Tag Archives: Donald Trump

medical news, national news

Yep, Trump isn’t your ‘normal’ president

Donald J. Trump more or less vowed to be an unconventional president while he campaigned for the office. Man, he’s made good on that one, eh?

Consider what he said after the failure of the Republican caucus in the Senate to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

“I won’t own” the failure, he said. He wants to let the ACA fail and then he’ll swoop in to clean up the mess — assuming, of course, that it even happens.

How disgraceful.

President Truman famously had that sign on his Oval Office desk: “The Buck Stops Here.” President Kennedy told us after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 that “victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan”; he took the hickey for the invasion’s failure. President Reagan admitted to making a mistake during the Iran-Contra controversy, that he didn’t believe “in my heart” that he was trading arms to a hostile nation; he “owned” it eventually.

The current president? He’s not standing by the stumble-bum effort in Congress to enact this legislation. Republicans had seven years to come up with an alternative to the ACA, which they despise largely — or so it seems — because it has Barack H. Obama’s name on it. They call it “Obamacare” as a term of derision.

They blew it. As head of the Republican Party, so did the president. He owns this mistake, whether he cares to admit it or not.

Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Reagan all knew how to stand behind their failures. They all understood that the terms of the office they required them to do so.

Aw, but what the hell. They were just your normal run-of-the-mill politicians who played by the rules. The current president doesn’t operate under the same precept of full accountability.

environmental news

Gore was ‘wrong’ about Trump

Albert Gore Jr. must possess a bottomless wellspring of hope in his soul.

The former vice president told Stephen Colbert this week that he had hoped Donald J. Trump would change his mind regarding his decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate change accord.

He has given up. The former VP says on Colbert’s late-night talk show that Trump is beyond redemption regarding climate change, which has been Gore’s signature issue since leaving the vice presidency in January 2001.

According to The Hill: “I went to Trump Tower after the election,” said Gore, who was on the show to promote his new movie, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.”

“I thought that there was a chance he would come to his senses. But I was wrong.”

The former vice president perhaps can take some solace in the belief — at least I believe it — that Trump doesn’t understand climate change or that he doesn’t grasp the theories floated by scientists around the world that human activity is a major cause of the planet’s changing climate.

Science means nothing to the reality TV celebrity-turned-president of the United States.

It doesn’t make Al Gore feel any better, to be sure. Perhaps his wellspring of hope is diminished somewhat as it regards the president of the United States.

International news, legal news, national news, political news

Obstruction of justice, anyone? Anyone?

James Comey believes that Donald J. Trump has obstructed justice.

That is the conclusion of a legal analyst who’s been following “the Russia thing” as closely as anyone in the United States of America.

Comey is the former FBI director whom the president fired because, according to Jeffrey Toobin, Comey declined to pledge complete loyalty to the president. Comey’s agency was conducting an investigation into whether Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russian government officials who are believed to have hacked into our nation’s electoral process.

Toobin’s article appeared in The New Yorker. He lays out what Comey would tell the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Here’s The New Yorker article.

I encourage you to read it.

So many questions to be asked. So many answers yet to be found.

Something tells me the roughest part of the ride awaits the president and his embattled team.

International news

Undisclosed meeting? What are we supposed to think?

Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin had another meeting recently that no one knew about … until now.

Hmmm. And the president continues to keep secrets that need not be kept? Is that what’s going on here?

The two presidents met for more than two hours in Hamburg, Germany the other day. Trump “pressed” the Russian president on whether his government interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Putin reportedly denied any such involvement. Of course he would deny it.

Then the men shook hands and went their separate ways. Then Trump decided to meet privately with Putin for more than an hour. The only other person in the room was Putin’s translator.

What did they talk about? What do the heads of state of two of the world’s most powerful nations say to each other? Did any of it — anything at all — have something to do with that “Russia thing,” the hacking into our electoral process?

They call this kind of thing “rolling disclosure.” It lends itself to whispering, conjecture, speculation. They only way for any of that to be dispelled is for the principals to tell the public in a forthright manner what they discussed and the context that they discussed it.

According to The Washington Post: “But Trump’s newly-disclosed conversation with Putin at the G20 dinner is likely to stoke further criticism, including perhaps from some fellow Republicans in Congress, that he is too cozy with the leader of a major U.S. adversary.”

Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry sought to brush the questions aside, suggesting that “other media” are casting this secret meeting in a negative light. There could be an explanation, Henry said.

Sure thing, hoss. Then we need to know precisely what these two world leaders said to each other. Absent that, what is the world expected to think?

 

national news

‘Let Obamacare fail,’ says POTUS; yeah, that shows ‘heart’

Donald J. Trump wanted the U.S. Senate Republican caucus to approve a health care plan with “heart.”

He didn’t get it. The Senate GOP plan cratered this week under the weight of the divisions within the caucus. The House of Representatives’ GOP plan was too “mean,” the president said.

So what does the president propose to do now? He wants to let the Affordable Care Act — Barack H. Obama’s signature domestic initiative — to “fail.”

There you go. Let the ACA fail — actually hoping it does — and then act. Meanwhile, millions of Americans who have obtained health insurance under the ACA’s auspices are left without health insurance.

That is such a heartfelt response, Mr. President.

The ACA isn’t doomed to fail, though, according to studies released by health insurance and medical agencies. It’s actually stabilizing, reports indicate.

Trump’s response to his own legislative failure — and make no mistake, the president owns this one bigly — is yet another example of this guy’s inability or unwillingness to take responsibility for any failure.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has talked openly about possibly working with Democrats to repair the ACA. If he can get the president focused long enough on the details of what is at stake, perhaps he can bring Donald Trump along, too.

Stranger things have happened, although this whole circus is beginning to rank among the strangest events in a good while.

legal news, national news, political news

No dirt on Hillary? Really!

Let me try to keep this straight.

Donald J. Trump Jr. accepts an invitation to meet with a Russian government operative who tells him she’s got some dirt on Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States.

Don Jr. goes to the meeting along with his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, then the campaign chairman for Don’s dad, Donald J. Trump Sr., the Republican presidential nominee.

He meets with the lawyer/government operative. What does Don Jr. get out of it? He says nothing came of it. There was no dirt of any use to the Trump campaign.

In other words, Hillary was clean.

The story, of course, isn’t entirely that the Russians didn’t have the goods on Clinton; it is that Trump the Younger thought they did and that he “loved it.” He didn’t call the FBI to rat out the Russian government. Indeed, the only grownup from the Trump team — Manafort — didn’t bother to blow the whistle, either. Oh, no. Don Jr. was accepting “normal” opposition research — from a hostile government that was hacking into our electoral process, undermining our democratic system.

As for the Hillary story, the Russians came up with as much actionable dirt on the Democratic nominee as congressional Republican investigators were able to find over the course of several years. That would be, um, nothing, man!

What a coincidence!

political news, State news

‘Lyin’ Ted’ makes a comeback

Flash back for a moment to the 2016 Republican Party primary campaign for president of the United States.

One of the candidates was tossing out insulting nicknames: Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary … oh, and Lyin’ Ted.

All of those insults were disgraceful displays of petulance from the man who tossed them, Donald John Trump.

But now it seems that “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz is showing that he might have earned that moniker. He said that “No one in Texas cares about the Russia” story. Really, Sen. Cruz? No one in Texas? He says he has attended numerous town hall meetings and no one brings up the questions about the president’s relationship with the Russian government, or whether that government sought to tilt the 2016 election in his favor.

Excuse me, Sen. Cruz, while I say it out loud and for the record: That is a lie.

Social media erupted with comments from Texans who do care about the Russian investigation and what it might produce.

According to the Austin American-Statesman: “Washington is obsessed right now. It is the Democratic talking point du jour,” Cruz told reporters on Capitol Hill … “But when I go back to Texas, nobody asks about Russia. You know, I’ve held town halls all across the state of Texas, you know how many questions I’ve got on Russia? Zero.”

Read more from the American-Statesman here.

My trick knee is throbbing once again and it is telling me that Cruz has, indeed, received questions about Russia. I also am going to toss out the notion that this issue is far more than just a Washington, D.C., parlor game.

So, with that, allow me only to say, with extreme vigor and conviction: Stop your lyin’, Ted.

national news

These six months have dragged on and on … and on

I have to agree with Frank Bruni, the esteemed New York Times columnist.

Bruni posits that the first six months of Donald J. Trump’s time as president have seemed like the longest six months of his life.

Mine, too.

Here is Bruni’s Times column.

Bruni seems to suggest that it’s the lying that has done him in just six months into Donald Trump’s time as president. As Bruni writes: “I was just 9 when Richard Nixon resigned and a teenager during the Jimmy Carter years. I began paying close attention only with Ronald Reagan. He and every one of his successors bent the truth, to varying degrees. He and every successor had a vanity that sometimes ran contrary to the public good. But none came close to Trump in those regards.”

It won’t change. Bruni knows — as many of us do — that 71-year-old men don’t change their ways just because they assume a new job in an arena with which they have zero familiarity.

Trump appears set now, six months in, to govern precisely the way he ran for the office of president. It will be chaotic, disorganized, confusing.

And it will seemingly last many lifetimes longer than its actual length … however long it will be.

International news, national news, political news

Bush ethics lawyer: Why not give Putin clearance, too?

Richard Painter teaches law at the University of Minnesota.

He once served as ethics adviser to President George W. Bush, so his Republican credentials are well-known. However, he’s demonstrating that ethical conduct ought to ignore partisan consideration.

Professor Painter is furious, fuming, outraged over what he believes is a lack of ethical decorum permeating Donald J. Trump’s administration. Exhibit A: the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Painter believes Kushner should surrender his top-secret White House security clearance because of his numerous contacts with Russian government officials who might have been involved in that Russian hacking and their efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.

Painter said via Twitter that Kushner’s clearance needs to be revoked, but if the government is going to allow the young man to keep it, then it should just give one to Russian President Vladimir Putin, too.

Check out The Hill report.

Painter has been making the rounds for several months commenting on Donald J. Trump. He isn’t a fan. Perhaps he owes his antagonism to the president’s vocal criticism of President Bush’s handling of the Iraq War. It might have something to do with the insults that Trump hurled at the former president’s brother, Jeb, during the 2016 GOP presidential primary campaign.

Whatever. Professor Painter isn’t holding back.

I cannot blame him for demanding that Donald Trump seek to develop some understanding that “government ethics” need not be an oxymoron.

national news, political news, religious news

Evangelicals’ support of Trump: as perplexing as ever

An article that was published slightly more than a year ago remains relevant today.

It comes from Esquire magazine. The noted documentary filmmaker Ken Burns asks: What is it about Donald Trump that reminds evangelical voters of Jesus Christ?

Burns was troubled a year ago over why evangelical Christian voters glommed onto Trump’s candidacy. I remain puzzled in the extreme as to why they remain loyal to this guy a year later, and six months into his presidency.

Burns said, for example: “The Republican Party has been extraordinarily successful at getting many groups of people to vote against their self-interest. Evangelicals are voting for Donald Trump. What part of Donald Trump reminds you of Jesus Christ? Trump lusts after his own daughter on national radio, talks about women’s bodies and breasts in such a disparaging way, and mocks them. How is this in any way Christian? When you make the ‘other’ the enemy, how is that Christian?”

Check out the Esquire link.

Burns noted a year ago that Trump once lusted after his own daughter, Ivanka. He carried on highly publicized extramarital affairs on his first two wives. Of course, we have that infamous “Access Hollywood” video in which Trump is overheard boasting about how he grabbed women by their genitals.

He routinely denigrates women and there is zero evidence anywhere in his professional or personal history of any commitment to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

But he remains on evangelicals’ A-list. He’s their guy. Their “dream come true,” in the words of Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr.

Someone has to explain it to me. I’m all eyes and ears.