Category Archives: Donald Trump

When the White House officially unveiled its 2018 budget Tuesday, President Donald Trump's budget director took pains to insist that the blueprint represents campaign promises kept.

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said that the president is making good on his vow to save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, among other things, and said that they are not kicking anyone off who needs the programs.

Yet deep cuts to many aspects of the American safety net indicate otherwise.

Here's where the president's proposal breaks his promises and at times his own self-proposed contract to voters.

Broken Promise #1: Trump vowed not to cut Medicaid

Trump's budget would cut Medicaid by a lot, despite the president telling the Daily Signal days before launching his White House bid, "I'm not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I'm not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid."

The administration proposes reducing spending on Medicaid programs by more than $600 billion over the next decade, a massive cut that appears to go on top of $839 billion in Medicaid cuts included in the House health care bill Trump is supporting.

Mulvaney insists that the proposed reduction in spending isn't a cut it's simply growing less than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects the needs of the program to be.

"There are no Medicaid cuts in terms of what normal human beings would call cuts, we are not spending less money than we did the year before," Mulvaney said.

Broken Promise #2: Trump said he wouldn't cut Social Security

Trump's budget proposes slashing the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), a $31.4 billion change to the program that pays monthly benefits to over 10 million disabled individuals under the retirement age.

Mulvaney argued that SSDI isn't "what most people would consider to be Social Security" and said he would "hope" less people receive the program once they remove individuals who "should not" be getting it. It's unclear how the administration determined there is that much fraud in the system.

Broken Promise #3: Trump said he'd fully fund the border wall

The president promised to fully fund a border wall, with plans to make Mexico pay for it later, in his "Contract With the American Voter." The president's budget would allocate $2.6 billion for planning, designing, and constructing the border wall and its surrounding securities, but Republican leaders estimate the wall could cost as much as $15 billion.

"While we did not get as much money as we wanted for 2017 omnibus we did get a lot," Mulvaney said. "We are going to continue to press on."

Broken Promise #4: Trump promised to cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities

This is another contract promise. Trump's administration has tried to restrict funding to so-called "sanctuary" cities jurisdiction that don't enforce federal immigration priorities and cooperate fully with federal authorities but their efforts were halted by the courts.

This budget doesn't include any kind of limit on federal funding, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions narrowed the scope of Trump's executive order on the issue in a memo Monday.

Broken Promise #5: Trump said he would increase funding for treatment of PTSD

Trump's budget would increase funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs, but the budget proposal doesn't appear to focus money on PTSD or mental health issues.

It would, however, slash $3.2 billion from the "individual unemployability" benefit, which the budget says will be "modernized." The program allows the VA to more fully compensate disabled veterans, including those with PTSD, whose disability renders them unemployable.

Broken Promise #6: Trump told police union leaders he'd find more funding for training

Trump promised resources for training in his voter contract, as well. This budget aims to increase funding for more border agents and immigration judges, increased immigrant detentions, and fighting the opioid crisis, but it does not earmark additional funds for training police.

Broken Promise #7: Trump promised to bring down the debt "fairly quickly"

Barring the kind of hyperbolic growth Trump has promised and economists have disputed, Trump's budget would do little to combat the national debt. Rather, it would potentially increase it.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

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Donald Trump's Budget Breaks These 7 Campaign Promises - NBCNews.com

New York Times

Donald Trump Discovers Muslims New York Times Of course, Trump timed his discovery that more than 95 percent of the victims of terrorism are themselves Muslim to coincide with his stay in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest sites and to an immense thirst for weapons from great American ... Manchester bombing shows Donald Trump is rightUSA TODAY Behold! Donald Trump and the mysterious glowing orb.Washington Post Was Donald Trump convincing in Saudi Arabia?Al Jazeera America CNN -Salon all 7,683 news articles »

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Donald Trump Discovers Muslims - New York Times

Donald Trumps approval rating has fallen by 4 points in the wake of several weeks of controversial developments, including his decision to oust FBI chief James Comey.

The Harvard-Harris poll, provided exclusively to The Hill, was taken May 17-20 and shows the presidents approval rating has dropped to 45 percentfrom the 49 percentin the same survey taken in March.

In particular, respondents to the surveywhich questioned 2,006 registered voters rather than people sampled from the general populationdisapproved of Trumps decision to fire Comey, as well as how he went about ousting the former bureau chief.

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The poll, taken at the height of the Comey frenzy, shows a weakening hand, as would be expected, Mark Penn, co-director of the Harvard-Harris survey, told The Hill.

President Donald Trump in the House of Representatives on February 28 and then-FBI Director James Comey in Washington on July 7, 2016. Jim Lo Scalzo/Gary Cameron/Reuters

He is holding on to 90 percent of his voters, and his ratings are still above approval ratings for both the Democratic and Republican parties, Penn said.

But Comey has proved to be no more popular than Trump; in fact,the majority of people polled (60 percent) disapproved of Comeys performance as head of the FBI.

Additionally, 70 percentof people disliked the way in which Comey handled the investigation into Hillary Clintons use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Penn said,The polling on Comey shows that President Trump is more in trouble for the way he fired Comey rather than for removing him.

Another bump in the road for Trump came after The Washington Postrevealed that heshared highly classified information about a plot by the Islamic State group (ISIS), which was obtained through an intelligence-sharing partnership, with Russian officials in the Oval Office.

The majority of voters (52 percent across both parties and 56 percentof independents) surveyed said they did not think it was appropriate for the president to reveal such highly classified information to Russia. Thispossibly affected Trumps popularity rating as well.

Although the poll does show a drop in approval for Trump, it gives higher figures than many other approval-rating polls, possibly because the questions went tovoters rather than members of the general public.

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Donald Trump's Popularity Drops 4 Points in Wake of Comey Firing - Newsweek

New York Times

Manchester, Donald Trump, Roger Moore: Your Morning Briefing New York Times Our society can have no tolerance for this continuation of bloodshed, Mr. Trump said after meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, above, the Palestinian leader. We cannot stand a moment longer for the slaughter of innocent people. Mr. Trump meets today with ... and more »

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Manchester, Donald Trump, Roger Moore: Your Morning Briefing - New York Times

New York Times

Manchester, Donald Trump, Uber: Your Tuesday Briefing New York Times The blast reverberated through the Manchester Arena just as a show by the American pop star Ariana Grande was ending. Panic and mayhem seized the crowd, many of whom were young teenagers. A suspect died at the scene, the police said. Britain's ... and more »

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Manchester, Donald Trump, Uber: Your Tuesday Briefing - New York Times

(WASHINGTON) Education advocates say President Donald Trump's budget contradicts his campaign pledge to make college more affordable with its proposed elimination of subsidized student loans and cuts in other programs that help students pay tuition.

The 2018 budget, unveiled Tuesday, slashes funding for the Education Department by 13.5 percent.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a statement that it "reflects a series of tough choices we have had to make when assessing the best use of taxpayer money. It ensures funding for programs with proven results for students while taking a hard look at programs that sound nice but simply haven't yielded the desired outcomes."

But critics said it contradicts President Donald Trump's campaign promises to make college more affordable at a time when student debt is ballooning.

"Donald Trump ran as a populist, but he is a governing as an elitist and this budget is a clear indication of that," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

When he accepted the Republican presidential nomination last year, Trump had said, "We're going to work with all of our students who are drowning in debt to take the pressure off these people just starting out in their adult lives. Tremendous problem."

His first budget seeks to save over $1 billion by eliminating subsidized student loans. For undergraduate students who qualify, the government pays the interest while they remain in college. Students can borrow up to $23,000 during their four years in college. The current interest rate is 3.76 percent.

An additional $859 million would be saved by ending student debt forgiveness for those who enter public service. The program was launched in 2007 with the idea to motivate university graduates to take government and teaching jobs in remote rural areas. Under the program, the remainder of a student's debt is forgiven after he or she makes 120 qualifying payments, or typically after 10 years.

Natalia Abrams, executive director of Student Debt Crisis, an advocacy group, said that over 550,000 borrowers are currently enrolled in the debt forgiveness program. The Education Department said those already in the program will not be affected by the change.

"We need to make it easier for people to go to and pay for college, this budget does the exact opposite," Abrams said.

The budget also proposes to nearly halve the federal work-study program to $500 million. The program provides funding to colleges and universities to create jobs for students, which help them pay tuition.

It maintains funding for Pell grants and makes them available year-round.

Former Education Secretary John King called Trump's budget "an assault on the American dream" and said it will make it harder for students to attend and finish college. "They are harming the long-term future not just of students but also of the country," he told The Associated Press.

Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president the National Education Association, describes the document "a wrecking ball of a budget" and that they would work to defeat it.

For elementary and secondary education, the budget seeks to expand charter and voucher-type programs for private schools around the country. It calls for an additional $1 billion in funds to encourage school districts to advance choice options, $250 million in scholarships to low-income families to attend private schools and $167 million to start or expand charter schools. However, the budget stops short of launching a sweeping $20 billion school choice project that Trump talked about on the campaign trail.

The American Federation of Children, a school choice advocacy group, which DeVos used to head, praised the increase in school choice funding.

"We're pleased to see the administration put funding muscle behind their pledge to facilitate an expansion of school choice options across the country," the group said in a statement

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Donald Trump's 2018 Budget Slashes Education Department Funding by 13.5% - TIME

By Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Early in his pontificate, Pope John Paul II met with Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian prime minister with a Nazi past; a few years later, he welcomed the Harlem Globetrotters to the Vatican and was named an honorary Globetrotter. Donald Trumps state visit to Pope Francis on Wednesday falls somewhere between those two encountersbetween the unnerving and the tacky, between the unseemly and the unlikely.

Whatever else it does, the visit upends the conventional wisdom about the discerning power of democracy and the nature of so-called populism. How strange is this: a group of 115 unelected celibate men of advanced age, bound to secrecy, choosing from amongst themselves and casting paper ballots in the Sistine Chapel, elects a relatively unknown man who turns out to possess abundant virtue and wisdom, and who is also clearly a man of the people; whereas an American voting public of 126 million men and women, working from the copious information produced by a robust free press and an endless run of presidential debates, has its votes channeled through arcane electoral math and bestowed on a self-serving huckster who has a poor grasp of notions like public service and the common good, and whose idea of the people is my people. Its enough to make you want to swap the Electoral College for the College of Cardinals.

On Wednesday, the most credible world leader of our time will meet the least credible; a person who shows the dynamism of character will meet a person who demonstrates the limits of character. If Donald Trumps presidency has clarified anything, it is the perdurance of characterand the improbability of people, especially wealthy and powerful people in their 70s, to change dramatically. A person rich in character can deepen and ripen, increase and multiply. Such a person is in St. Peters chair now. A person of poor character is reduced, even impoverished, by circumstances, until he is morally bankrupt. Such a person is in the White House now. Truly, Donald Trump is a walking, talking, tweeting demonstration of St. Augustines proposition that there is a stone so heavy that even God cannot lift itand that this stone is the human heart, weighed down with selfishness, pettiness, greed, envy, and all the other sins.

Only fools and moderate Republicans ever believed that Trump would undergo a conversion to statesmanship in the White House. It wasnt going to happen. No, Trump puts in mind the amoral, bounding industrialist Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waughs novel Brideshead Revisited, a wealthy, showy man of invincible ignorance, as the Catholic tradition used to call ita person who, a priest in the novel dryly reports, doesnt correspond to any degree of paganism known to the missionaries.

It is hard to imagine Trump receiving words of spiritual insight from Pope Francis: has a seed ever been sown on stonier ground? And it is hard to imagine this pope flattering this president: leave that to the petroleum potentates of Saudi Arabia. What good, thenif anycan come of this meeting?

If any piece of Franciss wisdom could get through to Trumpand stabilize his silly presidency, more Gong Show than reality TVit might be the rubric for discernment that Francis has followed since his days as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Jesuit provincial (superior) and archbishop of Buenos Aires. Here it is, cited time and again in the accounts of his life: Time is greater than space; unity prevails over conflict; reality is more important than ideals; the whole is greater than the part.

Thats it, the whole thing: concise, clear, and simple enough to fit onto the one-page briefs required by a president whose attention span is as short as his fingers. Each part of the rubric, applied to Trumps presidency, can offer some of the clarity that he and we sorely need just now. Lets take each in turn.

Time is greater than space. As Franciss biographer Paul Vallely summarizes it, We live in tension between the present and what is to come, between trying to possess the space around us and trying to initiate processes that will bear fruit in an uncertain future. What does this mean for the presidency? The appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel is likely to slow the brakeless roller-coaster of the Trump administration. While Muellers team does its work, the rest of us can work to undo some of the changes that Trump has jammed through in between controversiesnamely the rollbacks of regulations pertaining to the environment, climate, oil drilling, and natural resources. In matters of climate, especially, time is greater than space, but if we dont act quickly the human race will have to live, for many centuries to come, in our limited spacea planet that is barely habitable.

Unity prevails over conflict. Polls and approval ratings suggest that right now there is considerable unity around the idea that Donald Trump is faltering as president. Alas, the president himself is the person least likely to recognize this truth; but a man used to getting his way, accustomed to gaining the appearance of unity by purchasing subservience and demonizing resistance, will tire of pushing against super-majorities. And the reason for this is bound up with part three of the rubric.

Reality is more important than ideas. This maxim is sometimes translated as Reality over the ideal. Put that way, its pertinence to this presidency is all the more clear. Donald Trump has no ideals, and his only strongly held idea is that he is better at everything than everybody elseor could be if only everyone else would let him be. Because Trump is a supremely talented demagogue (as Andrew Sullivan has put it) rather than an ideologue, its likely that the vigorous application of reality stands a chance of overcoming him. In many respects, reality is already overcoming himfor example, through the events following his firing of F.B.I. Director James Comey and the huge body of reportage (much of it sourced to people in his government) that delineated his motives for the firing, forcing his administration to recalibrate its ideas to reality every few hours. It is now clear to everyone but Trump himself that even a president with both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court going his way cant do away with the reality of governingor with the ideas and ideals in which the thousands of career civil servants in the federal government have rooted their own careers.

The whole is greater than the part. Four months into his presidency, Trump seems not to understand the truths that the president works for us and not the other way around, and that the president is not the C.E.O. of America, Inc. but the head of one branch of the United States government. It is hard for people in positions of great power to recognize that they are only one part of a whole, but some do.

One example will be near at hand during Trumps state visit to the Vatican: in fact, it will be right up the hill from the Vatican Palace, in the monastery behind St. Peters Basilica. Four and a half years ago, the worlds last absolute monarchPope Benedict XVIrecognized that the whole of the Catholic Church was greater than the part that was his embattled pontificate. Elected for life, he was beholden to nothing and no one under God. And yet he resigned, the first pope to do so in nearly 600 years, stepping out of his part for the sake of the whole. God willing, something of this will get through in Rome, and Donald Trump will go and do likewise.

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Can God Save Donald Trump? - Vanity Fair

The message written by US President Donald Trump at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum guest book and signed by him and his wife Melania is seen after their visit on May 23, 2017, in Jerusalem.(Photo: Gali Tibbon, AFP/Getty Images)

President Trump visited Yad Vashem on Tuesday, and, like his predecessors, left behind a note in the Holocaust memorial's book of remembrance.

His note was brief:

"It is a great honor to be here with all of my friends so amazing & will never forget!"

Here's what Barack Obama, then in the middle of his first presidential campaign, wrote when he visited in July2008:

"I am grateful to Yad Vashem and all of those responsible for this remarkable institution. At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man's potential for great evil, but also our own capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here, and know their history, so that they can add their voices to proclaim 'never again.' And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims, but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed like us, and who have become symbols of the human spirit."

Of course, not all notes need to be long. Here's what then-President Bush wrote months before, in January 2008:

"God bless Israel."

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At Israel's Holocaust memorial, comparing Donald Trump, Obama and Bush notes - USA TODAY

Speaking in Bethlehem after a deadly bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, President Trump called the terror attack the work of "evil losers." USA TODAY

President Trump on Tuesday insisted that "evil losers" was the best way to describe those responsible for the bombing that killed some 22 people at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

"Iwont call them monsters because they would like that term," Trump said in Jerusalem on Tuesday. "They would think thats a great name. I will call them from now on losers, because thats what they are. Theyre losers. And well have more of them. But theyre losers. Just remember that."The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack on the21,000-seat Manchester Arenaon Monday night.

Calling terrorists "losers" is an idea Trump has had before. Back in November 2015, the president tweeted, "The media must immediately stop calling ISIS leaders "MASTERMINDS." Call them instead thugs and losers. Young people must not go into ISIS!"

But calling people "losers" is a termTrump throws around rather liberally, and not just for terrorists.Here's a comprehensive list of other people and groupsthe president has considered a loser on Twitter (all before he took office):

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Donald Trump calls Manchester bomber (and many, many other people) 'losers' - USA TODAY

President Donald Trump took off on Friday afternoon, embarking on his first foreign trip as president and almost as soon as he was wheels up to Saudi Arabia the bombshells started going off.

The New York Times reported that Trump boasted to Russian officials that in firing FBI Director James Comey he had dispatched a nut job and that his ouster took great pressure off of him. The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that the federal investigation into possible collusion between Trumps presidential campaign and Russia includes a current White House official as a significant person of interest.

Elsewhere in Trumps orbit:

COMEY ONE, COME ALL: Former FBI Director James Comey has agreed to testify in public to the Senate Intelligence Committee after Memorial Day.

SUBSIDY SUBMARINED?: President Trump has told associates that he would like to end payments of key Affordable Care Act subsidies a move that could destabilize the laws marketplaces.

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Donald Trump: Latest News, Top Stories & Analysis - POLITICO