Category Archives: GOP

Trump is wrong about Saddam Hussein

Hayder Al-Shakeri writes: As an Iraqi, I learned about the values on which the United States of America was built during an exchange semester in the US. I admired those values and respected Americans for believing in them. But Donald Trump contradicts some of those very principles. In a speech on Tuesday, I heard him praise the way Saddam killed “terrorists” without reading them rights or even letting them talk. This is not the American system that I was taught – nor these the values I respected.

“Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. Right? He was a bad guy, really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights, they didn’t talk, they were a terrorist, it was over,” Donald Trump said in his speech.

It is true that Saddam killed many people. Saddam killed men and women, kids and minorities and many others who stood up to him. Most of them were not terrorists, though. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been wasted under his leadership/dictatorship. Iraq, in his opinion, might have looked better during his time, but Iraqis back then suffered greatly.

Saddam led Iraq into long wars lasting several years, during which Iraqis had to fight for what he believed in. He committed genocides against his people and eventually Iraq had up to 250 mass graves spread around in the country. Saddam went after anyone who opposed him – he didn’t care about violating basic human rights or democracy.

Through such acts, Saddam was able to instill terror in his people, making them afraid to whisper a word. That is how Saddam dealt with terrorism, by terrorizing everyone so no one would be able to speak or stand up to him. In that way, the state looked orderly and people seemed in a better place than right now. [Continue reading…]

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Would Donald Trump quit if he wins the election? He doesn’t rule it out

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The New York Times reports: The traditional goal of a presidential nominee is to win the presidency and then serve as president.

Donald J. Trump is not a traditional candidate for president.

Presented in a recent interview with a scenario, floating around the political ether, in which the presumptive Republican nominee proves all the naysayers wrong, beats Hillary Clinton and wins the presidency, only to forgo the office as the ultimate walk-off winner, Mr. Trump flashed a mischievous smile.

“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he said minutes before leaving his Trump Tower office to fly to a campaign rally in New Hampshire.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr. Trump is playing coy to earn more news coverage. But the notion of the intensely competitive Mr. Trump’s being more interested in winning the presidency than serving as president is not exactly a foreign concept to close observers of this presidential race. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s rigged system


As Donald Trump warns about a “rigged system,” he’s indirectly training terrorists.

No, he doesn’t have secret training camps in Montana or Utah. Nor does he need to disseminate any information about bomb-making. He doesn’t even need to have the desire to see anyone turn to violence.

All he needs to do is carry on bottling rage, distributing it far and wide and sooner or later this incendiary infusion is bound to explode.

Whenever and wherever this happens — and there’s no telling how many times it has already happened — it will be hard to pin the blame directly on Trump. The ticking time-bombs within the brittle minds of many an American are scattered from coast to coast.

Rage contained will get released when the person within whom it has been festering no longer feels like this is their own possession — their own demon that they must struggle to restrain.

As rage gets sanctioned and fueled by a powerful and prominent man like Trump who has positioned himself as a champion of the people, then the would-be perpetrator of violence who previously went unnoticed now believes he has been transformed into an instrument of a higher law and an expression of the will of his nation.

Not my will, but Thy will be done, thinks the American terrorist for whom this country, its people, and God form a holy trinity.

When Trump says this is a “rigged system,” he’s telling his followers they don’t live in a democracy.

Figuratively or literally, this is a call to arms — and that’s exactly the message that some of Trump’s followers are receiving.

Trump, like every experienced white collar criminal, is an expert in covering his tracks. As an agitator, he adopts the posture of an impassive witness, observing events without telling anyone what to do. But as Alex Massie observed after Jo Cox was murdered in the UK:

When you encourage rage you cannot then feign surprise when people become enraged. You cannot turn around and say, ‘Mate, you weren’t supposed to take it so seriously. It’s just a game, just a ploy, a strategy for winning votes.’

When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks. When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.

When Trump calls out to his followers that the FBI’s decision not to indict Hillary Clinton means that he and they are up against a “rigged system,” these are the kinds of responses he triggers:

“There’s a place in hell for this CARELESS, CORRUPT, LYING WITCH! 😡” tweets @MiddleClazzMom.

“I’d like to see her on fire in hell, and our sick terrorist Obama” tweets @vickilynne58.

“Disband the FBI!! Start a Citizen Secret Police to interorgate them!! Yes! I’m pissed!!” tweets @wiley4454.

“When #Government doesn’t follow the #Laws the #Citizens don’t need to!” tweets @drginareghetti.

“We all received a major blow today but like our founding Fathers this will not stop us from wining the war #MAGA #Trump2016” tweets @jrmadmen.

When you say the system is rigged, this isn’t a callout to voters — it’s a declaration that voting is worthless.

This is the message that ardent Trump supporter and conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, hears loud and clear: “The Fix Is In: @HillaryClinton Will Be The Next President! #RiggedSystem”

“If this DONT WAKE THE AMERICAN people up, I dont know what will.. Time for the pitchforks,” tweets @BeezakaMrB.

But don’t expect a big rush on farm-supply stores, because in a country where it’s easier to buy an assault rifle than it is to track down a pitchfork, those who feel most enraged about a rigged system won’t be grabbing agricultural implements.

The more Trump claims he’s up against a rigged system, the more angry his supporters will be when he loses. They won’t accept loss as a defeat; they will view it as a crime.

Seeing themselves as victims of evil global forces, there will be a few who decide that violence is the only path to justice.

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Reporter calls out Donald Trump’s son-in-law over anti-Semitism

The New York Times reports: On Tuesday morning, Dana Schwartz, a culture reporter for The New York Observer, sent a pitch to the paper’s editor in chief.

After posting a message on Twitter criticizing Donald J. Trump for using an image of Hillary Clinton with a shape resembling the Star of David and a pile of cash, Ms. Schwartz spent the Fourth of July weekend getting trolled by anti-Semitic Trump supporters.

Now she wanted to write about the experience.

“I feel an obligation to use whatever platform is available to me to bring that hatred out of the shadows, acknowledging it and discussing it,” Ms. Schwartz wrote to the editor, Ken Kurson.

Mr. Kurson responded swiftly, she said, with a single word: “Go.”

He didn’t see the piece until it was published online. It may not have been what Mr. Kurson was expecting.

It did not simply criticize Mr. Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters. It called out Mr. Trump’s Orthodox Jewish son-in-law and de facto campaign manager, Jared Kushner — the owner of The Observer. [Continue reading…]

Kushner released a statement in response to Schwartz’s letter, saying:

My father-in-law is an incredibly loving and tolerant person who has embraced my family and our Judaism since I began dating my wife. I know that Donald does not at all subscribe to any racist or anti-semitic thinking. I have personally seen him embrace people of all racial and religious backgrounds. The suggestion that he may be intolerant is not reflective of the Donald Trump I know.

Unable to face such a courageous expression of dissent from an employee, Kushner (or his loyal underlings) removed Schwartz’s letter from the Observer — but it can still be read here.

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Quiet fixer in Donald Trump’s campaign: His son-in-law, Jared Kushner

The New York Times reports: International diplomacy is a world of careful rituals, hierarchy and credentials. But when the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, wanted to communicate with Donald J. Trump, he ended up on two occasions in the Manhattan office of a young man with no government experience, no political background and no official title in the Trump campaign: Jared Kushner.

Mr. Kushner held court at length with Mr. Dermer, doing his best to engage in the same sort of high-level conversation that the ambassador conducted with career diplomats and policy experts from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

A 35-year-old real estate developer, investor and newspaper publisher, Mr. Kushner derives his authority in the campaign not from a traditional résumé but from a marital vow. He is Mr. Trump’s son-in-law.

Yet in a gradual but unmistakable fashion, Mr. Kushner has become involved in virtually every facet of the Trump presidential operation, so much so that many inside and out of it increasingly see him as a de facto campaign manager. Mr. Kushner, who is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, helped recruit a sorely needed director of communications, oversaw the creation of an online fund-raising system and has had a hand in drafting Mr. Trump’s few policy speeches. And now that Mr. Trump has secured the Republican nomination, Mr. Kushner is counseling his father-in-law on the selection of a running mate.

It is a new and unlikely role for Mr. Kushner, a conspicuously polite Harvard graduate whose prominent New Jersey family bankrolled Democrats for decades and whose father’s reputation was destroyed, in a highly public and humiliating manner, by his involvement in electoral politics.

Now, in a Shakespearean turn, Mr. Kushner is working side by side with the former federal prosecutor who put his father, Charles Kushner, in prison just over 10 years ago: Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, whom Mr. Trump named as a top adviser. Mr. Kushner originally voiced objections to Mr. Trump about the appointment, but Mr. Kushner and Mr. Christie have since become wary allies in seeking to impose greater discipline on Mr. Trump’s unconventional campaign.

Much about the Trump candidacy seems at odds with Mr. Kushner’s personality and biography: An Orthodox Jew and grandson of Holocaust survivors, Mr. Kushner is now at the center of a campaign that has been embraced by white nationalists and anti-Semites. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s unchristian spirit

Peter Wehner writes: Since Donald Trump assures us that the Bible is his favorite book, it’s worth asking: Just what is his theology?

After Mr. Trump met with hundreds of evangelical Christians a couple of weeks ago, James Dobson, who is among the most influential leaders in the evangelical world and serves on Mr. Trump’s evangelical executive advisory board, declared that “Trump appears to be tender to things of the Spirit,” by which Dr. Dobson meant the Holy Spirit.

Of all the descriptions of Mr. Trump we’ve heard this election season, this may be the most farcical. As described by St. Paul, the “fruit of the Spirit” includes forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, hardly qualities one associates with Mr. Trump. It shows you the lengths Mr. Trump’s supporters will go to in order to rationalize their enthusiastic support of him.

Dr. Dobson is not alone. Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, has praised Mr. Trump’s life as in many ways exemplary and said that he believes that “Donald Trump is God’s man to lead our nation.” Eric Metaxas, who has written popular biographies of William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, has rhapsodized about Mr. Trump and argued that Christians “must” vote for him because he is “the last best hope of keeping America from sliding into oblivion.” [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump: The pied piper of American bigotry takes a shot at ‘Jewish money’

 

Apologists for the Trump campaign, such as former campaign manager, Cory Lewandowski, are trying deflect criticism of the campaign’s use of blatantly anti-Semitic imagery by claiming that the star used in the now infamous “history made” tweet is the same as the star used by American law enforcement.

Let’s see if I understand. When Trump uses imagery that’s meant to reinforce his message that Hillary Clinton is deeply corrupt, he wants to imply she’s as corrupt as what he views as that other widely recognized symbol of corruption… the American sheriff?

That’s strange. I thought Trump was a big fan of the police.

Lewandowski says the reaction to the tweet is ‘political correctness run amok.’

If so, why did the Trump campaign kowtow to their critics by altering the tweet to remove an innocent “sheriff’s star”?

And how come the first place this image is known to have been used before it was co-opted by Trump was a neo-Nazi message board?

What’s really going on inside the campaign?

Does Trump actually feel like he needs to strengthen and expand the coalition of support he already has among neo-Nazis, white supremacists, anti-Semites and every other stripe of bigotry woven into the tapestry of American politics?

Although I think it’s dangerous to underestimate how large a place bigotry holds in American culture, I don’t actually believe that a realistic presidential campaign — even one led by a quintessentially ugly racist American — can conceivably win by appealing to this diseased fragment of the American psyche.

And given that Twitter has had such an important role in Trump’s media strategy, it’s highly implausible that the latest “unforced error” was really that.

Firstly, it seems much more likely that, in part, this is the latest example of what Trump has been doing all along: baiting the media in order to get free publicity.

A campaign that’s already financially stretched is likely to become increasingly desperate in its use of stunts designed to grab headlines.

But wait a minute, some people may be thinking: Why would Trump risk alienating some extremely wealthy Jewish donors — especially Sheldon Adelson — just for a couple of days free but politically costly media attention?

Back in May, Adelson was reported to be “poised” to donate $100 million or more to the Trump campaign at a time that Trump estimated he might need to raise $1 billion.

The money never came through.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Many [inside the Trump campaign] were hoping casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who spent nearly $100 million in the 2012 presidential race, would save the day by starting his own pro-Trump super PAC to provide a trusted safe haven for donors.

But after Trump’s polling numbers tanked with his race-based criticism of a federal judge and response to the Orlando shooting, Adelson has put his plans on hold. The Las Vegas billionaire is “not actually starting a PAC despite what has been reported,” his spokesman said.

So, perhaps Trump’s anti-Semitic tweet might be better understood not as dog whistle to bigots whose loyalty he’s already won, but instead as a counterpunch aimed at Jewish donors like Adelson who now find it impossible to deny Trump’s inherent toxicity.

Trump’s biggest lie was that he would never need anyone else’s money, so nothing now eats his heart out more with bitterness and envy than the sight of his competitor sitting on piles of cash while he has close to none.

As much as Trump may have appeared to possess an extraordinary capacity to avoid being penalized for his irrepressible racism, the reality seems to be that it is driving his campaign to bankruptcy.

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Trump wants us to follow the Brits into a corner of isolation

Timothy Egan writes: In committing economic suicide, Britain is trying to close the door and hide from the world. It felt good, no doubt, to tell those overbearing bureaucrats in Brussels to bugger off. We’ll stick with our bangers and mash without any interference from Europe! But the Brexit vote was also a drunken swing at those “others” remaking the image of a lost England. To hear the haters tell it, “Polish vermin” and brown-skinned hordes have overwhelmed the little island nation.

Trump wants us to follow the Brits into a corner of isolation — by race, religion and trade. His philosophy, the rant of a besotted boob making things up in public, is anti-American at its core. In rejecting our former colonial masters, we threw off monarchy, the class system and a state religion. We opened our doors to all nations, all religions, all opinions.

The New World can certainly learn much from the Old World. But the sun never sets on a stupid idea. And this vote to stop the spinning globe and get off at 1952 is among the stupidest. Britain is cracking up now because it followed the crackpots. The United States could make the same mistake — rejecting free trade, and rejecting a welcome mat for free people.

Today, about 13 percent of Britain is foreign-born. What’s disruptive, especially in the timeless tableau of rural England, is that the number of immigrants has more than doubled since 1993. That’s what caused some of the open hatred in the campaign to leave the European Union. Trump is playing with that same fire now. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump loves crazy conspiracy theories — just like the majority of Americans

The Boston Globe reports: Sometimes, Donald Trump sounds as though he is just passing on information, as he did after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died. “They say they found a pillow on his face,” Trump told a radio interviewer, “which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.”

Other times, he seems to be wondering aloud, as he did when he suggested the Clintons might have been involved in what he termed the “very fishy” 1993 suicide of former White House aide Vince Foster.

More famously, he helped drive the so-called birther movement, insisting that President Obama was not born in the United States and that investigators he had sent to Hawaii would expose “one of the greatest cons in the history of politics and beyond.”

Trump’s affinity for conspiracy theories might seem the stuff of a few kooks and cranks living in their parents’ basement.

But far from being a marginal phenomenon, conspiracy theories have always been part of the American political landscape and are believed by more than 55 percent of the public — a group that cuts across race, gender, income, and political affiliation, according to researchers and polls.

The surprising breadth of conspiracy beliefs shows that while Trump’s rhetoric may repel a large segment of voters, it is also tapping a deep vein of thought among Americans who distrust elites and suspect that larger, darker forces are orchestrating domestic and world events.

“When I started studying conspiracy theories, I was stunned,” said Thomas J. Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University. “I thought I was going to find them on the fringes of American attitudes, but they are a core way that Americans read about and explain political phenomena in response to uncertainty.” [Continue reading…]

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Inside the six weeks Donald Trump was a nonstop ‘birther’

The New York Times reports: Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country.

But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.

That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.

“What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Mr. Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?”

Mr. Farah recalled that Mr. Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s birthplace, to resolve the debate.

Mr. Trump’s eagerness to embrace the so-called birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to right-wing conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Mr. Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system.

In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination. [Continue reading…]

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How a quest by elites is driving ‘Brexit’ and Trump

Neil Irwin writes: What lesson should a card-carrying member of the economic elite take from the success of Donald J. Trump, and British voters’ decision to leave the European Union?

Voters in large numbers have been rejecting much of the underlying logic behind a dynamic globalized economy that on paper seems to make the world much richer. For the bankers, trade negotiators, international businesspeople and others who make up the economic elite (including journalists like me who are peripheral members of it), this is cause for introspection, at least among those who aren’t too narcissistic to care what their countrymen think.

Here is an overarching theory of what we might have missed in the march toward a hyper-efficient global economy: Economic efficiency isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Efficiency sounds great in theory. What kind of monster doesn’t want to optimize possibilities, minimize waste and make the most of finite resources? But the economic and policy elite may like efficiency a lot more than normal humans do. [Continue reading…]

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White nationalist group will go to GOP convention to ‘defend’ Trump supporters

McClatchy reports: A group of white nationalists and skinheads who held a rally in Sacramento over the weekend where at least five people were stabbed plans to show up at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next month to “make sure that the Donald Trump supporters are defended.”

The violent clash at the California state Capitol accentuates concerns about the Republican National Convention, with political tensions high and thousands of pro- and anti-Trump protesters expected to descend on Cleveland.

“I think everybody is concerned about the potential for violence at the convention,” said Ryan Lenz, senior writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists and hate groups. [Continue reading…]

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John Feffer: Donald Trump and America B

Circus, carnival, comedy hour, joke: it’s been a festival of insults, charges, racist slams, bizarre proposals, and raging narcissism. I’m talking, of course, about the season of Trump in American politics. When no one gave him a second thought or a chance in hell, he soared and a Trump presidency came into view.  As he reached the heights, like an Icarus flying too close to the media sun, his ultimate creation — himself as a presidential provocateur — began to melt before our eyes.  His campaign manager was axed; his ads went missing; his paid staff remained “skeletal”; his funds were short; his fundraising pathetic; his “unfavorables” headed for the stratosphere (so high that even Hillary Clinton, a candidate with an unfavorable problem of her own, began looking like everybody’s best friend); the key members of his party loathed him and that party’s popularity was, in any case, sinking fast; corporations were pulling out of his future convention en masse, Republican governors heading for the hills, hundreds of convention delegates threatening revolt (while its chairman promised not to rein them in); a mass shooting/terror incident that Trump should have turned into political gold managed to do less than nothing for him; and that, of course, was just the beginning, not the end, of whatever process is now at work.

It was always obvious that the man with the bouffant hairdo was, in his own way, the most fragile of creatures, and that the illusion of a campaign he had so singlehandedly created might dissolve at any moment.

And The Donald has another problem he hasn’t even begun to deal with. In the campaign for the Oval Office, he’s facing off against a woman. If the Republican nomination taught us one thing, it was that a bullying man bullying men might carry the day in America, but a bullying man bullying a woman was a problematic spectacle. Hence, his attempt to turn Carly Fiorina’s face into an insult backfired radically and gave her lagging campaign brief new life. He now has four months to take on “crooked Hillary” and, sexist as it might be, the Trumpian manner and the mannerisms that go with it are unlikely to serve him well in a nomination-style contest with her.

Under the circumstances, were his pumped up self-creation of a campaign to deflate radically, understand one thing that TomDispatch regular and author of the future Dispatch Book Splinterlands makes brilliantly clear today: no one should take what Donald Trump stands for in this election year less seriously because of that. He may not be the ultimate messenger; he may not even be a serious human being or candidate; but those he’s rallied to his side couldn’t be more human, serious, or needy. The messenger might not last; the message is another story entirely. Tom Engelhardt

The most important election of your life
(Is not this year)
By John Feffer

The voters vowed to take their revenge at the polls. They’d missed out on the country’s vaunted prosperity. They were disgusted with the liberal direction of the previous administration. They were anti-abortion and pro-religion. They were suspicious of immigrants, haughty intellectuals, and intrusive international institutions. And they very much wanted to make their nation great again.

They’d lost a lot of elections. But this time, they won.

In Poland, that is.

In two elections last year, the conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) won the Polish presidency and then, by a more convincing margin, a parliamentary majority.

And this wasn’t just a victory for PiS. It was a victory for Poland B.

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In new poll, support for Trump has plunged, giving Clinton a double-digit lead

The Washington Post reports: Support for Donald Trump has plunged as he has alienated fellow Republicans and large majorities of voters overall in the course of a month of self-inflicted controversies, propelling Democrat Hillary Clinton to a double-digit lead nationally in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey finds sweeping unease with the presumptive Republican nominee’s candidacy — from his incendiary rhetoric and values to his handling of both terrorism and his own business — foreshadowing that the November election could be a referendum on Trump more than anything else. [Continue reading…]

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Why Trump makes me scared for my family

Aziz Ansari writes: “Don’t go anywhere near a mosque,” I told my mother. “Do all your prayer at home. O.K.?”

“We’re not going,” she replied.

I am the son of Muslim immigrants. As I sent that text, in the aftermath of the horrible attack in Orlando, Fla., I realized how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful about how she worshiped.

Being Muslim American already carries a decent amount of baggage. In our culture, when people think “Muslim,” the picture in their heads is not usually of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or the kid who left the boy band One Direction. It’s of a scary terrorist character from “Homeland” or some monster from the news.

Today, with the presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and others like him spewing hate speech, prejudice is reaching new levels. It’s visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and pray. It makes me afraid for my family. It also makes no sense. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump hails EU referendum result as he arrives in UK

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump has touched down in Scotland in the middle of the UK’s biggest political crisis for decades to welcome Brexit, hailing the referendum result as a reflection of anger over loss of control to the European Union.

“The UK had taken back control. It is a great thing,” the Republican presidential candidate said.

He landed by helicopter on the front lawn of his Trump Turnberry golf resort shortly after 9am on Friday to find a Britain shell-shocked by the Brexit vote.

Wearing a white baseball cap, Trump strode the couple of hundred yards up the gravel path to the Ayrshire hotel accompanied by his family. He was not scheduled to speak to the press but could not resist responding to shouted questions from the media scrum.

He described the referendum result as a historic vote and predicted many such uprisings around the world. “It will not be the last. There is lots of anger.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump flies to Scotland to tend to business interests while hoping his campaign can ‘reset’

The New York Times reports: His campaign is desperately short of cash. He has struggled to hire staff. Influential Republicans are demanding that he demonstrate he can run a serious general election campaign.

But, for reasons that emphasize just how unusual a candidate he is, Donald J. Trump is leaving the campaign trail on Thursday to travel to Scotland to promote a golf course his company purchased on the country’s southwestern coast.

Normally when presidential contenders travel abroad, they do so to burnish their foreign policy credentials, cramming their schedules with high-level meetings with foreign dignitaries and opining on the pressing international issues of the day.

But, to a large extent, Mr. Trump’s business interests still drive his behavior, and his schedule. He has planned two days in Scotland, with no meetings with government or political leaders scheduled.

And despite the fact that Mr. Trump touches down in Britain the day after its “Brexit” vote on whether to leave the European Union, his itinerary — a helicopter landing at his luxury resort, a ceremonial ribbon cutting and family photo, and a news conference — reads like a public relations junket crossed with a golf vacation.

When asked about the vote in an interview this month with The Hollywood Reporter, Mr. Trump seemed not to be familiar with Britain’s referendum, first answering, “Huh?” and then, “Hmm.” Finally, after the Brexit vote was explained to him, Mr. Trump answered with his trademark decisiveness: “Oh yeah, I think they should leave,” he said, a sentiment he has since repeated. On Wednesday morning, however, Mr. Trump told Fox Business that his opinion on the issue was not significant since he had not followed it closely. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump faces wall of opposition as he returns to Scotland

The Guardian reports: When Susie and John Munro bought their cottage 35 years ago they had a clear view of Girdle Ness lighthouse in Aberdeen 10 miles south and the rugged, towering dunes which became their kids’ playground. All they can see now is an earth wall built by Donald Trump for “the world’s greatest golf course”, to hide their home from sight.

The berm, which reaches four metres-high and sits opposite their front door, entirely blocks out the horizon and the sea. A hefty locked gate blocks the public road they once used to reach the beach. In heavy rain, say the Munros, the road now floods. At times, they say Trump’s security staff sit in 4×4 vehicles watching their movements.

“He has just ruined it for us here. He has just hemmed us in,” Susie Munro said. “He just did what he pleased and the council just turned a blind eye.” And in a reference to his presidential campaign pledge to deal with immigration, she says quietly: “Mr Trump likes his walls.” [Continue reading…]

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