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For all of the work John Kelly has put into his new role as White House chief of staff, instituting new limits on whom President Trump speaks with and what information he sees, Trump has an escape hatch: his phone. Put limits on who can reach Trump at the White House? Fine, but then Trump just calls them from his cell later that night. Limit the data that lands on his desk? Great, until he fires up Twitter and sees whatever he wants to see. (Twitter, Axios reported in May, is the only app on his phone.)

Much of what Trump learns about the world is filtered through two lenses: what he watches on cable news (particularly Fox) and what he sees on Twitter. Wireds Ashley Feinberg linked the arguments from Trumps Tuesday news conference about the violence in Charlottesville last weekend to rhetoric that he may have picked up from Twitter or from watching Fox. The liberal site Media Matters put a fine point on that latter connection, pairing Trumps language with similar statements that had previously aired on Fox.

Users of Twitter will understand, however, that it can be tricky to know what someone else sees when he or she fires up the application. Everyone follows a different group of people, and that colors the information they receive.

To that end, weve created @trumps_feed, an account that checks whom Trump follows every five minutes and then retweets any new tweets from them over that period. The net result is a replication of what Trump would see on those occasions that he switches over from the Mentions tab.

Its this. This is what Trump would see right now if he opened Twitter.

Again, this account will update every five minutes with any new accounts that Trump follows.

Whom does he follow right now? Twitter allows us to see all 45 of those accounts right now, and, interestingly, the order in which he followed them.

That order, from earliest to most recent follow, goes like this:

Of the 45 accounts he follows, nine are for the Trump Organization and seven are linked to his other favorite business, Fox News.

And what do they tweet about? We took all of the tweets from those accounts this month (except the Trump Organization ones) and created a word cloud.

They tweet about Trump.

The Trump name is mentioned 389 times in August tweets from these users. His Twitter handle is mentioned 230 times. Fox Newss Twitter handle is mentioned 184 times. The word president comes up 164 times and the news of the month, Charlottesville, 120 times.

Anyway. If youre ever curious whats spurring Trumps views on something out there in the world, take a dip into @trumps_feed and see. If its not being discussed there and its not on Fox News, maybe its something that his senior staff decided he should focus on.

But wed recommend starting with Twitter or Fox News.

A side-by-side look at how President Trump and Fox News pundits discussed the Charlottesville violence. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)

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Now you can see what Donald Trump sees every time he opens Twitter - Washington Post

In many ways, the Trump presidency never got off the ground: The presidents legislative agenda is going nowhere, his relations with foreign leaders are frayed, and his approval rating with the American people never enjoyed the honeymoon period most newly elected presidents do. Pundits who are sympathetic toward, or even neutral on, the president keep hoping that the next personnel movethe appointment of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, say, or the long-rumored-but-never-delivered departure of Steve Bannonwill finally get the White House in gear.

But what if they, and many other people, are thinking about it wrong? Maybe the reality is not that the Trump presidency has never gotten started. Its that hes already reached his lame-duck period. For most presidents, that comes in the last few months of a term. For Trump, it appears to have arrived early, just a few months into his term. The president did always brag that he was a fast learner.

The White House Is Under Siege

Who knows when the lame-duck period began. Was it on January 21, when Trumps administration tried to argue, against all evidence, that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history? Or the next day, when Kellyanne Conway introduced the world to alternative facts? Was it when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey? Was it the days-long slow reveal on Donald Trump Jr.s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016? Or did it come on Tuesday, when Trump stepped to a lectern in Trump Tower and delivered a strange de facto defense of white nationalism?

Whatever the turning point, thinking about Trump as a lame-duck president seems a better rubric for making sense of his administration than most. Consider the things that happen in a lame-duck period.

A lame-duck presidents legislative agenda starts to stall out. Members of Congress are just no longer interested in following the presidents lead, especially where it might create a political liability for them. Big bills start to waste away on Capitol Hill, and where a new president would bring both political capital and novelty to bear, a lame duck just doesnt have the juice. So it is with Trump. His various attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare have all failed, and while he was able to force both houses of Congress to take them back up before, largely through sheer force of will, his more recent pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he has no interest in heading into the breach once again, and GOP members have largely agreed with him.

A lame-duck president gets caught in a vicious cycle. Once legislators start refusing to follow his lead, he begins to look like a paper tiger, so they follow his lead even less. Now that Republican senators have defied Trump once, why should they get in line on other controversial bills, like tax reform?

By the time a president reaches his lame-duck period, scandals have begun to pile up. Sometimes they are minor and varied; sometimes theyre blockbusters, from Iran-Contra to Monica Lewinsky. Either way, the taint of controversy tarnishes the president, diminishes his political capital, and starts to absorb time and energy that once would have been spent on constructive rather than defensive actions. Trump is already facing an open-ended investigation, unmatched in breadth by anything except the Clinton-era Whitewater scandaltaking in allegations of money-laundering, of espionage, and of violations of campaign-finance laws, and potentially reaching into Trumps own personal financial dealings prior to becoming president. Its already proving a large distraction, as demonstrated by Trump taking time while returning from a trip to Europe to dictate a statement on behalf of his son, Donald Trump Jr. The statement he dictated turned out to be an obfuscatory disaster that only made the matter worse. Meanwhile, Trumps personal lawyer is busy sending defenses of Trumps Charlottesville comments to conservative journalists.

As controversy and inaction set in during a presidents lame-duck period, he starts to lose staffers who see no reason to stick around for a final stretch of inaction. Others stick around but grumble to the press about lack of discipline and lack of progressand as they look ahead to their next job, they often put preserving their own reputations ahead of advancing their bosss agenda. Trumps West Wing has a busy revolving doorhes already lost two communications directors, one press secretary, one chief of staff, and a national-security adviser, among othersand the tenor of leaks about the White House, once largely a chronicle of internecine warfare, is increasingly full of statements of disappointment and frustration about the president himself.

Another problem for a lame-duck president is that exhaustion sets in. Its the seven-, or in some cases, three-, year itch, as someone who was a fresh and exciting face at the start of his term has become tired, boring, or irksome. Trump benefited from his outsize media personality during the campaign, but now hes paying for it. Barely a day goes by without a new Trump-involved controversy. The public, and even the journalists paid to care, have become numb. Some of Trumps aides and allies want him to take a less public approach, but thats beyond him. He has one mode: on, and public-facing. Just take his alleged vacation over the last week or two, which has produced a surfeit of presidential news even by Trump standards.

As a result, mostthough not allpresidents see a slow slide in their approval rating toward the end of their terms. Trumps presidency has been one long slide, with his numbers now resting in the mid-30s.

The Trump presidency keeps offering occasions on which people ask how long the status quo can possibly continue. I have wondered that, and Erick Erickson does today:

This is not sustainable. Something is going to have to give. I do not know what, but something will give. The nation cannot sustain this constant state of chaos and crisis drift for three and a half more years. We will either see external or internal forces applied that will hurt the nation.

But thinking about Trump as a lame duck who will just have to stumble through the rest of his presidency makes more sense, at least at the present moment, than expecting that Trump will be removed from office, whether by resignation, impeachment, or some more far-flung possibility. The president shows little sign of being the sort of person who could be forced into resigningafter all, after he was bullied by staff into condemning racism, he was so agitated that the following day he defended the Charlottesville marchers with a more strongly worded statement.

Impeachment remains a remote possibility, even with 40 percent of voters favoring it in a new Public Religion Research Institute poll. Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation is likely months, if not years, away from concluding with any charges or referrals. And the hope of some other solutionfrom a 25th Amendment removal to a military coupis, as I wrote earlier this week, both dangerous and unrealistic. Meanwhile, negative partisanship guarantees that a durable partisan equilibrium persists. Even after the backlash to Trumps comments Tuesday, including from many staunch conservatives, two-thirds of Republicans now say they back Trumps comments.

Instead, Trump will have to muddle through, no doubt with the accent on mud. Are there ways that presidents can fight their way back to relevance once relegated to the duck pond? Its difficult, though not impossible. Barack Obama, for example, faced some notable defeats late in his termmost importantly, he was unable to get his nominee for a Supreme Court seat confirmedbut he also put together a long list of real (if fragile) achievements.

Trump has one big benefit that other lame-duck presidents havent: He has three and a half years, minimum, left in office. (Its hard to believe that hed win reelection if current trends persist, but then it was hard to believe that hed win election in the first place.) But there are also several reasons he might be particularly ill-equipped to bounce back.

A classic step for a lame-duck president is to concentrate on foreign affairs. Thats one area where the executive branch has wide latitude to act on its own, without requiring the cooperation of a recalcitrant Congress. Trump doesnt have cohesive enough a foreign-policy vision to point to obvious goals. Indeed, he ran on a platform of retrenchment on the world stage, not greater involvement. Where he has ventured overseas, trouble has awaited. He has feuded with the leaders of some of the closest U.S. allies. Even Britains Theresa May, who has worked to maintain a decorous relationship with Trump, delivered a veiled criticism of Trumps reaction to the violence in Charlottesville. Besides, Trump may have less leeway in foreign affairs than most presidents. Congress has already shown an unusual degree of willingness to meddle in executive-branch autonomy. Angry about Russian interference in the election and worried about Trumps proposed rapprochement with the Kremlin, Congress overwhelmingly passed new sanctions, over the White Houses objections.

Trump could try to work domestically through executive action, too, but hed face challenges there as well. With a sheaf of executive orders at the start of his term, the president already ordered much of what he had identified as possible through the White House. Finding new and more creative ways to flex presidential muscle would require a well-staffed, orderly, and experienced administration able to work as a well-oiled machine, and theres no indication that exists.

There is one other possibility: a crisis. In moments of catastrophe, citizens like to rally around even an unpopular president, seeking unity and leadership. But the signs so far about how Trump might handle a genuine, huge crisis are not promising. In fact, given the chance to deal with a crisis, he has often just made things worse for himself. Over the last week, his improvised language inflamed an already dangerous standoff with North Korea. Then he turned a national tragedy in Charlottesville into a huge personal liability for himself out of an inability to simply condemn racism and leave it at that.

The result is that, as improbable as it seems, the nation could be in for an indefinite period much like the current one. If Donald looks like a lame duck, swims like a lame duck, and quacks like a lame duck, theres a good chance hes a lame duck.

See the article here:
Donald Trump Is a Lame-Duck President - The Atlantic

Paris Hilton is backtracking after defending President Donald Trump.

Last November, two days after Trump was elected, Marie Claires Irin Carmon headed to Mexico tointerview Hilton for a wide-ranging piece about her career, her sex tape and the new president. That interview was published in the September 2017 issue of the magazine, and the socialite-turned-DJ is seemingly having some regrets.

Before he was POTUS, Trump who is friends with Hiltons parents went on Howard Sterns radio show and said he found 12-year-old Hilton attractive. While speaking with Carmon, Hilton who called herself a feminist during the same interview brushed off the remark, saying Trump was always so respectful. She also appeared to brush off his grab them by the pussy comment and the multiple allegations of sexual assault against him, saying his accusers are just trying to get attention and get fame.

Twitter users called Hilton out for victim-blaming and for being a faux-feminist opportunist.

I want to apologize for my comments from an interview I did last year, she said in a statement to Us Weekly Wednesday. They were part of a much larger story and I am regretful that they were not delivered in the way I had intended.

I was speaking about my own experiences in life and the role of media and fame in our society and it was never my intention for my comments to be misapplied almost a year later, she added, saying shes deeply hurt and deeply sorry.

Moving forward I will continue to do what I can to be an advocate for girls and women with the hopes of providing a louder voice for those who may desperately need it, she said.

Last year, Hilton publicly stated she voted for Trump in the 2016 election, but in the Marie Claire interview she said she didnt vote at all.

Frank Micelotta Archive via Getty Images

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Paris Hilton Apologizes For Comments Defending Donald Trump - HuffPost

President Donald Trump said hes sad to see Confederate statues and monuments being taken down around the United States.

Confederate memorials are being removed around the U.S. after a white supremacist protest to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned into a weekend of racist violence in whichone woman was killed.

According to USA Today, there are more than 700 Confederate monuments installed in public areas across 31 states.Washington, D.C.; Lexington, Kentucky; Memphis, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama; and other places are taking steps to remove their monuments.

Baltimorequietly removed its remaining Confederate monuments Tuesday night in the wake of the Charlottesville incident.On Monday night, protesters tore down a Confederate monument in Durham, North Carolina.

Trump previously expressed worry about the removal of these statues during an unhinged press conference on Tuesday.

You really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop? Trump asked.

His tweets on the issue came after White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told The New York Timeshe thought Trump could win a battle with the left over the statues, arguing Trumps rhetoric connects with the American people about their history, culture and traditions.

The race-identity politics of the left wants to say its all racist, Bannon said. Just give me more. Tear down more statues. Say the revolution is coming. I cant get enough of it.

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Donald Trump 'Sad To See' Confederate Monuments Being Taken Down - HuffPost

Last November, a week after Donald Trump was elected President, I spoke on the phone with a fifty-five-year-old divorced college graduatehe declined to specify his alma materwho had been working as a construction manager in Sacramento, California. The man, who identified himself as James Zarth, said that he was Grand Klaliff, or second in command, of the California realm of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a subgroup of the notorious white-supremacist group, which, according to a recent estimate from the Southern Poverty Law Center , has five or six thousand members in the United States. Previously a member of the White Aryan Resistance and various skinhead groups, Zarth said that he joined the K.K.K. when Barack Obama first became President. I did a lot of soul-searching, Zarth told me in November. At first, I thought it was a hate group. Id been a skinhead for a long time, but I figured out that a lot of them are just into drugs and violencetheyre not helping their own race. The K.K.K. is one of the only white-nationalist organizations thats family-oriented and looking out for white rights.

Zarth crudely articulated the many things that he and the K.K.K. hoped and expected that Trump would do for white nationalists. I had been put in touch with him by James Spears, a Great Titan of the Loyal White Knights, whod responded to a message that I sent to a general-inquiry address listed on the groups Web site. (The site has since been removed.) I sent the e-mail after learning about a Trump victory parade that the Knights were planning to hold the following monththe first parade theyd had cause to hold in eight years, Zarth saidat a then undisclosed location in Pelham, North Carolina. The planned parade had been widely reported in the media, and I aimed to write about what went down. But the night before it was set to take place, at a pre-rally gathering, the leader of the California chapter stabbed another member of the group ; he and another Loyal White Knight were arrested. The parade the next day amounted to chants of white power yelled from a few dozen cars. Even the simple task of carrying out a highly publicized parade to celebrate President-elect Trumps victory turned into a farce , the S.P.L.C. wrote. It had been evident for a while that many white supremacists liked TrumpEvan Osnos had reported on this for The New Yorker in the summer of 2015 and the failed rally didnt seem to merit the attention that the K.K.K. obviously craved. My editor suggested that the reporting Id done could come in handy down the road. We shelved the piece for the time being.

Ive been thinking about that conversation with Zarth all week, ever since white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia , and one of them allegedly killed a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, with his car, injuring nearly twenty others. After Trumps press conference on Tuesday , in which the President of the United States equated the mostly peaceful counter-protest with the Nazi-themed violence and Klan-style rhetoric of the other side, I pulled out my audio recorder and listened to Zarths words again.

I noticed something was going wrong in America decades ago, Zarth told me. He mentioned the TV shows Father Knows Best, Andy Griffith, The Brady Bunch, and Little House on the Prairie. Usually, those shows had a Christian moral, he said. But now that the Jews own the majority of the media stations, theyre showing things that are against Gods law, like race-mixing and homosexuality. He pointed to Americas diverse population as its primary source of violence and conflict. We advocate for living separately within America. We are a benevolent, fraternal, Christian, white-civil-rights organization, he claimed. We are for family and for God. We see our race and our heritage going away and being harmed by intermixing with these mongrel races. It has to stop.

He added, I think we now have a President with some of the same ideals. He insisted that the Loyal White Knights had been growing since Trumps victory. When I asked him for specifics, he replied, I cant give out exact numbersthats why were called the invisible empire. But I can tell you this: since Trump has been elected, people have been calling us left and right wanting to join, from all walks of life. The claim was difficult to fact-check. In February, the S.P.L.C. published a report asserting that the number of operating U.S. hate groups rose from eight hundred and ninety-two, in 2015, to nine hundred and seventeen, in 2016. The radical right was energized by the candidacy of Donald Trump, the report read.

Zarth, not surprisingly, listed illegal immigration, welfare reform, and the loss of manufacturing jobs as issues that Trump was getting right, and he said that he liked Trumps politically incorrect talk. He doesnt have a filter between his brain and mouth, Zarth said. Its hurt him a couple times. But I believe everything hes saidincluding being a Christianis true. Hes not a politician. People voted him in because they are tired of the same old establishment. We want a person we can relate to. When I asked how, exactly, he related to a self-proclaimed billionaire from New York, Zarth responded, Hes a white Christian man. Zarth seemed unfamiliar with Steve BannonI think hell make a good senior adviser was all he could muster about himand he had no idea who Reince Priebus was. Some of his positions were surprising; he expressed a concern for the environment, for instance, and professed a belief in global warming. But slowing the destruction of the earth was not, for Zarth or the K.K.K., an urgent issue.

He told me how Will Quigg, the leader of the Loyal White Knights, had made headlines in March, 2016, when he said that he was endorsing Hillary Clinton. Quigg tweeted after Trumps victory that hed been using reverse psychology . When you have a group with the stigma of the K.K.K. endorsing a candidate, Zarth said, of course the candidate is going to disavow, because its going to make people think hes a racist. Thats why we stopped endorsing Trump. If these other white-nationalist organizations and people were thinking straight, they would have never endorsed Trump, either. They should have kept it to themselves.

Zarth claimed to disapprove of hate crimes, including those that had already occurred after Trumps election. He spoke at length about the supposed underreporting of black-on-white crime. When I asked him if there were any recent instances of white-on-black violence that he condemned, he thought for a moment, then mentioned Dylann Roof , the young white killer of nine black parishioners at a Charleston, South Carolina church, in June, 2015. When he went and shot and killed those people in church, I did not agree with that, Zarth said. If he had that in his mind, that he wanted to go out and kill some negroeswe do not want people to go out and do that, Zarth said. He added, But if he would have went down to a drug neighborhood and shot a whole bunch of drug dealers and criminals, felons, I would not have felt as bad. But he should not have went to a church and killed those people while they were praying to their God, whatever God that may be.

Just then, Zarth received a call on another phone, and his ringtone, a few notes from Lynyrd Skynyrds Sweet Home Alabama, played. I asked him if he and the K.K.K. really had complete confidence in Trump. He could fall back and not do any of his campaign promises now that hes in there, Zarth said. Hes already softened up his stance on Muslims. But I dont think theres a chance of him softening all the way.

This week, I talked to Adam Domby, a professor of Southern history at the College of Charleston, about what he thought had changed for white supremacists since Trumps election. We need to acknowledge that these beliefs have always been here and are not on the fringe, he said. Now people are just being open about it. They have taken off their hoods and are lighting their faces up for all to see with tiki torches. Thats a feeling of empowerment beyond measurement. No longer are they embarrassed or fearful of repercussions. In part, they see their views as validated by the election.

I called Zarth back, too, a day after the rally in Charlottesville. I wanted to know if this is what Zarth had hoped for, if this violence was a kind of fulfillment for him and the Klan. A woman who would not identify herself answered the phone. At first, she claimed that she didnt know who Zarth was. Then she said that she simply didnt know where he was. When I pressed her about his feelings about the state of things, referring to the violence in Charlottesville specifically and the matter of race relations more generally, she said, Hes happy.

Read more:
What a White Supremacist Told Me After Donald Trump Was Elected - The New Yorker