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President Donald Trump speaks at Kirkwood Community College on June 21, 2017, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

I was mulling, as one does, over this presidency, and something crystallized in my head that I had not quite grasped before. Its policies are best described as simply perverse. The new Senate health-care bill is just the latestshining example. As Peter Suderman explains, it certainly isnt based on any serious conservative ideas about reforming health care; it has no vision of how it wants health care to be organized; the loss of health care for the working poor will be most intense in Republican districts; and, just as important, a huge amount of it is simply kicked into the future and could easily be forestalled or nullified by future Congresses and presidents. For good measure, by ending many of the taxes in the bill that make it work, and by removing the individual mandate, itriskssendingthe insurance markets into a deeper crisis.

So what on earth is the point? For Trump, it seems to me, the whole point is to have a win. He doesnt give a shit about what the bill actually contains. Hell just lie about it afterward and assume his cult followers will believe him. For Ryan, its just a way to make a future tax cut for the superrich more budget-friendly, while pushing the political costs of shredding Medicaid onto some future sucker.

And then you think about those tax cuts Ryan wants so badly. We are told that these cuts will spark so much growth they will pay for themselves and more. And yet if there is one thing we really do know by now, it is that this strategy has spectacularly failed and failed again to work. Reagans tax cuts left the U.S. with an unprecedented peacetime deficit; George W. Bush inherited a small surplus and, after his tax cuts didnt spur higher growth, handed Obama a Treasury close to bankrupt. In Kansas, the exact same strategy has incurred so much debt that a supermajority of the legislature, led by Republicans, have junked it. To pursue it a third time on a national scale is the definition of madness.

The only theme I can infer is this: Whatever Obama did, Trump will try to undo.

We are also living in an era of extreme inequality. Any responsible politician would be trying to find a way to ameliorate this, if for no other reason than it is deeply dangerous for the stability of our society and the health of our democracy. And yet the policy of the Republicans is to further increase such inequality to levels beyond even the robber-baron era. Again, the only word for this is perverse.

Ditto, for that matter, the idea that coal is the future of energy, and that climate change is a hoax. There was absolutely no point in withdrawing from the nonbinding Paris Accord which is why Trump is now lying by claiming, as he did last Wednesday night, that it was binding. It was an utterly pointless way to isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world, and cede leadership to China. There wasreally no point at all in trashing the modest opening to Cuba under Obama, poisoning relations, and then just fiddling with the details.

Elsewhere in foreign policy, we have just begun a deepening of the war in Afghanistan, the longest in American history, with no strategy in place. Weve also junked the very careful limits that Obama put on the war against ISIS, leading to increasingly dangerous conflict with the Russians. And we now have a broader Middle East policy that has needlessly junked the core gain of the Obama years. The opening to Iran gave the U.S. far more leverage in the region, balancing out our previous Sunni commitments with a Shiite counterweight. Now Trump has fully committed the United States to one side of an intra-Muslim divide, while trashing Qatar, which houses the most important military base in the entire region. Again: perverse.

And what on earth was the purpose of equivocating about the criticalcommitment to Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, undermining the core underpinning of the Atlantic alliance and then affirming it anyway? We havent even gotten commitments to more defense spending from the Europeans, apart from what Obama had managed to get them to agree to already. But what we have achieved is an unprecedented rupture in relations with most of the key European allies.

It is also, frankly, perverse to ignore Russias blatant attempt to disrupt our elections and to keep reaching out to Putin when the Congress will rightly deepen sanctions anyway, and Putin willpursue his own ambitions regardless. None of this is coherent strategy, and almost all of it counterproductive.

The only theme I can infer is this: Whatever Obama did, Trump will try to undo.The perversity is the flip side of spite.

Nathaniel Franks new book on the long fight for marriage equality, Awakening: How Gays And Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America, has one thing going for it: Its a professional work of history. The only book on the movement we have so far wasnt. Jo Beckers hagiography of Chad Griffin, Forcing the Spring my review is here was an outright attack on everyone who had worked for the cause decades before Griffin tried to pass himself off as the gay Rosa Parks (yes, the book actually called him that). Awakening is therefore by default the best account we have, but its also a truly impressive, nuanced, fair account in its own right. Its astonishing to me that the New York Times and the Washington Post have yet to review it.It relays the lung-filling highs and stomach-churning lows of the long trek toward gay dignity. Better still, it brings into focus the small band of disparate individuals who somehow brought what was unimaginable into reality. Many people think marriage was won overnight. This book proves it wasnt.

But its chief merit is that it explains for straight people and the younger gay and lesbian generations just how deeply divisive this issue was in the gay world for so long all the way back to the 1950s, when the story really starts. The core gay divide in the gay world has always been between those who wanted equality and dignity in mainstream society and those who wanted to revolutionize and subvert the mainstream itself. Civil marriage was an issue where this divide was perhaps deepest. You can go back to the old gay magazine, One, published by the Mattachine Society, and see exactly the arguments that erupted later. In 1953, Frank notes, it ran an essay called Homosexual Marriage? The question mark was more like a gasp. In a screed against the normalization of gays, it worried thatequal rights means equal responsibilities. Equal freedoms means equal limitations. A decade later, in 1963, a counterpoint appeared: Lets Push Homophile Marriage. The term homophile itself was an attempt to redefine gay men as more than just sexual. The argument: It seems to me that when society finally accepts homophiles as a valid minority with minority rights, it is going first of all to accept married homophiles. We are, after all, closest to their ideals. In some ways, the gay-rights movement has spent the last few decades having that same fight over and over again.

But it is, of course, more complicated and interesting than that. Marriage equality was both subversiveandintegrationist. It subverted nascent gay culture and traditional heterosexual assumptions. And yet it was also a uniquely powerful symbol of integration, equality,and a common humanity. It was based on a submerged reality, which was that many gay men and especially lesbians had always been in committed relationships and that that experience was a vital bridge with heterosexuals, who usually comprised the rest of our families. The proof of that is in the number of gays and lesbians now in civil marriages: around a million.

Nonetheless, for the longest time, the fight for marriage had almost no constituency in the post-1969 gay world too conservative for some, way too utopian for others and was kept aloft by a tiny group of activists, lawyers, and writers, who never gave up, despite setbacks at almost every turn. The biggest gay-rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, for example, remained hostile to pushing for marriage all the way through to the mid-aughts.The central figure from the get-go, Evan Wolfson, had to fight the rest of the movement continuously to keep the dream alive. Its easy, in the wake of victory, to forget that story but Frank covers its nuances better than anything else Ive read. And he gives everyone their due. Toward the end of the book, he focuses a little too much on the litigation and not enough on the culture, but this is a small flaw in an otherwise indispensable account.

What resolved the gay divide, in the end, was the religious right. When George W. Bush endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004, as Frank explains, almost everyone in the gay movement realized that something fundamental to our human dignity and civil rights was at stake. Old ideological divisions briefly evaporated in the heat of the struggle, and the fast-rising support for the idea among gays and lesbians themselves turned into a grassroots revolution. The long game eventually, cumulatively brought the breakthrough.What began as as light covering of snow, easily brushed away, became, snowflake by snowflake, a drift, which eventually precipitated an avalanche. We live in the wake of it.

The other day, I managed to see the new documentary by David France, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, at the Provincetown Film Festival. It shines a piercing light on another cleavage in the gay world. And thats the long tension between gays and lesbians and transgender people. Theres an astonishing clip in the movieof a gay-rights rally for New York Pride in 1973, when a transgender instigator of Stonewall, Sylvia Rivera, forced herself onstage and grabbed the microphone. And as she began her impromptu speech, you can see and hear the crowd booing, shouting, and heckling at the interloper. Its a riveting and horrifying moment. For all the high-flown talk about the LGBT community, the truth is, these three groups have often had little in common apart from marginalization. Many gay men have sadly long been uncomfortable around transgender people; and many lesbians have bristled at times at the notion that transgender women are trulythe same as women who have been physiologically such from birth.

And then there was Marsha P. Johnson, an icon of Stonewall and the lost gay world of the West Village in the 1980s and early 1990s. I actually dont know quite how to identify her. She dressed as a woman but also as a man. Her family refer to her in the film interchangeably as he and she. She floated through all these divisions and seemed to belong in every camp. Was she a drag queen? Or transgender? Or a cross-dresser? In the end, I think, her charisma transcended all these identities. She was an individual, and in some ways, a saint. Gentle, African-American, always beaming, bringing outcasts into her home, shimmering through Pride like a vision of divine love, she seemed to have no enemies in an often contentious community. And she died like a martyr, her body suddenly washing up at the Christopher Street piers in 1992, quickly designated a suicide, with only the most cursory of investigations.

No one who knew her believed she killed herself. And the movie tries, all these years later, to solve the mystery of her death. Sadly, it doesnt quite deliver the payoff you want, but you learn so much along the way it doesnt really matter. As an evocation of a different era, the movie is quite wonderful. I have just two quibbles. Theres an implication that the Stonewall riots were instigated by trans people of color, who were then erased by the white cis middle class. Thisis far too pat. Its critical that the key trans figures at Stonewall be recognized. Ditto gay men of color. Putting them front and center on that fateful night is vital for the historical record, and Im glad this movie exists for that reason alone. But you only have to look at the actual photographs of the riots to see masses of young gay white men as well, lining up on the streets, jumping into the melee. And in some ways, it was the rebellion of those with much more to lose that marked a shift in consciousness.

Theres also a statement in the movie that there was no gay-rights movement before Stonewall. This is just untrue, and it erases the legacy of the early gay rights pioneers in the 1950s, like Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, and Harry Hay, who founded the movement in the terrifying era of the lavender scare. People who risked their lives and careers marching in front of the White House in the 1950s, who started the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, who laid the foundations for marriage equality, gays in the military, nondiscrimination in employment, and coined the term Gay is Good, deserve not to be forgotten. This movie wipes them from history.

But there I go again, I suppose. It wouldnt be a gay movie without an internal gay controversy. And the internecine fights will never fully end because the accident of homosexual orientation more than any other knows no single demographic, or gender, or race, or class. To form a coherent movement out of that massive, random diversity was never going to be easy. Pride Marches this year have beendisrupted and halted by groups connected with Black Lives Matter who oppose the mainstream corporate support and openly gay police organizations that so many of usregard as huge achievements of integration, rather than blights.Butpurist factionshave always triedto impose a singular vision on a very non-singular group of people. It has always been that way, from the very beginning. Love breaks through every human identity, and so must a movement rooted in the search for love. And of that divisiveness and contentiousness, spats and feuds, marches and countermarches, and rare, fleeting moments of unity, I am, in some, yes, perverseway, proud.

See younext Friday.

Should Democrats in places like Georgia keep trying to rebuild white support? Or should they focus on minority mobilization? The debate goes on.

A new report suggests Obama knew about Putins intervention in the 2016 election and its aims, but didnt move aggressively until it was too late.

The emergence of a new game plan, from persuasion to motivation.

Look, I dont know who you are, wiseass, Biden reportedly said.

One surprised music critic reviews Mystified.

The Justice Departments handling of the Clinton email investigation is at the center of the senators questions.

Dean Heller of Nevada said he could not support legislation as written. Now things get dicey for Mitch McConnell.

Turns out, the former FBI director was attending an event for a nonprofit that works with abused children.

D.C. might still be revolving around legislative gridlock and investigations. But the electoral landscape would be very different.

A U.S. representative said he couldnt back the resolution which condemned violence against women because it supported safe abortion.

Obamacares popularity seems to be peaking just as Republicans get closer to taking it down in legislation that is not popular at all.

The Saudi-led coalition wants the tiny Gulf state to cut off ties with Iran and close Al Jazeera, ultimatums Qatar isnt likely to meet.

Change is slow. Thats why we have to keep working.

She met with a handful of Republican senators this week, but they couldnt agree on a plan.

The president also admitted that his tape bluff was an attempt to intimidate Comeys testimony.

A quick break from the off-camera briefings.

Inclusion of this House deal in the Senate bill shows McConnell playing the long game. But it could encourage shakedowns by fence-sitting senators.

This is why the Senate bill can ignore everything the moderates demanded and still probably pass.

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Andrew Sullivan: The Perverse Presidency of Donald Trump - NYMag - New York Magazine

WASHINGTON The merger between the Trump Organization and the Trump administration continued on Friday with the announced hire of Timothy Harleth, the director of rooms at Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., as the new White House chief usher.

President Donald Trump fired the previous usher, Angella Reid, on May 5. The chief usher oversees all White House household staff, and the position normally carries over from administration to administration. Ike Hoover, the longest-serving chief usher, worked for five different presidential administrations from 1909 to 1933.

Reid was the first chief usher to be dismissed by a president.Like Harleth, Reid, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, came from the hospitality industry as a former Ritz-Carlton executive.

In an unprecedented move, Trump has decided to maintain ownership of his multibillion-dollar business enterprise while serving as president. He has routinely used his position to advertise his various business properties, including his hotel in Washington. He has even fulfilled promises in his companys marketing materials that he could drop in on weddings held at his hotels and golf courses.

The decision to hire Harleth was announced in a press release from first lady Melania Trump.

I am so pleased that Timothy will be joining our team, she said in a statement. He was selected because of his impressive work history and management skills. My husband and I know he will be successful in this vital role within the White House.

See the original post here:
Donald Trump's Latest Hire Is Plucked Directly From His DC Hotel - HuffPost

Robert Farley, Eugene Kiely, Brooks Jackson and Lori Robertson, FactCheck.org Published 9:07 a.m. ET June 23, 2017 | Updated 16 hours ago

President Donald Trump, speaking at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, touted the wealth of some of his top economic advisers. 'In those particular positions, I just don't want a poor person," he commented. (June 22) AP

President Trump speaks during a rally on June 21, 2017, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.(Photo: Kelsey Kremer, The Des Moines Register)

The 2020 presidential campaign is more than 1,200 days away, but President Trump held yet another Make America Great Again rally this time in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And, as he did in past campaign speeches, Trump spoke for a long time and reeled off numerous false and misleading claims:

The president visited Iowa on June 21, making an official stop first at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids to talk about agriculture. Later that evening, Trump spoke to a large crowd in the nearby U.S. Cellular Center at a political rally organized by his campaign.

At his rally, Trump exaggerated when he claimed that his administration had deported MS-13 gang members by the thousands. It is by the hundreds, not thousands.

Trump, June 21: "The other thing that I have to tell you. You have a gang called MS-13. These are true animals. We are moving them out of the country by the thousands, by the thousands."

Trump is referring to the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a gang that was formed by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1980s. In April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that there are 10,000 MS-13 gang members in the United States. That made us skeptical of the claim that thousands already had been deported.

We asked the White House how many gang members have been removed under the Trump administration, but it declined to comment.

However, TheWashington Post on May 24 wrote that this year the U.S. has deported 398 gang members to El Salvador compared with 534 in all of 2016, according to Salvadoran government statistics. Those figures represent members of all El Salvador gangs, such as MS-13 and the 18th Street gang. MS-13 is primarily El Salvadoran, according to a 2005 National Gang Threat Assessment report by the National Alliance of Gang Investigators Association, though its possible there are members from other countries.

Danielle Bennett, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told us in an email that so far in fiscal year 2017 from Oct. 1, 2016, to June 4, 2017 ICE has removed 2,798 gang members. But that includes all gang members, not just MS-13 members. She said ICE does not track gang removals by specific gang, so it does not know how many of the 2,798 were MS-13 members. The 2,798 removals also span both the Obama and Trump administrations, so not all of the FY 2017 deportations occurred under Trump.

By contrast, there were 2,057 gang members deported in fiscal 2016, so there has been an increase this fiscal year. We dont know how much of that is attributable to Trumps policies, but Bennett said that ICE under the Trump administration does specifically target MS-13 members for arrest and removal. That appears to be corroborated by the statistics from El Salvador published in the Post.

Bennett also said that ICE Homeland Security Investigations has made 602 criminal arrests and 170 administrative immigration arrests of MS-13 members so far in fiscal year 2017, as of June 4. But those figures include arrests made under both administrations, and the criminal arrests include citizens and noncitizens alike. For example, ICE reported last month that it arrested 104 MS-13 gang members as part of a six-week anti-gang enforcement operation that resulted in 1,378 arrests from March 26 to May 6. But nearly two-thirds of all those arrested were U.S. citizens, so most would not have been eligible for deportation.

Trump can take credit perhaps for cracking down on gang members and increasing the deportation rate of gang members from El Salvador. But he exaggerates when he says he is deporting MS-13 gang members by the thousands.

In the farming state of Iowa, Trump repeatedly played on the mythical claim that the federal estate tax is keeping family farms from being passed on to the next generation of farmers.

First, in his speech at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, the president said:

Trump: "I want to make sure the next generation of Americans has that opportunity [to live on a farm] as well. And, in particular, that includes your children and your grandchildren, and [we are] working very hard to get rid of the death tax so that those farms can be passed on."

And at his rally later that evening, he said the estate tax should go because, You should have a right to pass your farm onto your children and onto your grandchildren.

The fact is, however, that more than 99% of all farms are expected to be passed on without paying any estate tax at all. Repeal of the federal estate tax would benefit only the very wealthiest multimillionaires. And even the few who owe any tax may spread payments out over more than a decade.

A March 15 study by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that 38,328 farms would become part of estates in 2016, of which only 0.42% 161 estates would owe any estate tax at all.

All of those would be multimillion-dollar farms; only estates worth $5.45 million or more must file a return, and most of them dont owe any tax. For those who do owe tax, the study estimated that the average effective rate would be 20% with the option of spreading payments over 14 years.

Separate research by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center puts the number even lower. TPC estimates that only 50 farms and closely held businesses will pay any estate tax in 2017.

And regardless of whether the number is 161 or 50, those farm estates that owe any tax at all have the option to spread installments over 14 years at reduced interest rates.

When we wrote about this estate-tax myth in 2015, we reached out to Neil Harl, an Iowa State University professor of economics and agriculture, who has been studying the estate taxs impact on small businesses and farms for decades.

I have been involved in this area since 1958 and I have never seen land that had to be sold to pay the federal estate tax and I have conducted more than 3,400 seminars in 43 states which included federal estate tax planning, Harl wrote to us in an email. The italics were his. And for this article, we checked back with him, and he said that is still the case.

The lobbyists early on, I am told, concluded farmers as a group are more highly respected than billionaires, at least on this issue, he added.

Trump wrongly claimed that all insurance companies have left the individual market in Iowa. In fact, Medica Health announced on Monday that it would stay in the market statewide.

The president further claimed that insurers are leaving all of the states. There are currently 44 counties in three states with no insurer for 2018, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Trump:"In fact, I was just told by your great governor and ex-governor that your insurance companies have all fled the state of Iowa. Pretty sad, isnt it? Well, theyre Ill tell you what, theyre going from every state. Theyre leaving all of the states."

Iowas individual insurance marketplace where those who get Affordable Care Act subsidies buy their own insurance has had a shaky outlook for 2018. Before Medicas announcement on Monday, the state was unsure if the insurance carrier would participate next year. Two other insurers Aetna and Wellmark had already said they wouldnt sell plans on the state marketplace in 2018, leaving Medica as potentially the sole statewide insurer. (Gundersen Health Plan sells policies in five of the states 99 counties, Iowas Insurance Division says.)

Iowas Insurance Division said it was unlikely these carriers will remain in 2018 and proposed on June 12 to the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services a stopgap measure to retool the states ACA marketplace, where 72,000 Iowans now get coverage. That stopgap measure would change the income-based tax credits to age- and income-based assistance; create one plan rather than the metal levels of the ACA (bronze, silver, gold, platinum); and add funding to a state reinsurance program to help insurers cover high-cost individuals.

Iowas Insurance Division confirmed to FactCheck.org that Medica was the only insurer to file 2018 proposed rates by this weeks deadline; Gundersen did not.

Medicas announcement was widely reported, and it said its 2018 plans would come with a 43% average premium increase. Iowa Insurance Commissioner Doug Ommen said the state would still move forward with the stopgap proposal, and he expressed concern about Medicas average rate increase driving away younger and healthier policyholders.

Medica CEO John Naylor told CNBC on June 16 that the company wanted certainty from the federal government on whether cost-sharing subsidies for low-income individuals would continue. In late May, the Trump administration and House of Representatives asked for a 90-day delay to the federal lawsuit on the matter, according to Politico.

When the federal government set out certain rules, our expectations are that these rules are followed, Naylor told CNBC. So as we look at pricing we need to know are those rules going to be enforced in 2018.

Trump greatly exaggerated when he claimed that insurance companies are leaving all of the states. As of June 21, there were 44 counties, with 31,268 insurance enrollees, at risk of having no insurance carrier for 2018, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which relied on state rate filings and media reports. Those counties are in three states: Ohio, Missouri and Washington. However, the analysis notes that the insurer Centene said it would expand its insurance business in several states, including those three, but hasnt detailed exactly where.

Insurer participation in 2018 will not be finalized until fall of 2017, KFF says.

Trump again claimed he has reversed the trend of coal mining job losses, and misleadingly pointed to the opening of a new coal mine in Western Pennsylvania as evidence that his policies have led to a resurgence in coal mining. Neither of those is true.

Trump, June 21:"And weve ended the war on clean, beautiful coal. And were putting our miners back to work. In fact, you read about it, last week a brand new coal mine just opened in the state of Pennsylvania, first time in decades, decades. Weve reversed and 33,000 mining jobs have been added since my inauguration."

In fact, there has been an increase of about 1,000 coal mining jobs since January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For some perspective, there has been a total loss of nearly 40,000 coal mining jobs over the last five years.

How does Trump get to 33,000? After talking specifically about coal mining, Trump cites a figure for all mining jobs including gas, oil, metal ores, coal and nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying. There have been 32,600 total mining jobs added since January. We wrote about this issue once before when EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt tried a similar sleight of hand.

As for the grand opening of the Corsa Coal Companys Acosta Deep Mine near Pittsburgh on June 8, that had nothing to do with Trumps efforts to roll back coal regulations. As we wrote when Trump made similar boasts earlier this month, development of the Acosta mine began in September, two months before Trumps election victory.

Industry experts also tell us it is not emblematic of a resurgence of coal mining.

The Acosta mine produces a particular type of coal that is used to make steel. Thats a bit of a niche market in the coal industry, accounting for just 10% of coal production in the U.S. There has been a surge in demand for this kind of coal because of production problems overseas.

However, the vast majority of coal produced in the U.S. is thermal coal, the kind used to generate electricity. Consumption of that kind of coal has declined by nearly 18% between 2012 and 2016, mostly due to the surge in cheaper natural gas production driven by the shale revolution and to competition from renewable energy.

Environmental regulations which Trump has targeted also hurt coal mining, but according to an April report from Columbia Universitys Center on Global Energy Policy, those regulations were a significantly smaller factor in the shrinking of the coal industry. Industry experts say Trumps efforts to roll back those regulations might stem the decline in coal consumption, but would not bring coal mining jobs back to levels seen even a few years ago.

Trump touted his decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which he said would have been an economic catastrophe for the U.S. The agreement, which took effect last year, was signed by 195 countries and primarily aims to keep warming well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C.

The president pushed back at critics who said the pact is nonbinding.

And they all say its nonbinding, he said. Like hell its nonbinding. When we get sued by everybody because we thought it was nonbinding, then you can tell me it was nonbinding.

There are aspects of the agreement that are legally binding. Todd Stern, a former U.S. special envoy for climate change, explained in a press conference shortly before the agreement was reached that countries must submit nationally determined contributions that outline their emissions targets and report actions taken to meet those targets. But meeting emissions targets wasnt one of the legal requirements.

Stern, Dec. 2, 2015:"Weve made our position clear all year long that we support an agreement thats legally binding in many respects, including the elements of accountability of the agreement, the requirement to put forward a target, to do it with information that clarifies it, the obligation to report and be reviewed on your inventories and the actions youre taking in order to meet your target. Any number of rules and so forth. So a whole number of elements that are legally binding, but not the target itself."

Stern wrote a May 8 op-ed for TheWashington Post urging Trump to stay in the Paris Agreement. He said the president should keep in mind that as much as I would be sorry to see any retrenchment countries can adjust their emissions targets downward. The agreement permits it, and I know because I helped negotiate that flexibility.

Trump said he was promoting legislation that would bar new immigrants from receiving welfare for five years, but a 20-year-old law already does that. He introduced his proposal after promising to preserve the safety net for people who truly need help.

Trump, June 21: "But others dont treat us fairly. Thats why I believe the time has come for new immigration rules which say that those seeking admission into our country must be able to support themselves financially and should not use welfare for a period of at least five years. And well be putting in legislation to that effect very shortly."

But as The Hillpointed out, such a law already exists. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, signed into law in 1996 by then-president Bill Clinton, states that immigrants are not eligible for any Federal means-tested public benefit for a period of 5 years beginning on the date of the aliens entry into the United States. That would include such benefits as food stamps, Medicaid and Social Security.

As USA TODAY noted, there are some exceptions in the law for children and pregnant women, refugees, and active duty military or veterans. Its possible, the story notes, that Trump is seeking to toughen the restrictions, or to eliminate some exceptions. Trumps proposed FY 2018 budget notes that refugees are exempt from the five-year waiting period, and stresses the need to control the cost of benefits paid to immigrant-headed households. But it offered no details on how that would be accomplished beyond reducing the number of refugees, curbing illegal immigration and increasing merit-based legal immigration.

We reached out to Trumps press office for clarification, but it declined to provide any information on the record.

Trump also repeated the claim that the U.S. already has spent $6 trillion in the Middle East since 2001. It hasnt.

Trump, June 21:"After decades of rebuilding foreign nations all over the world, we are now rebuilding our nation. As of a few months ago, our country has spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, wasted. We started 16 years ago and its in far worse shape than it was 16 years ago by many times over. So, we spent all of this money, all of these lives."

Actually, the U.S. has spent about $1.7 trillion through fiscal year 2016, which ended Sept. 30, 2016, according to a February report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

During the campaign, Trump made the $6 trillion figure a talking point. For example, in Philadelphia, he gave a speech in which he said, We must declare our independence from a failed establishment that has squandered $6 trillion on foreign wars in the Middle East that never end and that we never win and that have made us less safe.

His campaign at the time cited a Reuters news article about a study that projected the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost the U.S. $6 trillion over the next four decades. The story said the cost estimate included future commitments, such as the medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans.

It may be that the wars eventually will cost the U.S. $6 trillion. However, Trump said the U.S. has spent $6 trillion (past tense) as of a few months ago. Thats not accurate.

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Trump rides high into Iowa stop after Congressional wins

Trump proposes a law that's existed for 20 years

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Fact check: Trump makes misleading claims at Iowa rally - USA TODAY

President Donald Trump riffed on Democrats at his campaign-style rally in Iowa on Wednesday, saying the party has been "unbelievably nasty" while at the same time admitting he hasn't made bipartisanship easy.

I am making it a little bit hard to get their support, but who cares," Trump said Wednesday.

The President said Democrats were not willing to work with Republicans on the pending health care legislation at his Wednesday night rally, saying that even if the GOP came up with the "greatest health care plan in the history of the world" they would not get a single vote from Democrats. Democrats generally oppose the Republicans' plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Obama's signature legislative achievement. And in the Senate, Republicans have been working on a bill to partner the House's replacement plan largely in secretwithout input from a large swath of members of both parties.

For a little over an hour, the President worked to convince the crowd of supporters some of whom donned "Make America Great Again" hats and held signs that his administration is making "tremendous progress" back in Washington. In signature Trump fashion, he took jabs at the "fake news media" complaining that the news cameras never show the crowds at his rallies.

Trump also couldn't help but take a little victory lap, chiding Democrats over their disappointing loss in the Georgia special election on Tuesday. After that win and the win in South Carolina, Trump said his party is "5 and 0" when it comes to special elections. "The truth is, people love us," Trump said. "All we do is win, win, win."

In his effort to rouse his supporters, Trump touted his recent announcement on changes to U.S.-Cuba policy, his decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords, his tax and infrastructure plans, and the tough approach his administration has taken to immigration enforcement.

On Wednesday, Trump told the Iowa crowd that the southern border wall he promised to build and make Mexico pay for could feature solar panels. "Thats one of the places that solar really does work," Trump said, noting the hot climate in the southwest, where a border wall would primarily be built. "I think we could make it look beautiful, too."

Though the President poked at Democrats, he did concede that unity on Capitol Hill would be good for the country. "Just think about what a unified American nation could achieve," he said.

During the 2016 election, many independent Iowa voters came out in support of Trump and helped him win the state. The President's Wednesday night rally marked his first trip to the state since his inauguration.

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President Trump Admits He's Not Making it Easy to Get Democrats' Support - TIME

Donald Trump promised to get Congress to repeal Obamacare, enact tax reform, pass a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, impose tariffs on outsourcers, subsidize child care and fund a border wall with Mexico all in the first 100 days of his presidency. Not surprisingly, none of those things happened. What is surprising is that little of this agenda has even been submitted by the president to Congress: no tax bill, no infrastructure bill, no anti-outsourcing bill, no child-care bill and no legislation to build the wall. Why?

The explanation goes beyond the usual factors that bedevil any new president overpromising on the pace of action, underpreparing for the challenges of office, trouble in staffing up. These do play some part in Trump's achingly slow start. But Trump's failure to get key agenda items to the starting line reflects more fundamental problems in policymaking problems that will persist even after this administration is fully staffed and acclimated.

First, policymaking at the White House is hard and tedious work that involves digesting reams of paper, weighing difficult trade-offs and enduring hours of meetings. There is little evidence Trump has any interest in this sort of endeavor. The campaign anecdote that Ohio Gov. John Kasich, R, was offered a vice presidency with control over domestic and foreign policy, in a White House where Trump would be responsible only for "making America great again," speaks volumes.

Even an "art of the deal" president cannot make policy if he is unaware of key parts of his proposals, as he was shown to be on the question of preexisting conditions in health-care reform or whether he had approved the Keystone XL pipeline without a requirement that it would be built using U.S. steel. In a constantly leaking White House, it is revealing that there have been no stories about Trump making, say, a hard choice on tax reform after a long review session. Trump's most memorable comment about policy was revelatory: "Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated."

Second, Trump's career reflects an inconsistency and expediency about ideas that indicate he will never take policymaking seriously. Yes, all political leaders shift their views over time, some dramatically. But no major figure in either party ever has been as helter-skelter as Trump. He has embraced government-funded universal health care, supported late-term abortions and proposed the largest tax hike in history and the exact opposite of all of these things, as well to achieve his political objectives at a given moment.

While running for president, Trump said that the minimum wage was "too high," that it should not change and that it "has to go up." On a single day of the 2016 campaign, he broadcast three stances on his core campaign issue immigration policy. I say this not to relitigate a campaign charge about Trump and flip-flopping, but rather to suggest that, absent specific direction from the president at each juncture in the process, his team is probably hard-pressed to divine the Trump policy approach to any question, beyond political expediency. This doubtlessly lengthens the process as underlings wrestle over several possible approaches. Policymaking is hard if one cannot take the president literally; impossible if his ideas cannot be taken seriously.

Finally, the Trump policy process must surely be gridlocked because to the extent there is any indication of what Trumpism is as a policy philosophy it is a jumble of populist slogans and corporatist concessions totally at war with itself. The Trump plan includes a promise to raise taxes on corporations that outsource and a pledge to cut taxes on those same corporations to a record low. Trump has embraced a Democratic plan to restore limits on Wall Street that were removed 20 years ago while advancing a Republican plan to strip away limits imposed after the 2008 financial crisis. He has called for $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending but proposed a budget without a penny of net new spending or borrowing. He promised voters they would get better health-care coverage, then held a party in the White House Rose Garden for a House bill that would allow insurance companies to slash benefits a bill that he characterized as "mean" the following month. Every campaign agenda contains some half-zebras, half-elephants but the Trump platform designed to appeal to disaffected manufacturing workers who resent globalization, and disaffected globalists who resent taxation and regulation, is especially problematic in implementation.

When Trump hit the 100-day mark with no major legislative wins, his allies told the world to give him time. But time is not Trump's trouble: His lack of interest in policymaking and an incoherent agenda are the obstacles. Congress can't dispose of plans when the president can't even get his act together to propose them.

Washington Post

Ronald A. Klain served as a senior White House aide to presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and was a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.

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Why Donald Trump will accomplish nothing as president - Chicago Tribune