Chris Uhlmann, reporting for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from Hamburg on the G-20 summit:
‘Trump has pressed fast-forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader’
Category Archives: Donald Trump
Trump gave Putin exactly what he wanted
Masha Gessen writes: While American news media offered differing interpretations of the meeting between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, debating whether Mr. Trump had shown resolve or had fallen into a trap set by Mr. Putin, the Russian press disagreed on only one thing: the proper translation of the word “tremendous,” which Mr. Trump used to describe the meeting. Headlines in state-owned media, state-dominated media, and the lone independent Web-based TV channel offered translations that hewed closer to “grand,” “outstanding,” or “amazing.” Those distinctions aside, all agreed: The meeting was a triumph.
Mr. Putin has for years — 17 years, to be exact, for this is how long he has been in power — been clear about what he wanted from his relationship with the United States president: He wants to be treated as an equal partner on the world stage and not to be questioned about or pressed on the Russian government’s actions inside Russia or in what he considers his sphere of influence. Despite the friendly tenor of Mr. Putin’s relationship with George W. Bush and the offer of a “reset” made by Barack Obama’s administration, Mr. Putin never achieved his objective — until now. His fourth American president has given him exactly what he wanted: respect, camaraderie and freedom from criticism.
The one accomplishment of the meeting — a limited cease-fire in Syria — is exactly what Mr. Putin wanted. Not the cease-fire, that is: He wanted an acknowledgment that the United States and Russia are equal negotiating parties in the Syrian conflict. He spent years cajoling and then blackmailing the Obama administration into accepting Russia’s decisive role in the Middle East. Now, Mr. Trump has handed him much more than that. He has demonstrated that Russia and the United States can negotiate Syrian life and death without involving any Syrians. [Continue reading…]
Trump team met with lawyer linked to Kremlin during campaign
The New York Times reports: Two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.
The previously unreported meeting was also attended by Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to interviews and the documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.
While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and Russians, this episode at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, is the first confirmed private meeting between a Russian national and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. It is also the first time that his son Donald J. Trump Jr. is known to have been involved in such a meeting.
Representatives of Donald J. Trump Jr. and Mr. Kushner confirmed the meeting after The Times approached them with information about it. In a statement, Donald Jr. described the meeting as primarily about an adoption program. The statement did not address whether the presidential campaign was discussed. [Continue reading…]
‘Our world has never been so divided,’ says French President Macron at close of G-20 summit at which U.S. isolated itself
The Washington Post reports: President Trump and other world leaders on Saturday emerged from two days of talks unable to resolve key differences on core issues such as climate change and globalization, slapping an exclamation point on a divisive summit that left other nations fearing for the future of global alliances in the Trump era.
The scale of disharmony was remarkable for the annual Group of 20 meeting of world economic powers, a venue better known for sleepy bromides about easy-to-agree-on issues. Even as negotiators made a good-faith effort to bargain toward consensus, European leaders said that a chasm has opened between the United States and the rest of the world.
“Our world has never been so divided,” French President Emmanuel Macron said as the talks broke up. “Centrifugal forces have never been so powerful. Our common goods have never been so threatened.”
The divisions were most bitter on climate change, where 19 leaders formed a unified front against Trump. But even in areas of nominal compromise, such as trade, top European leaders said they have little faith that an agreement forged today could hold tomorrow.
Macron said world leaders found common ground on terrorism but were otherwise split on numerous important topics. He also said there were rising concerns about “authoritarian regimes, and even within the Western world, there are real divisions and uncertainties that didn’t exist just a few short years ago.”
“I will not concede anything in the direction of those who are pushing against multilateralism,” Macron said, without directly referring to Trump. “We need better coordination, more coordination. We need those organizations that were created out of the Second World War. Otherwise, we will be moving back toward narrow-minded nationalism.” [Continue reading…]
G-20 leaders’ statement on climate change highlights rift with U.S.
The Guardian reports: World leaders have made clear the US’s isolated stance on climate change, with 19 of the G20 countries affirming their commitment to the “irreversible” Paris climate agreement.
After lengthy negotiations that stretched well into Saturday, the final joint statement from the meeting in Hamburg notes Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris deal while stating that the world’s other major economies all still support the international effort to slow dangerous global warming.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said on Saturday she “deplored” the US exit from the agreement and added that she did not share the view of Theresa May, the British prime minister, that Washington could decide to rejoin the pact.
“I think it’s very clear that we could not reach consensus, but the differences were not papered over, they were clearly stated,” Merkel told reporters at the end of the two-day meeting. “It’s absolutely clear it is not a common position.”
The communique reads: “We take note of the decision of the United States of America to withdraw from the Paris agreement,” adding: “The leaders of the other G20 members state that the Paris agreement is irreversible” and “we reaffirm our strong commitment to the Paris agreement”. [Continue reading…]
Other world leaders held full press conferences at G-20, but not Trump
The Hill reports: President Trump was one of the only world leaders to leave the G-20 summit without holding a full press conference.
Trump on Saturday departed Hamburg, Germany, for Washington after the close of the three-day summit of the world’s top political leaders.
As first noted by CNN, Trump did not hold a full news conference at the end of the event, while other top world leaders did.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said at his Saturday press conference that he thinks Trump believed his assurances that Russia did not interfere in last year’s U.S. election. [Continue reading…]
When Putin met Trump, he inquired whether the press in attendance were “the ones who insulted you?” Trump responded: “These are the ones, you’re right about that,” to which Putin laughed, signaling perhaps that a strong leader would not tolerate such criticism.
Nothing would appear to satisfy the Russian president more than the opportunity to shake the American president’s hand while also laughing at him.
Trump handed Putin a stunning victory
Molly K McKew writes: President Donald Trump needed to accomplish two things this week during his visits to Poland and the G-20 Summit in Hamburg. First, he needed to reassure America’s allies that he was committed to collective defense and the core set of values and principles that bind us together. Second, he needed to demonstrate that he understands that the greatest threat to that alliance, those values, and our security is the Kremlin.
Trump delivered neither of these. In very concrete terms, through speech and action, the president signaled a willingness to align the United States with Vladimir Putin’s worldview, and took steps to advance this realignment. He endorsed, nearly in its totality, the narrative the Russian leader has worked so meticulously to construct.
The readout of Trump’s lengthy meeting with Putin included several key points. First, the United States will “move on” from election hacking issues with no accountability or consequences for Russia; in fact, the U.S. will form a “framework” with Russia to cooperate on cybersecurity issues, evaluating weaknesses and assessing potential responses jointly. Second, the two presidents agreed not to meddle in “each other’s” domestic affairs—equating American activities to promote democracy with Russian aggression aimed at undermining it, in an incalculable PR victory for the Kremlin. Third, the announced, limited cease-fire in Syria will be a new basis for cooperation between the U.S. and Russia; Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went so far as to say that the Russian approach in Syria—yielding mass civilian casualties, catastrophic displacement, untold destruction and erased borders—may be “more right” than that of the United States.
Each of these points represents a significant victory for Putin. Each of them will weaken U.S. tools for defending its interests and security from the country that defines itself as America’s “primary adversary.” Trump has ceded the battle space—physical, virtual, moral—to the Kremlin. And the president is going to tell us this is a “win.” [Continue reading…]
The white nationalist roots of Donald Trump’s Warsaw speech
Jamelle Bouie writes: “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” said the president, before posing a series of questions: “Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
In the context of terrorism specifically, a deadly threat but not an existential one, this is overheated. But it’s clear Trump has something else in mind: immigration. He’s analogizing Muslim migration to a superpower-directed struggle for ideological conquest. It’s why he mentions “borders,” why he speaks of threats from “the South”—the origin point of Hispanic immigrants to the United States and Muslim refugees to Europe—and why he warns of internal danger.
This isn’t a casual turn. In these lines, you hear the influence of [Steve] Bannon and [Stephen] Miller. The repeated references to Western civilization, defined in cultural and religious terms, recall Bannon’s 2014 presentation to a Vatican conference, in which he praised the “forefathers” of the West for keeping “Islam out of the world.” Likewise, the prosaic warning that unnamed “forces” will sap the West of its will to defend itself recalls Bannon’s frequent references to the Camp of the Saints, an obscure French novel from 1973 that depicts a weak and tolerant Europe unable to defend itself from a flotilla of impoverished Indians depicted as grotesque savages and led by a man who eats human feces.
For as much as parts of Trump’s speech fit comfortably in a larger tradition of presidential rhetoric, these passages are clear allusions to ideas and ideologies with wide currency on the white nationalist right.
Defenders of the Warsaw speech call this reading “hysterical,” denying any ties between Trump’s rhetoric in Poland and white nationalism. But to deny this interpretation of the speech, one has to ignore the substance of Trump’s campaign, the beliefs of his key advisers, and the context of Poland itself and its anti-immigrant, ultranationalist leadership. One has to ignore the ties between Bannon, Miller, and actual white nationalists, and disregard the active circulation of those ideas within the administration. And one has to pretend that there isn’t a larger intellectual heritage that stretches back to the early 20th century, the peak of American nativism, when white supremacist thinkers like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard penned works with language that wouldn’t feel out of place in Trump’s address. [Continue reading…]
Once dominant, the United States finds itself isolated at G-20
Trump was shunted to the far left and placed under Emmanuel Macron’s close supervision.
The New York Times reports: For years the United States was the dominant force and set the agenda at the annual gathering of the leaders of the world’s largest economies.
But on Friday, when President Trump met with 19 other leaders at the Group of 20 conference, he found the United States isolated on everything from trade to climate change, and faced with the prospect of the group’s issuing a statement on Saturday that lays bare how the United States stands alone.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the host of the meeting, opened it by acknowledging the differences between the United States and the rest of the countries. While “compromise can only be found if we accommodate each other’s views,” she said, “we can also say, we differ.”
Ms. Merkel also pointed out that most of the countries supported the Paris accord on climate change, while Mr. Trump has abandoned it. “It will be very interesting to see how we formulate the communiqué tomorrow and make clear that, of course, there are different opinions in this area because the United States of America regrettably” wants to withdraw from the pact, she said.
Mr. Trump seemed to relish his isolation. For him, the critical moment of Friday was his long meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, which seemed to mark the reset in relations that Mr. Trump has been desiring for some time. It also provided Mr. Putin the respect and importance he has long demanded as a global partner to Washington.
Where previous American leaders saw their power as a benevolent force, and were intent on spreading prosperity through open markets and multilateral cooperation, Mr. Trump has portrayed himself as a nationalist, a unilateralist and a protectionist, eager to save American jobs.
What recent events have underscored, though — and especially at the G-20 — is that no nation is today large or powerful enough to impose rules on everyone else. In advancing his views, Mr. Trump has alienated allies and made the United States seem like its own private island. [Continue reading…]
225 years ago Alexander Hamilton anticipated the rise of Trump and the subversion of American democracy
On August 18, 1792, Alexander Hamilton wrote: The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion….
When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.” [Continue reading…]
Trump accepts Putin’s word that Russia didn’t hack the U.S. election, says Lavrov
Lavrov: Trump said he heard Putin's statements that Russia didn't hack election and accepts them.
— Lucian Kim (@Lucian_Kim) July 7, 2017
The Washington Post reports: Eight months after an unprecedented U.S election — one that U.S. intelligence agencies say the Russian government tried to sway — President Trump and President Vladimir Putin sat for their first meeting on Friday, a friendly encounter that ended in confusion over whether Trump accepted assurances that the Kremlin was innocent of any wrongdoing during the campaign.
Trump, believed to be the intended beneficiary of the Russian meddling, emerged from the extraordinary meeting — which dragged so long that Trump’s wife tried once to break it up — with a deal including Russia and Jordan on a partial Syrian ceasefire. The agremeent would mark the first time Washington and Moscow had operated together in Syria to try to reduce the violence.
But there were no grand bargains on U.S. sanctions on Russia, the Ukraine crisis or the other issues that have divided the nations for years.
The meeting, on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit, opened with Trump telling Putin it was an “honor to be with you.” In the closed-door discussion, Trump pressed Putin “on more than one occasion” on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential elections, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who attended the two-hour-and-16-minute meeting, told reporters.
Tillerson said “President Putin denied such involvement” but agreed to organize talks “regarding commitments of noninterference in the affairs of the United States and our democratic process.”
But Tillerson’s counterpart, Russian Foreign Minster Sergei Lavrov, said that Trump had heard out Putin’s assurances that Moscow did not run a hacking and disinformation effort, and dismissed the entire investigation into the Russian role.
“President Trump said that this campaign has taken on a rather strange character, because after many months, whenever these accusations are made, no facts are brought,” Lavrov told Russian reporters. “The U.S. president said that he heard clear statements from President Putin about this being untrue, and that he accepted these statements.”
The two presidents, he said, are “looking for mutually beneficial agreements and not trying to act out some confrontation scenarios, not trying to create problems out of nothing.” [Continue reading…]
The remaking of Donald Trump
Joshua Green writes: Well into its run, The Apprentice was viewed by corporate America as the epitome of the forward-thinking, multicultural programming that all advertisers were increasingly seeking, especially after the election in 2008 of a biracial president. Just as Barack Obama symbolized the country’s uplifting racial progress, advertisers were “also tapping into that same yearning, particularly among younger Americans, to put racial divisions behind us and move forward in a more unified way,” Danny Allen, a top executive at the multicultural-focused ad agency Sensis, declared in 2009. As unlikely as it sounds from the vantage point of today, Trump and The Apprentice, up through the end of the decade, were considered by advertisers and audiences alike to be a triumph of American multiculturalism.
As a celebrity and a pop-culture icon, Trump was riding higher than ever. But privately he was obsessing over politics. Nobody knew it yet, but soon enough they would—because Trump was about to do something that any ordinary Republican with an eye on the White House would consider reckless to the point of insanity: He was about to torch his relationship with minority voters.
Trump had achieved by 2010 what Republican politicians had struggled, without success, to accomplish for the better part of 50 years. He had made himself genuinely popular with a broad segment of blacks and Hispanics. This audience didn’t think of him as a politician, of course. Not yet. But as a starting point in a bid for higher office, Trump was already out on the far horizon of where the Republican Party one day hoped to be.Truth be told, the party was moving in entirely the wrong direction. Ever since 1964, when Barry Goldwater championed “states’ rights”—understood to signify his opposition to the civil rights movement—minority voters had turned their backs on the Republican Party. Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”—stoking white racism for electoral gain—had only cemented this state of affairs. In the 11 presidential elections that followed Goldwater’s thumping loss, no Republican had won more than 15 percent of the black vote. And in the most recent election, in 2008, exit polls showed that John McCain had pulled a meager 4 percent of them. Republicans fared slightly better among the fast-growing population of Hispanic voters, with George W. Bush hitting a high point of 44 percent in 2004. But here, too, the GOP was backsliding: McCain had carried just 31 percent of Hispanics. Republican strategists looking toward the future were already growing nervous because the changing demography of the U.S. made perfectly clear that minorities would steadily increase as a share of the eligible electorate. Republicans needed to win more of them.
Trump was the furthest thing from a racial innocent. In 1989, after five black and Hispanic male teenagers from Harlem were accused of raping a white female jogger in Central Park, he had felt it necessary to spend $85,000 running full-page ads in the New York daily newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty. “Muggers and murderers,” he wrote, “should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” (Even after DNA evidence exonerated the Central Park Five, Trump refused to apologize and held fast to his insistence that they were guilty.) And yet, however improbable, he had managed to win the good favor of millions of minority voters.
What was it, then, that impelled Trump to suddenly start questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship and implying that he wouldn’t produce a birth certificate because he hadn’t really been born in the U.S.? And not just air his suspicion that Obama was born in Kenya but conduct a full-scale media blitzkrieg that took him from Fox News to ABC’s The View to drive home this fantastical narrative?
Trump himself would never say. But knowing now that his presidential ambitions were serious—and not simply a ratings stunt, as we assumed at the time—it seems clear that he was considering challenging Obama in 2012 and had an inkling of the power he could marshal by highlighting the president’s otherness to appeal to anti-Obama voters. The birther charge had been circulating for some time in the darker corners of the internet, on right-wing conspiracy sites, and in email chains. As someone possessing perhaps the best raw political instincts of any Republican in his generation, Trump had intuited, correctly, that a racist attack targeting a black president was the surest way to ingratiate himself with grass-roots Republican voters. [Continue reading…]
Most Americans disagree with Trump admin’s enforcing travel ban against grandparents
Ryan Goodman writes: One of the hotly contested questions in the Travel Ban litigation is the definition of “close family relationships.” The Supreme Court told the administration that it cannot enforce the ban against any foreign national who has a “close familial relationship” with a person in the United States. The plaintiffs including the state of Hawaii have argued that the Supreme Court’s order should be understood to protect grandparents. The Justice Department told the federal court in Hawaii that the plaintiffs’ views of close family relationships “lack any universal or cohesive support.” That is the question the Hawaii federal court refused to decide on Thursday, and tried to kick the issue up to the Supreme Court. So, what to make of the competing views of family structure and where grandparents fit in?
A poll out this week suggests most Americans fundamentally disagree with the administration’s position. The Politico/Morning Consult survey asked the following question and got these results:
“Do you believe each of the following should qualify as a close family relationship for visa applicants from six predominately Muslim countries wishing to enter the United States? Grandparent”
Yes, this should qualify: 67%
No, this should not qualify: 20%That is not only a huge margin in general. It also holds true across different groups of people who were asked the question. More specifically, the margin held strong such that at least 60% of Americans agreed that grandparents should qualify as a “close family relationship” for the purpose of receiving visas from the six predominately Muslim countries regardless of the respondent’s party identification, religion, gender, age, income, education, or region of the country. Even among people who voted for Donald Trump for president, 61% agreed that grandparents should qualify and 29% thought they should not. [Continue reading…]
Trump misrepresents intelligence findings on Russian interference in U.S. election
Video of Trump & Putin meeting—as disgusting as you'd think.
Smiling, hand grab, back pat, barf. #TrumpRussia pic.twitter.com/YKFOisQvdd
— Scott Dworkin (@funder) July 7, 2017
The New York Times reports: President Trump said on Thursday that only “three or four” of the United States’ 17 intelligence agencies had concluded that Russia interfered in the presidential election — a statement that while technically accurate, is misleading and suggests widespread dissent among American intelligence agencies when none has emerged.
The “three or four” agencies referred to by Mr. Trump are the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the F.B.I. and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, all of which determined that Russia interfered in the election. Their work was compiled into a report, and a declassified version was released on Jan. 6 by the director of national intelligence. It said that all four agencies had “high confidence” that Russian spies had tried to interfere in the election on the orders of President Vladimir V. Putin.
The reason the views of only those four intelligence agencies, not all 17, were included in the assessment is simple: They were the ones tracking and analyzing the Russian campaign. The rest were doing other work.
The intelligence community is a sprawling enterprise that includes military officers who track enemy troop movements, accountants who analyze the finances of Islamist militants and engineers who design spy satellites. There are soldiers, sailors and Marines; tens of thousands of civilian government employees and tens of thousands of private contractors.
Asked about Russia’s election meddling during a news conference on Thursday in Poland, Mr. Trump repeated his familiar refrain that “it could” have been Russia or other countries that interfered in the election, and then appeared to suggest that there was hardly an intelligence community consensus on the matter.
“Let me just start off by saying I heard it was 17 agencies,” he said when asked about the intelligence assessment.
“I said, ‘Boy, that’s a lot.’ Do we even have that many intelligence agencies, right? Let’s check it. And we did some very heavy research,” Mr. Trump continued. “It turned out to be three or four — it wasn’t 17 — and many of your compatriots had to change their reporting, and they had to apologize, and they had to correct.”
Mr. Trump was also correct about inaccurate news reports. Some, including an article in The New York Times, incorrectly reported that all 17 American intelligence agencies had endorsed the assessment.
But there is no evidence that significant uncertainty or dissent exists across the intelligence community, simply because not all 17 were involved in the assessment of Russian interference. [Continue reading…]
Trump’s plan to team up with Putin in Syria — and leave Assad in power
The Daily Beast reports: For once, Rex Tillerson is not freelancing.
Late Wednesday, ahead of the first-ever meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the secretary of state suggested that the U.S. is willing to explore “joint mechanisms” with Russia to stabilize the vicious Syrian civil war.
After a dizzying series of policy shifts on Syria, administration and congressional sources tell The Daily Beast that Team Trump is introducing the beginnings of a new strategy for Syria—one that, in the short term at least:
• leaves dictator Bashar al-Assad in power;
• acquiesces to the idea of “safe zones” proposed by Russia and its allies;
• leans on cooperation from Moscow, including the use of Russian troops to patrol parts of the country.
It’s the sort of plan that observers have long suspected would ultimately emerge as Trump’s approach—despite his pledge that Assad has “no role” in governing the Syrian people. Top Trump aides from Jared Kushner to former national security adviser Michael Flynn have pushed for closer coordination with Russia on Syria for months. [Continue reading…]
Trump’s warning about ‘Western civilization’ evokes holy war
Walter Shapiro writes: A surprising omission in Donald Trump’s Warsaw foreign policy address was the president’s failure to hail the 17th century Polish king, John III Sobieski. As Steve Bannon and his fellow hard-right history buffs in the White House must know, it was Sobieski who defeated the Turks in 1683 at the gates of Vienna – and saved Central Europe from a Muslim invasion.
The Trump-Bannon worldview depicts Europe and America reeling from a second Muslim invasion. That is what Trump meant as he thundered, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive … Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
The Trump advance team is probably high-fiving each other over their collective brilliance in choosing Warsaw as the venue for the president’s apocalyptic message to Europe. The combination of a welcoming right-wing government that shares Trump’s disdain for a free press and the emotional weight of Polish history seemed irresistible. [Continue reading…]
The racial and religious paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw speech
Peter Beinart writes: In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to “the West” and five times to “our civilization.” His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means. It’s important that other Americans do, too.
The West is not a geographic term. Poland is further east than Morocco. France is further east than Haiti. Australia is further east than Egypt. Yet Poland, France, and Australia are all considered part of “The West.” Morocco, Haiti, and Egypt are not.
The West is not an ideological or economic term either. India is the world’s largest democracy. Japan is among its most economically advanced nations. No one considers them part of the West.
The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white. Where there is ambiguity about a country’s “Westernness,” it’s because there is ambiguity about, or tension between, these two characteristics. Is Latin America Western? Maybe. Most of its people are Christian, but by U.S. standards, they’re not clearly white. Are Albania and Bosnia Western? Maybe. By American standards, their people are white. But they are also mostly Muslim.
Steve Bannon, who along with Stephen Miller has shaped much of Trump’s civilizational thinking, has been explicit about this. In a 2014 speech, he celebrated “the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam” and “our forefathers” who “bequeathed to use the great institution that is the church of the West.” [Continue reading…]
U.S. government ethics chief resigns, with parting shot at Trump
The Guardian reports: The top ethics watchdog in the federal government announced his resignation on Thursday, taking a parting shot at Donald Trump as he did so.
Walter Shaub, head of the independent Office of Government Ethics (OGE), said in his resignation letter to Trump that he would step down in mid-July, six months before the end of his term, in order to take a job at the Campaign Legal Center, a not-for-profit good-government group.
Leading the OGE had been “the great privilege and honor of my career”, he wrote.
In a separate statement from the center, Shaub said: “In working with the current administration, it has become clear to me that we need improvements to the existing ethics program. I look forward to working toward that aim at Campaign Legal Center, as well as working on ethics reforms at all levels of government.”
Shaub is a longtime federal bureaucrat who was appointed to the OGE by Barack Obama in 2013 and confirmed by a voice vote in the US Senate.
Since Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, Shaub has strongly criticized the president over his failure to divest from his business holdings, saying he was “extremely troubled” that Trump simply turned over his investments to his two oldest sons.
Shaub also clashed with the White House over whether lobbyists working in the Trump administration should have to disclose ethics waivers, and over aide Kellyanne Conway’s controversial suggestion that Americans should buy products sold by Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter.
In his resignation letter, he also took one more opportunity to goad Trump on his approach to government ethics policies, putting in italics “public service is a public trust” – the first of 14 principles of public service promulgated by George HW Bush in a 1989 executive order.
OGE staff, he wrote, were “committed to protecting the principle that public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the constitution, the laws, and ethical principles above private gains”. [Continue reading…]