President Donald Trump skipped a session devoted to climate change at the G7 summit here, a snub aides wrote off as a scheduling conflict but nonetheless reflects Trump’s isolation on the issue.
As other leaders were taking their seats around a large round table, the chair reserved for Trump sat empty. The summit’s host, French President Emmanuel Macron, gaveled the meeting to order anyway and launched into an explanation of a wrist watch made from recycled plastic.
Later, the White House said Trump’s schedule prevented his attendance.
“The President had scheduled meetings and bilaterals with Germany and India, so a senior member of the Administration attended in his stead,” press secretary Stephanie Grisham said.
But the leaders of both those countries — German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — were both seen attending, at least for the start of the session.
An official said the staffer who replaced Trump worked for the National Security Council.
Speaking afterward, Macron seemed to shrug off Trump’s absence.
“He wasn’t in the room, but his team was,” Macron said at a news conference. He urged reporters not to read too much into Trump’s decision to skip the session, insisting the US is aligned with the rest of the G7 on issues of biodiversity and combating fires in the Amazon rainforest.
Still, Macron acknowledged Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord — a move that angered European nations, who remain part of the pact. Macron said it was no longer his goal to convince Trump to return to the agreement.
In the lead-up to the G7, Trump’s aides said he wasn’t entirely interested in the climate portions of the summit, believing them a waste of time compared to discussion of the economy.
After past G7s, Trump complained that too much time was spent on issues he deemed unimportant, like clearing oceans of plastics.
But Macron made climate one of the main focuses of this year’s gathering anyway, scheduling the session on Monday and insisting the leaders address the Amazon fires.
That was bound to create divisions between Trump and the other leaders. Trump has loosened environmental regulations in the United States, even as he claims that water and air are at their cleanest levels ever.
President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president’s private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.
Behind the scenes: During
one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, “I got it. I got
it. Why don’t we nuke them?” according to one source who was there.
“They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across
the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it
disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?” the source added, paraphrasing the
president’s remarks.
Asked how the briefer reacted, the source recalled he said something to the effect of, “Sir, we’ll look into that.”
Trump
replied by asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could
handle and reiterating his suggestion that the government intervene
before they make landfall.
The
briefer “was knocked back on his heels,” the source in the room added.
“You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished.
After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with
this?'”
Trump also
raised the idea in another conversation with a senior administration
official. A 2017 NSC memo describes that second conversation, in which
Trump asked whether the administration should bomb hurricanes to stop
them from hitting the homeland. A source briefed on the NSC memo said it
does not contain the word “nuclear”; it just says the president talked
about bombing hurricanes.
The
source added that this NSC memo captured “multiple topics, not just
hurricanes. … It wasn’t that somebody was so terrified of the bombing
idea that they wrote it down. They just captured the president’s
comments.”
The sources said that
Trump’s “bomb the hurricanes” idea — which he floated early in the first
year and a bit of his presidency before John Bolton took over as
national security adviser — went nowhere and never entered a formal
policy process.
White House response:
A senior administration official said, “We don’t comment on private
discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national
security team.”
A different senior administration official,
who has been briefed on the president’s hurricane bombing suggestion,
defended Trump’s idea and said it was no cause for alarm. “His goal — to
keep a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland — is not bad,”
the official said. “His objective is not bad.”
“What
people near the president do is they say ‘I love a president who asks
questions like that, who’s willing to ask tough questions.’ … It takes
strong people to respond to him in the right way when stuff like this
comes up. For me, alarm bells weren’t going off when I heard about it,
but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into ‘the
president is crazy’ narrative.”
The big picture:
Trump didn’t invent this idea. The notion that detonating a nuclear
bomb over the eye of a hurricane could be used to counteract convection
currents dates to the Eisenhower era, when it was floated by a
government scientist.
The idea
keeps resurfacing in the public even though scientists agree it won’t
work. The myth has been so persistent that the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. government agency that predicts
changes in weather and the oceans, published an online fact sheet for the public under the heading “Tropical Cyclone Myths Page.”
The
page states: “Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the
storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive
fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land
areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say,
this is not a good idea.”
About 3 weeks after Trump’s 2016 election, National Geographic published an article titled, “Nuking Hurricanes: The Surprising History of a Really Bad Idea.” It found, among other problems, that:
Dropping
a nuclear bomb into a hurricane would be banned under the terms of the
Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty between the U.S. and the former
Soviet Union. So that could stave off any experiments, as long as the
U.S. observes the terms of the treaty.
The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required. A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20×1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.
If we think about mechanical energy, the energy at humanity’s
disposal is closer to the storm’s, but the task of focusing even
half of the energy on a spot in the middle of a remote ocean
would still be formidable. Brute force interference with
hurricanes doesn’t seem promising.
In addition, an explosive, even a nuclear explosive, produces a
shock wave, or pulse of high pressure, that propagates away from
the site of the explosion somewhat faster than the speed of
sound. Such an event doesn’t raise the barometric pressure after
the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the
atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground. For
normal atmospheric pressure, there are about ten metric tons
(1000 kilograms per ton) of air bearing down on each square
meter of surface. In the strongest hurricanes there are nine. To
change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you
would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter
inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion
(500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It’s difficult to
envision a practical way of moving that much air around.
Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a
chance to grow into hurricanes isn’t promising either. About 80
of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but
only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year. There is no
way to tell in advance which ones will develop. If the energy
released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released
in a hurricane, it’s still a lot of power, so that the hurricane
police would need to dim the whole world’s lights many times a
year.
President Donald Trump defended calling himself “the chosen one” in a set of tweets Saturday, explaining that he and the reporters present at the press gaggle understood he was joking.
“When I looked up to the sky and jokingly said ‘I am the chosen one,’ at a press conference two days ago, referring to taking on Trade with China, little did I realize that the media would claim that I had a ‘Messiah complex,’” Trump wrote. “They knew I was kidding, being sarcastic, and just … having fun.”
“I was smiling as I looked up and around,” he continued. “The MANY reporters with me were smiling also. They knew the TRUTH…And yet when I saw the reporting, CNN, MSNBC and other Fake News outlets covered it as serious news & me thinking of myself as the Messiah. No more trust!”
When I looked up to the sky and jokingly said “I am the chosen one,” at a press conference two days ago, referring to taking on Trade with China, little did I realize that the media would claim that I had a “Messiah complex.” They knew I was kidding, being sarcastic, and just….
….having fun. I was smiling as I looked up and around. The MANY reporters with me were smiling also. They knew the TRUTH…And yet when I saw the reporting, CNN, MSNBC and other Fake News outlets covered it as serious news & me thinking of myself as the Messiah. No more trust!
Trump called himself “the chosen one” and looked up at the sky on Wednesday as he spoke to reporters about trade and China, leading some pundits to accuse the president of having a messiah complex.
Trump defended the comments to reporters on Friday night.
“Let me tell you, you know exactly what I meant,” Trump said. “It was sarcasm. It was joking. We were all smiling. And the question like that is just fake news. You’re just a faker.”
On Friday, Trump announced he would raise tariffs on China by 5 percent in response to the country’s retaliatory tariffs on the United States.
The media freaked out over Trump’s “chosen on” comment because he knows his large evangelical base has called him chosen by God.
Want to see a perfect example of a “dog whistle”?
Donald Trump defended his ridiculous comments he was “God’s Chosen One” as nothing more than sarcasm, and actually we’re the ones who think he has a Messiah complex.
But actually this is not true.
It’s very well documented American evangelicals, such as Vice President Mike Pence, truly believe Donald Trump is divinely chosen, anywhere in a range from “an imperfect vessel of God” to Jesus himself reincarnated.
From common comparisons to the Biblical King Cyrus:
Trump’s “Christian policy liaison” preached that God told him personally that Trump would win the GOP nomination and help pave the way for the Second Coming:
The president of Godfactor said “God was speaking through Trump,” to motivate Christians to defend their ability to discriminate against gay people and minorities:
Televangelist James Robinson screamed at attendees of the Liberty Council’s “Awakening” conference to vote for Trump, comparing him to the disciple Paul:
Trunews evangelical host Rick Wiles told his listeners while broadcasting at a Trump rally, “God has picked him up and used him as a battering ram to beat down the walls of the New World Order”
The fact is Trump knows making insane comments about him being anointed by God will motivate his base because virtually all of the people listed above Trump has placed on religious White House advisory panels and have been inside the Oval Office.
The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court not to extend a sex discrimination ban to include sexual orientation, arguing that the language for the law was not intended for that purpose.
The Justice Department argues that the language in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prevents employment discrimination “because of sex,” does not apply to sexual orientation, in an amicus brief filed Friday.
The Justice Department says the term “sex” is not otherwise defined in the law, arguing that it therefore means the “ordinary meaning of ‘sex’” which is refers to a person being “biologically male or female.”
“It does not include sexual orientation,” the department said in the brief. “Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, standing alone, does not satisfy that standard.”
The filing relates to the cases of Gerald Bostock, a man who claims he was fired by Clayton County, Ga., for being gay, and Donald Zarda, who claims he was fired as a skydiving instructor at Altitude Express, for being gay.
President Donald Trump on Friday said he was ordering U.S. companies to “immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”
Trump also said he was ordering all U.S. postal carriers, including FedEx, Amazon, UPS and United States Post Office, “to SEARCH FOR & REFUSE all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!).”
And Trump said he will respond this afternoon to China’s newest round of tariffs on U.S. goods.
The White House did not immediately respond when asked if the announcement, delivered in a four-part Twitter thread Friday morning, constituted an official order from the president.
….better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing..
….all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!). Fentanyl kills 100,000 Americans a year. President Xi said this would stop – it didn’t. Our Economy, because of our gains in the last 2 1/2 years, is MUCH larger than that of China. We will keep it that way!
In a statement, UPS said that it “follows all applicable laws and administrative orders of the governments in the countries where we do business. We work closely with regulatory authorities to monitor for prohibited substances.”
FedEx also responded: “FedEx already has extensive security measures in place to prevent the use of our networks for illegal purposes. We follow the laws and regulations everywhere we do business and have a long history of close cooperation with authorities.”
Amazon and the Postal Service were not immediately available for comment.
Top trade advisors Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro were reportedly near the Oval Office just before the president sent his latest tweets. A source later told CNBC that Trump was meeting with his trade team Friday.
I spotted Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer just outside the Oval Office moments before the president tweeted this. It’s entirely possible he’s tweeting now with their input as he goes along. https://t.co/sUPjtUND7Y
“My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powel or Chairman Xi?,” Trump wrote, misspelling Powell’s name.
Trump has repeatedly blasted the Fed, even before his election. But his long-standing dissatisfaction with the Fed, which he accuses of bungling the U.S. economy, has increased amid concerns over a global economic slowdown. Trump nominated Powell as chairman in 2017.
The president’s tweet came as he prepares to head to France on Friday for the G-7 meeting of world leaders, where trade and the economy will be atop the agenda.
The Fed, an independent board whose members are appointed by the president, raises interest rates to cool down a hot economy and cuts them to stimulate a sluggish one. The rates affect how much it costs to use a credit card, sign a car loan or buy a home.
Trump this week has upped the ante in his year-long campaign to browbeat the Federal Reserve into slashing rates, calling for the central bank to lower its key short-term rate by “at least” a full percentage point “over a fairly short period of time.”
For good measure, he has added that the move should be accompanied by “perhaps some quantitative easing as well,” referring to the Fed’s massive bond purchases during and after the Great Recession to lower long-term rates.
Trump again voiced frustration with the Fed on Wednesday, tweeting that Germany “is actually being paid to borrow money, while the U.S., a far stronger and more important credit, is paying interest.”
President Donald Trump gushed over himself during a freewheeling press spray on Wednesday, insisting that victims of mass shootings adore him.
“I went to the hospitals,” Trump said when asked about his recent visits to hospitals in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio following two massacres that left 31 dead. Trump then made bizarre remarks on the victims, complaining that there was no media coverage of their adulation for him:
“The people that were so badly injured that I was with, they love our country. And frankly, do you want to know the truth? They love their president. And nobody wrote that. Nobody wrote that. Because you didn’t write the truth. New York Times doesn’t like to write the truth. They totally love our country and they do love our president. So when I went to Dayton, when I went to El Paso, and when I went into those hospitals, the love for me, and me maybe as a representative of the country, but for me, and my love for them, was unparalleled. If you read the papers, it was like nobody would meet with me. Not only did they meet with me, they were pouring out of the rooms. The doctors were coming out of the operating rooms. There were hundreds and hundreds of people all over the floor, you couldn’t even walk on it.”
President Donald Trump claimed to laughter on Wednesday that he sought to give himself a Medal of Honor, but decided not to after being counseled against the move by aides.
The offhand remark from the president came during his address to the 75th annual national convention of American Veterans, a volunteer-led veterans service organization also known as AMVETS.
At the event in Louisville, Kentucky, Trump singled out for praise WWII veteran and Medal of Honor recipient Woody Williams.
“That was a big day, Medal of Honor. Nothing like the Medal of Honor,” he continued. “I wanted one, but they told me I don’t qualify, Woody. I said, ‘Can I give it to myself anyway?’ They said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’”
Amid scattered chuckles, Trump concluded: “Great, great people. These are great, great men and women that get congressional Medal of Honor. Thank you, Woody.”
The president’s assessment that he should receive the nation’s highest award for acts of military valor followed his statement earlier Wednesday afternoon that he is “the chosen one” in relation to his administration’s trade conflict with China — a proclamation he turned to the sky to deliver.
Trump never served in the military and was granted five draft deferments — four for college and one for bone spurs in his heel.
A bizarre diplomatic row, even by the standards of the Trump administration, dragged on Wednesday as the US president said the way Denmark’s prime minister dismissed his idea of buying Greenland was “nasty.”
On Tuesday, President Trump abruptly canceled a planned state visit to Denmark after Mette Frederiksen, the Danish PM, firmly rejected his stated wish to buy Greenland, the semi-autonomous island home to 56,000 people.
Frederiksen had labelled the idea of the US purchasing Greenland an “absurd discussion” to be having.
….The Prime Minister was able to save a great deal of expense and effort for both the United States and Denmark by being so direct. I thank her for that and look forward to rescheduling sometime in the future!
But while he initially thanked the Danish PM on Twitter for “being so direct,” in remarks to journalists as he departed the White House on Wednesday, Trump branded her comment as “nasty.”
“I thought the prime minister’s statement that it was absurd, that it was an absurd idea, was nasty. I thought it was inappropriate. All she had to do was say, ‘No, we wouldn’t be interested,'” Trump said.
“She’s not talking to me. She’s talking to the United States of America,” the president added. “You don’t talk to the United States that way.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Frederiksen expressed “regret and surprise” at September’s state visit being canceled, as she reiterated once more that Greenland was not for sale.
“I had been looking forward to the visit and preparations were well underway,” Frederiksen told journalists in Copenhagen in a statement delivered in Danish and English. “It was an opportunity to celebrate Denmark’s close relationship to the US, which remains one of Denmark’s closest allies.”
She added, “This does not change the character of our good relations [with the US], and we will of course from Denmark continue our ongoing dialogue with the US on how we can develop our cooperation and deal with the many common challenges we are facing.”
.@POTUS values & respects 🇩🇰 and looks forward to a visit in the future to discuss the many important issues in our strong bilateral relationship! Great friends & Allies like 🇺🇸 and 🇩🇰 should be able to discuss all issues openly & candidly.#dkpol#partnershipsmatter
“That’s all we have to say about that,” the spokesperson added.
Former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt was more direct. “Is this some sort of joke?” she wrote on Twitter after Trump canceled the state visit.
So the POTUS has cancelled his visit to Denmark because there was no interest in discussing selling Greenland @BBCRadio4 Is this some sort of joke? Deeply insulting to the people of Greenland and Denmark.
The Wall Street Journal first reported last week that Trump had raised the possibility of buying Greenland, and he confirmed Sunday that such a purchase had been discussed because of the island’s strategic location and natural resources.
“Essentially, it’s a large real estate deal. A lot of things can be done,” Trump said. “It’s hurting Denmark very badly, because they’re losing almost $700 million a year carrying it. So they carry it at a great loss.”
He later tweeted a meme of a Trump Tower–style skyscraper in a settlement in Greenland.
But any such sale was firmly ruled out by Denmark and Greenland, which is self-governing in all respects apart from foreign policy and defense.
Speaking in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, on Sunday, Frederiksen said the sale of Greenland was not even up for discussion, pointing out, for one thing, that Greenland belongs to Greenland, not Denmark.
“Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over,” she told a TV reporter. “Let’s leave it there.”
President Trump on Wednesday said his administration is once again seriously considering an executive order to end birthright citizenship months after several lawmakers cast doubt on his ability to take such action.
“We’re looking at that very seriously,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House for Kentucky. “Birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land — walk over the border, have a baby, congratulations, the baby’s now a U.S. citizen.”
“We are looking at birthright citizenship very seriously,” he added. “It’s, frankly, ridiculous.”
The president proposed ending the practice that grants citizenship to those born in the United States during his 2016 presidential campaign. He revived the idea last year, saying he would sign an executive order to enact the change.
Numerous lawmakers, including several Republicans, quickly pushed back on the idea and argued Trump lacked the authority to make such a change using an executive order. They cited that birthright citizenship is a right enshrined under the 14th Amendment.
Trump responded to the criticism by saying birthright citizenship would be ended “one way or another.”
The president has sought various ways to crack down on illegal and legal immigration throughout his presidency.
His administration enacted and later reversed a “zero tolerance” policy that led to the separation of thousands of migrant families; Trump has sought changes to asylum laws to keep refugees in Mexico while they wait to be processed; and the White House last week rolled out a rule that would make it more difficult for some immigrants to obtain green cards.
The Trump administration announced earlier Wednesday it would unveil a new rule that would allow migrant families to be held indefinitely, ending a procedure known as the Flores Settlement Agreement that requires children to be held no longer than 20 days.
