Trump decides to let Trump be Trump

 Trump decides to let Trump be Trump 

 

Trump be Trump

When Donald Trump was elected president, there was modest comfort in knowing the executive branch is made up of some 4,000 presidential appointees, 1,200 of whom must be confirmed by the Senate and 630 of whom fill top-tier agency positions. The hope was that Trump would get himself some honest, competent help.

With some exceptions, that has not proved to be the case. Hundreds of jobs went unfilled for a year or more, including 240 top-three agency officials. Regulatory jobs went to alumni of regulated industries. Key West Wing jobs turned over as the White House turned into a human resources merry-go-round.

Now Trump is into a new phase of personnel changes, purging people who have said “no” to him once too often or people who have embarrassed him with bad headlines about ethical problems. The irony of that speaks for itself.

White House sources have told the New York Times and the Washington Post that the president has decided that after 14 months in office, he can get by on his trusted gut. He makes decisions, he once said, “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

So last week he replaced his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, with former CNBC talking head Larry Kudlow. Cohn told Trump “no” too many times on trade issues. Kudlow is a true believer in trickle-down economics, which on TV gave him an almost unblemished record of being wrong on big economic stories. But he was on TV, which is a key credential for Trump.

Trump last week also replaced Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who told him “no” a lot, with CIA director Mike Pompeo, the former congressman from Koch Industries in Wichita, Kan.

To replace Pompeo at the CIA, Trump’s gut led him to agency veteran Gina Haspel, who played a big role in the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” of terrorist detainees. Trump’s gut has told him “waterboarding works,” though studies say otherwise.

Next on the hit list could be Housing Secretary Ben Carson, not because of his deep lack of understanding of housing issues but because his wife’s insistence on $31,000 worth of office furniture caused embarrassing headlines. The same kind of headlines could cost high-flying Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin his job.

After that could come a third national security adviser. Trump has had it with the intellect and restraint of Gen. H.R. McMaster, who replaced Gen. Michael Flynn, who was caught lying about what he told the Russian ambassador.

Even with competent people around him, however briefly, Trump’s first 14 months have been chaotic. Now he’s staffing up with sycophants. Trump Unleashed is a profoundly disturbing thought.

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Samuel L. Jackson mocks Trump’s proposal to arm teachers

Samuel L. Jackson took to Twitter to criticize President Trump after he made repeated pushes for arming trained teachers as a way to address school shootings.

“Can someone that’s been in a Gunfight tell that Muthaf---- that’s Never been in a Gunfight, the flaws of his Arm The Teachers plan??!!” Jackson tweeted on Friday.

Trump tweeted on Thursday that highly trained teachers would serve as a deterrent to school shootings in the wake of the deadly attack at a Florida high school last week.

The president called for 20 percent of teachers — with military or special training experience — to be allowed to carry concealed guns.

Student survivors of the Florida school shooting that left 17 people dead have led reignited calls for action on gun violence.

On Wednesday, Trump held a listening session at the White House with students and parents affected by school shootings to discuss solutions for the national epidemic.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, Trump doubled down on his proposal to arm teachers who have had firearms training. 

“The teachers and the coaches and other people in the building, the dean, the assistant principal, the principal, they love their people, they want to protect these kids,” Trump said.

Trump added of the suspected gunman: “A teacher would have shot the hell out of him."

Jackson and Trump have sparred before. In 2016, Jackson said Trump cheats at golf and that he received a surprise bill from Trump for being a member of one of his courses.

News from: thehill

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Trump_processes Fla. students’ grief as president, parent

Once again, it was the images of children that propelled President Donald Trump to act.

Trump spent the first days after the Feb. 14 school shooting in Florida fixated on the grieving and anguished students and parents.

While at his Florida estate for the long weekend after the shooting, Trump studied the students’ appeals on cable news, listened to their accounts during a visit to a hospital and processed their words not just as a president but as the father of an 11-year-old.

The shooting made “no sense,” Trump has told aides privately, and said the White House had to do something.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to share private conversations, likened the president’s reaction to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students to the impact Trump felt when he saw images of children’s listless bodies after a chemical attack in Syria last April. Trump ordered airstrikes against the Syrian government.

After the shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people, Trump cast widely for answers. He even embraced some ideas at odds with his allies at the National Rifle Association.

One idea took root during a dinner last weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort, where the president had put off playing golf for two days on the advice of aides who said golfing so soon after the shooting would be insensitive.

Television personality Geraldo Rivera, who dined with the president and his two oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, arrived with a pitch: ban people under age 21 from buying assault-type weapons.

Trump took the idea “under advisement,” Rivera, a Fox contributor, wrote in an email. And as days passed by, consideration turned into full-blown support.

“The savagery of the wounds inflicted by the AR-15 shocked and distressed him,” Rivera said.

Before the weekend was over, Trump was weighing ideas from imposing new gun controls to arming school officials. He tapped into the thinking of family, aides and outside allies. As the days went on, his list kept growing.

Trump has offered support for strengthening federal background checks, banning “bump stock” type devices like the ones used in the Las Vegas massacre, reopening mental institutions, and having some trained school personnel carry concealed weapons.

That last notion was promoted by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on “Fox and Friends,” a program frequently watched by the president.

Whether Trump’s search ultimately yields significant results is an open question.

Much like the Trump presidency, this search for solutions has been an unscripted process playing out on live television and on Twitter.

“There’s a tremendous feeling that we want to get something done,” Trump said Thursday during a discussion with state and local officials. “And we’re leading that feeling, I hope.”

Throughout his meetings, Trump kept coming back to the students.

A week after the Valentine Day’s attack, he hosted an extraordinary and cathartic session with surviving students and grieving parents in the White House’s State Dining Room. The unscripted event unfolded as a televised national mourning session.

Heading into the event, aides were nervous about it would go.

Trump, never a natural at emotional language, grasped for the right words.

“I know you’ve been through a lot. Most of you have been through a lot — more than you ever thought possible,” he said. “More than you ever thought humanly possible. And all I can say is that we’re fighting hard for you, and we will not stop. We will not stop. We’re going to get there. And I just grieve for you.”

He clutched in his hands a notecard listing numbered questions and talking points for the conversation.

The last one: “I hear you.”

Perhaps the powerful moment came when father Andrew Pollack stood, flanked by his sons, and offered an anguished appeal to Trump to fix this problem now — albeit too late to help his own daughter, Meadow.

“King David Cemetery, that is where I go to see my kid now,” Pollack said.

The moment stuck with Trump.

On Friday, he spoke of Meadow’s “beautiful, beautiful smile and a beautiful life so full of promise.”

“There are not enough tears in the world to express our sadness and anguish for her family and for every family that has lost a precious loved one,” he said.

The White House has yet to offer a complete plan to address school violence. But by week’s end, Trump felt like the discussion itself was evidence of progress.

“We’re well on the way to solving that horrible problem,” he said.

News Credit To : wfla

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House Speaker Ryan of Republican is not ready to support Trump

Ryan, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, said conservatives wanted to know if Trump shares their values.

The top elected Republican, Paul Ryan, said on Thursday he was not ready to endorse Donald Trump, a sign of the challenges the party's presumptive presidential nominee faces rallying the Republican establishment behind his White House bid.
Trump, who has built a huge following with an anti-establishment message, shot back at Ryan in a statement.
"I hope to support our nominee, I hope to support his candidacy fully," Ryan said on CNN. "At this point, I'm just not there right now."
"I am not ready to support Speaker Ryan's agenda. Perhaps in the future we can work together and come to an agreement about what is best for the American people," he said.
"We respect Speaker Ryan’s opinion and believe that since the primary ended early we will have time to unify. We anticipate the two meeting soon to begin to help unite the party," said RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Walters.
The Republican National Committee, under pressure to unify the party or face an electoral rout in the Nov. 8 election, said Ryan and Trump were expected to meet soon. It added that "only a united Republican Party will be able to beat Hillary Clinton."
Many Republicans have grappled this week with whether to support Trump, who has deviated from the party line on trade and upset the party establishment with offensive comments about women and immigrants. Trump on Thursday announced a new campaign finance chairman in response to questions about his readiness for a general election race.
Trump's last remaining rivals in the Republican race, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich, dropped out this week, clearing the New York billionaire's path to be picked as the presidential nominee. His will likely face Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, in the Nov. 8 general election.

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Breaking News of The Day: Clinton looks to bounce back with Kentucky win

Hillary Clinton hopes to avoid another round of primary defeats that, while doing little to diminish her delegate lead over Bernie Sanders, magnify her difficulty in unifying the Democratic Party.
Primaries in Oregon and Kentucky, which vote on Tuesday, could extend her losses after the Vermont senator carried Indiana and West Virginia earlier this month.

While Sanders is expected to win in Oregon, the Clinton campaign sees an opportunity in Kentucky, a state she carried easily in her primary campaign eight years ago.
Throughout the campaign, Clinton has struggled with working-class, white voters, however, particularly in communities hit hard by manufacturing job losses in the Rust Belt. It’s a group that's also boosting Republican Donald Trump’s candidacy.

Over the weekend, Clinton made several stops in Kentucky, including drop-ins at churches, and she continued her busy schedule on Monday. Despite an earlier decision to shift resources to general election swing states, the campaign is running television ads in the Bluegrass State.
On Monday, Clinton dropped by a smoke-filled diner in Paducah. “I want to help bring back the kind of economy that worked for everybody in the 1990s,” she told the audience, which included at least one Trump supporter.

Entering Tuesday's contests, Clinton leads Sanders by nearly 300 pledged delegates. When super delegates — elected officials and party leaders free to support either candidate — are factored in, her lead is much larger and brings her to within 150 delegates away of the 2,383 needed to clinch the Democratic nomination, according to the Associated Press. In the final round of state primaries next month, Clinton holds a 10-point lead in California, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, where 475 pledged delegates will be at stake.

Yet Sanders has repeatedly said he’ll fight all the way to the Philadelphia convention in July. And he’s showing he’ll battle for every last delegate, jetting on Monday to Puerto Rico, which holds a caucus on June 5.
Appalachian states, including West Virginia and Kentucky, had been loyal to Clinton, who won there by big margins over then-senator Barack Obama in 2008. Her husband also carried them in his 1992 and 1996 campaigns, and she’s been placing increased emphasis on his role in a possible Hillary Clinton administration, betting that he remains a popular figure in the region.

“I’ve already told my husband that, if I’m so fortunate to be president and he will be the first gentleman, I’ll expect him to go to work,” she told the Kentucky diners Monday.
On Sunday, she said the former president would be “in charge of economic revitalization,” particularly in hard-hit areas like Appalachian coal country. She’s also touting her plan for coal miners, including investments to create new jobs in infrastructure and repurposing mines and protecting miners’ health insurance and retirement programs.

While the outcome of the Kentucky primary won’t matter much in the overall delegate battle between Clinton and Sanders (Democrats award delegates proportionally), it could highlight the challenges ahead for Clinton in a potential match up with Trump. In exit polls of West Virginia, a third of those who voted in the Democratic contest said they planned to back Trump in November.
Part of Clinton's challenge may stem from comments she made at a town hall meeting in Ohio, when the Democratic front-runner said she would "put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." She would later apologize.

Meantime, Clinton now rarely mentions Sanders in her stump speeches, making clear that her chief target is Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, whom she’s portraying as a “loose cannon.” Separately, the main super PAC supporting her, Priorities USA, is planning to begin $6 million in anti-Trump ads starting on Wednesday.

Other high-profile Democrats have also stepped in to do battle with Trump.
After a commencement address on Saturday at Bridgewater State University, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren called Trump “a truly dangerous man.” Warren has also engaged in heated Twitter exchanges with Trump. On Sunday, President Obama, who’s largely stayed on the sidelines until a nominee is official, waded into the race during a commencement speech at Rutgers University.

“In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue,” he said, in an apparent reference to Trump. “That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you are talking about.’”

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Top News Stories of the day: Two bombings in Baghdad kill 44, say police, medical sources

A spokesman for Baghdad Operations Command told state television the attacker in al-Shaab, a predominately Shi'ite Muslim area, had set off an explosives-filled vest in coordination with a planted bomb. Initial investigations revealed the attacker had been a woman, he said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks. Islamic State h

as claimed bombings in and around the capital last week that killed 100 people and sparked popular anger against the government for failing to ensure security.

Two bombings hit Baghdad on Tuesday, killing at least 44 people and wounding more than 90, police and medical sources said, following the bloodiest week of attacks inside the capital so far this year.
A suicide bombing in a marketplace in the northern district of al-Shaab killed 38 people and wounded more than 70, while a car bomb in the southern neighborhood of al-Rasheed left six dead and another 21 wounded, the sources said.

Security has improved somewhat in the capital in recent years, even as Islamic State fighters seized swathes of the country almost to the outskirts of Baghdad's ramparts.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said a political crisis sparked by his attempt to reshuffle the cabinet in an anti-corruption bid was hampering the fight against Islamic State and creating space for more insurgent attacks on the civilian population.

But the prospect that the capital could return to the days when suicide bombings killed scores of people every week adds to pressure on Abadi to resolve the political crisis.

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Breaking News: Transgender bathroom rule a matter of dignity, Obama says

It was his first public comment on the issue since the Department of Education announced the new guidelines last Friday.

"Anybody who has been in school, in high school, who has been a parent should realize that kids who are sometimes in the minority — kids who have a different sexual orientation or are transgender — are subject to a lot of bullying, potentially," Obama told the web site Buzzfeed Monday.

New federal rules on school bathrooms are designed to protect transgender students from bullying, President Obama said Monday.

The federal guidance came the same week that the Department of Justice and North Carolina exchanged lawsuits over that state's new bathroom law. It requires people to use the public restrooms that correspond to the sex observed on their birth certificate.

"They are vulnerable, and I think it’s part of our obligation as a society to make sure everybody is treated fairly, and our kids are all loved and protected, and that their dignity is affirmed," he said.

 But the White House has also acknowledged that Obama was regularly consulted on the guidelines, and they reflect his own values. "I think it is fair to say — and I think it's important — that this kind of announcement reflects the President’s strongly held view about the need to prevent discrimination, but also the need to protect the safety and dignity of every student in America," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said last week.

The new guidelines require schools to allow transgender students to use the restroom and locker rooms that correspond to their chosen gender. And by invoking the sex discrimination law known as Title IX, the rules carry with them the threat of federal enforcement — including a loss of federal education funds. A number of state-level Republican officials have called the move federal overreach that violates the right of each state to determine education policy.

" We said it is our view that you should treat these kids with dignity," Obama said. "Ultimately, depending on how these other lawsuits go, courts will affirm or reject how we see the issue."
Obama said that guidance came from the Department of Education in response to questions from schools about how to handle the bathroom accommodations, and was an effort to advise school districts on "best practices" on a range of transgender issues.

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