Tag Archives: Donald Trump

national news, political news

Ex-CIA boss ‘deeply saddened and angered’

John Brennan believes the new president of the United States conducted a “shameful” display in a most inappropriate place.

I happen to agree with him.

Brennan is the former CIA director who reportedly is “deeply saddened and angered” that Donald J. Trump would stand before the CIA Memorial Wall to chastise the media for its reporting of the crowd size at the president’s inaugural ceremony.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ex-cia-director-trump-should-be-ashamed-of-himself/ar-AAm6e3y?li=BBnb7Kz

The Hill reported this, quoting former CIA deputy chief of staff Nick Shapiro: “Former CIA director Brennan is deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of CIA’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes. Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself,” Shapiro said in a pair of tweets.

Yep, that’s the president.

The Memorial Wall contains 117 stars that memorialize the CIA agents who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty for the United States. They are heroes. It’s a place of honor and dignity. It is not the place for anyone — even the president — to make patently political statements.

Yet there he was today. He virtually ignored the sacrifice made by the individuals honored on that wall. The president chose instead to make cheap political points.

The former CIA director is correct. The president’s actions were a “despicable display of self-aggrandizement.”

International news

How will the president deal with this mass protest?

I am about to state the obvious … which is that Donald Trump’s presidency is off to a rocky start.

He took the oath of office as the 45th president of the United States, gave his inaugural speech, witnessed a parade in his honor, signed an executive order or two in the Oval Office, went to some inaugural balls and then awoke this morning to an entire planet protesting his inauguration.

Millions of women — and men! — hit the streets all over the nation and the world to signal their dissent at his election. It might not end for a while.

White House press flack Sean Spicer held his first news briefing today at the White House. What did he talk about? Not about the protests … oh, no, not at all. He griped about the media’s coverage of inaugural crowd estimates!

I think the president needs to deal with this. Somehow and in some fashion he needs to address the nation about the concerns expressed on streets all across the nation.

Women are concerned about the president’s stated disrespect of women; his admission of sexual assault on women; his disparagement of women; the degrading manner in which he talks about women’s appearance. The litany of insults goes on.

Women now are fearful of what Trump and Congress will do to issues close to their hearts: reproductive rights, women’s health, equal pay, to name just three.

Let’s set aside that Trump was elected in the first place. He won an election he wasn’t supposed to win. Women around the country wanted to see of their own — Hillary Rodham Clinton — make history by becoming the first women elected president. It didn’t happen.

The candidate who did win, Trump, has a record with which he must face his critics.

Will he do it? Will he face his critics? Will he answer their concerns specifically?

I believe a real leader would — and should — stand before the nation and talk specifically about the protests that have been mounted.

media news

Sean Spicer: media puncher in chief

Sean Spicer sauntered into the White House press briefing room today and did something quite extraordinary.

The White House press secretary looked the media in the eye and echoed what the new president of the United States has said repeatedly: He called them dishonest.

Think about that. The fellow who will be the president’s spokesman, his point of contact with the White House press corps, took off his proverbial glove and slapped the media square in the face.

And over what? This is the best part.

He challenged the media’s reporting of the size of the crowd at Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. The crowd, he said, was bigger than the media reported. It rivaled the size of the crowd that gathered for Barack Obama’s first inaugural and was larger than President Obama’s second inaugural.

Spicer bitched about pictures he said misrepresented the size of the crowd.

Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. The president of the United States is continuing his campaign to discredit the media. He trotted out his spokesman to lash out at the press corps while he — Trump, that is — was accusing the media of being full of “dishonest people.”

It’s been said that people in power shouldn’t “punch down.” If you’re the president of the United States, you pick fights, say, with members of Congress over policy matters or you argue with heads of state of adversarial nations.

Arguing over crowd size? To be candid, a lot of Trump’s supporters think he’s right, that the media deserve to be taken down, that they are too big, too powerful, too smug, too elitist and, oh yes, too liberal.

Let’s all get ready, folks. There’s much more of this to come. Of that I am quite certain.

national news

Trump’s anti-CIA tweets are media’s fault

Let me see if I have this correct.

Donald J. Trump sends out dozens of tweets questioning the CIA’s intelligence-gathering ability while dismissing the agency’s conclusions about alleged Russian hacking during the 2016 election.

Then he blames the media for it.

It’s the media’s fault that it reported the president’s tweets.

Is that he said today while meeting at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-visits-cia-blames-tensions-with-intelligence-community-on-the-media-213121618.html

I admit to being slow on the uptake at times. This one, though, muddles my cognitive ability.

Here’s the thing that’s even nuttier. There will be those among us who will agree with Trump. The media have somehow made up something that the president himself stated about the CIA. Didn’t he criticize the spooks for sending out false intelligence about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction?

The media deserve criticism for reporting it?

Trump said this today while meeting with CIA operatives:

“I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, right? And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community. And I just want you to know that there’s a reason you’re the No. 1 stop: It is exactly the opposite,” he said.

“I love you,” Trump concluded. “There’s nobody I respect more.”

Which is it, Mr. President?

International news, national news, political news

The world is watching a ‘great’ nation’s turmoil

I’m watching the news today and getting an eye and earful about how the world is reacting to Donald J. Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States.

I received this e-mail message from a friend of mine in Australia. He is a worldly fellow, a keen student of U.S. politics. My friend writes: “We’re all praying for you … and ourselves as well. We’re all in this together. For historical precedent, check out Germany 1918-1939 or the Cultural Revolution in China. I honestly thought the extent of Russian involvement in the election was grounds for treason, but clearly the rules have changed!”

No mention, of course, of the women’s marches around the world that are occurring today.

I’m guessing women marched in my friend’s city in South Australia.

I won’t elaborate on his statement regarding pre-World War II Germany or what happened in the 1960s in China.

Suffice to say that, though, that the world — if my friend’s message is any indicator, and I believe it is — cares deeply about what happens in the United States.

What does that mean? To me it means two things.

One is that we are in fact the world’s most indispensable nation.

The other aspect is that the United States of America continues to be “great,” despite what the brand new president has bellowed to the contrary.

national news, political news

Trump does battle with … ‘W’?

Yochi Dreazen has offered an interesting analysis on Donald J. Trump’s inaugural speech in an essay written for Vox.com.

It is this: The real target of the new president’s barbs and brickbats wasn’t his immediate predecessor, Barack H. Obama; rather, Dreazen writes, it was the guy who served before Obama — George W. Bush.

Here’s the essay:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-real-target-of-trump%e2%80%99s-inaugural-speech-wasn%e2%80%99t-barack-obama-it-was-george-w-bush/ar-AAm4gLu?li=BBnb7Kz

When you think about it, the notion makes sense.

Trump didn’t mention the Affordable Care Act, or the Iran nuclear arms deal or the return of diplomatic relations with Cuba in his inaugural speech. Republicans all across the land have been critical of all three policy issues.

His target instead, if you parse the president’s 16-minute inaugural speech, was the amount of money we’ve spend on foreign wars while neglecting our roads, bridges, airports and rail lines.

Dreazen writes: “Take Trump’s comments about how the US had wrongly ‘spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.’ The president who launched those costly wars — and who was responsible for the bulk of the estimated $5 trillion that the US has spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the bulk of the 8,000 American military deaths in the two countries — was Bush, not Obama.

So, this seems to portend an interesting dynamic as the new president prepares to craft his agenda and present it to a Congress controlled in both chambers by Republicans.

GOP lawmakers do not believe we’ve wasted our effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor do they hold the Bush administration in the same highly negative light that Trump cast on it while he campaigned for the presidency. He called the Iraq War a “disaster,” a “huge mistake.”

President Bush — along with his father, Bush 41 and brother Jeb, the former Florida governor and 2016 GOP presidential candidate — returned the favor by refusing to campaign for Trump. None of them attended the GOP convention in Cleveland. They sat on their hands.

I’m going to venture not too far out on the limb here by suggesting that the Bushes are held in considerably greater regard by establishment congressional Republicans than the 45th president.

How will this play as Trump has to work with Republicans who control the flow of legislation and laws? Let’s all hold our breath … and wait.

national news, political news

Scorned women on the march

How does that saying go? “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”?

A lot of women around the United States of America are feeling scorned today, the first full day of Donald J. Trump’s presidency.

They’re marching on Washington, D.C. They’re marching all across the country. Why, even in Amarillo, Texas — where the president earned about 80 percent of the total vote — women were to march at Ellwood Park.

Their protest? They dislike (a) the election of a man who actually admitted to mistreating women and (b) the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who most pundits and prognosticators said would make history by becoming the first woman elected president of the United States.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/meet-the-women-of-the-womens-march-on-washington/ar-AAm5aKo?li=BBnb7Kz

I’m trying to process this collective march throughout the land.

On the one hand, I understand women’s anger, disappointment and pain. Trump campaigned for the presidency while hurling insults at many demographic groups — and that included women, who took personally his attacks on people such as former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and actor/comedian Rosie O’Donnell.

But … get this: Exit polling showed that Trump garnered more than 50 percent of the female vote nationwide. Statistically, that might have spelled the difference between winning and losing for the Republican presidential nominee. By capturing a majority of the female vote, does the women’s march overstate the concern that marchers are expressing? I don’t know the answer to that question.

It does appear that the national divide now is split not just along urban and rural residents, among racial groups and among socio-economic groups. It now appears split along gender.

A lot of women are angry today as the realization of Trump’s inauguration as the 45th president is soaking into their consciousness. Not all of them, mind you. Indeed, I know several women here in the Texas Panhandle who voted for Trump — many of them with great trepidation; however, others did so with great enthusiasm.

My advice today to the president? Pay careful attention to what these women on the march are saying. He should not want to be on the receiving end of women’s rage if he scorns them yet again by ignoring their protests.

national news, political news

It’s done; now it’s time to get used to a new era

The deed is done.

Barack Obama handed over the reins of power to Donald J. Trump. The former president and his family jetted off to California. The new president took up some business in the Oval Office before dancing the night away with his wife.

I’ll make yet another confession: I’m not yet ready to embrace fully the notion that Trump is actually, really and truly, certifiably the commander in chief of the world’s greatest military machine.

Yes, I know he is president. I know he won an election that seemingly everyone on the planet thought he’d lose bigly.

I’ve mentioned already that I’ve voted in 12 presidential elections. Five times my candidate has won; seven times he has lost. I know what it’s like to be on the short end of the vote count. Heck, the first election I voted in — that would be 1972 — my guy lost 49 states.

However, in every case I’ve been able to accept fully the outcome and move on … until now.

This one feels strangely different. It has something to do with what I still believe about the president’s unfitness for the office he now occupies. I get that not everyone agrees with me. Many of my friends here in the Texas Panhandle voted for Trump. They’re still my friends.

Still, I ask you to hang with me. I’m likely to come around.

Eventually.

International news, national news, political news

Trump fills two key national security posts … next?

Donald J. Trump took the oath of office today and the U.S. Senate managed to do its job by confirming two critical appointments to the new president’s national security team.

Senators confirmed James Mattis as secretary of defense and John Kelly as secretary of homeland security.

Two elements intrigue me about both of these men.

One, they are retired general-grade officers, both Marines, both of them with four stars each on their epaulets. You’ll recall that the president said he knows “more than the generals about ISIS, believe me.”

But … does he? I don’t think so. I am convinced as well that the president didn’t think so either when he blustered that statement while campaigning for the office. It was an applause/laugh line.

The second element that is most interesting to me is that Gens. Mattis and Kelly both contradict some talking points that Trump declared, also while campaigning for the presidency.

Mattis in particular has declared Russia to be a primary threat to our national security, something that Trump has dismissed virtually out of hand as the controversy over Russian hacking has escalated. Kelly, too, has shown to be his own man while discussing ways to protect the nation.

Kelly takes the point now as Trump’s guy in the fight to control illegal immigration. Mattis now gets to assess additional international threats to the nation — and he is seriously concerned about Russia. Perhaps he can persuade the commander in chief that he, too, needs to worry about Vladimir Putin’s intent.

I’m also fascinated that the notion of a retired Marine general with the nickname of “Mad Dog” is seen as the reasonable alternative to the man who nominated him in the first place.

These two men will assume critical roles in the new administration. One word of warning, though, is in order: Donald Trump now needs to concentrate aggressively on filling many of the staff-level national security jobs that are vacant.

He did vow at his inaugural that he would eliminate radical Islamic terrorists from the face of the planet. You must get busy, Mr. President.

national news

POTUS goes to war with those around him

Get ready for this: I am about to give the new president of the United States a backhanded compliment for showing some serious brass while delivering his inaugural speech.

Donald J. Trump, standing on a podium surrounded by many men and women with whom he’ll work — the folks who serve in Congress — threw down the gauntlet. He said the era of doing nothing in Congress has ended; he said Washington prospered while the rest of the nation suffered; he accused lawmakers essentially of enriching themselves while the Ordinary Joe was sucking wind.

Did the folks on the podium feel the burn?

More’n likely.

However, if this was his effort to bridge the divide that has split the country, I fear it might have widened it — particularly among the individuals who serve in Congress. Indeed, the divide between Capitol Hill and the White House might be the most gaping of all.

Republicans made it clear when Barack Obama became president that they had no intention of cooperating with him. Now it’s Democrats’ turn to exact revenge on a Republican president.

And the president today perhaps gave them more ammo to lock ‘n load as they prepare to do battle with the guy who’s just dissed them so grandly … and in front of so many people.

Given that most of out here in the proverbial peanut gallery don’t really know about Trump’s ideology, we are left to wonder if his declaration of war against Congress is going to perpetuate the gridlock that gripped the federal government for much of the past eight years.

Here’s my fear: If Democrats succeed in blocking whatever Trump wants to do, there could be collateral damage inflicted by Republicans who launch their own counterattack.

Or … lawmakers on both sides of the aisle could get angry enough at Trump’s fighting words to stop government dead in its tracks.

Then what?