Tag: Donald Trump

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Trump Repeats Proposal To Reinstate Russia To G-7

Donald Trump continues to shill for Russian President Vladimir Putin
On Saturday, Donald Trump proposed to expand the G-7 by adding four non-member nations, including Russia. The other countries on Trump’s longer invitee list were India, Australia and South Korea. The group suspended Russia’s membership in 2014 over its annexation of Crimea in Ukraine. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau told reporters Monday that Russia should not be welcomed back. The U.K. has also signaled that it would veto any such plan.

“Its continued disrespect and flaunting of international rules and norms is why it remains outside of the G-7 and it will continue to remain out,” said Trudeau, who later added in French: “It will not be acceptable to accept it within the G-7.”

Decisions on membership must be backed unanimously by the G-7 members.

Trump also proposed reinstating Russia ahead of the 2018 G-7 summit, which was hosted in Canada by Trudeau.

(via Politico)

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Trump Urges Governors To ‘Dominate’ Protesters Or Look Like ‘Fools’

Donald Trump

Donald Trump to governors during race riots: “You have to dominate!”
It has been one week since George Floyd died in Minneapolis after a white police officer pressed his knee into the 46-year-old black man’s neck for more than eight minutes, and the protests continue across the nation with no leadership from Donald Trump. From the Washington Post:

During a conference call Monday, Trump berated the state leaders, calling them “weak,” and urged them to “dominate” protesters, according to officials familiar with the president’s remarks. The conference call followed another turbulent night across the nation, as protests that began peacefully exploded into mayhem.

Trump also called on them to take back the streets and use force to confront protesters and said if they did not, they would look like “fools,” alarming several governors on the call as they communicated privately, according to the officials.

“If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time,” Trump said, according to a person on the call.

Demonstrators clashed with police outside the White House for a third consecutive night as the unrest spread from Boston to Sioux Falls, S.D. More than half of the nation’s governors have called in the National Guard to help quell the unrest, and at least 45 million Americans were under a curfew on Sunday night.

In some cities, law enforcement officers were seen marching and kneeling with protesters. But elsewhere, police in riot gear continued to increase their use of force, which added to the disorder. On Monday, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) ordered a state investigation after a man was fatally shot during an overnight confrontation with Louisville police and the National Guard.

Some conservative commentators are urging the president to address the nation, but the White House press secretary said Trump is focused on the far-left “antifa” movement that he believes is behind the violence. “A national Oval Office address is not going to stop antifa,” Kayleigh McEnany said.

At this point, we’re basically the ‘States of America.’

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Pelosi: Trump Should Unify Our Country, Not Fuel The Flame Of Division

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on ABC This Week
During an appearance on ABC News’ This Week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was asked by George Stephanopoulos what President Donald Trump should be doing during the ongoing riots and protests over the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis. “The president of the United States should bring dignity to the office that he serves,” said Pelosi. “He should be a unifying force in our country.” “We have seen that with democratic and republican presidents all along. They have seen their responsibility to be the president of the United States, to unify our country, and not to fuel the flame, not to fuel the flame. “I think to take his bait time and time again is just a gift to him because he always wants to divert attention from what the cause of the response was.”

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Donald Trump: ‘By The Way, MAGA Loves Black People’

Asked if he feels he might be inciting racial unrest by inviting his supporters to appear outside the White House tonight, Donald Trump told reporters today that ‘MAGA loves black people.’ “MAGA. Make America great again. These are people that love our country. I have no idea if they were going to be here, I was just asking. I have no idea if they were going to be there, MAGA is make America great again. By the way, they love African-American people, they love black people. MAGA loves black people. I heard that MAGA wanted to be there and a lot of MAGA was going to be there and I have no idea. They love our country.”

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Chicago Mayor Sends Coded ‘F*** You’ To Trump

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (screen capture)
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Friday called out Donald Trump for trying to “foment violence” and offered a coded response for tweets that appeared to threaten Minneapolis rioters protesting the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

“We see the game he’s playing because it’s so transparent and he’s not very good at it. He wants to show failures on the part of Democratic local leaders to throw red meat to his base. His goal is to polarize, to destabilize local government and inflame racist urges. And we can absolutely not let him prevail,” Lightfoot said.

“I will code what I really want to say to Donald Trump. It’s two words: It begins with F and ends with YOU.”

On Thursday night, President Trump took to Twitter as protesters surrounded a Minneapolis police station and set fire to it.

He characterized the protesters as “THUGS” and tweeted, “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

On Friday, Lightfoot accused the president with whom she has clashed repeatedly of attempting to “foment violence.” She made no apologies for the vulgar reference that ran contrary to the advice of former First Lady Michelle Obama’s infamous line that, “When they go low, we go high.”

“I am not Michelle Obama,” the mayor said.

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Twitter Tags Trump Tweets With Fact-Checking Label

Donald Trump (image via Flickr/WhiteHouse – public domain)
Over the past three years, Donald Trump’s Twitter habit has put the social media platform in the uncomfortable position of balancing First Amendment rights of expression (by Trump) versus his endless stream of fact-free statements causing the spread of disinformation. For instance, over the past week Trump has tweeted unfounded accusations that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was somehow involved in the death of a former intern. Even the spouse of the deceased aide publicly begged the CEO of Twitter to remove the tweets but to no avail. Today, for the first time, Twitter applied a fact-checking label to some of Trump’s tweets claiming mail-in ballots would lead to overwhelming voter fraud. The label, which reads “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” links to news reports about the Donald’s unsubstantiated claims. A spokesperson for Twitter, Katie Rosborough, told the Washington Post the tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”

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Poll: Biden Leads Trump By 5 In Swing State Minnesota

L-R Former Vice President Joe Biden, Donald Trump
A new Star Tribune-MPR News-KARE 11 Minnesota poll shows former Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden leading Donald Trump by 5 points in the swing state of Minnesota Via the Minnesota Star-Tribune:

The survey, which was released on Monday, found that 49 percent of registered Minnesota voters favor Biden in a head-to-head matchup against the president. Forty-four percent said they’d back Trump, while 7 percent said they remained undecided.

The poll indicates that Biden and Trump are in a dead heat among independents, with 42 percent backing Trump and 41 percent the former vice president. Among independent voters, 17 percent said they were undecided.

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Trump Twitter Rant: “Barack Was Always Playing Golf!”

Donald Trump

Predictably, Donald Trump has become triggered by the fact folks noticed he took time to play golf on Saturday and Sunday this weekend. First, he lashed out at a campaign ad regarding his golf habit. Then, as he’s done many times in the past, he turned his focus on his predecessor claiming Obama was “always” playing golf. Many on social media criticized the Donald for his bad timing as the coronavirus death toll nears 100,000. Plus, the obvious hypocrisy after frequently harping on President Obama playing golf during his 8 years in the White House. Note – at this point in his administration, Obama had played 70 rounds of golf over more than three years. To date, Trump has played golf or visited one of his golf properties 251 times. “Sleepy Joe’s representatives have just put out an ad saying that I went to play golf (exercise) today. They think I should stay in the White House at all times. What they didn’t say is that it’s the first time I’ve played golf in almost 3 months, that Biden was constantly…vacationing, relaxing & making shady deals with other countries, & that Barack was always playing golf, doing much of his traveling in a fume spewing 747 to play golf in Hawaii – Once even teeing off immediately after announcing the gruesome death of a great young man by ISIS!”

Please remember that when it comes to Trump’s hypocrisy, there’s always a tweet:

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NY Times Prints 1000 COVID Obituaries On Front Page

(image via New York Times)
The front page of today’s New York Times lists one-sentence obituaries of 1,000 people who have died from the COVID-19 pandemic here in the United States. With the death toll about to cross the 100,000 mark, those names represent a scant 1 percent of those lost in just over 3 months – an average of 1,100 deaths a day. From the New York Times:

Instead of the articles, photographs or graphics that normally appear on the front page of The New York Times, on Sunday, there is just a list: a long, solemn list of people whose lives were lost to the coronavirus pandemic.

As the death toll from Covid-19 in the United States approaches 100,000, a number expected to be reached in the coming days, editors at The Times have been planning how to mark the grim milestone.

Marc Lacey, National editor, had warned Tom Bodkin, chief creative officer of The Times, that the milestone was coming. “I wanted something that people would look back on in 100 years to understand the toll of what we’re living through,” Mr. Lacey said in an email.

There’s an interactive article on the Times‘ website expounding on the list of those lost and included on the front page. As the Times was prepping its cover story yesterday, Donald Trump played golf at his National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. According to reports, he is playing another round of golf again today. CNN notes this is his 358th visit to one of his properties and his 266th trip to one of his golf clubs since he took office in January 2017. The Biden campaign noted the widely divergent perspectives on the gravity of the COVID-19 threat.

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Trump Plays Golf As U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Approach 100K

According to Bloomberg News (and other sources), Donald Trump headed to the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Virginia today.

President Donald Trump headed to the golf course for the first time in over two months, engaging in his personal passion as well as attempting to show how the country can return to normal after stay-at-home orders taken against the coronavirus.

Trump arrived at the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Virginia around 10:30 a.m. on Saturday. He was spotted earlier wearing a white polo shirt and signature white “Make America Great Again” cap. The White House doesn’t always confirm Trump’s activities while at his golf courses.

The president’s most recent golf outing was March 8 at the Trump International course in West Palm Beach, Florida. He teed it up with members of the World Series-winning Washington Nationals baseball team, according to images posted by the players on social media. Trump played at the same course on March 7.

In 2014, Trump criticized President Barack Obama for playing golf when there were TWO cases of Ebola in the U.S. As of today, there are 1.6 million cases of COVID-19 which has claimed the lives of nearly 100,000 Americans. And according to the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate has soared to 14.7 percent. But in 2014, when the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent and the Ebola outbreak had been contained, Trump took time to criticize Obama…?