Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious diseases expert, are spilling into the open as officials openly attack the doctor for his public health advice during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Fauci’s advice has often run contrary to President Trump’s views, and the attacks on Fauci have begun to look like a traditional negative political campaign against an opponent. Yet this time, the opponent is a public health expert and career civil servant working within the administration. 

Dan Scavino, deputy chief of staff for communications, shared a cartoon on his Facebook page late Sunday that depicted Fauci as a faucet flushing the U.S. economy down the drain with overzealous health guidance to slow the spread of the pandemic. Continue reading.

Leading Homeland Security Under a President Who Embraces ‘Hate-Filled’ Talk

New York Times logoElaine Duke, a lifelong Republican, was acting secretary of homeland security for four months in 2017.

WASHINGTON — Elaine C. Duke, then President Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, arrived at the Roosevelt Room, down the hall from the Oval Office, on a steamy August afternoon in 2017 expecting a discussion about President Trump’s pledge to terminate DACA, the Obama-era protections for young immigrants. Instead, she said, it was “an ambush.”

“The room was stacked,” she recalled. Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s assault on immigration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other White House officials demanded that she sign a memo ending the program, which they had already concluded was illegal. She did not disagree, but she chafed at being cut out of the real decision-making.

“President Trump believes that he can’t trust,” Ms. Duke, now a consultant, said in a wide-ranging interview about the 14 months she spent working for him and the consequences of the president’s suspicion of what he calls the “deep state” in government. “That has affected his ability to get counsel from diverse groups of people.” Continue reading.

Fauci is sidelined by the White House as he steps up blunt talk on pandemic

Washington Post logoTrump hasn’t consulted with the scientist since early June, telling Hannity ‘he’s ‘a nice man but he’s made a lot of mistakes.’

For months, Anthony S. Fauci has played a lead role in America’s coronavirus pandemic, as a diminutive, Brooklyn-accented narrator who has assessed the risk and issued increasingly blunt warnings as the nation’s response has gone badly awry.

But as the Trump administration has strayed from the advice of many of its scientists and public health experts, the White House has moved to sideline Fauci, scuttled some of his planned TV appearances and largely kept him out of the Oval Office for more than a month even as coronavirus infections surge in large swaths of the country.

In recent days, the 79-year-old scientist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has found himself directly in the president’s crosshairs. During a Fox News interview Thursday with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.” And when Greta Van Susteren asked him last week about Fauci’s assessment that the country was not in a good place, Trump said flatly: “I disagree with him.” Continue reading.

CDC will issue new guidance on school openings, Pence says, after criticism from Trump

Washington Post logoThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will issue new guidance on school openings, Vice President Pence said Wednesday, hours after President Trump criticized earlier recommendations as “very impractical” and vowed to meet with the agency himself.

Citing Trump’s concern that the guidance might be “too tough,” Pence said that the CDC would issue additional recommendations starting next week that would provide “more clarity” and stressed that the guidelines should not supplant the judgment of local officials.

“We don’t want the guidance from CDC to be a reason why schools don’t open,” Pence said. “I think that every American, every American knows that we can safely reopen our schools. . . . We want, as the president said this morning, to make sure that what we’re doing doesn’t stand in the way of doing that.” Continued reading.

White House claims remdesivir decreases coronavirus mortality rate

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday claimed the mortality rate of the coronavirus has decreased due to, among other things, the use of the drug remdesivir — which has not been clinically proven to have any effect on the COVID-19 mortality rate.

McEnany brought up the drug in response to a question about coronavirus testing after a reporter asked about President Donald Trump’s saying that the U.S. “tested almost 40 million people, by so doing we show cases 99% of which are totally harmless.”

Most experts say that it is too soon to focus on a decrease in mortality because deaths lag behind an uptick in case numbers. Continue reading.

White House Hopes Americans ‘Grow Numb’ To Escalating Virus Death Toll

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has been claiming that COVID-19 has been mostly defeated in the U.S. — which is laughable in light of how much infection rates have been surging, especially in Sun Belt states. But according to Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey, Team Trump has found a new coronavirus talking point: claiming that Americans can learn to live with the pandemic and the ever-climbing death count.

According to Abutaleb and Dawsey, the “goal” of Trump’s White House and campaign allies “is to convince Americans that they can live with the virus — that schools should reopen, professional sports should return, a vaccine is likely to arrive by the end of the year, and the economy will continue to improve. White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking, who requested anonymity to reveal internal deliberations.”

A Trump Administration senior official, quoted anonymously, told the Post that Americans will “live with the virus being a threat.” And a former Trump official, according to the Post, said of Trump’s allies, “They’re of the belief that people will get over it, or if we stop highlighting it, the base will move on — and the public will learn to accept 50,000 to 100,000 new cases a day.” Continue reading.