Archive for the ‘Donald Trump’ Category

With Donald Trump’s impeachment trial over, Joe Biden pushes his agenda in televised town hall – Jamestown Sun

In a wide-ranging televised town hall that touched on the pandemic, economic relief, China-U.S. relations and race and policing, Biden also aimed to build public support for his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan, which is awaiting congressional action.

"Now's the time to go big," he said during a CNN prime-time broadcast, as he fielded questions from voters at the landmark Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. "If we pass this bill alone, we'll create 7 million jobs this year."

With the U.S. Senate having acquitted former President Trump in his second impeachment trial on Saturday, the White House is eager to press ahead with Biden's proposals on the economy, COVID-19, climate change and racial inequality.

Biden again made clear he would prefer to turn the page on the divisive Trump era. When CNN host Anderson Cooper asked him whether he agreed with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Republicans who voted to acquit were cowards, the president demurred.

Watch a clip from the presidential town hall below:

"For four years, all that's been in the news is Trump," Biden said. "The next four years, I want to make sure all the news is the American people. I'm tired of talking about Trump. He's gone."

After a parent and a teacher asked how Biden planned to ensure that schools could open safely amid the pandemic, the Democratic president said he anticipated that "most" elementary and middle schools would have in-person classes five days a week by the end of his first 100 days in office.

He also said he believes teachers should be moved closer to the front of the line for inoculation.

"I think that we should be vaccinating teachers we should move them up in the hierarchy," Biden said, although he noted that states, not the federal government, have the authority to decide how to prioritize vaccinations.

RELATED: Trump lashes out at McConnell in deepening feud between top Republicans | Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani accused in lawsuit of conspiring to incite Capitol riot

Biden said he expected everyone who wanted a vaccine would be able to get one by July, when his administration will have secured enough shots to inoculate all Americans. But he also warned that the recovery from the pandemic that has killed more than 485,000 people in the United States would still take many months and urged people to wear masks, maintain social distance and wash hands for the foreseeable future.

Tuesday's visit, as well as a trip scheduled for Thursday that will take Biden to a Michigan vaccine manufacturing site, offered the president an opportunity to tout the importance of a new relief bill even as Republicans remain largely opposed to its massive price tag.

Biden wants Congress to pass the legislation in the coming weeks in order to get $1,400 stimulus checks out to Americans and bolster unemployment payments.

Some aspects of the bill, including Biden's push to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, may have a difficult time gaining enough support to pass. After a small business owner raised concerns at Tuesday's town hall, Biden suggested he might be willing to consider a more gradual phase-in.

Biden's visit to Wisconsin a state he narrowly won on his way to capturing the presidency was his first official trip since taking office on Jan. 20, though he has traveled to his home state of Delaware and to the Camp David presidential retreat.

Tuesday's travel also marked Biden's first flight on the larger version of Air Force One, the presidential plane.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw, Nandita Bose and Eric Beech; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Richard Pullin)

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With Donald Trump's impeachment trial over, Joe Biden pushes his agenda in televised town hall - Jamestown Sun

The real estate industry is divesting from Donald Trumpbut divesting from white supremacy requires more – Brookings Institution

This week, former President Donald Trump is facing his second impeachment trial, this time for his role in the failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. And just as some of his Republican colleagues may vote against him in that trial, many of Trumps longtime real estate colleagues have now decided his behaviors in office were too egregious to warrant continued support.

Trumps lender of last resort, Deutsche Bank, is reportedly refusing to do any more business with him or his company, according to The New York Times. Brokerage giant Cushman & Wakefield announced they would no longer handle leasing agreements for Trump properties. The commercial real estate company JLL is no longer handling the sale of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Signature Bank, which has also financed Trump projects in the past, closed his accounts and announced they would not do business with any member of Congress who voted not to certify the Electoral College results for the 2020 election. Multiple industry political action committees have suspended donations to those members of Congress as well.

Lenders separation from Trump is a recognition that financial support enabled his anti-democratic behaviors. However, the real estate industry has been complicit in white supremacy and racial discrimination long before Trump took office. Will the repudiation of Trump lead to a wider reckoning?

Land ownership is the primary source of wealth and means to access capital in America. And for over a century, the real estate industry has implicated itself deeply in white supremacy by backing and profiting from racist practices that created and still sustain the nations unequal land and home ownership.

Redlining, racial housing covenants, predatory lending, and neighborhood-destroying highway construction have all contributed to a wealth gap in which white families have roughly10 timesthe net worth of the average Black family.This lack of wealth and ongoing discrimination has throttled Black individuals capacity to acquire, retain, and grow assets that are critical to well-being. For instance, during the last two decades, even as overall U.S. homeownership has grown, there has been a catastrophic loss of homeownership in key cities that have large shares of Black homeowners.

How is this happening in the 21st century? Its been widely documented that the formal association between neighborhood, race, and insurance risk established by the federally backed Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s altered the valuation, market dynamics, and long-term viability of Black neighborhoodsmany of which consequently experienced significant change, ranging from decline to displacement, over the last three generations. This damage has been concretized into neighborhoods in ways large and small. For example, todays appraisal methods and price comparison models extend and reinforce racialized harm because they operate on a comparison basis that assumes a level playing field where there never was one.

Even with the prohibition of overt racial discrimination and oversight, the housing market is structured to disproportionately exclude Black and brown households. For example, our zoning codes and building practices are streamlined to deliver large single-family homes at the urban fringe. Thus, for decades, the very largest houses (four or more bedrooms) have grown as a share of all housing inventory, while smaller configurations have stagnated or declined. Because people of color are farmore likelythan white people to be first-time rather than repeat homebuyers, a mass of housing inventory weighted against attainable starter homes disproportionately favors households with higher concentrations of generational wealth to pay bigger down payments. Over6 millionBlack and brown millennials would be considered mortgage-ready if there were any attainable homes for sale in prime locations.

Meanwhile, todays de facto housing market segregationfinanced by anti-Black lending practicesmakes it possible to target Black and brown communities with predatory loan products while withholding retail amenities. At the same time, Black neighborhoods pay a segregation tax in the form of lower housing values.

White neighborhoods, on the other hand, pay higher housing cost premiums to maintain their exclusiveness. This premium enriches not just the homeowners, but also land speculators, builders, lenders, insurers, and tax jurisdictionsin other words, the real estate industry. The industrys role in eroding Black wealth and profiting from racial division across decades and decades has been much more destructive to our democratic experiment than Trumps four years in office.

So if the real estate industry is reckoning with Trump, it should also address its legacy of discrimination in housing devaluation, lower rates of homeownership, and higher interest rates among Black and brown homebuyers. In divesting from these formal and informal white supremacist systems, the industry can instead invest in historically disenfranchised people and places, including through reasonable protections for renters and new programs, policies, and models that expand Black and brown property ownership.

On January 6, Donald Trump attacked the legitimacy of American democracy. The real estate industrys divestment from him is a start, but does not begin to address the entirety of the anti-democratic and racially biased real estate ecosystem. To truly advance democracy, the real estate industry must divest from white supremacy and develop anti-racist systems that encourage both integration and inclusion.

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The real estate industry is divesting from Donald Trumpbut divesting from white supremacy requires more - Brookings Institution

Joe Biden Finally Says What A Lot Of People Are Thinking About Donald Trump – HuffPost

President Joe Biden is so over his predecessor.

Im tired of talking about Donald Trump, he saidduring Tuesday nights town hall event in Milwaukee. I dont want to talk about him anymore.

He said it twice during the event, including when asked about Trumps second impeachment acquittal.

Look, for four years all thats been in the news is Trump, Biden explained. The next four years I want to make sure all the news is the American people.

True to that sentiment, Biden referred to Trump only as the former guy at another point.

Based on the reaction on social media, the president is hardly alone in the desire to move on:

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Joe Biden Finally Says What A Lot Of People Are Thinking About Donald Trump - HuffPost

Of course Donald Trump’s team didn’t tell the truth about his Covid-19 illness – CNN

Throughout Trump's campaign for president and the four years in the White House, he and those closest to him repeatedly sought to obfuscate about his overall health -- setting new lows in the standards of transparency for our chief executive in the process.

When Trump tested positive for Covid-19 in October 2020, it was virtually impossible to get a straight answer about his condition out of anyone in the White House -- including White House physician Sean Conley.

Conley repeatedly gave rosy assessments of Trump's health while battling the disease, conveniently parsing words to avoid acknowledging what we now know (and long suspected): This was a very serious health crisis for Trump.

"I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the President in his course of illness has had. I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction, and in doing so it came off that we're trying to hide something."

Which tells you everything you need to know about Conley -- and the approach to Trump's health he and the White House team took. What difference does the desire to "reflect the upbeat attitude of the team [and] the president," have on Trump's condition? And why would Conley providing accurate information about Trump's condition "steer the course of illness in another direction"? Short answer: It wouldn't.

That Trump's condition was even more dire than we knew, then, isn't surprising. A lack of transparency -- and Trump's desire to always be perceived as strong and, uh, manly -- was a feature, not a glitch, of the Trump White House.

Knowing the full picture of a President's health -- whether that President is Trump or Joe Biden or whoever comes after Biden -- is a public right. Being purposely misinformed or given very limited information for public relations reasons should not be excused. Or repeated.

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Of course Donald Trump's team didn't tell the truth about his Covid-19 illness - CNN

Opinion | Is This the End of Obsessively Hating Donald Trump? – The New York Times

Yet we too are sticking to a script, as celebrants in the impeachment managers bid to win the hearts and minds of jurors who have not shown ownership of either. Mr. Trump may have railed against it and had his surrogates fight it, but the trial has given a new spotlight to an attention addict whose rehab was not going well. He is not there, but this is still The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, about Donald J. Trump, featuring applause for Donald J. Trump, and starring Donald J. Trump as Donald J. Trump. His ego and his coffers need you to watch, to tweet, to rage.

So do you not watch, to enlarge the collective spiting of him? Do you give oxygen to an amoral human torch? The Resistance did not create or empower Mr. Trump. But we did make the classic first mistake of concluding that our insights, analysis and morality would convince his supporters that they were tragically wrong. When that failed, we made the classic second mistake of assuming we hadnt made our first mistake loudly or clearly enough. Im not ready to believe that we started it, but I, for one, have gotten loud and blasphemous enough to peel the paint off my walls.

Still, we cannot underestimate the power of righteous and organic hatred to overwhelm everything else. It is hard to fathom now, but in the epic sitcom All in the Family, one of the best running jokes consisted entirely of Carroll OConnors Archie Bunker getting in the face of Bea Arthurs Maude Findlay and announcing the identity of the worst president in history. He would elongate it and he would mispronounce it and when he would intone Fraaaaanklin. Delllllano. Roooooooosevelt!; she would erupt in paroxysms of liberal rage at his heresy.

These political passion plays were performed some 25 years after Roosevelt died, and were thus a real-time testament to something the half century since has erased: Beloved and revered as he may have been, F.D.R. was also passionately hated and blamed, and his memory alone could start political fistfights into at least the 1970s.

One wonders if the visceral hatred of Mr. Trump will end that soon. Or if it ever will.

Just as I have far more history with Mr. Trump than I would have wished, I also have some standing on the subject of people consuming political Soylent that they clearly dont like, dont want to see, and dont want to eat.

At roughly this time of year in 1998, I was at the Super Bowl on assignment for NBC and also doing a week of celebrity-themed shows for my little niche, boutique, offbeat news hour on MSNBC. We were all set up to interview John Lithgow in front of the refrigerator in the kitchen set of Third Rock From the Sun when my producer advised there had been a slight change in plans: I would instead be interviewing Tim Russert via satellite from Washington, because the president might be resigning over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Our audience first doubled, then trebled. The heady, news-packed and unpredictable early days of the show we subtly renamed White House in Crisis made for compelling viewing. Then came an enormous cloud of the kind of illogic which may apply to whatever follows Mr. Trumps second impeachment trial.

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Opinion | Is This the End of Obsessively Hating Donald Trump? - The New York Times