Category Archives: Entities

Trump signs executive orders without understanding their details while aides fumble around the White House in the dark

The New York Times reports: Mr. Priebus has told Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon that the administration needs to rethink its policy and communications operation in the wake of embarrassing revelations that key details of the orders were withheld from agencies, White House staff and Republican congressional leaders like Speaker Paul D. Ryan.

Mr. Priebus has also created a 10-point checklist for the release of any new initiatives that includes signoff from the communications department and the White House staff secretary, Robert Porter, according to several aides familiar with the process.

Mr. Priebus bristles at the perception that he occupies a diminished perch in the West Wing pecking order compared with previous chiefs. But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban. [Emphasis mine]

It is partly because he is seen as having a clear vision on policy. But it is also because others who had been expected to fill major roles have been less confident in asserting their power.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, occupies a central role in the administration and has been present at most major decisions and photo ops, but he is a father of young children who has taken to life in Washington, and, along with his wife, Ivanka Trump, has already been spotted at events around town.

Mr. Bannon has rushed into the vacuum, telling allies that he and Mr. Miller have a brief window in which to push through their vision of Mr. Trump’s economic nationalism. [Continue reading…]

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Sharpie-sniffing Trump discovers he can change White House décor without getting personally billed

The New York Times reports: Trump remains intensely focused on his brand, but the demands of the job mean he spends less time monitoring the news media — although he recently upgraded the flat-screen TV in his private dining room so he can watch the news while eating lunch.

He often has to wait until the end of the workday before grinding through news clips with Mr. Spicer, marking the ones he does not like with a big arrow in black Sharpie — though he almost always makes time to monitor Mr. Spicer’s performance at the daily briefings, summoning him to offer praise or criticism, a West Wing aide said.

Visitors to the Oval Office say Mr. Trump is obsessed with the décor — it is both a totem of a victory that validates him as a serious person and an image-burnishing backdrop — so he has told his staff to schedule as many televised events in the room as possible.

To pass the time between meetings, Mr. Trump gives quick tours to visitors, highlighting little tweaks he has made after initially expecting he would have to pay for them himself. [Continue reading…]

Donald Trump, a man of “fixed habits,” is famous for his preference for Sharpies. Sharpies contain industrial solvents and even if his pen of preference isn’t chosen on the basis of the effects on his brain, decades of toxic exposure could in part account for the glazed expression in Trump’s eyes. “Chronic inhalant abuse may result in serious and sometimes irreversible damage to the user’s heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, and brain. Brain damage may result in personality changes, diminished cognitive functioning, memory impairment, and slurred speech.”

Sharpies aside, Trump is clearly indifferent or ignorant about the elements of behavior that contribute to good health.

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James Baker on how to run a White House that works and why the world is so scared right now

Politico reports: Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: James A. Baker III was the gold standard when it came to running a White House. And so far he’s not overly impressed when it comes to the troubled kickoff of the Trump administration.

In his first extensive comments on America’s controversial new president, the former chief of staff, campaign manager, diplomat and all-around GOP wise man offered a serious and substantive critique of the early days of President Trump’s takeover. His advice: Stop blowing up the U.S. relationship with Mexico, don’t expect them to pay for the wall, don’t act as “Israel’s lawyer,” don’t be an isolationist, support NATO and do a much better job of working with the other power centers of Washington — Congress and the Cabinet — before unveiling disruptive new policies like the temporary refugee ban. “The rollout here was deficient, we have to acknowledge that,” he says.

When we met in his Houston office last week for the launch of The Global Politico, our new weekly podcast on international affairs in the Trump era, Baker held forth for nearly an hour about how things are supposed to work in a West Wing that’s got its game on, the ways in which the brash billionaire in the White House is — and is not — like his old boss Ronald Reagan, and his disappointment in Barack Obama for leaving “the world in much worse shape than it was eight years ago.”

He also weighed in on Russia sanctions, taking a firm line that they should remain in place to remind the Russian President Vladimir Putin that “rolling the tanks” into neighboring countries like Ukraine will not be tolerated, worried that Trump will trade those sanctions away for “nothing” and argued that Israel is risking its future by building more settlements. “We have allies that are just scared to death,” he notes, as a result of Trump’s early rhetoric and unpredictable foreign policy. [Continue reading…]

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The battle over truth is now central to our politics

Charles J. Sykes writes: By now, it ought to be evident that enemies are important to this administration, whether they are foreigners, refugees, international bankers or the press.

But discrediting independent sources of information also has two major advantages for Mr. Trump: It helps insulate him from criticism and it allows him to create his own narratives, metrics and “alternative facts.”

All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.

The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Mr. Kasparov grasps that the real threat is not merely that a large number of Americans have become accustomed to rejecting factual information, or even that they have become habituated to believing hoaxes. The real danger is that, inundated with “alternative facts,” many voters will simply shrug, asking, “What is truth?” — and not wait for an answer.

In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics. [Continue reading…]

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Steve Bannon’s war with Islam

Jalal Baig writes: There seems to be considerable urgency right now to enshrine Donald Trump’s Islamophobia into law. Talk of an immigration ban, a Muslim registry and even internment camps once sounded like the machinations of a spray-tanned salesman looking to indulge the electorate’s need for a good villain narrative. Amid an atmosphere of overwhelming chaos, the early days of Trump’s reign have made clear, however, that Islam is Public Enemy No. 1 and serves as the centerpiece of Steve Bannon’s ethno-nationalist agenda. (Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from certain Muslim-majority nations is currently on hold, thanks to a Friday federal court order. That does nothing to resolve the larger questions.)

Bannon called Trump “a blunt instrument for us” in an interview last summer with Vanity Fair. He added, “I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.” That the former Breitbart executive editor would have an outsized role in a Trump administration should have been evident long ago. In Trump, Bannon found a petulant Twitterphile and a manipulable tool who has minimal interest in policymaking and little insight into his own limitations. As he sought an upheaval to remake an America rife with perceived threats, Trump was, as Lawrence Douglas wrote, “the proper vehicle to carry the fight forward.”

For Bannon, the fight is against Islam. There are echoes of Samuel Huntington’s 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations?” Huntington wrote of a world that had been divided along “fault lines” such as culture, which could spur conflict between Islamic civilization and the West. Bannon speaks of the current war with “jihadist Islamic fascism” in apocalyptic terms and sees it as the latest iteration, as Uri Friedman wrote, “of an existential, centuries old-struggle between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic world.” [Continue reading…]

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Steve Bannon’s faith in global war

Time reports: Sometime in the early 2000s, Bannon was captivated by a book called The Fourth Turning by generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe. The book argues that American history can be described in a four-phase cycle, repeated again and again, in which successive generations have fallen into crisis, embraced institutions, rebelled against those institutions and forgotten the lessons of the past–which invites the next crisis. These cycles of roughly 80 years each took us from the revolution to the Civil War, and then to World War II, which Bannon might point out was taking shape 80 years ago. During the fourth turning of the phase, institutions are destroyed and rebuilt.

In an interview with TIME, author Howe recalled that Bannon contacted him more than a decade ago about making a film based on the book. That eventually led to Generation Zero, released in 2010, in which Bannon cast the 2008 financial crisis as a sign that the turning was upon us. Howe agrees with the analysis, in part. In each cycle, the postcrisis generation, in this case the baby boomers, eventually rises to “become the senior leaders who have no memory of the last crisis, and they are always the ones who push us into the next one,” Howe said.

But Bannon, who once called himself the “patron saint of commoners,” seemed to relish the opportunity to clean out the old order and build a new one in its place, casting the political events of the nation as moments of extreme historical urgency, pivot points for the world. Historian David Kaiser played a featured role in Generation Zero, and he recalls his filmed interview with Bannon as an engrossing and enjoyable experience.

And yet, he told TIME, he was taken aback when Bannon began to argue that the current phase of history foreshadowed a massive new war. “I remember him saying, ‘Well, look, you have the American revolution, and then you have the Civil War, which was bigger than the revolution. And you have the Second World War, which was bigger than the Civil War,'” Kaiser said. “He even wanted me to say that on camera, and I was not willing.”

Howe, too, was struck by what he calls Bannon’s “rather severe outlook on what our nation is going through.” Bannon noted repeatedly on his radio show that “we’re at war” with radical jihadis in places around the world. This is “a global existential war” that likely will become “a major shooting war in the Middle East again.” War with China may also be looming, he has said. This conviction is central to the Breitbart mission, he explained in November 2015: “Our big belief, one of our central organizing principles at the site, is that we’re at war.” [Continue reading…]

The cover of Time magazine brands Bannon as “The Great Manipulator,” and however accurately that might describe him, it is an image that serves Trump’s interests in this regard: it turns Bannon into Trump’s insurance policy by availing the so-called president with the option of firing Bannon rather than admit the failure of his presidency. Indeed, it’s reasonable to assume that Trump will sooner declare the failure of America than ever take responsibility for his own actions.

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Refugees are already vigorously vetted. I know because I vetted them

Natasha Hall writes: I conducted one of my last interviews as an immigration officer with the Department of Homeland Security in Istanbul, with Mahmoud and his 8-year-old son from Aleppo, Syria. The boy had lost his legs in the explosion that killed Mahmoud’s wife, sister and other children. It was supposed to be his first day at school in two years. Instead, they were in my office, reliving the worst experiences of their lives in an attempt to come to the United States. Mahmoud trembled as he spoke about returning to his home from work one day and digging his family members out of the rubble.

I had never been both so sad and so proud that this boy would be able to come to the United States and start school and a new life. Now I imagine them, four years after leaving Syria and three years after registering as refugees, being told to go back. Go back where?

This is what President Trump’s recent executive order has done. The order bans entry for citizens of seven countries for 90 days, suspends all refugee admissions for 120 days, halves the total number of refugees allowed into the United States this year and bars refugees from Syria indefinitely. It demands “a uniform screening standard and procedure,” “questions aimed at identifying fraudulent answers and malicious intent,” “a mechanism to ensure that the applicant is who the applicant claims to be” and “a mechanism to assess whether or not the applicant has the intent to commit criminal or terrorist acts.”

Whoever wrote this order is evidently not aware that these screenings, procedures and questions already exist. [Continue reading…]

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Canada, leading the free world

Nicholas Kristof writes: President Trump’s harsh travel ban reflects a global pattern: All around the world, countries are slamming the doors shut.

One great exception: Canada. It may now be the finest example of the values of the Statue of Liberty.

This isn’t just because Canadian leaders are particularly enlightened, although there’s some of that. It’s mostly because the Canadian people themselves remain astonishingly hospitable, with many groups clamoring for more Syrian refugees.

“Thank you, Canada,” Omar al-Omar, a Syrian who was shot at age 15 as the war started, said to me at a center here where refugees are getting lessons in English and in Canadian habits, such as excruciating politeness. “I’m very happy. I feel welcome.” [Continue reading…]

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China is eager to fill the vacuum in climate change leadership that is being left by the U.S.

Larry Buhl writes: Earlier this month China halted more than 100 coal-fired power projects. Scrapping these projects, with combined installed capacity of more than 100 gigawatts, may have more to do with China’s current overcapacity in coal production than its commitment to mitigating climate change. Nevertheless, Chinese leaders are likely happy that the move is framing their nation as a green energy leader, according to experts in Chinese and environmental policy.

That’s because, they say, the Chinese government is now eager to fill the vacuum in climate change leadership that is being left by the U.S. And, they say, China is poised to eat America’s lunch in the renewable energy sector.

Saying that China is doing nothing on climate change has long been a right wing talking point used to stop U.S. regulations such as carbon taxes. While that may have been true a decade ago, it certainly isn’t true now.

Already, China is both the world’s leading producer of renewable energy technologies and its biggest consumer. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump defends murder

How can the so-called president best be characterized?

Demented?


A slayer of liberty?


Destroyer of global order?


Or as Trump chose to portray himself at the defining moment of his inauguration, with raised fist?

The fist is a multipurpose symbol — a favorite of revolutionary leaders. But Trump’s calls out for comparison with that of another thug who until recently was very adept at grabbing headlines (until he got overshadowed by America’s chief thug): the fist of Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte.

When Hillary Clinton and many other leaders of the political establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, pronounced that Trump was “unfit for office,” many critics of the establishment viewed this charge with cynicism. It was dismissed as an expression of the establishment’s sense of entitlement — a way of saying that Trump could not be allowed to become president simply because he wasn’t an accepted member of the ruling class. It was as though Trump was being damned on the basis of nothing more than his lack of refinement.

What should be clear now, however, is that most of those who spoke out and declared Trump unfit — irrespective of whether those claims came from inside or outside the establishment — really meant what they were saying. This wasn’t just campaign rhetoric.

And yet even now, there are Trump loyalists, sympathizers, and reactionaries of a variety of political complexions who say: give Trump a chance. There are those who downplay the resistance to Trump as shrill.

But I would say this: Anyone at this juncture who remains unwilling to judge Trump as unfit for office is already placing him above the possibility of criticism; they are in effect offering him license to do anything.

When Bill O’Reilly invited Trump to condemn Vladimir Putin by saying, “he’s a killer,” Trump brushed off the charge by effectively saying, so what? — “We’ve got a lot of killers.”


Trump is saying that if Putin helps him kill members of ISIS, he doesn’t care if the Russian president has a habit of killing his own critics, political opponents, journalists, or anyone who threatens his grip on power. And Trump respects Putin not in spite of the measures he’s willing to take to secure his power, but on the contrary because of his success in consolidating his position of domination.

In other words, Trump respects Putin because he respects ruthlessness.

But Trump’s new on the job, he’s still learning, he needs time to polish his rough edges.

Really? Trump at 70 is still maturing? I don’t think so.

On the contrary, after two weeks we have every reason to expect more of the same and much worse.

Already, millions of people have had their lives disrupted, families have been broken apart, and murders have taken place directly or indirectly as a result of Trump moving into the White House.

Those who spent the last six months warning that a Trump presidency would be disastrous, were neither being alarmist nor particularly prescient. They were, on the contrary, simply judging Trump on the basis of the evidence he presents every single day of being a man whose recklessness, belligerence, ignorance, volatility, reactivity, immaturity, incompetence, and fundamental lack of respect for democracy and the rule of law, render him unfit for office.

When the American people speak loudly enough and when the Republicans in Congress conclude that Trump poses an existential threat to their own narrow interests, he will be impeached.

We don’t have to endure this spectacle for a full four years.

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Trump’s belligerence towards Iran plays into the hands of Tehran’s hardliners

Saeed Kamali Dehghan writes: Distorting realities, ignoring nuances and hijacking people’s fears: that’s the recipe for a demagogue who lives not on his own wits but others’ miseries. It is particularly bad when the person or the country being targeted by that demagogue does little to straighten things out, which is exactly what is happening right now with Iran and Donald Trump.

Iranians know too well from their own experience with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, their hardline former president, how dangerous it is to have a politician telling you passionately half of the truth without caring that the other half is often a lie or a distortion of facts.

Trump’s increasingly bellicose approach towards Iran, first by imposing a blanket travel ban, then putting Tehran “on notice” after a ballistic missile test, as well as by reported plans of new sanctions, carries two subtle messages. The first message is that Iranophobia is going to be his adopted weapon to distract attentions at home, appeal strongly to the US’s wealthy Arab allies who are already welcoming him as a moderate president, and please Benjamin Netanyahu. Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, reacting on Twitter to the missile test, is right to point out that Iran only spends a fraction on defence compared to the US’s Arab allies in the region, which are big recipients of US, UK and French arms.

Trump’s second message, albeit one barely admitted by his officials, is that his administration’s problem is not just with the Iranian state, but with its people too. His executive order suspending all entries to the US from seven predominantly Muslim countries affects Iranians to a greater extent than it does nationals from the other six states.

There are more Iranians in the US, and far more Iranian students are likely to be affected by the new measures than those from Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen put together. Last year, there were 12,269 Iranian students studying in the US, according to data by the Institute of International Education, compared to 5,085 from the six other countries. Iranians are struggling to understand why they are being targeted in this way. [Continue reading…]

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The price of arrogance: Steve Bannon and the best and the brightest

On the day after Christmas, Marc Tracy ran into Steve Bannon in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Bannon was reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest which documents the Kennedy administration’s failings leading to the Vietnam War. Tracy writes: If “The Best and the Brightest” is a brief against the East Coast meritocracy, though, its proposed alternative is not pure ideology. It is expertise.

Time and again, in Mr. Halberstam’s telling, lower-level government officials who understood Vietnamese politics, sentiments and even geography assessed reality accurately and offered correct policy recommendations to the major characters — who shunted them aside.

In early 1964, for instance, a State Department study concluded that bombing North Vietnam to reach a favorable political settlement would fail. The finding “reflected the genuine expertise of the government from deep within its bowels,” Mr. Halberstam writes. But the higher-ups favored bombing, and so there was bombing. (Which failed.)

“You’ve got these guys that are so brilliant, but they’re generalists,” said Mr. Logevall. “There’s a distinction to be drawn, he concludes, between this abstract quickness, this verbal facility, and true wisdom, which he says was missing.”

Such a reading prompts thought of the more than 1,000 State Department employees who signed a dissent cable opposing the immigration executive order — an order that, according to reports, was written by Mr. Bannon and the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, neither of whom are counterterrorism experts (or lawyers).

In this light, Mr. Bannon seems less a repudiation than a reincarnation of the tragic protagonists of “The Best and the Brightest.” [Continue reading…]

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Federal judge’s ruling is ‘another stinging rejection of President Trump’s unconstitutional Muslim ban,’ says ACLU

The Washington Post reports: U.S. District Judge James L. Robart on Friday entered a temporary but nationwide stop to the order, saying he concluded the court “must intervene to fulfill its constitutional role in our tripart government.”

The Trump administration said it would go to court as quickly as possible to dissolve Robart’s order, and the president himself issued an extraordinarily personal criticism of Robart.

“The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” Trump said in a Saturday morning tweet.

Robart has been on the bench since 2004, and was nominated by President George W. Bush.

Department of Justice lawyers were preparing to immediately ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to dissolve Robart’s order, but had not filed anything as of Saturday afternoon. It is not clear how quickly those appeals court judges would consider the government’s stay request. And although the 9th Circuit is considered one of the country’s most liberal, its randomly assigned three-judge panels can be unpredictable.

If not successful, the government has the option of asking the Supreme Court to get involved. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is designated to hear emergency requests that arise from the 9th Circuit. But in high-profile cases such as this, such applications are generally considered by the full court.

The issue could reach the high court in days — or weeks.

“This ruling is another stinging rejection of President Trump’s unconstitutional Muslim ban,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “We will keep fighting to permanently dismantle this un-American executive order.” [Continue reading…]

The New York Daily News reports: Before he made headlines for temporarily blocking President Trump’s controversial travel ban, Federal Judge James Robart was quietly assisting refugees and speaking out against injustice from his bench in Seattle.

Robart, who presides in Washington State, was nominated by President George W. Bush to a seat on the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington in 2003 and was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2004.

During Robart’s confirmation hearing, Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, of Utah, praised the judge for his pro bono legal work, noting he’d represented a number of refugees over the course of his decades-long career, according to CNN.

“He has been active in the representation of the disadvantaged through his work with Evergreen Legal Services and the independent representation of Southeast Asian refugees,” Hatch said at the time.

His community service and outreach has additionally extended to members of at-risk communities and special needs children. Robart is the former president and trustee of Seattle Children’s Home, as well as the former co-chair of Second Century Society and Children’s Home Society of Washington State, according to his official bio. [Continue reading…]

CNN reports: Following the judge’s ruling — and before the government’s announcements Saturday morning — the International Air Transportation Association, a worldwide airline industry trade group, cited US Customs and Border Protection in telling its members to follow procedures “as if the executive order never existed.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran carries out new missile tests after Trump imposes sanctions

Bloomberg reports: Iran carried out further missile tests during an annual military exercise, a day after President Donald Trump imposed fresh sanctions on a raft of individuals and companies in response to the country test-firing a ballistic rocket last week.

The country successfully tested a range of land-to-land missiles and radar systems during the drills in a 35,000 square-kilometer stretch of desert in the northern Iranian province of Semnan, the semi-official Tasnim agency reported Saturday, citing Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ aerospace division.

“If the enemy falls out of line, our missiles will pour down on them,” the brigadier general was cited as telling reporters on the sidelines of the military trials, without referring to any particular nations. Any threats made by the U.S. against Iran were “nonsensical,” Tasnim cited him as saying. [Continue reading…]

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New York’s attorney general is emerging as the leader of the Trump resistance

Politico reports: “I like you. You and me, we’re going to be best friends.”

It is early January, and Eric Schneiderman is sitting in his 25th-floor office above Lower Manhattan, doing his best Donald Trump impression, puckering his lips into a duck face, scrunching up his nose and lowering his voice into something that resembles the president’s outer-borough growl.

Schneiderman is recalling his meeting with Trump in 2010. Back then, Schneiderman was running for attorney general of New York, and Trump was still in his pre-birther, reality TV host phase. Trump had donated money to one of Schneiderman’s opponents in the Democratic primary. Schneiderman managed to pull off a come-from-behind victory, and after the race, he went to Trump Tower to ask for a donation for the general election. Trump coughed up $12,500 to the Democrat, and Schneiderman went on to beat his Republican opponent and win.

But Trump and Schneiderman did not become best friends. That meeting was the beginning of a long and increasingly bitter saga between the two. Schneiderman took up the state’s existing case against Trump University — New York wanted the school to drop the “university” from its name, since it was not chartered as an institution of higher learning and lacked a license to offer instruction — and as he pursued it over the next five years, he became the target of a relentless series of personal attacks from the Trump camp. Trump filed an ethics complaint alleging that Schneiderman offered to drop the suit in exchange for donations; he went on television to denounce Schneiderman as a hack and a lightweight, and said he was wasting millions of taxpayer dollars when he should have been going after Wall Street. (Never mind that Schneiderman had already been declared “the man the banks fear most” by the liberal magazine The American Prospect.) “The whole scorched-earth strategy towards those who would challenge him, we got a preview of,” says Schneiderman. [Continue reading…]

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Trust records show Trump is still closely tied to his empire

The New York Times reports: Just days before his inauguration, President-elect Donald J. Trump stood beside his tax lawyer at a Midtown Manhattan news conference as she announced that he planned to place his vast business holdings in a trust, a move she said would allay fears that he might exploit the Oval Office for personal gain.

However, a number of questions were left unanswered — including who would ultimately benefit from the trust — raising concerns about just how meaningful the move was.

Now, records have emerged that show just how closely tied Mr. Trump remains to the empire he built.

While the president says he has walked away from the day-to-day operations of his business, two people close to him are the named trustees and have broad legal authority over his assets: his eldest son, Donald Jr., and Allen H. Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer. Mr. Trump, who will receive reports on any profit, or loss, on his company as a whole, can revoke their authority at any time.

What’s more, the purpose of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust is to hold assets for the “exclusive benefit” of the president. This trust remains under Mr. Trump’s Social Security number, at least as far as federal taxes are concerned.

Since his election, there have been widespread calls for Mr. Trump to sell his assets and put the proceeds in a blind trust. He has resisted those calls, stressing that the president has no legal obligation to do so.

While the trust structure, outlined in documents made public through a Freedom of Information Act request by ProPublica, may give the president the appearance of distance from his business, it drew sharp criticism from experts in government ethics. [Continue reading…]

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Doctor angling for position as White House physician is doubtful about testing Trump for dementia

The New York Times reports on an interview with longtime Trump physician, Dr. Harold N. Bornstein: Dr. Bornstein also addressed questions about Mr. Trump’s recent description of himself as a “germophobe.” Dr. Bornstein said he had never discussed that phenomenon with Mr. Trump, but “we are very careful to keep the examining rooms spotlessly clean, which we do anyway.” He added, “He always stands there and changes the paper on the table himself” after an examination. “Other than that, nothing.”

Dr. Bornstein said that he was sure that Mr. Trump was up to date on an H.I.V. test, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all adults get at least once. He said if he became the White House doctor he doubted that he would include in Mr. Trump’s annual checkup any psychometric tests as a base line for potential dementia. Mr. Trump’s father, Fred, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in his eighties and a number of experts have urged that older political leaders undergo such tests.

Dr. Bornstein also said he had cared for Mr. Trump’s first and third wives, and occasionally for the second. “I am probably the only person in the world who has every phone number for him and all the wives,” Dr. Bornstein said.

About a month ago, Dr. Bornstein said he told Mr. Trump’s secretary, Rhona Graff, “You know, I should be the White House physician.” Past presidents like Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush brought their own doctors to the White House, but others have used a White House physician.

Dr. Bornstein was invited to Mr. Trump’s inaugural, although he said it was not as pleasant an experience as he expected. [Continue reading…]

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