Weekly Review
A leaked account of a recent White House meeting depicted Trump comparing his advisers to a consultant who he felt gave bad advice to the owners of one of his favorite Manhattan restaurants in the 1980s; it was reported that Trump told an audience at his golf club in New Jersey that the White House was “a real dump” and that the members, who pay him dues, were his “real people”; and then Trump departed for a 17-day visit to the club, where he was once planning to build a mausoleum for himself. Read more...
U.S. president Donald Trump, who abandoned the role of U.S. president in the film Sharknado 3 in order to run for office, fired his chief of staff, Reince Priebus; tweeted that there was no “chaos” in the White House; and appointed as his new chief of staff John Kelly, who reportedly had made a pact with Defense Secretary James “Chaos” Mattis not to both be out of the country while Trump is in command of the military.[1][2][3][4] Trump’s top counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka, who in the 1990s signed his name using the insignia of a Nazi-aligned Hungarian group, said that the military is “there to kill people and blow stuff up”; Trump visited New York’s Suffolk County, where the former police chief was arrested for beating a man he suspected of stealing a duffel bag of sex toys from his car, and said that it was okay for police to hit suspects on the head; and a spokesperson for the N.Y.P.D., whose officers in Brooklyn shot and killed a mentally disabled black man, said that Trump’s endorsement of police brutality was “unprofessional.”[5][6][7][8][9][10] Trump told his Cabinet that Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto had called him to praise his border-control efforts, Peña Nieto said he had “not recently communicated by phone” with Trump, and a leaked transcript of a months-old conversation between the two showed Trump telling Peña Nieto that New Hampshire was a “drug-infested den,” that Peña Nieto should not “even think about” Canada, and that “it is you and I against the world.”[11][12] The Trump Administration indicated that it would no longer support a Labor Department rule that had expanded the number of employees who were required to receive overtime pay, and the Secret Service vacated Trump Tower after being unable to resolve a dispute over how much the United States should pay the Trump Organization for the space it rents to protect Trump.[13][14] A lawsuit was filed alleging that Trump preapproved the publication of a retracted Fox News story, which claimed that a staff member of the Democratic National Committee was murdered for leaking files to WikiLeaks, an act that the reporter had no evidence of, and that the FBI and the CIA had already told Trump was carried out by Russian hackers.[15] A leaked account of a recent White House meeting depicted Trump comparing his advisers to a consultant who he felt gave bad advice to the owners of one of his favorite Manhattan restaurants in the 1980s; it was reported that Trump told an audience at his golf club in New Jersey that the White House was “a real dump” and that the members, who pay him dues, were his “real people”; and then Trump departed for a 17-day visit to the club, where he was once planning to build a mausoleum for himself.[16][17][18][19] Trump’s communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, who was reported to have skipped the birth of his child to watch Trump give a speech in which he described a Manhattan cocktail party to a group of teenage boy scouts, said the “entire” communications department would be “fired over the next two weeks,” threatened to fire an assistant press secretary, was himself fired, and was listed in a new edition of the Harvard Law School alumni magazine as being dead since 2011.[20][21][22][23][24][25] Trump’s education secretary didn’t answer questions about whether she supported the cuts to teacher-training programs proposed in Trump’s budget, Trump donated his second-quarter paycheck to the Department of Education to fund a STEM camp, and then Trump backed a proposal to replace the current immigration system with one that would admit people into the country based on their level of education and ability to speak English. “Look,” Trump once said of his own academic abilities, “my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at M.I.T.—good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my, like, credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged.”[26][27][28][29]
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