Donald trrump

'They say he’s not going to win re-election,’ blurted a tank top-wearing twenty-something as he scanned the crowd outside SNHU Arena in Manchester, New Hampshire. 'But look at this shit!' Pressed into the throng, I couldn't help but agree. At his first re-election rally in New England, President Trump’s supporters had filled the arena’s 12,000 seats. Denied entry, thousands more filled an adjacent plaza in which the campaign had erected a jumbotron. For them, proximity to the Trump rally was well worth the afternoon heat and the sticky urban humidity. Many wore Red Sox shirts or Patriots jerseys.

If President Trump secures re-election next fall — a prospect growing less likely by the day — it won’t be because of his scintillating ability to staff his own government. On that score, he doesn’t seem to care. Personnel is the Achilles’ heel of this presidency. Trump sometimes describes the goings-on in the administration as if he were still a bystander in the American power game. His retweet of a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory this weekend is funny, but frustrating: to whom does the Department of Justice report, again? The personnel issue is partly by design. The president prefers a lean, freewheeling staff, like he had at his personal business, a former senior administration official said.

'Why are you so hooked on that?' Joe Biden asked a reporter in Iowa Thursday. She’d asked him to label President Donald Trump a white supremacist. 'You want me to say the words so I sound like everybody else. I’m not everybody else. I’m Joe Biden.' 'I’ve always been who I am,' the former vice president said. 'It’s like everybody wants everybody to call someone a liar. And then you say - "I don’t call people liars." I say they don’t tell the truth. You want me to say "liar" so you can put it out and you can say "Biden called someone a liar." That’s not who I am. You got the wrong guy.' https://twitter.com/JTHVerhovek/status/1159561051601612802 Of course, this prompted howls of indignation on social media.

Well la-dee-dah. The House votes to condemn 'President Trump for his "racist comments" about four Democratic congresswomen of color.'First, I am glad that 'racist comments' was in scare quotes. Why? Because there was nothing racist about the president’s tweets inviting creeps like Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar to leave the United States if she doesn’t like it here.  Second, I wish people would give the phrase 'people of color' a rest. Everyone is a color — even, I suppose, Albinos (is that 'racist' now, too?). I, for example, am a pleasing pink. But the fact that someone is dark-skinned imparts to him no special virtue, just as the fact that someone is Caucasian saddles him with no special liability. Except, alas, that it does.

It wasn’t even that laborious a process. Two days after he gave a prolonged self-exculpation masquerading as a press conference to defend the sweetheart deal in Florida that he vouchsafed to billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein 12 years ago, labor secretary Alex Acosta threw in the towel. For Trump the prospect of having Acosta remain was a nonstarter with the 2020 presidential race looming large. Trump was quick to note today that he will miss Acosta, whom he deemed 'a tremendous talent, he’s a Hispanic man.' Indeed Acosta was the lone Hispanic member of his cabinet. Trump even singled out an elite school as evidence of Acosta’s bona fides: 'He went to Harvard.' According to CNN, this will make for high-level vacancy 261 for the Trump administration.

Imagine that you’re Donald Trump for a day. You wake up, you ablute, you make the usual follicular adjustments, you shoot off a few tweets in the throne room, and then you mooch down to the West Wing. Here, you face a choice. Do you dive into the fate-of-nations stuff and open the files marked ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘Iranistan’, like John Bolton has asked? Or do you spend the day compiling a guest list for a White House event on anti-conservative bias in Big Tech, at which the talking points will be as tired and old as the curly cheese sandwiches? The answer depends on which Trump-for-a-day you prefer to be.

H. Ross Perot issued colorful and sweeping statements, including the claim that a 'giant sucking sound' of jobs whooshing abroad would occur after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He promised that he, and he alone, could fix what ailed America. He promised that as an outsider, he could clean out the Washington establishment and set wrong aright in both political parties. The fiery and paranoid Texan embodied American exceptionalism. Perot, who died on Tuesday, never reached the White House. But the Texan businessman and presidential candidate left a lasting mark on American politics. He paved the way for the presidency of another brash business tycoon, Donald Trump. A shrewd businessman, he evinced an interest in politics early on.

If there were any doubt that the Mail on Sunday’s leaked British diplomatic cables scoop was not a dramatic story, Donald Trump has just removed it. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1148298497189392384 I can’t really believe that Trump’s skin is so thin. Plenty more have said plenty worse — however, ambassadors are not meant to cause such a fuss. But Trump, with his sharp instincts, can sense opportunity in the insult: the new prime minister will be keen to make amends. And, in his tweets, Trump is keen to hint towards the good news for the Special Relationship and the ‘wonderful’ UK. May and her government were indeed incapable of working with Trump.

To make a great success of a speech you need timing, what the ancient Greeks called kairos, you need an electric connection with your audience, and you need a bit of luck. President Trump, in his damp squib of a Fourth of July speech, had none of those things.  Kairos-wise, the Fourth of July was a near-miss: the sort of occasion that asks for and often gets rousing oratory. But in this case the resonance of the date was undermined by the suspicion that rather than honoring the national holiday the president was seeking to hijack it. As Elizabeth Warren commented tartly, 'If he's going to do a campaign event, then it should be paid for by his campaign contributions. It should not be paid for by the American taxpayer.

The Washington, DC city council is having none of it. 'Tanks, but no tanks', it tweeted at Donald Trump. Trump may shy from actual warfare but he has arranged a military extravaganza masquerading as a July 4 ceremony. While there may be no 'brand new Sherman tanks,' as Trump promised — they were retired after the Korean War — the Pentagon is furiously trying to figure out if it can safely transport the 60-ton M1 Abrams tank over Memorial Bridge without collapsing it. A thunderstorm might also cause any tanks to sink into the ground of the National Mall. It would be awkward symbolism for the man who promised to drain the swamp.

America is unraveling into an unhappy confederation of hostile tribes. Extremists on the right are murdering Jews in synagogues and African Americans in churches. The woke left is bullying us into a neo-segregation in which we’re judged by the color of our skin. We’re too obsessed with economic growth to recognize that the rising tide has swallowed entire regions. We’re too proud of our tradition of immigration to admit the failures of assimilation.At a time of such angry division, what can bind up our wounds and bring us together as a nation?A renewed patriotism would be a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough. Patriotism asks us to love our country. But what we need now is more than love of country. We must love our fellow citizens.

Of all the low-profile candidates vying for national attention in the Democratic debates this week, Marianne Williamson stood out. In coverage immediately before, she was derided for simply being an 'author and activist': descriptors, it's worth noting, that could be applied to everyone else standing. The 66-year-old was placed at the far edge of the Thursday debate stage and only got four minutes and 58 seconds of speaking time. But she made those seconds count. First, she struck out against her arch-nemesis: plans. 'I’ll tell you one thing, it’s really nice if we’ve got all these plans, but if you think we’re going to beat Donald Trump by just having all these plans, you’ve got another thing coming,' she said. 'Because he didn’t win by saying he had a plan.