Weekly Review
A Republican congressman from Nebraska refused to say whether people were “entitled to eat.”
U.S. president Donald Trump, whose golf course in Ireland once requested permission from local authorities to build a wall to protect against sea-level rise, pulled out of the Paris climate agreement; defended the decision by saying he was elected not by Paris but by Pittsburgh, a city he lost in 2016; and proclaimed June to be National Ocean Month.[1][2][3][4] White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that Trump was the “best messenger” for his administration, and a poll found that 61 percent of Americans think Trump hurts his administration when he speaks.[5][6] Trump asked his Twitter followers to figure out the “true meaning” of a word he invented as part of a sentence fragment he tweeted the previous night, Trump’s communications director resigned, four candidates asked to fill the job opening told the White House they did not want to be considered, and other potential candidates equated the job to “career suicide” and “a horrific bungee-jumping accident.”[7][8][9][10] One White House official issued a statement saying that Trump had a “magnetic personality” and “exuded positive energy,” and another White House official told a reporter that Trump had become “glum,” gained weight, trusted no one, and “now lives within himself.”[11][12] Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is currently a person of interest in the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign for allegedly attempting to establish a secret communication channel between the Trump Administration and the Kremlin, was reported to have met in December with Sergey Gorkov, a former FSB classmate of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who later appointed Gorkov as head of the state-owned VneshEconomBank, which was sanctioned by the United States and later the European Union in 2014.[13][14] The White House said the meeting between Gorkov and Kushner covered diplomatic issues, and Gorkov said it was a business meeting.[15][16] Trump tweeted a news story claiming that anonymous sources say Kushner did not attempt to set up communications with Russia, and Trump also tweeted that it is “very possible” stories citing anonymous sources are “made up.”[17] A Republican congressman from Nebraska refused to say whether people were “entitled to eat,” Veteran’s Affairs secretary David Shulkin said the aim of reducing the number of homeless veterans to zero was not “the right goal,” and a Gallup poll found that more than half of those living in military communities in the United State now disapprove of Trump, who once compared his efforts to avoid sexually transmitted diseases to those of “a soldier going over to Vietnam.”[18][19][20][21] Three men in London drove a van into a crowd, exited the vehicle, and attacked patrons of a nearby market, killing seven people; and Trump tweeted in response to the attack that it was time to “get down to business” and then went golfing for the 23rd time since he took office.[22][23] A Democrat in Iowa withdrew from a race for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives because she had received death threats, and a Republican state representative in Texas threatened to shoot his Democratic colleague.[24][25] A G.O.P. county chair in Oregon recommended that Republicans employ private militias, and a former Trump campaign official was sentenced to seven years in prison for organizing an armed militia to aid in a standoff against the U.S. government.[26][27] A conservative radio host called for “a more violent Christianity,” a noose was found at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, a white man in California shouted racial slurs at a black man and then attacked him with a machete, a white man shouting racial slurs ran over two members of the Quinalt tribe with a monster truck, and a white man riding a Portland train drank sangria while shouting racist slurs at a woman wearing hijab, then stabbed to death two people who attempted to intervene. “I’m sorry the world is so cruel,” said a bystander to one of the dying men.[28][29][30][31][32]
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