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Donald Trump, Quebec City, Warren Buffett: Your Monday Briefing New York Times The reactions: Mr. Trump said the order was a matter of national security, but some Republicans are calling for him to back down. European leaders and Silicon Valley executives denounced the move, while predominantly Muslim nations not affected by the ...

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Donald Trump, Quebec City, Warren Buffett: Your Monday Briefing - New York Times

Forget betting on the outcome of the game. Silly prop bets are where you can have the most fun. USA TODAY Sports

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady smiles after beating the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2017 AFC Championship Game at Gillette Stadium.(Photo: Geoff Burke, USA TODAY Sports)

HOUSTON Tom Brady no longer gets a pass on his friendship with Donald Trump.

Not after this weekend, when the country boiled over in rage and indignation at Trumps decision to turn Americas back on refugees. Not after this season, when Colin Kaepernick was pilloried from coast to coast for trying to draw attention to the shortcomings of our country.

And not when hes about to command the NFLs biggest stage.

Brady and the New England Patriots arrive here Monday, a few hours before the Super Bowl Opening Night. While the event has turned into a circus this is where Brady famously got a marriage proposal from a Mexican TV reporter in a wedding dress he can expect to get some tough questions about Trump.

As well he should.

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Trumps campaign was steeped in racism, bigotry and misogyny, and he has doubled down on his hatred in his first week as president. Its left Americans across the country angry and frightened, fearful that the ideals that have made this country exceptional for more than 200 years are being abandoned.

Brady might not agree with Trumps views or his policies, as he seemed to indicate last week during his weekly appearance on WEEIs Kirk and Callahan radio show. His support might have more to do with Trumps many golf courses than the man himself.

But in refusing to publicly disavow Trump's actions, Brady is giving tacit endorsement to both Trump and the chaos he has created.

Why does that make such a big deal? Brady said when his friendship with Trump was raised. I dont understand that. I dont want to get into it, but just if you know someone, it doesnt mean that you agree with everything that they say or do. Right?

Theres things I dont believe [in], absolutely. I dont believe in, you know, theres a lot of things, Brady continued. Not to denounce anything, its just that theres different things that I feel like, you know ...I dont agree with everything. Thats fine, right?

No, its not.

There are plenty of people in the NFL owners, executives and players who are Trump supporters. But no one was as public as Brady, who had a Make America Great Again hat in his locker way back in September 2015.

Brady is not dumb, nor is the four-time Super Bowl champion and NFLs cover boy oblivious to his image. He knew the hat was going to get noticed, he knew it was going to get coverage and he was fine with it.

Its only now, when hes facing questions and criticism, that he thinks the friendship should be off limits. But it doesn't work that way. If you stake out a position, you need to own it. Or if youve had a change of heart, explain why.

If Brady needs an example of how thats done, he can look at Kaepernick.

From the day his national anthem protest became public in August, Kaepernick has been open, available and consistent with his opinion. It has not been a popular one; as the protests spread across the league, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback was portrayed as anti-American, anti-military and anti-police all of which he denies.

Hes had insults, slurs and worse directed at him. He was blamed for the drop in TV ratings early in the season. One person last week even tried to say Trumps election was partly the result of Kaepernicks protests.

It would have been easy for Kaepernick to brush off questions or say hed rather talk about football, as Brady has done. Instead, hes been eloquent in detailing his concerns over police brutality in minority communities. Hes sparked conversations and reflection in NFL locker rooms and beyond.

Regardless of whether he was duped into being a prop or is genuinely friends with Trump, Brady inserted himself into the national firestorm. He cant be surprised that people want to know more. And now expect more.

***

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.

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Tom Brady has some explaining to do on Donald Trump - USA TODAY

If you call something the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, you kind of have to get rid of it when you have the chance.

So it seems like only a matter of time before President Trump really does begin to pull us out of the North American Free Trade Agreement so that he can try to negotiate a presumably great deal to replace it. The question, though, is what kind of deal this will be for American workers. And the answer may be not much of one.

Now, if you listen to populists of the right- or left-wing variety, everyone from Ross Perot to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Trump himselfsays there's one reason and only one reason that we've lost so many manufacturing jobs the past few decades. It's that the government has forced blue-collar workers to compete on unfair terms with people from much poorer countries. In other words, we've struck trade deals that have helped American companies outsource jobs to low-cost countries, but hurt American workers who have been left with only McJobs. Our politicians, Trump thundered during the campaign, have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization, moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas. It was a familiar litany of acronym-filled woe: NAFTA, China joining the WTO, and the TPP. (Those last two are the World Trade Organization and the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership).

Trade reform and the negotiation of great deals, Trumpwent on, is the quickest way to bring our jobs back to our country.

There's only one problem with this. It isn't really true. Trade deals, you see, matter, but they don't matter that much. What does is how strong or weak the dollar is. But let's back up a minute. This isn't to say that NAFTA, for example, has had no effect on our economy. It clearly has. Indeed, a decent chunk of our manufacturing base has migrated south of the border the past 24 years, although itwould be an exaggeration to say that it was accompanied by a giant sucking sound, as Perot did. Even the most pessimistic estimates from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institutesay that it cost us something like 400,000 manufacturing jobs and 100,000 jobs over this time. As economist Brad DeLong points out, those aren't even 0.3 percent and 0.1 percent, respectively, of our total jobs.

On the campaign trail President Trump spoke out aggressively against NAFTA, calling it "the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere." Economists have a more nuanced view of the deal struck in the early 1990s. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

That doesn't come close to explaining why we have a Rust Belt. So why do we? Well, a lot of it was inevitable, but the parts that weren't have more to do with bad dollar policy than bad trade policy. Think about it like this: Althoughour golden age of manufacturing employment is over, our golden age of manufacturing output is not. That's higher than ever. The simple story is that we don't need as many people to make as much stuff. Which, as DeLong highlights, is why the share of people working in manufacturing has fallen almost as much in Germany, which really has done everything right, as it has here.

But almost isn't the same as, well, the same. That difference matters. Economists, though, have a tendency to be a bit Panglossian about this, to shrug their shoulders about good, middle-class jobs being lost because it was all going to happen at some point anyway. It brings to mind John Maynard Keynes's admonition against giving ourselves too easy, too useless a task by saying that things will be all right in the long run, becausewe are all dead in the long run. Keeping factories here and the supply chains they're a part of offer people better wages, communities better stability, and the economy better productivity.

Why, then, haven't we been able to keep as many of our manufacturing jobs? Blame the dollar. It started when then-Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker sent the dollar soaring by jacking up interest rates in his successful bid to whip inflation in the early 1980s. It continued when President Ronald Reagan's tax-cut-fueled deficits forced the Fed to keep rates higher than it would have for the rest of the decade. It went furtherafter the International Monetary Fund bungled its East Asian financial crisis bailout so badly that emerging markets started stockpiling big war chests of dollars pushing their value up to save themselves from the same fate. And it's gotten going again now that the Fed is raising rates at the same time that the rest of the world is cutting them or even printing money. The point is that a more expensive dollar makes our exports more expensive overseas, and more-expensive exports can only be competitive if they become cheaper by moving production to lower-cost locales. Thathas been a bigger deal than the one we've struck with Mexico and Canada. Cutting tariffs by 5 or 10 percent just doesn't matter as much as the dollar shooting up 20 or 30 percent.

Which is to say that getting rid of NAFTA won't bring back many factory jobs if the rest of Trump's policies push the dollar up even more which they probably will. That is, assuming Trump does in fact increase infrastructure and defense spending at the same time he slashes taxes for the rich and corporations. Just like the 1980s, the resulting deficits would force the Fed to raise rates more than it expected, and sendthe dollar up more than our exporters could afford.

Even the best trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere wouldn't change that. Sad.

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Donald Trump's plan to bring jobs back to America comes with one giant asterisk - Washington Post

Trump Immigration Ban Sows Chaos Wall Street Journal President Donald Trump on Sunday defended his executive order restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries as his plan to tighten national security spawned legal challenges, congressional criticism, widespread protests and confusion at ... and more »

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Trump Immigration Ban Sows Chaos - Wall Street Journal

President Donald Trump on Monday mocked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer(D-N.Y.) for shedding tears over the plight of refugees.

I dont see him as a crier, Trump said of Schumer, and asked whether the senator had hired an acting coach.

Theres about a 5 percent chance that it was real, but I think they were fake tears, he said ahead of a meeting with small business leaders at the White House.

Standing alongside several refugees in New York City on Sunday, Schumer vowed to fight Trumps executive order that temporarily blocked the entry of all refugees, indefinitely blocked Syrian refugees and imposed a ban on travelers coming from several Muslim-majority countries.

This order was mean-spirited and un-American, the senator said as he fought back tears.

The president wants people to believe that everyones a terrorist or a criminal whos an immigrant. Its not fair and its not right, he added.

A spokesman for the New York senator declined to take the bait.

We are not going to dignify that with a response, Matt House, communications director for Schumer, told HuffPost.

Trump has hurled personal insults at Schumer before. Earlier this month, the president referred to the senator as head clown amid the fight to repeal Obamacare.

In aninterview with HuffPosts Amanda Terkel, Schumer said he believed it was a mistake to go toe-to-toe with Trump in a similar fashion.

I think you stick with your values and the merits, he said, because I think that you go down to his level [with name-calling]. He loves that level of just name-calling. And then the focus is off the bad things hes doing to America.

This article has been updated with comment from Schumers office.

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Donald Trump Accuses Chuck Schumer Of Shedding 'Fake Tears' Over Refugees - Huffington Post