New York Times | The Priming of Mr. Donald Trump - The New York Times New York Times President Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times. Donald Trump has said many strange things in recent interviews. |
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The Priming of Mr. Donald Trump - The New York Times - New York Times
New York Times | Donald Trump, douard Philippe, Ransomware: Your Tuesday Briefing New York Times And Syria will be on the agenda when President Trump and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey meet at the White House today. Our correspondents tried to dissect the delicate issues Mr. Trump confronts in Saudi Arabia and Israel as he goes on his ... |
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Donald Trump, douard Philippe, Ransomware: Your Tuesday Briefing - New York Times
SEATTLE U.S. appeals court judges on Monday questioned the lawyer defending President Donald Trump's temporary travel ban about whether it discriminates against Muslims and pressed challengers to explain why the court should not defer to Trump's presidential powers to set the policy.
The three-judge 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel was the second court in a week to review Trump's directive banning people entering the United States from six Muslim-majority countries.
Opponents - including the state of Hawaii and civil rights groups - say that both Trump's first ban and later revised ban discriminate against Muslims. The government argues that the text of the order does not mention any specific religion and is needed to protect the country against attacks.
In addressing the Justice Department at the hearing in Seattle, 9th Circuit Judge Richard Paez pointed out that many of Trump's statements about Muslims came "during the midst of a highly contentious (election) campaign." He asked if that should be taken into account when deciding how much weight they should be given in reviewing the travel ban's constitutionality.
Neal Katyal, an attorney for Hawaii which is opposing the ban, said the evidence goes beyond Trump's campaign statements.
"The government has not engaged in mass, dragnet exclusions in the past 50 years," Katyal said. "This is something new and unusual in which you're saying this whole class of people, some of whom are dangerous, we can ban them all."
The Justice Department argues Trump issued his order solely to protect national security.
Outside the Seattle courtroom a group of protesters gathered carrying signs with slogans including, "The ban is still racist" and "No ban, no wall."
Paez asked if an executive order detaining Japanese-Americans during the World War Two would pass muster under the government's current logic.
Acting U.S. Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, said that the order from the 1940s, which is now viewed as a low point in U.S. civil rights history, would not be constitutional.
If Trump's executive order was the same as the one involving Japanese-Americans, Wall said: "I wouldn't be standing here, and the U.S. would not be defending it."
Judge Michael Daly Hawkins asked challengers to Trump's ban about the wide latitude held by U.S. presidents to decide who can enter the country.
"Why shouldn't we be deferential to what the president says?" Hawkins said.
"That is the million dollar question," said Katyal. A reasonable person would see Trump's statements as evidence of discriminatory intent, Katyal said.
In Washington, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said at a news briefing that the executive order is "fully lawful and will be upheld. We believe that."
The panel, made up entirely of judges appointed by Democratic former President Bill Clinton, reviewed a Hawaii judge's ruling that blocked parts of the Republican president's revised travel order.
LIKELY TO GO TO SUPREME COURT
The March order was Trump's second effort to craft travel restrictions. The first, issued on Jan. 27, led to chaos and protests at airports before it was blocked by courts. The second order was intended to overcome the legal problems posed by the original ban, but it was also suspended by judges before it could take effect on March 16.
U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii blocked 90-day entry restrictions on people from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, as well as part of the order that suspended entry of refugee applicants for 120 days.
As part of that ruling, Watson cited Trump's campaign statements on Muslims as evidence that his executive order was discriminatory. The 9th Circuit previously blocked Trump's first executive order.
Last week the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia reviewed a Maryland judge's ruling that blocked the 90-day entry restrictions. That court is largely made up of Democrats, and the judges' questioning appeared to break along partisan lines. A ruling has not yet been released.
Trump's attempt to limit travel was one of his first major acts in office. The fate of the ban is one indication of whether the Republican can carry out his promises to be tough on immigration and national security.
The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to be the ultimate decider, but the high court is not expected to take up the issue for several months.
(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton in Washington)
WASHINGTON President Donald Trump disclosed highly classified information to Russia's foreign minister about a planned Islamic State operation, two U.S. officials said on Monday, plunging the White House into another controversy just months into Trump's short tenure in office.
WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO President Donald Trump said he would seek to keep his tough immigration enforcement policies from harming the U.S. farm industry and its largely immigrant workforce, according to farmers and officials who met with him.
WASHINGTON Republican U.S. Representative Trey Gowdy, who was among 11 people being considered for director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on Monday he is not interested in the job.
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In travel ban case, US judges focus on discrimination, Trump's powers - Reuters
President Donald Trumps supposedly short attention span has NATO reworking its usual summit discussion format ahead of his first sit-down with the international organization later this month, Foreign Policy reported Monday, citing current NATO and former senior U.S. officials.
The report appeared on the same dayas aPoliticoarticle on how the presidents staffers feedhim news and routinely monitorhim in an effort to head off angry tweets.
According to Foreign Policy, NATO wants some of the worlds top leaders to cut down their discussions to two to four minutes, and one unidentified source said organizers for the May 25meeting were freaking out.
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Its kind of ridiculous how they are preparing to deal with Trump, a source with knowledge of the meetings planning said. Its like theyre preparing to deal with a childsomeone with a short attention span and mood who has no knowledge of NATO, no interest in in-depth policy issues, nothing.
Still, other officials admitted there is some reason behind their prognostication about Trumps attention span, with one former senior official saying the NATO meetings can be painfully dull.
At least one major change is on tap: Even though the next meeting isnt considered a full summit, NATO officials decided against following their regular practice of publishing a full, formal meeting declaration, out of fear Trump may not like the idea.
The presidents use of Twitter also reportedly has NATO officials on edge, as does his avowed attitude towardthe 28-member body during his campaign last year and after he took the oath of office. Specifically, Trump demanded that NATO members pay their agreed upon contributions to the groups defense fund, for which the U.S. supplied 3.61 percent of its annual gross domestic product last year. Only four other countries met the 2 percent guideline for NATOs defense expenditures last year.
Perhaps in order to keep Trumps attention, officials told Foreign Policy that they will attempt to focus on counterterrorism and the defense budgets, two areas of interest to the president.
The report about NATOs preparations follows a Politico article thatcitesfour White House officials saying someone on Trumps staff offered him two Time magazine covers. One, from 2008, was about global warming, while the other,supposedly from the 1970s, was a fake cover abouta coming ice age. Because staffers were afraid the president would take the hoax to be real,they intervened before the president could take to his Twitter account.
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NATO Plans for Donald Trump's Short Attention Span: Report - Newsweek
President Trump.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
The tax plan that Donald Trump's economic advisers unveiled last month was a bit of a mystery. After days of hype, the administration produced a single, generously spaced page of bullet points with about as much detail as your average grocery list. It was a lot like the barely sketched-out proposal Trump campaigned on, but somehow a little less thorough. The White House tried to frame it as a declaration of core principles, but even that would have been an overly generous description. If a couple of college Republicans split a bottle of Tito's and wrote a tax plan without access to the internet, their final product might have been almost as embarrassing. Almost.
Jordan Weissmann is Slates senior business and economics correspondent.
Why would the White House even bother with such a half-assed effort? It was unclear. Yes, Trump was desperate to convey a sense of momentum before his first 100 days in office expired, but the one-pager mostly demonstrated his administration had nothing to show after months of supposed effort.
But Monday we have an answer. It comes toward the end of a deeply depressing Politico story about how President Trump's aides are apparently trying to stop each other from handing our moody adolescent in chief news stories that might convince him to do something stupid, since he tends to react rashly to whatever thing he has read last. It turns out that Trump basically ordered up his tax plan after seeing a New York Times op-ed by the four horsemen of intellectually impaired supply-side fanaticism:
To be clear, Trump's folks didn't follow the op-ed's advise word for word. Where Forbes, Kudlow, Laffer, and Moore wanted Trump to postpone individual-income-tax reform and just focus on cutting corporate taxes, the administration's page o' info dealtwith both the personal and business side of the tax code. The point remains, however, that the president read an op-ed, got excited, and ordered his advisers to crank out something before anybody was remotely ready to do so.
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I am normal American patriot from State of Michigan and tax plan of Donald Trump is greatest plan in history US of A. More...
While convincing the president to do the thing you just wrote is basically a pundit's dream come true, it's not how normal policymaking works in Washington, and for good reason: A policy team can't really function if it has to upend its plans because the president read a newspaper article he liked. Beyond that, crafting a monumental piece of legislation like tax reform is complicated, and rolling out a laughably undercooked one-pager and pretending it's an actual policy statement can only convince Congress it doesn't need to take your input seriously. Not shockingly, after the Trump team released its plan, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a bland joint statement that amounted to patting the president on the head and saying, We'll take it from here.
To sum up: Maybe the White House would function more smoothly if the president couldn't read? Make of that what you will.
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The Pathetic Story Behind Donald Trump's One-Page Tax Plan - Slate Magazine (blog)