Donald Trump – Mediaboss Marketing

Donald Trump: Sights And Sounds – Forbes

Donald Trump: Sights And Sounds
Forbes
The most avid news junkie would be hard pressed to recount the words of the speeches Donald Trump made during his just-concluded whirlwind international tour; yet even the most casual observer would very likely be able to rattle off specific details of ...

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Donald Trump: Sights And Sounds - Forbes

May 30th, 2017

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Donald Trump Deals Away America’s Prestige, and His Own Position – Daily Beast

So this week, he warns us, the president is going to announce his decision on whether the United States will remain a party to the Paris climate accord. I guess the delay is meant to dupe us into believing that hes been studying the substance of the issue.

I think we all expect that hell pull the United States out of the agreement, signed by 195 nations (and unsigned by just Nicaragua and Syria, if you want an idea of the company Donald Trump would be putting us in). Indeed Axios reported Monday that Trump has already told several associates that hes giving it the heave-ho. The thin reed of hope here is that a slew of major U.S. corporationsincluding the CEO of Exxon!have told him to stay in Paris.

So maybe theres the slimmest of chances that he might pleasantly surprise us. But come on. He knows hed have a mutiny on his hands if he doesnt reject the accord. The three key elements of the Republican Party these days are the hardest-right members of Congress (look, for example, at how the House Republicans rewrote the health bill to placate the Freedom Caucus); Rush Limbaugh and the other media propagandists, and the rabid pro-Trump base. Each of these overlapping groups would be enraged if Trump stuck with Paris.

As a matter of politics, hes already lost more or less the entire country except for these people. If he starts losing themby doing things like coming around to Barack Obamas position on climate changetheyll start thinking the words President Pence sound just fine. And they, unlike the rest of us, have the power to make it happen.

So lets assume that by weeks end the United States is out of the Paris accords. There are two contexts in which we need to understand the gravity of the moment.

The first is the domestic political context. Republicans will be hailing this as a great victory for the American people, who dont want to be bound by these onerous and heavy-handed international treaties. However, the truth as far as we can discern is that the American people do in fact want to be bound by these treaties.

First of all, most Americans believe that climate change is a real problem that the human race has caused or contributed to and must do something about. Gallup found a little more than a year ago that public concern about climate change was at an eight-year high. Fully 64 percent said they worried about climate change, and nine in 10 said the effects are either now being felt or will certainly be felt in the future, leaving the hoax dead-enders at 10 percent of the population (but about 52 percent of the Congress; oh well).

Which brings us to the Paris agreement. It hasnt been polled much, but last November the Chicago Council on Global Affairs commissioned a survey that found that 71 percent of Americansand even 57 percent of Republicansback the accord.

In other words, the GOP position is deeply unpopular. So if Trump moves in the expected direction, it will lower his own popularity, and the congressional GOPs. Pretty much every major item on the GOP agenda, from getting out of Paris to repealing Obamacare to giving the rich more tax cuts, is wildly unpopular. Yet they keep doing it, and keep wondering why theyre so unpopular. Its not complicated. They are carrying out the will of their huge donors and about a third at best of the population. So the political fallout for them will be negative, and that of course is all to the good.

In the second context, however, the political fallout is likely to be extremely harmful to the United States. I refer of course to the international context. We saw Trump complete a disastrous overseas trip, which started with him outing the Mossad, built toward his alarming non-defense of NATO, and ended with this puffy and low-energy old man unable to join his fellow heads-of-state and walk a few hundred feet.

That was funny, in a pathetic sort of way. But Angela Merkels speech in southern Germany Sunday wasnt funny. As Henry Farrell observed in The Washington Post, Merkels rhetoric about the EU needing to go its own way was a stark departure from the past, indicating that Germany and Europe are likely to take on a much more substantial and independent role than they have in the past 70 years.

To hear American conservativesand Trumptell it, the EU is a hidebound and sclerotic institution that cant approve golf courses fast enough. But guess which economy is bigger, the EU or the United States? In 2016, China was first, the EU second, and America third.

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To those of you who say that getting out of Paris will unleash the American tiger, I say stop reading InfoWars. Theres a reason the Exxon CEO wants us to stay in. Its called a global marketplace in which the rules are standardized. For the United States of America, which has led every major international concert since World War II, to stand down from that role and go its own way is humiliating and, more to the point, self-marginalizing. The Paris agreement expands markets, creates new energy technologies, and spurs growth. Were really going to say we want no part of that, are we?

And just imagine how it will feel three years from now, say, when theres another major international accord of some kind, and the two people standing up front are Angela Merkel and Xi Jinping, with the president of the United States absent. Donnie Two Scoops will be down in Palm Beach, tweeting away, eating his favorite dessert. And the world will be eating our lunch.

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Donald Trump Deals Away America's Prestige, and His Own Position - Daily Beast

May 30th, 2017

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Donald Trump: The Gateway Degenerate – New York Times

New York Times

Donald Trump: The Gateway Degenerate
New York Times
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Donald Trump: The Gateway Degenerate - New York Times

May 30th, 2017

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Trump, feted and chided abroad, returns to uncertainty at home – CNN

It was an upbeat message for a leader fresh from meeting with his new club of foreign counterparts for the first time. But underneath the point-by-point recap of his trip lay uncertainty over his agenda and disputes with his foreign counterparts.

Trump's first voyage abroad was a story told in chapters, each successively less pleasant for a President still taking stock of his standing on the world stage.

Beyond a scattering of formal remarks, none of the story was told by Trump himself, who refused to hold a news conference and, by his advisers' own admission, revealed little of his thinking to top aides as he hopped from nation to nation.

In some ways, uncertainty amounted to a win, at least in the minds of Trump's aides. As Trump prepared to depart Washington last Friday, there was little surety among his staff that the nine-day odyssey could proceed without failure. Trump himself, who hadn't slept in a bed that wasn't his own since taking office, remained skeptical a five-country itinerary could end well.

A homebody with little appetite for discomfort, Trump was imagining the worst. Unpleasant foreign food, withering jet lag, and an unfamiliar bed had been his experiences as a businessman abroad. Even in the days leading up to his departure, Trump asked whether the trip could be truncated. He vented about the ambitious schedule to his senior advisers in the days leading up to his departure.

But by then it was too late. With meetings locked in and the world anticipating his global debut, Trump settled into his quarters on Air Force One for a flight four times longer than any he'd taken as President.

President Trump receives Saudi gold medal 01:43

Fourteen hours later, Trump was tucked into the back of his armored limousine, speeding into central Riyadh alongside King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and watching billboards plastered with both their faces whiz past.

Yet an air of navet hung in the air after the President's speech to leaders of more than 50 Muslim majority nations. The White House described it as something of a fait accompli, with a top official twice declaring that the President had "united the Muslim world."

As Trump delivered his opening argument to a room packed with leaders of Muslim nations, however, the newly sedate language didn't entirely come through.

"There is still much work to be done," Trump said. "That means honestly confronting the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamists and Islamic terror of all kinds."

Trump after UK attack: Terrorists evil losers 02:39

Huddling with aides in his suite at the storied King David hotel overlooking the old city, the message on extremism he'd delivered in Saudi Arabia -- which came with few details -- suddenly appeared more difficult. In Israel, a country intimately familiar with the scourge of terror and the entrenched politics of peace, the problem appeared even more insurmountable.

Trump was unsatisfied with the language his advisers had prepared for a speech later that morning. The condemnation of the attack lacked verve, Trump believed. Describing the attackers in ordinary terms wouldn't suffice. Instead he wrote up his own description, using the insult he's long considered the most cutting.

"I will call them from now on losers because that's what's they are. They're losers," Trump said a few hours later standing alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "We'll have more of them. But they're losers -- just remember that."

The message was well received. But hours later, it was clear Trump faced a steep climb before bridging the gaps that have long stymied American presidents' attempts at fostering stability in the Middle East.

"I hope this heralds a real change," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said ahead of Trump's remarks at the Israel Museum. "Because if the attacker had been Palestinian and the victims had been Israeli children, the suicide bomber's family would have received a stipend from the Palestinian Authority. That's Palestinian law. That law must be changed."

It was an intrusion of real-world obstacles into Trump's vision for peace, which he once deemed easy, but which this week he declared the hardest deal of all.

President Trump, Pope Francis exchange gifts 01:20

The Pope presented Trump with a bound copy of his encyclical on protecting the environment, "Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home."

For all the underlying tensions setting the stage for their first visit, given their unusually harsh exchange last year over immigration and whether the building of walls is a Christian thing to do, the Pope took another tack.

A skilled politician in his own right, Francis honed in on the President's pending decision whether to pull the US from the Paris climate accord. It was the first of several conversations Trump conducted this week on the landmark carbon reduction agreement, which he vowed as a candidate to scrap.

At the Vatican, though, Trump insisted his mind was open.

"I'll be reading them," Trump said of the essays from the Pope on the environment and creating peace.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican's secretary of state, weighed in with the direct message urging Trump and his team to stay true to the Paris agreement.

The President's first meeting with Francis was steeped in symbolism, the final stop in visiting the three homes of the Abrahamic religions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

He's the second American president to visit the Vatican under Francis' papacy. While President Barack Obama's meeting was 20 minutes longer than Trump's, the Holy See wasted little time comparing the two.

As he left the Apostolic Palace, Trump told the Pope: "I won't forget what you said."

If he meant climate change, the Pope will have won round one.

Trump calls out NATO allies to pay up 02:04

Flying north from Rome, Trump found the temperature quickly cooling. He arrived at NATO's headquarters on the outskirts of Rome under a cloud of suspicion on multiple fronts.

In one of the only off-script moments of his trip, Trump declared in Jerusalem that he hadn't mentioned Israel by name with his Russian visitors. But at NATO, the concerns still boiled.

It was just one of the rifts between Trump and his European counterparts. After open-arm welcomes in Riyadh and Jerusalem, Trump's foreign swing took a distinct tonal shift. Instead of banquets and horses, Trump was suddenly flung into tension-filled meetings with leaders deeply skeptical of his foreign agenda.

Subsequent sessions proceeded similarly. Trump reportedly griped about the hurdles in opening golf courses in Europe with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. European Council President Donald Tusk said after his meeting with Trump that they weren't able to bridge differences over Russia.