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President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to rally at the White House, inviting a potentially dangerous mix of protesters after people angry about the death of an unarmed black man in Minnesota police custody skirmished with the Secret Service on Friday.

He threatened the unlimited power of the U.S. military to clamp down on demonstrations, tweeting from Air Force One as he traveled to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the launch of a SpaceX spacecraft. The military is ready, willing and able to assist, Trump said earlier.

In a series of tweets early on Saturday, Trump also seemed to revel in the potential for violence outside the White House, warning that Fridays protesters would have been met by the most vicious dogs and most ominous weapons had they dared to breach the fence around the property.

He depicted Secret Services agents as eager to battle the demonstrators, and later issued an appeal to his supporters to assemble: Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser rebuked the president in her own series of tweets, calling him a scared man. Afraid/alone and saying she stood with people peacefully protesting the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis this week.

Those demonstrations were not altogether peaceful, though. The Secret Service said in a statement that it arrested six people and that multiple personnel from the agency were injured when protesters assaulted them with bricks, rocks, bottles, fireworks and other items.

Videos from Fridays demonstration showed protesters chasing journalists from the park and throwing objects at officers wearing riot gear, and Secret Service officers responding with pepper spray.

Contrary to Trumps assertion that Bowser wouldnt let the D.C. police get involved, the Secret Service said the citys police and U.S. Park Police were also on the scene of the protests.

Bowser called a press conference on Saturday to discuss the situation. I call upon our city and our nation to exercise great restraint, even while the president tries to divide us, she said.

Trump told reporters he had no idea if his boosters would assemble on Saturday night at the White House.

I heard that MAGA wanted to be there that a lot of MAGA was going to be there, Trump said as he departed the White House, using the acronym for Make America Great Again.

Washington on Friday entered Phase One of its reopening from coronavirus stay-at-home restrictions. Large gatherings of people are currently prohibited.

Trump also tweeted that ANTIFA and the Radical Left were stoking protests against Floyds death, a day after saying he understood the pain that demonstrators were feeling. Antifa, short for anti-fascist, is sometimes used to describe militant left-wing activists.

Attorney General William Barr made a brief televised statement to make similar comments, tying the protests to groups of outside radicals and agitators exploiting the situation.

It is a federal crime to cross state lines or to use interstate facilities to incite or participate in violent rioting. We will enforce these laws, Barr said. He took no questions.

Minnesota officials, including the states Democratic governor, echoed Trumps suggestion that organized agitators were exploiting anger about the death of Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed black man.

The situation in Minneapolis is no longer in any way about the murder of George Floyd, Governor Tim Walz said. It is about attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities.

Video showed a white police officer in Minneapolis kneeling on Floyds neck to the point the arrested man could no longer breathe. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was arrested Friday and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.

In Washington, demonstrators gathered in a park across from the White House around dusk on Friday, briefly causing the compound to be locked down. It was just one of a string of protests around the country, from Atlanta to Oakland, California.

Trump said he watched every move of Fridays protests outside the White House, and couldnt have felt more safe.

Had protesters breached the complexs fence, they would have faced the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, Trump said. Thats when people would have been really badly hurt, at least.

Bowser said in her briefing that Trumps reference to attack dogs was no subtle reminder to African-Americans of segregationists that let dogs out on women, children and innocent people in the South. She called the comments an attack on humanity.

Friday nights protests came on a day after Trump appeared to threaten violence against certain demonstrators, tweeting overnight that when the looting starts, the shooting starts.

The phrase echoed a remark made in 1967 by a white Miami police chief when announcing tougher policing policies for the Florida citys black neighborhoods. In a rare reversal, Trump later said his tweet wasnt intended as a threat, but merely meant to discourage looting that has historically coincided with violence.

Trump also said hed spoken with Floyds family and that he understood the hurt and pain of demonstrators.

We have peaceful protesters, and support the rights for peaceful protesters, Trump said Friday. We cant allow a situation like in Minneapolis to descend further into lawless anarchy and chaos.

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Trump Suggests 'MAGA' Fans Gather at White House, While Threatening to Clamp Down on Demonstrations With Military - TIME

President Donald Trump announced Friday that the United States will cut ties with the World Health Organization.

"China has total control over the World Health Organization despite only paying $40 million per year compared to what the United States has been paying, which is approximately $450 million a year," Trump said during a news conference in the White House Rose Garden.

"The world needs answers from China on the virus. We must have transparency. Why is it that China shut off infected people from Wuhan to all other parts of China?" he added. "It didn't go to Beijing, it went nowhere else, but they allowed them to freely travel throughout the world, including Europe and the United States."

Trump has repeatedly criticized the WHO's response to the coronavirus,which has hit the U.S. worse than any other country, amid scrutiny of his own administration's response to the pandemic. He has claimed the WHO is "China-centric" and blames the agency for advising against China travel bans early in the outbreak.

"Fortunately, I was not convinced and suspended travel from China saving untold numbers of lives," Trump said April 14.

The agency has defended its initial response to the coronavirus pandemic, saying it gave world leaders enough time to intervene early in the outbreak.

The agency declared Covid-19 a global health emergency on Jan. 30 when there were only 82 cases outside of China and zero deaths, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference on May 1. "Meaning, the world had enough time to intervene."

The WHO has also defended China, saying as far back as February that the country's response to the virus was an improvement from past outbreaks such as SARS.

Earlier this month,Trump threatened topermanently cut off U.S. funding of the WHO.In a letter,he said that if the WHO "does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization."

On Friday, Trump said the WHO "failed to make the requested greatly needed reform" and the U.S. "will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs."

The WHO's funding runs in two-year budget cycles. For the 2018 and 2019 funding cycle, the U.S. paid a $237 million required assessment as well as $656 million in voluntary contributions, averaging $446 million a year and representing about 14.67% of its total budget, according to WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic.

It's unclear exactly what mechanism Trump intends to use to terminate WHO funding, much of which is appropriated by Congress. The president typically does not have the authority to unilaterally redirect congressional funding.

Lawrence Gostin, a professor and faculty director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, said in a tweet Friday that Trump's move is "unlawful" because pulling funding requires Congress, which has already authorized funding.

It's also "dangerous" because "we're in the middle of a pandemic," he said.

On May 20, WHO officials said they worried the agency's emergency programs would suffer if the presidentpermanently pulled U.S. funding from the international agency.

Most funding from the United States goes directly out to the program that helps countries in "all sorts of fragile and difficult settings," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO's health emergencies program, said at the time.

"We'll obviously have to work with other partners to ensure those funds can still flow," Ryan said. "This is going to be a major implication for delivering essential health services to some of the most vulnerable people in the world, and we trust developed donors will, if necessary, step in to fill that gap."

The WHO started sounding the alarm on the outbreak in China in mid-January.On March 11, WHO officialsdeclared the outbreak a pandemic, when there were just 121,000 global cases. The virus has now infected more than 5.8 million people worldwide, including more than 1.73 million in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

-- CNBC's Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this report.

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Trump says the U.S. will cut ties with World Health Organization - CNBC

At an event at the White House, President Trump is asked about demonstrations over George Floyd's death, and his conversation with Floyd's family USA TODAY

WASHINGTON President Donald Trump said Friday he spoke with the family of George Floyd and asserted that his relatives are "entitled to justice" in the case.

"I understand the hurt. I understand the pain. People have really been through a lot," Trump told reporters at the White House. "The family of George is entitled to justice and the people of Minnesota are entitled to live in safety."

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was arrested Friday, days after video circulated of him holding his knee to Floyd's neck for at least eight minutes before Floyd died. Floyd's family released a statement following the arrest, calling it a"welcome but overdue step on the road to justice."

Trump's remarks came hours after an overnight tweet in which he called the Minneapolis mayor "very weak" and said that thugs are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd." He alsosingled out looters, posting that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

The phrase was first used by Miami Police Chief Walter Hedley in 1967, who threatened a crackdown on "hoodlums" he said were taking advantage of the civil rights movement. Questioned about the racial origins of the phrase, Trump said he wasn't aware of them.

"Ive heard that phrase for a long time. I dont know where it came from," Trump said. "Ive also heard it from any other places."

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Trump appeared to row back the tweet before speaking on Friday. In a followup tweet on Friday, he wrote that "it was spoken as a fact, not as a statement. It's very simple, nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters."

Trump didn't say specifically who he spoke with or when. Asked on Thursday whether he had spoken with the family he said he had not.

"I just expressed my sorrow," Trump said. "It certainly looked like there was no excuse for it."

A reporter asked what Floyd's family said to him.

"They were grieving," Trump responded.

Contributing: Courtney Subramanian, David Jackson

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/05/29/george-floyd-donald-trump-says-he-spoke-minneapolis-mans-family/5284068002/

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'I understand the pain.' Trump says he spoke with members of George Floyd's family - USA TODAY

WASHINGTON Cmon, @Jack. You can do it.

Throw on some Kendrick Lamar and get your head in the right space. Pour yourself a big old glass of salt juice. Draw an ice bath and fire up the cryotherapy pod and the infrared sauna. Then just pull the plug on him. You know you want to.

You could answer the existential question of whether @realDonaldTrump even exists if he doesnt exist on Twitter. I tweet, therefore I am. Dorsey meets Descartes.

All it would take is one sweet click to force the greatest troll in the history of the internet to meet his maker. Maybe he just disappears in an orange cloud of smoke, screaming, Im melllllllting.

Do Trump and the world a favor and send him back into the void whence he came. And then go have some fun: Meditate and fast for days on end!

Our country is going through biological, economic and societal convulsions. We cant trust the powerful forces in this nation to tell us the truth or do the right thing. In fact, not only can we not trust them. We have every reason to believe theyre gunning for us.

In Washington, the Trump administrations deception about the virus was lethal. On Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, the fat cats who carved up the country, drained us dry and left us with no safety net profiteered off the virus. In Minneapolis, the barbaric death of George Floyd after a police officer knelt on him for almost nine minutes showed yet again that black Americans have everything to fear from some who are charged with protecting them.

As if that werent enough, from the slough of our despond, we have to watch Donald Trump duke it out with the lords of the cloud in a contest to see who can destroy our democracy faster.

I wish I could go along with those who say this dark period of American life will ultimately make us nicer and simpler and more contemplative. How can that happen when the whole culture has been re-engineered to put us at each others throats?

Trump constantly torques up the tribal friction and cruelty, even as Twitter and Facebook refine their systems to ratchet up rage. It is amazing that a septuagenarian became the greatest exploiter of social media. Trump and Twitter were a match made in hell.

The Wall Street Journal had a chilling report a few days ago that Facebooks own research in 2018 revealed that our algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness. If left unchecked, Facebook would feed users more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.

Mark Zuckerberg shelved the research.

Why not just let all the bots trying to undermine our elections and spreading false information about the coronavirus and right-wing conspiracy theories and smear campaigns run amok? Sure, were weakening our society, but the weird, infantile maniacs running Silicon Valley must be allowed to rake in more billions and finish their mission of creating a giant cyberorganism of people, one huge and lucrative ball of rage.

The shareholders of Facebook decided, If you can increase my stock tenfold, we can put up with a lot of rage and hate, says Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at New York Universitys Stern School of Business.

These platforms have very dangerous profit motives. When you monetize rage at such an exponential rate, its bad for the world. These guys dont look left or right; they just look down. Theyre willing to promote white nationalism if theres money in it. The rise of social media will be seen as directly correlating to the decline of Western civilization.

Dorsey, who has more leeway because his stock isnt as valuable as Facebooks, made some mild moves against the president who has been spewing lies and inciting violence on Twitter for years. He added footnotes clarifying false Trump tweets about mail-in ballots and put a warning label on the presidents tweet about the Minneapolis riots that echo the language of a Miami police chief in 1967 and segregationist George Wallace: When the looting starts, the shooting starts.

Jack is really sincerely trying to find something to make it better, said one friend of the Twitter chiefs. Hes like somebody trapped in a maze, going down every hallway and turning every corner.

Zuckerberg, on the other hand, went on Fox to report that he was happy to continue enabling the Emperor of Chaos, noting that he did not think Facebook should be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.

It was a sickening display that made even some loyal Facebook staffers queasy. As The Verges Casey Newton reported, some employees objected to the companys rationale in internal posts.

I have to say I am finding the contortions we have to go through incredibly hard to stomach, one wrote. All this points to a very high risk of a violent escalation and civil unrest in November and if we fail the test case here, history will not judge us kindly.

Trump, furious that Dorsey would attempt to rein him in on the very platform that catapulted him into the White House, immediately decided to try to rein in Dorsey.

He signed an executive order that might strip liability protection from social media sites, which would mean they would have to more assiduously police false and defamatory posts. Now that social media sites are behemoths, Galloway thinks that the removal of the Communications Decency Act makes a lot of sense even if the president is trying to do it for the wrong reasons.

Trump does not seem to realize, however, that hes removing his own protection. He huffs and puffs about freedom of speech when he really wants the freedom to be vile. Its the mother of all cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face moves, says Galloway.

The president wants to say things on Twitter that he will not be allowed to say if he exerts this control over Twitter. In a sense, its Trump versus his own brain. If Twitter can be sued for what people say on it, how can Trump continue to torment? Wouldnt thousands of his own tweets have to be deleted?

Hed be the equivalent of a slippery floor at a store that sells equipment for hip replacements, says Galloway, who also posits that, in our hyper-politicized world, this will turn Twitter into a Democratic site and Facebook into a Republican one.

Nancy Pelosi, whose district encompasses Twitter, said that it did little good for Dorsey to put up a few fact-checks while letting Trumps rants about murder and other misrepresentations stay up.

Facebook, all of them, they are all about making money, the speaker said. Their business model is to make money at the expense of the truth and the facts. She crisply concluded that all they want is to not pay taxes; they got their tax break in 2017 and they dont want to be regulated, so they pander to the White House.

Originally posted here:
Trump, Twitter and Jack Dorsey - The New York Times

President Donald Trump talks to reporters following a closed Senate Republican policy lunch meeting to discuss the response to the coronavirus outbreak on Capitol Hill, May 19, 2020.(Yuri Gripas/Reuters)The president faces a much tougher road to reelection than most seem to think.

President Trump was disappointed. Bad weather on Wednesday forced a delay in SpaceXs planned launch of the Dragon spacecraft, robbing the president of a prized photo opportunity. He plans to attend the next launch, scheduled for May 30 at 3:22 p.m. EDT, but the spoiled visit to Florida punctuated another week of foreboding news from the campaign trail.

The coronavirus has left President Trump without his signature issue (the economy) and without his preferred venue (the tentpole rally). The bump in his approval rating as Americans rallied around the flag at the outset of the crisis is gone. Assessments of Trumps performance during the pandemic look a lot like his approval rating overall: polarized by party, andupside down. He continues to trail Joe Biden in bothnationalandswingstatepolls. The margins are narrow, but they are also consistent. President Trump has not been ahead in any live-interview national poll conducted this year.

Yet an aura of invincibility surrounds the president. That is why the same polls that show him losing to Biden also show that the public expects him to win. It is whybetting marketsfavor him, too. After all, the story goes, Trump accomplished the impossible in 2016. He defeated thesecond-most-unpopular candidate in American history(he was number one) against all odds. Why cant he do it again? The presidents imagination, ruthlessness, and guile, the shortcomings of his uninspiring and slightly out-of-it opponent, andthe Teflon qualityof this campaign have lulled the public and the GOP into a sense of complacency. Sure, things look bad. But Trump will find a way out of it. He always does.

Well, maybe not this time. The 2020 election looks more and more like a contest between luck and precedent. On one side is President Trumps incredible run of good fortune. On the other side is the weight of history. Consider: Every president reelected since Mr. Gallups first poll in 1935 enjoyed at least one day, and often several, when his approval rating was above 50 percent. That is something President Trumphas not experienced.

Not since 1940 has a president been reelected with a double-digit unemployment rate. Nor has a president been reelected with an unemployment ratetwo or more points higherthan when he entered office. Unemployment was15 percentin April 2020, and is expected to rise for at least a while longer. It was5 percentin January 2017. The recovery will need to have the trajectory of an Elon Musk rocket for unemployment to fall to less than 7 percent by November 3.

That is when America will hold its 59th presidential election. In all but five of the previous 58 contests, the same man won both the popular and electoral votes. The fact that two of the exceptions occurred in the past 20 years has distorted our perspective. We begin to consider it not only possible but probable that President Trump could win reelection without winning the popular vote.

History suggests that what is possible is also unlikely. Reelection was a prize awarded to just one of the four men before Trump who entered office on the basis of the Electoral College alone. John Quincy Adams lost to Andrew Jackson in the rematch of 1828. Rutherford B. Hayes did not run for a second term in 1880. Benjamin Harrison lost to Grover Cleveland in the rematch of 1892. The exception was George W. Bush, who defeated John Kerry in both the popular and electoral votes in 2004.

Bush, like Trump, faced an unexpected crisis in his first term. His decisive and compassionate leadership during the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath was an important factor in his reelection. Voters for whom terrorism was the most important issue backed Bush by a 72-point margin,according to the exit poll, and at that time majorities approved of the war in Iraq (51 percent) and considered it part of the war on terrorism (55 percent). Bushs approval rating in the exit poll was 53 percent.

In theMay 27 ReutersIpsos poll, the public disapproved of President Trumps handling of the coronavirus pandemic, while backing him on the economy and jobs. His job approval was 41 percent. In theMay 21 Fox poll, it was 44 percent. Nowhere close to where it has to be to win a second term.

And so, America waits for Trump to pull a rabbit out of his hat. What might that look like? A stunning economic rebound would bolster the presidents strengths and restore confidence in his stewardship. Trumps opponent might delegitimize himself through continued gaffes, a vice-presidential selection that frightens more people than it reassures, and debate performances that heighten concerns about age and ability. Something unexpected might happen. The campaign is young. As a wise manonce wrote, only an idiot would bet against Donald Trump.

Right now, though, Republicans have every reason to be worried about November.

This piece first appeared in the Washington Free Beacon.

The rest is here:
Trump in Trouble - National Review