Category Archives: Donald Trump

President Donald Trump loves rallies, but he cant hold a rally every day. Sometimes he has to turn to Fox & Friends.

Amid a series of moves closing off access to the administration for journalists including recent major changes to the frequency and format of official press briefings the president and first lady Melania Trump are tapingan exclusive interview today with Fox News Ainsley Earhardt, his first televised, in-person interview in six weeks. (The interview is set to air Friday.) This move makes perfect sense for Trump, who is mired in countless major scandals and can expect to avoid being grilled about any of them on Fox & Friends, known more for its family-barbecue brand of casual, coded racism and xenophobia than for actual journalism.

The interview also speaks to a larger trend in the presidents approach to the press, as he increasingly elevates and prioritizes loyal conservative sycophants over actual news outlets. After tomorrows Fox & Friendsinterview, Trump will have given as many interviews to Fox & Friends (three) during his presidency as he has to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN combined.

Since his inauguration, Trump has given 10 televised interviews in total to Fox News (and one to Fox Business), one each to CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and the Christian Broadcasting Network, and none to CNN.

Trumps decision to grant another sit-down interview tohis friends at Fox & Friendscomes 40 days after his last one-on-one interview with Foxs Jeanine Pirro, who also asked him predictable softball questions. It is an ideal move for a president who wants to appear as if hes granting media access without being accessible to any members of the media who might actually ask him a critical question. (The last time he allowed that to happen, he stepped on a James Comey-shaped rake courtesy of NBCs Lester Holt.)

Trumps retreat to his friends at Fox is happening in the midst of his administrations unprecedented war on the press at large. On the same day the president and first lady are sitting down with Earhardt, elsewhere in the White House, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders conducted yet another bizarre and pointlesspress briefing that barredvideo recordings. The frequency of the White House press briefings and gaggles recorded or otherwise has been sharply declining in recent months. The Washington Posts Callum Borchers calculated that the total White House press briefing time for June will shrink to about a third of what it was in March.

Trump also lags far behind his predecessors in holding solo presidential press conferences. So far, Trump has held just one press conference, in which he called CNNs Jim Acosta fake news; at this point in previous administrations, President Barack Obama had held six, President George W. Bush had held three, and President Bill Clinton had held seven solo press conferences.

Fox News (and Fox & Friends, in particular) is predictably the runaway favorite when Trump is compelled to branch out from public interaction via Twitter and rallies. As Politicos Joanna Weiss wrote last month:

Trumps cozy relationship with Fox & Friends has become one of the great curiosities of his unusual presidency. A well-known cable TV devotee, Trump has found inspiration for his Twitter timeline in various programs but none so much as Fox News Channels 6-9 a.m. talk show.

[. . .]

Its not hard to understand the shows appeal. While the rest of the media frets and wails over Trumps policies and sounds the alarm over his tweets, Fox & Friends remains unrelentingly positive. Its pitched to the frequency of the Trump base, but it also feels intentionally designed for Trump himself a three-hour, high-definition ego fix. For a president who no longer regularly receives adulation from screaming crowds at mega rallies, Fox & Friends offers daily affirmation that he is successful and adored, that his America is winning after all.

On Twitter, his preferred mode of communication with the public, the president has repeatedly lavished Fox & Friendswith praise since taking office. Trump routinely appeared on the show throughout his campaign, often calling in just to talk or complain about whatever was bothering him, including on Election Day. For years beforehand, he even had a weekly call-in segment on the show to share this thoughts about the news of the day.

The warm and familiar embrace of Fox & Friendsis where Trump turns for unconditional support in furthering an alternate reality where his presidency is historically successful and his critics are merely unfair or needlessly mean. Perhaps thats why Ivanka Trump is also now frequenting the show her own one-on-one interview with Earhardtwas pushed back to accomodate her fathers,but it will air on Monday.

Rob Savillo contributed original researchto this post.

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Fox & Friends is Donald Trump's safe space - Salon

The New York Public Theaters presentation of William Shakespeares 400-year-old play, Julius Caesar was embroiled in controversy this month, with protests over a choice to costume the titular character as President Donald Trump. This wardrobe decision was controversial because senators plot to stab Caesar to death in the play.

Now that this run of Julius Caesar has come to an end, actor Corey Stoll has written a piece for Vulture about what it was like to star in the play. Stoll had the role of Marcus Brutus, a reluctant assassin of Caesar.

Although the play is explicitly about the pitfalls of assassination, Stoll wrote that following through with the play amid the protest eventually felt like a contribution to the resistance. These days, that term is loaded to evoke the phrase #resist which refers to a rallying cry against Trump.

The protesters never shut us down, but we had to fight each night to make sure they did not distort the story we were telling, wrote Stoll in the piece that was published Friday. At that moment, watching my castmates hold their performances together, it occurred to me that this is resistance.

Watch video of two protestors disrupting a performance:

Stoll, who memorably played an eventually murdered politician in the first season of House of Cards, said that he had no idea this production would portray Trump so explicitly before signing on to the role.

Stoll was frustrated by the choice at first, as he feared involving Trump would overshadow the rest of the performance.

A passage from Stolls piece:

When I signed on to play the reluctant assassin Marcus Brutus in this production, I didnt know Caesar would be an explicit avatar for President Trump. I suspected that an American audience in 2017 might see aspects of him in the character, a democratically elected leader with autocratic tendencies. I did not think anyone would see it as an endorsement of violence against him. The play makes it clear that Caesars murder, which occurs midway through the play, is ruinous for Brutus and his co-conspirators, and for democracy itself ...

After four weeks in the rehearsal room, we moved to the theater and I saw Caesars Trump-like costume and wig for the first time. I was disappointed by the literal design choice. I had little fear of offending people, but I worried that the nuanced character work we had done in the rehearsal room would get lost in what could seem like a Saturday Night Live skit. I was right and wrong.

chudakov2 via Getty Images

After the presidents eldest child,Donald Trump Jr., blamed this production for the actions of the gunman who fired on a baseball team made up of Republican congressmen, Stoll began to fear for his own life.

Like most Americans, I was saddened and horrified, but when the presidents son and others blamed us for the violence, I became scared, wrote Stoll.

The production was plagued with disruptions from protestors, but fortunately had none that caused physically critical harm.

Read the whole piece at Vulture.

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'Julius Caesar' Star Considered The Play To Be Donald Trump 'Resistance' - HuffPost

Comedian Stephen ColbertPhotograph by Roger L. WollenbergGetty/Pool

While in Russia, Stephen Colbert sent a tweet to President Donald Trump and announced he was considering a White House run.

"I am here to announce that I am considering a run for President in 2020, and I thought it would be better to cut out the middle man and just tell the Russians myself," Colbert said on the Russian late-night show Evening Urgant on Friday.

As the American TV host continued poking fun at allegations that President Trump's campaign may have colluded with Russia , Colbert added, "If anyone would like to work on my campaign, in an unofficial capacity, please just let me know."

Russian host Ivan Urgant joined in on the fun saying, "Its a pleasure to drink with the future U.S. President. To you, Stephen. I wish you luck. We will do everything we can so you become President."

Colbert tweeted a picture of himself in Russia to the President Thursday with the caption, "Don't worry, Mr. President. I'm in Russia. If the 'tapes' exist , I'll bring you back a copy!"

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Stephen Colbert Tweets at Donald Trump and Mulls 2020 Run - TIME

In January, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey arrived at a press conference to announce that her office was taking action challenging President Trumps executive order on immigration.

It took only three days for Attorney General Maura Healey to take President Trump to court, filing two legal challenges in January while the nation was still debating the size of the inauguration crowd on the National Mall.

Now, just six months into Trumps term, Healey has racked up 11 legal cases against the Republican presidents agenda, a pace of nearly one court challenge every two weeks.

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The full impact of the legal barrage is not yet clear because most of the lawsuits are pending. But the fusillade is evidence of the increasingly aggressive and, some might say, partisan role that Democratic state attorneys general are taking in the Trump era.

The legal battles could also burnish Healeys reputation among Democratic voters, who already view her as a rising star and potential candidate for higher office.

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What were seeing, and certainly Healey is one of the leaders, is really an escalation of the AGs national role, said Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political scientist who studies the rising influence of state attorneys general in shaping federal policy. Whether its reversing Obamas regulations or going after something new, like the travel ban, theyre saying, Were going to be the first line of defense and push back on that.

Mass. AG Maura Healey has taken action against the Trump administration on numerous fronts in the past six months.

Republican attorneys general launched a similar assault on President Obamas agenda when he was in office, suing him over issues ranging from transgender rights to immigration and health care. But most of those lawsuits didnt begin until Obamas second year in office, and the full onslaught didnt start until his second term, Nolette said.

Whats new here is just the rapid escalation of all this, he said. The Democratic AGs, including Healey, are just jumping right into the fray during the earliest days and months of the administration.

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So far, Healey has filed or joined multistate legal challenges to the Trump administrations efforts to cut funding for the Affordable Care Act, enact bans on travel from several countries, undo student loan regulations, lessen oversight of for-profit colleges, and loosen environmental rules for oil and gas producers, trucks, electrical appliances, and light bulbs.

She also has also signed another dozen legal briefs, letters, and administrative requests in support of other states lawsuits against the travel ban and in opposition to administration policies related to the environment and consumer protection.

EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS

President Donald Trump.

Some legal observers contend the growing portfolio of federal court matters could drain attention and resources away from Healeys traditional duties as attorney general: to defend state agencies in court, issue advisory opinions on legal matters, and prosecute unscrupulous corporations and individuals.

The question is whether some of these lawsuits are depleting resources that might be used to pursue other important initiatives, especially if other states are challenging Trump and there is no fiscal cost to simply signing onto the briefs of other states, said Neal E. Devins, a professor at William & Mary Law School.

Healey insisted there is no tension between her federal legal activities and her responsibilities in Massachusetts, saying her battles against Trump are aimed at protecting local interests.

She said, for example, that Trumps executive orders to ban travel from some Muslim countries would have hurt local universities ability to attract top talent, that laxer energy-efficiency standards would undermine the states clean-energy sector, and that a delay sought by the US Department of Education in processing federal loan discharges could harm thousands of Massachusetts students. That is why, she said, she took steps to challenge those policies.

Weve run headlong into a brick wall when it comes to the Trump administration looking to take away rights and protections and to take us backwards, said Healey, who was elected in 2014. Thats why we absolutely have to be there as state AGs. This is our job, and if we dont do it, the question is: Who will?

From a legal standpoint, some scholars argue that Healeys attempts to defend federal regulations are an attempt to bypass Congress and craft national policy effectively legislating through litigation.

Shes overstepping her bounds as a state official trying to implement federal policy, and as an executive official trying to usurp federal power, said John C. Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University in Irvine, Calif. Weve got a real separation of powers problem.

Healey argued, however, that she is acting safely within her authority.

This is exactly the role of the state attorney general: Its to enforce the law, to make sure people are complying with the law, and to bring legal action when necessary to protect the interests of our state, she said.

Previous state attorneys general also sued Republican administrations but not as frequently, said James M. Shannon, who was the Democratic attorney general of Massachusetts during the first Bush presidency.

Shannon attributed the surge in legal cases against Trump to the extraordinarily aggressive actions he has taken as president some of it illegal, like the immigration ban.

Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

And its exacerbated because you dont have a Congress to stop him, he said. So I would say this is the first time weve seen the attorney generals office here, and across the country, really be the front line of opposition.

Politically, the legal challenges could lift Healeys standing among Democrats who want her to challenge Republican Charlie Baker in next years governors race. Healey has said she is running for reelection. But there is precedent elsewhere for her legal strategy leading to higher office.

When he was attorney general of Texas, Republican Greg Abbott boasted of the more than 30 lawsuits he filed against Obama, famously declaring that his job was straightforward: I go into the office in the morning. I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home. Partly on the strength of that record, Abbott was elected governor of Texas in 2014.

You can make a name for yourself in a state were the president is unpopular, said Saikrishna Prakash, a University of Virginia law professor. While other officials can only rail against the federal government, Healeys lawsuits signal to voters that shes taking action, he said.

Healey dismissed the comparison to Abbott and the implication that her court cases could give her a political boost.

Greg Abbott was somebody who said his job was to go to work, sue the Obama administration, and go home, she said. That is not the job of the attorney general. The job of the attorney general is to enforce the law and to make sure that youre fighting to protect the interests of the state, within the bounds of the law. And thats what were doing.

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Maura Healey's top target these days is Donald Trump - The Boston Globe

Johnny Depp apologized Friday for making flip remarks about assassinating the president. In a statement to People, the actor said, I apologize for the bad joke I attempted last night in poor taste about President Trump. It did not come out as intended, and I intended no malice. I was only trying to amuse, not to harm anyone.

Depp was Glastonbury Festivals inaugural guest at its new Cineramageddon drive-in movie theater in Britain Thursday night, and he certainly gave the place a memorable launch. While introducing a screening of his 2004 movie The Libertine, he made inflammatory statements about President Donald Trump.

I think he needs help and there are a lot of wonderful dark, dark places he could go, Depp said, according to the Guardian.

He then asked the crowd, When was the last time an actor assassinated the president?

The answer is 1865, when John Wilkes Booth shot and killed Abraham Lincoln at Fords Theatre.

It is just a question Im not insinuating anything, he assured the crowd. By the way, this is going to be in the press. It will be horrible. I like that you are all a part of it.

He also claimed he wasnt referring to himself, since hes not really an actor.

I lie for a living, he clarified. However, it has been a while and maybe it is time.

White House officials were not amused.

The joke is no laughing matter, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. These things are real.

Conway called Depp a nut job and said his statement was not a slip of the tongue but rather a deliberate attempt to spread vile ideas that could easily inflame lunatics who wish to bring harm.

A Secret Service spokesman told The Post that the agency is aware of the comment in question. For security reasons, we cannot discuss specifically nor in general terms the means and methods of how we perform our protective responsibilities.

Depp is hardly the first celebrity to target Trump.

Madonna came under fire in January, after she said shed thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.

Comedian Kathy Griffin was roundly criticized and fired from CNN after she was photographed holding a mask of what looked like President Trumps bloody severed head.

We expect actors and musicians and others to continue to spew hateful rhetoric, Conway said Friday.

How, she wondered, will people react to Depps remarks?

Will people chide him, discipline him or drop him? she asked.

In a sharply worded statement to The Post, deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that President Trump has condemned violence in all forms and its sad that others like Johnny Depp have not followed his lead. I hope that some of Mr. Depps colleagues will speak out against this type of rhetoric as strongly as they would if his comments were directed to a Democrat elected official.

This isnt the first time Depp has aired his feelings about Trump; he played the then-candidate in Funny or Dies The Art of the Deal: The Movie in early 2016. But that was mere parody not something the Secret Service might need to investigate.

Depp has been the subject of plenty of bad press in the past year. First there was the very public implosion of his short marriage to Amber Heard, who claimed the actor had physically abused her. Photos of her bruised face circulated on the internet.

Meanwhile, Depp sued his business managers, who in turn countersued, going public with some very unsavory accusations about the actor, saying that he has compulsive spending disorder and had squandered hundreds of millions of dollars with an outrageously extravagant lifestyle that included spending $30,000 every month on wine. According to a Hollywood Reporter story about Depps recent troubles, he was also difficult on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, where he routinely showed up late for work, leaving the cast and crew waiting around for hours.

And now there are his statements at Glastonbury.

If Kathy Griffins experience joking about Trumps death by holding up a fake severed head that resembled the president is any indication, there could be some serious blowback. Griffin ended up making a tearful apology but still lost her New Years Eve gig with CNN.

This isnt Depps first public apology. He had to do so on videotape when he and Heard illegally smuggled their dogs into Australia. The formal apology the pair made was stilted and stiff but at least seemed genuine. Later, Depp told Jimmy Kimmel that there had been a few takes of the mea culpa, since it was hard for him to keep his composure.

So much for saying sorry. But Depp said it himself: He lies for a living.

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Johnny Depp apologizes for joking about assassinating Donald Trump - Bangor Daily News

If you are an American worried about your local factory losing jobs, better not let Donald Trump find out.

Four reasons why:

In February, the US president visited the Boeing factory in North Charleston, SC. We are going to fight for every last American job, he declared at the rollout of the Dreamliner 787-10 passenger jet. He added, jobs is one of the primary reasons Im standing here today as your president, and I will never, ever disappoint you. Believe me, I will not disappoint you.

On Thursday (June 22), Boeing announced 200 jobs would be eliminated at the plant, as it faces stiff competition from its European rival Airbus.

In December, president-elect Trump visited the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, Indiana, to express his glee at a deal to keep 1,100 jobs there that had been slated to go to Mexico. And by the way, that number is going to go up very substantially as they expand this area, Trump said. So the 1,100 is going to be a minimum number. He added, These companies are not going to be taking peoples hearts out. They are not going to be announcing, like they did at Carrier, that they are closing up and moving to Mexico.

On Thursday, CNBC reported that more than 600 employees at the plant will be losing their jobs, as the deal did not work out as advertised. Last month, the company told Indiana officials about 800 factory employees would still have jobs when the layoffs end.

In December, Trump took notice of an industrial-bearings manufacturers plan to lay off its Indianapolis employees:

Well, not exactly. In late March, as noted by the Los Angeles Times, the company nevertheless started the shuttering process.

On Thursday, it was reported that the closing is coming in September. Plant union president Don Zering told the Associated Press that production by the remaining 110 workers goes on only because factories in Mexico and McAllen, Texasquite close to the borderarent yet prepared to do the work.

In January, Ford, the second-largest US automaker, pulled back on its plan to build a new plant in Mexico for the next generation of the Focus, a small-car model, a move that came after criticism from the president-elect. The new Focus instead would be manufactured at an existing plant in Mexico, Ford said.

On June 20, Ford announced it will build the new Focus, not in the US or Mexico, but in China.

There was no response from the president. He left that task to his Commerce secretary, who added a new optimistic twist in the face of the disappointing news.

The Ford decision shows how flexible multinational companies are in terms of geography, Wilbur Ross said. I believe that as President Trumps policies and reforms take hold, more companies will begin to locate their facilities in the US as several German and Japanese automakers already have.

The Detroit Free Press observed that Rosss cheery statement lacked any of the bellicose remarks made by candidate Trump about what he would do to manufacturers.

So no worries, America. It turns out the world is a complicated place that requires subtlety to navigate. The White House is on it.

This story has been updated to clarify the details of Fords January announcement about its manufacturing plans in Mexico.

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Why did the factory cross the road? To get away from Donald Trump's kiss of death - Quartz

Qatar is home to the USs largest military base in the Middle East and a long-time US ally. Since its Gulf neighbors, led by Saudi Arabia, imposed a blockade two weeks ago, president Donald Trump has enthusiastically praised the blockade and attacked Qatarcontradicting the messages from his own Defense Department, State Department, and Senate Republicans. His ex-ambassador to Qatar, who abruptly stepped down last week, this week took to Twitter to cheer the State Department for chiding the Saudis.

That same day, Trump chastised Chinas attempts to rein in North Korea, tweeting that it had not worked out. That must have made for an uncomfortable meeting, just hours later, between top Chinese defense officials and diplomats and the US secretaries of State, Rex Tillerson, and Defense, James Mattis.

US foreign policy experts who spoke to Quartz, many of whom work or worked in the National Security Council, State Department, or Pentagon in the past, say theyve rarely seen such a wide-open divide between what a US president is saying and long-stated US government agenda, or between the president and his own top policy and security advisors. It looks like we have two governments at the moment, said Edward Goldberg, a professor at New York Universitys Center For Global Affairs, and author of The Joint Ventured Nation: Why America Needs A New Foreign Policy.

Aside from contradicting his own officials, Trump has made a habit of bypassing them. This week his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and the Trump Organizations former legal counsel are in Israel for peace talks with Israeli and Palestinian authoritiescutting out the State Department and its decades of experience. Kushner will brief Trump, Tillerson, and national security advisor HR McMaster on his return, according to the White House. During Trumps last visit to the Middle East, Kushner sat in on a meeting with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, while McMaster was left outside, reportedly for hours.

White House officials seem to have given up trying to reconcile the conflicting approaches. Asked on Air Force One on June 21 how the presidents tweets affected Mattis and Tillersons meeting with Chinese officials, a spokeswoman had only this enigmatic response: The president is not going to project his strategy. And tweets speak for themselves. While Trump has focused on a few hot spots, the result is that the bureaucrats and generals are running much of US foreign policy.

Traditionally, the National Security Council (NSC) is supposed to serve as the presidents chief advisory body on foreign policy, funneling information from State, Defense, and intelligence agencies into a cohesive action plan. Some tensions are normal; in the Barack Obama administration, friction between the Oval Office, NSC, State, and Defense ran high over how to respond to ISIL and the Russian invasion of Crimea, among other topics.

But this time is different. Mattis, McMaster, and usually Tillerson are increasingly united around traditional US policy goals, as in Qatar. Trump, backed by a tiny group of personal confidantes with no foreign-policy experience, including Steve Bannon and Kusher, is disregarding them.

Not only are officials from these agencies openly contradicting the president; more quietly, some are recommending that his public statements be ignored. US foreign policy still works fine if the international community realizes they dont have to react to every Trump tweet, explained one defense department official, who asked not to be named.

The message to the rest of the world is that it is not a systematic policy development process, said Stephen Biddle, a defense policy expert at the Council of Foreign Relations and a former advisor to the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is poorly managed, poorly coordinated, and is going to be a challenge for any US embassy to try to understand and explain. You cant take a garden variety statement from the president or the secretary of State as US policy, said Biddle.

In the worst case, this confusion could cause the US to bumble into a war. We might find ourselves in a major military conflict with Assad, Iran, or Russia, without knowing why, exactly, or what US interests are, said Ilan Goldenberg, a director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, and a former State Department chief of staff.

Some military heads of command have already had a conversation about what to do if Trump gives an order they cant comply with, said a former National Security Agency analyst who still consults for the US government, citing direct conversations with military agency personnel. If it gets to a point beyond their comfort level, theyre well trained by the military not to disobey, said the defense official. Instead, expect the military leaders to just say Im out.

Kushners close relationship with Saudi prince Mohammad bin Salman, the 31-year old who has just been named successor to the aging King Salman, has shaped Trumps embrace of Saudi Arabia, analysts say. He has also helped moderate the presidents views on China. Because he has the presidents ear at any time, his influence has proven hard to counteract. Kushner has proven tough to work around, one lobbyist in DC with foreign clients said.

But Kushners foreign-policy inexperience is a risk for the situation now developing in the Middle East. Its much more dangerous than other previous spats, said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. What the Saudi royal family is doing is arguing whether the ruling family of Qatar has legitimacy, he said. If the Saudis want to push it all the way to its logical end, this could become a very dangerous crisis in the Gulf.

Moreover, the special prosecutor investigating the Trump campaigns possible ties to Russian election hacking is now investigating Kushners business dealings. If he becomes a bigger focus of the probe his star, and his influence, is likely to fade.

One Washington, DC consultant to Middle East governments compares Trumps stance on Qatar to a car with no driver but only a set of brakesin the form of State, Defense, and the NSC. The brakes are all that is stopping the tensions around Qatar turning into an all-out war against a US ally.

One emerging outcome of this is that foreign policy in general is increasingly under the control of the military. Mattis has a tremendous amount of autonomy, billions of dollars of weaponry at his disposal, and political capital, said Goldenberg. He can make decisions and back them up with real action. In particular, Mattis has been given full responsibility for troop levels in Afghanistan, normally something the president decides.

Described as both deeply thoughtful and extremely aggressive, Mattis earned a fearsome reputation for leading Marine troops in the bloody 2004 attack on Fallujah, but said last year he thought the Iraq war was a strategic mistake. Since taking the Defense job, he has urged for the US to provide more military support for anti-Iranian forces (paywall) in Yemen, and has armed Syrian Kurdish fighters.

McMaster, himself a general with experience in the Middle East and Afghanistan, has ex-Army officials Derek Harvey and Joel Rayburn on his team, giving even more heft to the military point of view. In contrast, Tillerson, as a civilian voice on foreign policy, is hampered by running a department with large numbers of senior posts and ambassadorships still unfilled, while trying to defend its budget, which Trump has targeted for nearly 30% cuts.

Taken together, the team is smart and well-respected, said Goldenberg. But, sometimes things cant be figured out with a military solution, he said. Sometimes they are grayer and murkier and uglier than good guys and bad guys.

A White House spokesman, Michael Short said that questions about a disconnect between the presidents words and the State and Defense departments actions were nebulous claims. Trump and Tillerson, he said, have both stated publicly that there are steps that Qatar needs to take to address concerns about support for terrorists and extremists. Given the high stakes involved, the United States is disappointed that this dispute between our partners in the Gulf has not been resolved.

The State Department is still pointing to a diplomatic solution. The president and the secretary both want to see the Qatar dispute resolved quickly, one official said. Through the secretarys phone calls and meetings, he believes it can be resolved.

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Under Trump, US foreign policy is increasingly being left to the generals - Quartz

Attention all unemployed minors: Jobs are coming!

Donald Trump, 71, delivered a speech at arally on Friday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, promising new jobs and support for our veterans.

But the presidents message was slightly skewed in a video promotion for the rally that Trump himself posted on Facebook later in the day.

The videos creator seems to have fallen victim to a classic case of homophone confusion, writing that the White House is putting our minors back to work referring to underage citizens as opposed to the coal miners Trump has championed throughout his campaign and presidency.

The gaff did not go unnoticed on Social Media, where Trump supporters and detractors joked about the typo. Facebook user Steve Robbins commented,Hopefully the miners get work also. I mean its great for our youth to have employment, but mining seems kind of dangerous as a first job.

This is absolutely hysterical!! wrote Ivelisse Berio LeBeau. Yes, lets put kids back to work, who cares about child labor laws!

Trump supporter Kim Rubin commented, Whoever is writing your copy needs to learn to spell! MINORS are children; MINERS mine coal. Dont get me wrong, Im a Trump fan, but that doesnt mean I give glaring mistakes a pass!

Ironically, minor miners were common in the early years of the 20th century, when children were preferred to do the work due to their small stature and ability to fit in spaces adults could not. One of the first child labor laws for the mines was passed in 1885, which required boys to be at least 12 to work in the coal breakers.

We have eliminated restrictions on the production of American energy, Trump said at the rally. We have ended the war on clean, beautiful coal. And we are putting our miners back to work.

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Donald Trump Rally Video Accidentally Proclaims He's 'Putting Our Minors Back to Work' - PEOPLE.com

It was a surreal new twist to a presidency that has often already stretched the limits of credulity, and has challenged conventions on the decorum and gravity expected in the behavior of the person who holds the office itself.

After weeks of speculation, the President delivered a mea culpa, a step that he had little choice to make, in a somewhat resentful manner, in keeping with his reluctance to ever publicly admit error.

"With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea ... whether there are "tapes" or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings," Trump wrote in a pair of tweets.

His statement was followed by a now-typical attempt by the White House to avoid accountability on an embarrassing episode. Trump's choice of Twitter to deliver his message did not expose him to cross-examination or questioning from journalists. The White House, meanwhile, banned live television coverage of its daily briefing, allowing only an audio recording to be broadcast afterward.

There's little doubt that the entire tapes issue represents a serious misstep by the President that put his White House on a perilous political and legal path.

"James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!" Trump tweeted on May 17.

The tweet caused an uproar, immediately raising comparisons with the Watergate-era taping system that caused the downfall of President Richard Nixon, and demands for Trump to immediately hand over any recordings.

If it was an attempt to intimidate Comey, as many have speculated, it backfired spectacularly.

Comey testified to the Senate intelligence committee earlier this month that he saw Trump's tweet and woke up in the middle of the night a few days later, suddenly twigging that any tapes could provide corroboration of his version of conversations with Trump that left him feeling deeply uncomfortable.

The former FBI chief said that as a result of the tweet he asked a friend to share the content of his memos with a reporter, in the hope that it would lead to the appointment of a special counsel.

That special counsel -- Robert Mueller -- who was appointed as a direct result of what now looks like a deeply ill-advised Trump tweet, now poses a serious threat to his entire presidency with an investigation into alleged collusion by campaign officials with Russian interference in the US election, that could branch off in unpredictable directions.

One clear effect of Trump's tweet on Thursday means that the accounting of what happened in conversations between the President and Comey now relies on one man's word against the other. There apparently are no tapes that could confirm what exactly happened in those chats.

But Comey has already handed the special counsel his contemporaneous memos of conversations in which he said Trump asked him to go easy on former national security adviser Michael Flynn, asked him for a pledge of loyalty and wanted him to publicly say that the President himself was not under investigation.

It will now be left to Mueller to decide whether Trump's actions in his interactions with Comey amount to an attempt to obstruct justice.

The original tweet may be considered as evidence as Mueller tries to work out whether the President was trying to intimidate Comey.

Still, the White House stuck to the line that despite the damaging fallout of the tapes episode, the President had no regrets.

"I don't think so," said White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, when asked whether Trump now wishes he had not issued the original tweet.

Sanders would not divulge many other details about Trump's motivation in warning of possible tapes of Comey, or why he inflicted a six-week-long mystery on the nation, a period that included him taunting reporters, saying that they were "going to be very disappointed" when the truth was revealed.

"I don't think it was a game," Sanders said, in the off-camera briefing, and appeared to suggest the President's original intent was to press the fired former FBI director to tell the truth.

"I certainly think that the President would hope that the former director would tell the truth, but I think it was more about raising the question of doubt, in general," she said.

But an associate of Trump who spoke to the President this week, told CNN's Jeff Zeleny that "if he doesn't regret this, he should."

The person also said that Trump was amused by all media obsession over the original tweet, raising the possibility that, as so many times before, the President is using conspiracy theories and sparking outrage to dominate the political conversation in Washington -- with himself at the center of the storm.

The manner of Trump's admission that there were no tapes, was consistent with the way in which he has dealt with climb-downs that are personally embarrassing to him during his time in office.

The President is known to be loath to publicly admit that he made a mistake. Last September, for instance, Trump finally repudiated his years-long conspiracy theory that claimed President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

But the admission came only at the end of a rambling event at his new hotel in Washington that included warm public testimony on his character from veterans.

That admission came with a new conspiracy theory.

"Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it, you know what I mean," Trump said, lobbing an unproven allegation against his then Democratic presidential rival.

In the case of his tweet on Thursday, Trump covered his embarrassment by again suggesting something nefarious was underway -- by raising the possibility there was some taping going on in the White House without his knowledge -- that again came without any corroboration.

Trump's critics immediately seized on his admission on the tapes to raise concerns about his suitability for the Presidency.

"There have been a lot of surreal and strange statements by Donald Trump, since he became President. But he seems to have a capacity to outdo himself," Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said on CNN.

Trump, as commander in chief, has the authority to know about any covert actions being performed by intelligence agencies or any electronic surveillance in the White House, Blumenthal said.

"To say he has no idea is absolutely preposterous and really an insult to the intelligence of the American people," Blumenthal said.

But other Democrats suggested that they would not necessarily take Trump's word in a tweet to end the episode.

"I prefer to get something in writing," said Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

The panel had established a deadline of Friday for Trump to hand over any tapes -- a move that may have precipitated his admission on Thursday.

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Trump ends his self-made crisis where it started: Twitter - CNN

His visit comes at a time of immense uncertainty and unpredictability in Indian-US relations.

Earlier this month, he singled out India during his announcement declaring the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

Top of the leaders' agenda will be the H1-B visa rehaul, the fight against terror and expanding on bilateral relations with the new administration.

We spoke to five young Indians about the importance of bilateral ties between the two countries and what they make of Trump.

Harshit Tibrewal, 22, is a software engineer working for a start-up. He believes good relations between the two democracies are vital, especially given India's rise in the global order.

"I think the relationship between the US and India is very strong, because a lot of trade happens between the two, a lot of people from here go to work and study there. Both countries are superpowers and Modi going to meet with Trump shows that the relationship is strong and getting stronger. It's very good to have such a good relationship with a strong country."

His sunny outlook comes despite being in an occupation hardest hit by Trump's visa crackdown.

"I don't think it (H1-B visa reform) will affect Indians. Most of these software companies need us," says Tibrewal.

Indian firms like Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro use the H-1B program to send thousands of engineers to the US.

Around 70% of the 85,000 H-1B visas issued annually go to Indian workers.

According to Tibrewal, Trump's America First agenda could actually backfire on him -- and the US.

"Indians have great minds of their own. Quoting Bill Gates, 'If I stopped hiring Indians, another Microsoft would have opened in India'. Donald Trump should know this too."

Twenty-year-old Kanika Sethi is a recent commerce graduate. While she understands the importance of relations between India and the US, she's skeptical about Trump's leadership.

"Donald Trump is a rich leader. I can't say whether he is a good or bad leader. But the first thing that comes to mind is money."

Between Modi's election in 2014 and Obama leaving office at the beginning of 2017, the two leaders met eight times. A record for leaders of the two nations. Obama is also the only sitting US President to have visited India twice while in office.

"There's no comparison with Obama. Obama was the best."

Yakita Somani, 20, also a commerce graduate, is more pragmatic about the upcoming visit especially on the hot button topic of H1-B visa restrictions.

"The first preference is given to American people and that's absolutely right. In India, if we protest for our rights, then that's the same thing. Indians there (the United States) who are facing discrimination and inequality, I feel you need to struggle for something. It's their policy and being the most powerful country, they don't need to think about the entire world."

At the same time, she is aware that forging closer ties with the United States is crucial for India.

"I feel America is the most powerful country, so if India is tied up with a country of this position, it will be beneficial i areas such as defense, security and many other things. Our country will become powerful."

Surya Hooda, 22, wants to become a civil servant and is currently studying for his exams.

"India's relations with America are very important. During Obama's time, they were on the rise. Now, Trump and his administration are going back on a lot of policies that the Obama administration employed."

"Trump has pulled back from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). India was not a part of the TPP so now there's an opportunity where we can directly establish bilateral relations directly with the US so that's a plus point."

Just weeks after coming into office, Trump formally withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation deal that had been negotiated under Obama.

Twenty-two-year-old Kilang Walling is an engineering graduate.

He describes Trump as a "loudmouth" and "not the kind of person you find in power."

However, like the other young people CNN spoke with, he understands the importance of US-Indian relations, especially in South Asia.

"India is growing in terms of power and the economy. Both India and the US need to cooperate. And because India is surrounded by not so friendly countries like China and Pakistan, India needs the US and the US also needs India because America and China also don't function well."

For Walling, the issue he wants to see most discussed during Modi's visit is the US' withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

"He (Trump) shouldn't have done that. America being a leader and a forward thinking country, he shouldn't have pulled out."

"I feel very strongly about the Paris deal. How the world is going, how climate change is going. It's essential that every human being needs to worry about this because we need sustainability. It's not only about living today, there are generations to come so we have to worry about this."

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What do young Indians think of Donald Trump? - CNN