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He's had a handful -- two-ish? -- weeks that could reasonably be described by neutral observers as "good." The rest of his weeks as President fall somewhere between not very good and disastrously bad.

Below, I've ranked Trump's six worst weeks. (I am defining a week for the purposes of this discussion as Monday-Sunday.) What weeks did I miss? Send me an email at cillizza@cnn.com and I'll add to this post if need be!

Thus began a months-long (and still ongoing) attempt by Trump's senior staff to find something (anything!) that backed up this claim. So far: Nothing.

After his White House works to trace the Comey firing to a memo outlining his many mistakes in the 2016 election penned by deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Trump does an interview with Lester Holt in which he tells the NBC anchor: "What I did is I was going to fire Comey, my decision. I was going to fire regardless of recommendation. (Rosenstein) made a recommendation. He's highly respected. Very good guy, very smart guy, the Democrats like him, the Republicans like him, he made a recommendation. But regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey."

Technically, this week isn't over yet -- Trump still has 48 hours to make it even worse. But, even if he does nothing bad between now and Sunday, the damage done to not only to his presidency but also the Republican party and the country is significant.

Excerpt from:
Donald Trump has been president for 30 weeks. This is the worst one. - CNN

The year was 1979 and the 33-year-old Trump, hungry to build what would come to be known as Trump Tower, had bought the aging Bonwit building and planned to knock it down. Standing nine floors above the street below, though, were two large Bas-Relief Art Deco sculptures. In an ordeal that even Trump admitted caused him problems, the real estate developer would tear the sculptures down, horrifying art and culture experts in New York and landing him on the front page of The New York Times.

"Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments," Trump wrote over two tweets. "You can't change history, but you can learn from it."

He added: "Also, the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!"

Trump, born and raised in Queens, had long dreamed of moving his family's outer borough real estate company to Manhattan. And nothing would signal his rise to prominence more than putting his name on a soaring building on Fifth Avenue.

In "Art of the Deal," the businessman-turned-politician's 1987 book, Trump writes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art asked him if he would donate the sculptures in 1979, shortly before he was about to demolish the Bonwit building.

"I said that if the friezes could be saved, I'd be happy to donate them to the museum," Trump writes.

But then cost and time got in the way.

Trump recalls that his crew came to him and told him the panels were "a lot heavier" than they thought. To save them, Trump writes, would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and would delay the project by "several weeks."

"I just wasn't prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a few Art Deco sculptures that I believed were worth considerably less, and perhaps not very much at all," he writes. "So I ordered my guys to rip them down."

It took mere hours for New York's art world to react with horror

Ashton Hawkins, the vice president of the board at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, told The New York Times at the time that Trump's decision was "extraordinary."

"We are certainly very disappointed and quite surprised," Hawkins said in a front-page Times piece titled "Developer Scraps Bonwit Sculptures".

A later New York Times editorial would savage Trump: "Obviously big buildings do not make big human beings, nor do big deals make art experts."

Even the young Trump was surprised by the reaction.

"What I didn't count on was the outrage this would create," he wrote. "It was not the sort of publicity you like to get. Looking back, I regret that I had the sculptures destroyed."

He added: "I'm not convinced they were truly valuable ... but I understand now that certain events can take on a symbolic importance. Frankly, I was too young, and perhaps in too much of a hurry, to take that into account."

Trump has offered varying opinions on the origins of violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia left one counter-protester and two police officers dead. The conflict between white supremacists and counter-protesters centered on the city's attempts to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Trump, during a confrontational news conference on Tuesday, suggested that if statues to Lee were to come down, former Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be next.

"You really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop," he said.

Trump later said that taking down statues like that would fundamentally alter history.

"You're changing history," he said. "You're changing culture."

Trump is not shying away from a debate over Confederate monuments and his top White House aides are pushing the debate on Twitter and in interviews.

That Bannon's theory that any discussion of Confederate monuments is politically beneficial for Trump has striking similarities to the lesson Trump took away from the Bonwit building controversy.

"Ironically, the whole controversy may have ended up being a plus for me in terms of selling Trump Tower," Trump wrote, noting that future stories would not draw "a tremendous amount of attention to Trump Tower" and help sell apartments.

"I learned a lesson from that experience: good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all," Trump wrote. "Controversy, in short, sells."

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The time Donald Trump wasn't worried about the 'history and culture' of sculptures - CNN

UPDATED with George C. Wolfe signing letter: All 17 citizen members of thePresidents Committee on the Arts and Humanities have resigned in the wake of President Donald Trumps stance on the violence last weekend in Charlottesville, VA. The committee, which includes actor Kal Penn and former Sen. Ted Kennedys widowVicki, penned a joint letter informing the administration of their decision.

At first the only member who didnt sign the letter was playwright George C. Wolfe, a fact that did not go unnoticed on social media. A later version of the letter tweeted out by Penn included Wolfes signature. No explanation, but Penn did add, PCAH is an official agency, that makes this the 1st White House department to resign.

Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions, the joint letter said in part (read it in full below).

Rex/Shutterstock

It is the fourth such presidential advisory board to shutter in the wake of Trumps stunning press conference Tuesday in the lobby of his Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he doubled down on his original comments that both sides were to blame for violent confrontations at a neo-Nazi and white supremacist rally in the Virginia city a week ago. Heather Heyer was killed in a car attack, and dozens more were injured in clashes with protestors.

After Tuesdays presser, CEOs began dropping from TrumpsManufacturing Jobs Initiative and Strategy & Policy Forum groups. Yesterday, the president disbanded both, and announced a similar council focused on what was to be a bipartisan topic infrastructure would be shuttered before it could begin.

The PCAH, whose members were appointed by President Barack Obama and held over by the Trump administration (they had not yet met under Trump), includes government officials and private citizens and features the heads of 12 federal agencies with cultural programs including the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities; the U. S. Departments of Education, Treasury and State; the Smithsonian Institution; the Library of Congress; the National Gallery of Art; and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Its honorary chairman is First Lady Melania Trump.

Todays letter was signed by Penn, Kennedy, Wolfe, Paula Boggs, Chuck Close, Richard Cohen, Fred Goldring, Howard L. Gottlieb, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anne Luzzatto, Thom Mayne, Eric Ortner, Ken Solomon, Caroline Taylor, Jill Cooper Udall, Andrew Weinstein and John Lloyd Young.

Heres the full text of the groups letter today, as tweeted by Penn:

Original post:
Another Presidential Council, This One Focused On The Arts, Quits On Donald Trump - Deadline

Former Vice President Al Gore was asked if he had any advice for President Donald Trump.

He offered up just one word.

Resign,Gore said in an interview with LADbible posted online on Thursday.

Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, made the comment while promoting his new film, An Inconvenient Sequel.

Last year, Gore visited Trump Tower after the election to discuss climate change in what he called a productive session.

His relationship with the president has been much less productive since.

I went to Trump Tower after the election, he told Stephen Colbert last month. I thought that there was a chance he would come to his senses. But I was wrong.

Check out the above video to see Gores message for how voters can help influence politicians in the climate change fight.

Continue reading here:
Al Gore Calls On Donald Trump To Resign - HuffPost

By Michael Tesler By Michael Tesler August 18 at 6:00 AM

Two days after Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine African American worshipers at the historically black Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C. Pictures of Roof holding Confederate flags soon surfaced and so, too, did calls from Democratic and Republican politicians to remove the flag and other Confederate symbols from government property.

Trump was one of those politicians. Within a week of the shooting, Trump came out in favor of taking the Confederate flag down from South Carolinas Capitol, adding, I think they should put it in the museum and let it go. Politico summarized his position: Trump to Confederate flag: Youre fired!

Of course, Trump took a much different position on Confederate symbols this week. He described removing Confederate statues as changing history changing culture. He defended marchers in a white supremacist rally that turned violent, saying they were protesting the removal of a very, very important statue. And, according to a White House source, he expressed sympathy with nonviolent protesters who he said were defending their heritage.

Trumps shift on Confederate symbols parallels his evolving connection to Republican voters a majority of whom, according to a poll taken shortly after the Charleston church shooting, opposed both efforts to ban displays of the Confederate flag on government property and to remove tributes to those who fought for the Confederacy from public places.

After President Trump's most recent rhetoric about Charlottesville inflamed even more criticism, a handful of GOP lawmakers, including Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), are criticizing Trump directly, while others stay silent. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

In those initial days of the campaign, when Trump came out against the Confederate flag, more Republicans rated him unfavorably than favorably (48 percent to 44 percent), and he was the preferred choice of only about 10 percent of Republican primary voters at that time.

But it didnt take long for Trump to win Republicans over, especially Republicans who support the Confederate flag.

In the Public Religion Research Institutes September 2015 American Values Survey (AVS), 60 percent of Republicans who thought that the Confederate flag symbolizes Southern pride rated Trump favorably. He was rated about 20 points less favorably among Republicans who thought the flag represents racism, but those individuals make up lessthan a fifth of the GOP.

But Trump grew disproportionately more popular among Confederate flag sympathizers in the party over the course of the campaign. In the October 2016 AVS, nearly 80 percent of Republicans who thought the flag symbolizes Southern pride rated Trump favorably, compared withjust 45 percent of those who thought it represented racism.

Racial attitudes are a strong determinant of public opinion on the Confederate flag. Thus, the pattern here is consistent with several analyses showing that attitudes about race and ethnicity were deeply implicated in Trumps rise.

Indeed, Trump performed best among Republicans who held unfavorable views of African Americans, Muslims, immigrantsand minority groups in general. Perceptions that whites are treated unfairly, and that the countrys growing diversity is a bad thing, were also significantly associated with support for Trump in the primaries. These attitudes were also stronglylinked to general election vote choices.

The upshot is that Trump voters were 50 points more likely than Clinton voters to say that the Confederate flag has more to do with Southern pride than racism in the 2016 AVS (80 percent to 30 percent, respectively), and 60 points more likely than Clinton supporters to oppose removing the statue of Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville (81 percent to 21 percent, respectively).

Its not too surprising, then, that Trump went from firing the Confederate flag in June 2015 to defending and even sympathizing with white supremacists protesting the removal of Confederate symbols. It shows again how Trump has increasingly appealed to his base as his approval among the rest of the country dips.

And Trumps base sees nothing wrong with Confederate symbols.

Michael Tesler is associate professor of political science at the University of California at Irvine and author of Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era.

See the article here:
In 2015, Donald Trump said the Confederate flag should go in a museum. Here's what changed. - Washington Post