Weekly Review
Trump visited Belgium, where he reportedly ate “lots of” chocolates and then complained he did not have a positive impression of the European Union because it took him two and a half years to get a license to open up a golf course in Ireland.
U.S. president Donald Trump, who was once implicated alongside a Saudi arms dealer in a scheme to avoid paying sales taxes at a Manhattan jewelry store, visited Saudi Arabia, where he ate steak with ketchup, participated in a sword dance, and announced plans to sell the country more than $110 billion in U.S. arms.[1][2][3][4][5] Trump then visited Israel, where he said in a meeting in Jerusalem that he had “just got back from the Middle East,” canceled a speech before Israel’s parliament because he didn’t want to be heckled, and visited and signed the guestbook of the country’s Holocaust museum. “SO AMAZING + WILL NEVER FORGET!” wrote Trump, whose administration once omitted mention of Jewish people in a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day.[6][7][8][9] Trump visited Belgium, where he reportedly ate “lots of” chocolates and then complained that he did not have a positive impression of the European Union because it took him two and a half years to get a license to open up a golf course in Ireland; a poll found that 54 percent of Americans believe Trump is “abusing the powers of his office”; and Trump shoved the prime minister of Montenegro.[10][11][12] It was reported that the FBI warned GOP congressman Dana Rohrabacher that the Russian government was attempting to recruit him as a spy; a recording was released of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy saying he believed Russian president Vladimir Putin “pays” Trump and Rohrabacher; Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said that Congress “really actually isn’t” in “chaos”; and a congressional GOP candidate body slammed, punched, and broke the glasses of a journalist in Montana, was charged with assault, and then won the election. [13][14][15][16] The Congressional Budget Office concluded that the House GOP’s American Health Care Act would cost 23 million Americans their health insurance by 2026, and a federal budget proposal submitted by the Trump Administration was found to have contained a $2 trillion math error.[17][18] A leaked transcript of a recent call between Trump and Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte revealed that Trump told Duterte, who once said he would “be happy to slaughter” as many drug addicts as Adolf Hitler did Jewish people, was doing an “amazing job,” and that the United States had clandestinely stationed two nuclear submarines near North Korea and that he’ll “see what happens” with regard to their usage.[19][20] Israel changed its intelligence-sharing protocols with the United States after Trump divulged secret Israeli intelligence about the Islamic State to Russian officials, and a team of hackers reported that it would take only five minutes to infiltrate the Wi-Fi network of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, where he has spent about one fifth of his presidency.[21][22][23] U.S. officials named Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a “person of interest” in the FBI’s investigation into whether the president’s campaign colluded with the Russian government; it was revealed that Trump told Russian officials that the “great pressure” he faced over his campaign’s ties to Russia had disappeared after he fired the FBI director overseeing the bureau’s investigation into those ties; and it was reported that Marc Kasowitz, an attorney who has represented Trump’s companies in bankruptcy and fraud litigation, would serve during the Russia probe as private counsel to Trump, who once acquired a race horse named Alibi from a known mob associate, changed Alibi’s name to D.J. Trump, and then refused to pay for it.[24][25][26][27]
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