Trump made at least eight false claims, seven of which he had made before. (The new one was an odd claim about Melania Trump and Kim Jong Un.) And he made at least five claims that we’ll call misleading, questionable or lacking in context.
Melania Trump and Kim Jong Un“
“The first lady has gotten to know Kim Jong Un, and I think she would agree with me he is a man with a country that has tremendous potential,” Trump said.
Facts First: Melania Trump was not present for any of Trump’s three meetings with Kim Jong Un, and there is no evidence she has ever spoken to Kim.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement later Monday:
“President Trump confides in his wife on many issues including the detailed elements of his strong relationship with Chairman Kim — and while the First Lady hasn’t met him, the President feels like she’s gotten to know him too.”We’re still calling the statement false. Trump’s phrasing, “gotten to know,” clearly suggested some level of personal interaction between Melania Trump and Kim.
President Donald Trump said U.S. and Chinese officials spoke Sunday and he is optimistic China wants to make a deal after the trade war between the two countries escalated in recent days.
“They want to make a deal,” Trump told reporters Monday during a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi at the Group of Seven Summit. “That’s a great thing.”
The conversations Sunday between the U.S. and Chinese officials were the first since the two countries lobbed a new round of tariffs at each other last week. Neither side formally broke off talks and White House officials had said they expected negotiations to continue despite the new tariffs. But investors had feared China could walk away from the negotiating table.
Speaking to reporters, Trump heaped praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping, calling him a “great leader” and said China wants “to do something very, very badly.” He said the calls were at the “highest levels.”
“We are probably in a much better position now than any time in the negotiations,” Trump said in a meeting Monday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
When asked about the phone calls, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said, “I haven’t heard about this.” News of Trump’s comments was breaking as he was addressing reporters.
Hours earlier, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said China sought “calm” negotiations and opposed an escalation.
“We are willing to solve the problem through consultation and cooperation with a calm attitude,” he said, according to Chinese newspaper Caixin. “We firmly oppose the escalation of the trade war,” he said, adding that it “is not conducive to China, the U.S. and the interests of people all over the world.”
Liu, China’s top trade negotiator, was speaking at a tech conference in Chongqing in southwest China, the Chongqing Morning Post reported.
The stock market fell sharply Friday after China announced it would slap retaliatory tariffs on $75 billion worth of U.S. goods, and Trump hit back saying he would increase existing tariffs on $250 billion in imports to 30 percent from 25 percent Oct. 1.
He also said that a planned 10 percent tariff on a further $300 billion in Chinese goods would now be taxed at 15 percent starting next month.
But the continued talks and optimism from Trump eased financial market jitters. U.S. stock futures pointed to a recovery Monday morning, with Dow futures jumping more than 200 points.
Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, said Sunday afternoon that he was anticipating a call from the Chinese this week and for Chinese officials to still come to Washington as planned.
“You’ve got both sides playing their game, we get that,” Kudlow told reporters. “As long as they are talking, I’m good.”
He said he didn’t feel disrespected by the surprise arrival of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the seaside town where the meeting of world leaders is taking place. Trump said French President Emmanuel Macron let him know Zarif was coming on the day of his arrival.
“I don’t consider that disrespectful at all, especially when he asked for my approval,” Trump said of Macron.
But White House aides said they felt blindsided by the unanticipated visitor, and some were upset at the French over the move, U.S. officials said shortly after Zarif’s arrival.
A spokesman for Zarif announced that he had arrived in Biarritz at the invitation of the French foreign minister “to continue talks” between the Iranian and French governments.
Trump said it would have been too soon to meet with the Iranians, and he declined to comment when asked if he sent any message to Zarif. There is no indication Zarif would have been willing to meet with the U.S. officials.
Trump said he isn’t looking for regime change in Iran, but that he wants to see the country abandon its nuclear program and stop its terrorism funding before lifting financial restrictions that have crippled its economy.
“We are looking to make Iran rich again,” Trump told reporters Monday. “Let them be rich.”
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.
