Category Archives: Donald Trump

Grishams book states that Trump made the decision to keep his visit under wraps because, she suspects, he didnt want to be the butt of the joke on late night television. The book also states her belief that he avoided anesthesia for the painful and invasive procedure because he didnt want Vice President Mike Pence to take over temporarily as commander-in-chief and loathed showing any kind of weakness.

Former White House aides say theyre surprised the detail never got out while Trump was president. After all, just about everything else eventually made its way into TV chyrons and newspaper headlines.

Instead, the moment became emblematic of another prominent feature of the Trump years: the president taking an otherwise normal event in 2018, more than 19 million colonoscopies were performed in the U.S. alone and turning it into something far larger and more controversial by his cryptic handling of it. In the process, it fed a destructive feedback loop: in which the White House operates in secrecy, the press gets motivated by it and the resulting speculation and reporting feeds a narrative of media irresponsibility.

Trump, a notorious germaphobe who is also obsessed with preserving an image of being in extremely top-notch health, went to immense lengths to hide word of his colonoscopy; so much so that few aides beyond Grisham, the presidents physician, and the chief of staffs office were even made aware at the time of just why he went to the hospital.

The initial line offered to explain his two-hour visit was that he was simply going in for a routine check up. Grisham herself told reporters he was taking advantage of a free weekend a half truth that would raise questions about her current account if not for the fact that others confirmed it.

Trump himself seemed particularly eager to get on the act of spinning his visit to the doc.

I went for a physical on Saturday. My wife said, Oh darling, thats wonderful. Because I had some extra time, he said during a Cabinet meeting shortly after the visit took place. But I went for a physical and I came back and my wife said, Oh darling are you OK? Whats wrong? Theyre reporting you may have had a heart attack. I said why did I have a heart attack? Because you went to Walter Reed, thats where we go when we get the physicals. I was only there for a very short period of time.

Trump explained to "Fox & Friends" the following Friday that White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Conley, noticed a break in his schedule and asked if he would come out to Walter Reed for a portion of his physical.

I said, yeah, go ahead, lets go, Trump recalled. I start my physical. Go see soldiers. Go see families. Did a little tour of the building. Get back in. On the way back I'm hearing rumors I'm in the hospital. Then I'm hearing rumors that I had chest pains. Then I'm hearing rumors I had a massive heart attack at the time being. Then I'm hearing rumors I'm not coming back, I'm staying at Walter Reed overnight and maybe for a long time.

But Trumps incredulousness over the coverage of his Walter Reed visit did little to tamp down speculation about what actually had occurred. In fact, it had the opposite effect. The topic became a fascination for newsrooms. Inside the White House, aides also were searching around for answers.

The day of the trip itself had been relatively quiet, with the exception of a flurry of tweets from Trump on everything from Donald Trump Jr.s book to the stock market. Impeachment hearings on Capitol Hill had just taken place but, as was typical on most weekends, there were few staff members around the sleepy West Wing. Then, in the early afternoon, a press wrangler called on the pool to gather for a secret movement.

A reporter on pool duty later informed the public around 3 p.m. that the president had arrived at the hospital, about 30 minutes north in Bethesda, where they waited for almost two hours. No events were listed in advance on the White House schedule for the weekend, and the use of a motorcade on a clear day instead of a Marine One helicopter only added to speculation about Trumps health.

Was he going to the CIA building? One journalist in the pool that day remembered wondering. We didnt know where we were going, but of course we were trying to think of whether it could be some kind of urgent health issue. We speculated, I think some people wondered if it could be a heart-related issue but no one had any idea and everyone was trying to find out. We were all spitballing.

The president was spotted by a photographer leaving Walter Reed at 5:03 p.m., shirt open, no tie, and with the exception of a press vans flat tire, the evening ended unceremoniously. Shortly after 8 p.m., Trump was back on Twitter.

On Fox News that night, Grisham told host Jeannine Pirro that Trump was "as healthy as can be ... He's got more energy than anybody in the White House."

But many in the public were unconvinced. There were questions about why Trump wasnt wearing a tie, or whether he looked like he was walking normally, or why he was carrying an envelope (likely his collection of work papers and news clips).

The question is less what did they do Saturday afternoon. The more important question is why was it done? Dr. Jonathan Reiner, the former cardiologist to Vice President Dick Cheney, asked on CNN. It doesnt make a lot of sense to do that kind of testing at Walter Reed without provocation.

President Donald Trump pauses during an event on healthcare prices in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Friday, Nov. 15, 2019, in Washington, a day before his trip to Walter Reed Medical Center. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo) | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

The first inclination of what actually happened came in a book by New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt about a year after the mystery procedure. Schmidt noted that in the hours leading up to Trumps trip to the hospital, word went out in the West Wing for the vice president to be on standby to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized.

Trump reacted as expected to Schmidts reporting, vociferously denying his visit had anything to do with him having mini-strokes, as suggested on Twitter. Soon after, he ordered Dr. Conley to publicly weigh in.

I can confirm that President Trump has not experienced nor been evaluated for a cerebrovascular accident (stroke), transient ischemic attack (mini stroke), or any acute cardiovascular emergencies, as have been incorrectly reported in the media, Conley wrote in an unusual statement circulated to the press.

And that was that. The Walter Reed trip remained an object of fascination and intrigue until Grisham came forward to finally provide some clarity.

Looking back now, one former Trump White House official said it was understandable the former president wouldnt want to reveal he was having a colonoscopy.

When youre President Trump and you believe youre going to get bad press no matter what, you can make everyone freak out [by keeping it secret] or you say youre going to have a colonoscopy and people are going to make jokes about it, youd prefer to have everyone in a tizzy rather than people have the image of him getting a colonoscopy, the official said.

But Grisham herself had a different perspective on the incident. In retrospect, she writes, it was like much else during the Trump years: a missed opportunity to be up front with the country and educate the public about an actually important issue, in this case the benefits of detecting disease.

I thought the American people had a right to know about the health of the president, and I still do. But I didnt push the matter too hard, Grisham wrote. I think the president was embarrassed by the procedure, even though President George W. Bush had had the same one done when he was in office and had been very transparent about it.

Original post:

The inside scope: How ego led Trump to hide a colonoscopy - POLITICO

Former President Trump told Fox News in an exclusive interview on Thursday that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell must be replaced among caucus leadership, after the 79-year-old Kentuckian led 10 other Senate Republicans in giving Democrats enough votes to break the filibuster on a debt ceiling increase.

On an ensuing party-line vote, Democrats passed a $480 billion debt ceiling increase which host Sean Hannity said will last until December giving the party time to potentially craft a procedure to successfully pass its multitrillion-dollar socioeconomic overhaul legislation dubbed "human infrastructure."

DEROY MURDOCK: MITCH MCCONNELL COLLAPSES BENEATH DEMOCRAT DEBT-LIMIT LIES

Trump, 75, told "Hannity" he knows the other 10 senators well and has mixed views on an individual basis with each.

In the past, Trump has railed against one of them, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, as "disloyal" and previously promised to support a primary challenger against her in 2022.

The other nine included Senate Minority Whip John Thune of South Dakota and Sens. Michael Rounds of South Dakota, Susan Collins of Maine, John Barrasso of Wyoming, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Richard Shelby of Alabama, John Cornyn of Texas, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.

"The Republican Senate needs new leadership," Trump said, adding that for a long time he has doubted McConnell's ability to lead his caucus, especially under such pressures.

"Mitch is not the guy, not the right guy, he's not doing the job," he said. "He gave [Sen. Charles Schumer of New York and his Democrats] a lifeline it's more than a lifeline, he gave them so much time to figure out what to do because they were in a big bind; they were unable to do anything."

"He had the weapon and he was able to use it. Its a shame," the Palm Beach Republican continued. "Thats not a good thing that happened today. He made a big mistake."

STATE DEPARTMENT BLAMES PRIVATE CHARTERS FOR SEVERAL INACCURATE AFGHAN REFUGEE FLIGHT MANIFESTS

The former president also addressed President Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, calling the ongoing situation "the single most embarrassing thing to happen to our country, maybe in its history."

He also voiced concern that Russia and China the latter of which borders Afghanistan will be able to, with the help of the Taliban, deconstruct and summarily reconstruct the billions of dollars worth of U.S. military equipment Biden left behind.

"It looked like a total surrender," he said.

Later in the interview, Hannity asked the former president about the continually intensifying border crisis, through which hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens have egressed unimpeded into the United States across the Rio Grande.

Trump replied that for a government to be so weak in response to such a chaotic and illegal situation, some officials must not have the same patriotism as others.

"All they [had] to do was leave [the border] alone," he said. "The wall was almost complete [and] one thing you didnt see was drugs. Drugs were at their lowest point in particular fentanyl, which is a brutal drug. It was stopped, it was at a level we had not seen in a long time."

BRANDON JUDD ON DISTURBING IMAGES AT TEXAS BORDER: CARTELS EMBOLDENED BY DEFUND POLICE MOVEMENT

"Now its coming in at levels that we have never seen: three, four, five times more than we ever had coming in Theres something wrong," Trump continued. "You wouldnt believe you could even say this, but somebody doesnt love our country.

"When they allow this to happen to our country, we have hundreds of thousands of people pouring in every two weeks."

CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Trump surmised that Central American nations, in particular, are "emptying their prisons into the United States" as the Biden administration refuses to vet many of the illegal alien migrants for criminal or terrorist ties.

"Some of the toughest people on earth are being dumped into the United States because they dont want them. They dont want to take care of them for the next 40 years. These people that are the roughest prisoners, anywhere, are being dumped into the United States for us to take care of them. What are they doing? They are destroying our country," he said.

Visit link:

Donald Trump calls for McConnell's ouster after giving Dems debt 'lifeline': 'Mitch is not the guy' to lead - Fox News

Traffic in front of the Trump Park Avenue building in Manhattan. Frank Franklin II/AP Photo

Former President Donald Trump's real estate company is fighting the valuation of Trump Park Avenue.

The building's retail space has been overvalued compared with similar properties, the company said.

The assessed value of the building's commercial space increased by about 1% in 2021-2022 tax year.

Former President Donald Trump's real estate company is fighting the property tax assessment on its Trump Park Avenue retail space, saying in part that its valuation is too high compared with similar properties.

Trump's property at 502 Park Avenue has been assigned "excessive, unequal, erroneous, unlawful and illegal assessments," the company said in a six-page petition filed on Thursday in New York State Supreme Court.

The petition was first reported by Bloomberg News.

The assessed value of the building's commercial space increased about 1%, climbing $112,347, for the 2021-2022 tax year, according to New York tax records.

Its total market value was assessed for the year at $12,238,099, up from $12,125,752 the prior tax year, according to records.

But its market value had been higher in the 2019-2020 tax year, at $12,285,788, according to records. It had increased in both of the tax years prior to that.

The property's market value is "excessive" because the "assessed valuation exceeds the full value of the real property," or the "sum for which the said real property would sell under ordinary circumstances," said the filing, which included Eric Trump as petitioner.

Trumps' New York petition came a few weeks after Illinois officials lowered the taxes on the company's Chicago tower by about 30%, in part because the building's commercial space has had trouble finding tenants.

Trump's company reportedly holds more than $2 billion in real estate in major US cities, including a minority stake in a San Francisco office tower. Between 2016 and 2020, Trump's DC hotel lost more than $70 million, according to an audit released by a House committee on Friday.

Story continues

Trump's NY properties were reportedly being scrutinized earlier this year as part of an investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

The company's Park Avenue property is largely residential.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The rest is here:

Donald Trump fights valuation on Park Avenue retail space, saying the property is being overvalued when compared with similar buildings - Yahoo News

On the latest episode of his HBO show Real Time, Bill Maher laid out a scenario in which Donald Trump could return to the White House in 2024.

After reminding viewers that Trump unsuccessfully tried to convince the country that he won the 2020 election, Maher warned of the former president attempting a slow-moving coup, proclaiming that he believes Trump will get the Republican nomination in the next election.

And thats what hes been working on fixing ever since, Maher told the crowd, claiming that Trumps spent the past year figuring out how to pull off the coup he couldnt pull off last time.

Maher continued, Hes like a shark whos not gone but has quietly gone out to sea. But hes been eating people this whole time, methodically purging the Republican party of anyone who voted for his impeachment or doesnt he agree hes the rightful ruler of the Seven Kingdoms.

The HBO host then compared his hypothetical theory to Al Qaedas first, less successful, attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

The Ding Dongs, who sacked the Capitol last year? That was like when Al Qaeda tried to take down the World Trade Center the first time with a van, he explained. It was a joke. But the next time they came back with planes.

I hope I scared the shit out of you, Maher ended the segment. Watch the full clip up top.

The rest is here:

Bill Maher Warns of Donald Trump's 'Slow-Moving Coup' Ahead of 2024 Election - Yahoo Entertainment

Ex-White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has claimed that he asked former President Donald Trump on at least two occasions to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, he said during an interview on The Jason Rantz Show.

Navarro, who was discussing his new book, "In Trump Time," said that the media hailed the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as a "God-like" figure, Fox News reported.

The former trade adviser, on the other hand, has a far less favorable assessment of Fauci. "That man is evil," he said during the interview on Wednesday. "Make no mistake about this. He is evil."

After disagreeing about imposing travel bans, Navarro recalled how he once got into a "screaming match" within three minutes of meeting Fauci.

"I came out of there thinking, 'Wow, that guy thinks he's smarter than he is,'" Navarro said. "More importantly, 'That guy's going to hurt us and the president.'"

The former trade adviser said that he asked Trump, at least twice, to fire Fauci. He added that he doesn't blame the former president for not taking his advice but referred to it as a "mistake for the republic."

Trump and Fauci have a history of sparring with one another, Insider's Bryan Metzger reported. Fauci often contradicted the former president's optimistic assessments of the pandemic state, while Trump called Fauci a "disaster."

In November 2020, Trump suggested that he planned to fire Fauci after Election Day.

Read this article:

Peter Navarro claims he twice urged Trump to fire Fauci - Business Insider

Chris Polansky got out of his van at the Love's truck stop in Boise City, Oklahoma, to gas up. He'd been hiking and camping with his dog, Trout Fishing in America ("Trout, colloquially," Polansky said). Polansky and Trout found themselves in the most remote corner of the Oklahoma Panhandle, a place where literal tumbleweeds roll down Main Street past the headquarters of No Man's Land Beef Jerky.

Polansky heard a cop tell him to get back in the van. The officer had been following him without sirens or lights, and Polansky searched for his license. Polansky dutifully sported a facemask, even though Oklahoma's laissez-faire attitude towards masking often devolves into outright hostility.

As Polansky watched the officer in his cruiser, he noticed something strange: the cop put his driver's license in his lips as he wrote out a speeding ticket. The officer held Polansky's license in his mouth for almost the entire duration of the traffic stop. He was aghast. The pandemic had just torn through a nearby meatpacking plant, but then again, this was rural Oklahoma.

"Of course," Polansky thought to himself as the officer scribbled out a ticket.

One year after Polansky's ticket, Boise City and surrounding Cimarron County made news around the world. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a ride-or-die Republican, signed legislation dedicating one nearby stretch of road as the President Donald J. Trump Highway, starting this Nov. 1.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

For State Sen. Nathan Dahm, the Panhandle is the perfect location for the Trump Highway. "Calls from the Panhandle were some of the loudest," he told me in an email. "This was no surprise as Cimarron County had the highest percentage of votes for President Trump in Oklahoma and one of the highest in the nation. The woke left kicked and screamed and put up trigger warnings, but we're thrilled the new highway signs will soon be raised."

I half-expected parade preparations to be in full swing when I visited thissummer. Not so. Mike Patel, staffing the night desk at the Townsman Motel, had never heard of the Trump Highway, but had a grim take on his adopted hometown. "The kids here, they leave for college, and they don't come back," he said. Boise City has been losing population since 1970.

Braving a storm that brought both hail and tumbleweeds, I walked from the Townsman down Main Street to find Tangee Cayton, a counselor at Boise City High School, who was selling fireworks out of the shell of a brick building. Cayton, like many folks in town, shrugged off questions about the highway. "It could bring tourists," Cayton said. "But it could also bring haters."

Many of the folks coming in and out of the store neither knew nor cared about the Trump Highway. Locals wanted to talk about anything other than the former president: How Amazon Prime was killing local business, how this hail might knock out the GPS system on a tractor, whether the new Mexican place in town was any good.

This surprised me. Cimarron County could very well be the most conservative county in the entire nation. In a statistic that resembles an election return from Russia, Trump captured 92% of the vote here. Joe Biden got a total of 70 votes in the entire county. Boise City's High Plains conservatism makes for a colorful subject on cable television. CNN stopped in the Bluebonnet Cafe and reporter Gary Tuchman asked a packed restaurant to raise their hands if they thought it was a "good idea to take the vaccine," to which he received blank stares. "What if President Trump was very robust and said 'take the vaccine?'" Tuchman insisted.

A roomful of glares shot back at Tuchman, who then sat down and tried to press the issue with a group of men in hunter orange. "Trump's a liberal New Yorker," one said. "Why would we trust him?"

That comment touched on a streak of anti-urban bias that runs even deeper than Trumpism in this area of the country. Yes, you could shorthand it to libertarianism, but that implies a set of policy beliefs. What urban folks do not understand about a place like the Oklahoma Panhandle is that pessimism about social progress is rooted deeper than the prairie shortgrass.

There are historical reasons for this pessimism, as the Panhandle has seen its share of tragedy and farce. Those historical forces, however, have stemmed not from government intervention or liberal elites, but rather from a sort of wildcat capitalism that once brought the region to the brink of famine.

* * *

Boise City, which is closer to Denver than to the state capital in Oklahoma City, was founded in a swindle. In 1908, the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company published a brochure advertising 3,000 lots for sale in a town of paved roads, tree-lined streets and handsome buildings, supplied with water from an artesian well. The brochure claimed that "King Corn and King Cotton grow side by side, yielding in excess of forty-five bushels of corn and a bale of cotton per acre."

By the force of American knowhow and bootstrapping, this Great American Desert would, the developers claimed, become the latest stage of Manifest Destiny. Only 30 years later, this area became the epicenter for what the environmental historian Donald Wooster has called "one of the three worst ecological blunders in history."

Even before the coming of the Dust Bowl, however, there was trouble on the frontier. For starters, the folks at the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company did not have title to the thousands of lots they sold. Midwesterners who knew little of life in an arid land in the former Comanchera arrived to find they'd been scammed. There were no trees, no buildings, no paved roads and a dry riverbed. Contrary to the advertisement's claims about King Cotton growing next to King Corn, no cotton could be grown in the Panhandle. Despite it all, the settlers took up the difficult task of breaking the land, making the thin soil produce wheat.

The region's anti-government sentiments are rooted in the lawless origins of the place. The Oklahoma Panhandle had been ceded to the United States by Texas so that the Lone Star State could remain a slave state (the Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery above 36.30 degrees north latitude). But the place was neither part of Kansas nor the Cherokee Nation. It was a place without a government, a Public Strip open to all sorts of bootleggers, swindlers, and outlaws.

Federal agents eventually arrested the leadership of the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company. Three men were charged with "grossly misrepresent[ing] the natural resources of Boise City and Cimarron County," and sent to the federal penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth, although they were later pardoned by President William Howard Taft.

After its dubious beginnings, a brief period of prosperity ensued. In the 1910s and 1920s, the Panhandle became a wheat producer during "the Great Plow-Up" of the Plains. World War I caused the price of American wheat to double, and the government proclaimed that the key to winning the war was to plant more wheat. Little did the government know that it was planting the seeds for the region's destruction.

On April 14, 1935, a darkness appeared on the horizon. Fluttering birds landed dead in yards. A "norther" picked up strength, turning dust particles into projectiles that felt like shards of glass on exposed skin. As cattle breathed in, their lungs filled with dust. At first, they lost their bearings and circled around, looking for water. Then they fell over, dead.

Swirling dust stripped cars of paint, felled trees and filled the intestines of livestock. Static turned people into electric livewires. Children died of dust pneumonia. By 1940, 43 percent of Cimarron County's residents had fled. The capitalistic urge to break the land and squeeze profits from wheat farms with little precipitation had destroyed the natural vegetation that kept the thin topsoil in place. Once a drought hit, northern winds turned cold fronts into black blizzards.

Survivors' stories are the thing of disaster movies. A child playing in the yard, lost in the blackness, wandered into a ditch and was suffocated by the dust. A woman whose car died in the static electricity of a dust storm pulled off the highway to seek help, only to become lost in dust so thick she could not see her hand in front of her face. In 1937, a reporter from Collier's toured the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles to find, "famine, violent death, private and public futility, insanity and lost generations."

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Today, the Dust Bowl is remembered as a terrible aberration that paired the dire economic conditions of the Depression with a rare drought. According to most environmental historians, however, it was a manmade ecological disaster that reflected an American desire to take risks, consume natural resources and ignore the advice of experts. An object lesson for our times of coronavirus and climate change if there ever was one.

I talked to a lot of Panhandlers about the Dust Bowl, and no one seemed to be drawing the same conclusions as the environmental historians who study it. Rather, people talked about the grit and resilience of their grandparents and great-grandparents, who stayed on while weak-kneed cowards fled to California. If there was a lesson to be learned about the Dust Bowl for them, it was this: Everyone lies, take what you can while you can and never, ever trust the government.

World War II brought one more indignity to Boise City. A B-17 Flying Fortress taking off from Texas mistook Boise City for a practice bombing range. The B-17 passed over the town several times, dropping a single bomb each time. Bombs nicked a Baptist church, crushed a garage and sent truckers fleeing out of town. A 1993 commemorative plaque proclaimed that, all those years later, the town was "still booming."

Almost every conversation about Boise City's precarious existence eventually turns, not to Trump's highway, but to the neighboring town of Guymon, which is growing at the fastest clip since the pre-Dust Bowl days. Guymon's revival began when Seaboard Foods built a pork processing plant there in 1996. (More recently, half the plant's workers contracted COVID.)

Tangee Cayton recalled teaching students of dozens of nationalities, from Ethiopian to Guatemalan, in Guymon's public schools. With a population of about 13,000, Guymon now has loft apartments and Latin-fusion restaurants; Boise City, with less than one-tenth that many residents, has No Man's Land Beef Jerky and Cimmy, a life-size Apatosaurus of rusted iron. Cimmy, along with the World War II bombing plaque, make for eccentric roadside Americana, but there's little hope for the long-term viability of the town.

Parker Furniture, across the street from Cayton's fireworks stand, has been in business since the Panhandle's halcyon days of the 1950s. Hank Hankla's family ran the store, and young Hankla drove all over the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles delivering furniture or laying carpet for the family business. Hankla remembers Boise City as an all-American town with four baseball teams and a Juilliard-trained music teacher. The postwar years were full of promise, but the perils of life on the High Plains were inescapable.

"We had dust storms into the 1950s," Hankla remembered. "That's the first time I saw a person in a face mask." Hankla recollected raising stakes on barbed-wire fences. If the tumbleweeds caught in the barbed-wire, dust piled up, burying houses. "You had to respect the dust," he said.

In fact, Guymon's resurgence worries many people in Boise City. Melissa McGaughy, a history teacher in the public schools, said there's a segment of the population that would rather watch the town die than become a multicultural, multilingual community. She'd seen it happen before. One Panhandle school district recently closed, and there's talk of another shutting down as well. With Oklahoma spending less per student and less on teacher pay than surrounding states, it's hard to see how the pattern of decline can be reversed.

Boise City has much to recommend it: cheap real estate, virtually zero crime and a population willing to drop off a pot roast on the porch if someone catches COVID-19, which Melissa McGaughy did, twice. The first time felt like the flu, but the second bout landed her in the hospital. The town pharmacist delivered drugs to McGaughy's door, and a stranger brought over a watermelon. McGaughy may not always see eye-to-eye with her neighbors, but she says many of them have been "wonderful" through the hard times. She also suspects that a lot more people have been vaccinated than Gary Tuchman's video at the cafe, or even state health data, might suggest. "We don't have a county health department, and that's caused lots of issues," she said.

None of those issues, safe to say, will be addressed by the coming of President Donald J. Trump Highway. "Boise City might be dying," McGaughy said, "but we're a couple good turns away from thriving. We need to start by accepting that things aren't what they used to be."

See original here:

Road to nowhere: Oklahoma's Donald J. Trump Highway runs through the Dust Bowl - Salon

In a recent editorialfor The Washington Post, historian J.M. Opal criticized Donald Trump by comparing him to Andrew Jackson, who Trump has saidis his favorite president. Since historian Arthur Schlesinger's masterful study "The Age of Jackson" is one of my favorite books, this got my attention.

Opal opensby mentioningthe most recent humiliating setback in Trump's post-presidential career:The "audit" of the presidential election in Arizona's largest county completely backfired,reaffirming Joe Biden's victory in that state.Thatwas one more piece of damagingnews in an unbroken chain that hasundercut Trump's attempts to spread themalignant normality he has created for his fascist cult, one which asserts thathe (and by extension they) was the real winner ofthe 2020 election.

Opal's reference to Jackson conjured up a peculiar memory. A few months after financier Anthony Scaramucci was hired and almost immediately fired as White House communications director, I interviewed himabout Trump's understanding of Americanhistory which meant that wetalkedabout Andrew Jackson. Ireferred to apassage from Jackson's 1832 message vetoing renewal of a charter for America's national bank, in which he argued that "there are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does it rains, shower favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."

Scaramucci's response was about how Trump could or could not get closer to that standard by living up to the idea that "responsible government protects minorities, whether they voted for them or didn't vote for them." I've thought about that a lot in subsequent years. DonaldTrump was in a position to win a legitimate victory in 2020had hetried to expand his base rather than appeal to its worst impulses. AndTrump's abuses of powerafter losing the 2020 election give new weight to Scaramucci's observations.

As far as we can tell, Trump has not wavered in his choice of Jackson as a presidentialbeau idal.(The photograph above this article shows Old Hickory's portrait hanging near Trump in the Oval Office.) As Opal noted, one could argue that Trump'sclaim to being a latter-day Jacksonhas strengthened since the 2020 election. Trump's Big Liehas been toinsist that he was the rightful winner, and Jackson himself lost an election through what he alleged (with far more plausibility) was a "corrupt bargain."In 1824, Jackson lost to John Quincy Adams (even though Jackson probablywon the popular vote, which Trump has never done) after nocandidates won a majority in the Electoral Collegeand theelection was thrown into the House of Representatives, where Speaker Henry Clay was instrumental in securing Adams' victory. Adams later appointed Clay as secretary of state, making him next in line for the presidency under the rules of succession at that time.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

By refusing to accept Biden's victory in 2020, was Trump behaving likeJackson? Well, not so much.

"Honestly, there's very little to compare," historian Matthew J. Clavintold Salon by email. "When Jackson lost the election of 1824, despite winning a plurality of both the popular and Electoral College votes, he was outraged. Some would say rightfully so. But he did not challenge the election results. Nor he did question the election's integrity." Jackson argued instead that the Electoral College should be abolished and replaced with direct election by popular vote a constitutional change that would have altered history,undoing the presidenciesof Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush, as well as Trump.

Opal makes muchthe same point, writing that "to be sure, Jackson seethed at the Corrupt Bargain, especially since he hated Clay as much as he hated any other person, no small thing. (He actually liked Adams for having supported his illicit war on Black, Creek and Seminole fighters in Spanish Florida in 1818.) Nonetheless, Old Hickory contained his legendary temper and accepted the outcome."

To avenge what he perceived as a terrible wrong, Opal continues, Jacksoncreated a "loud and proud" political coalition of "slavers and sailors, farmers and workers who believed that the people were sovereign, that government was corrupt, and that the United States had suffered too long at the hands of European empires and North American 'savages.'" They ultimately formed the Democratic Party which still exists today, although it switched sides on racial-justice issues partway through the 20th century and Jackson was legitimately elected in1828.

Trump and his allies in the Republican Party may well believe that winning a legitimate election is not possible for them and they may be right.Barack Obama's election in 2008suggested the possibility of a coalitionof racial minorities and white liberals that might controlgovernment for at least the next generation. Facing that,the Trumpers haveused theBig Lieto roll back voting rights, making it more difficult for Democratic constituencies to vote and worse yet, empowering Republican state legislatures and local officials to overturn unfavorable election results.

So Andrew Jackson tried to strengthen democracy after his defeatin 1824, as execrable as some of his personal and political views were.Trump has done exactly the opposite, effectively trying to destroy or short-circuit democracy.There's a good reason for that:Jackson had at least a plausibleclaim that he'd been cheated.Trump did not.

Biden "decisively won the majority of both the popular and Electoral College votes" in 2020, Clavin pointed out. "With absolutely no evidence of fraud, President Donald Trump claimed, and continues to claim, that he won the election. The belief that Biden stole the election is utterly absurd, and it subverts the whole idea of democracy and republicanism."

That support for American democracy makes the differences between Jackson and Trump clearin other important ways. Jackson worked hard to prevent a civil war from tearing apart the Union; Trump actively encourageda coup after losing a valid election. Jackson was a fierce patriot (and skilled fighter)who risked his life for his country on a number of occasions; Trump is a draft dodger who referred to soldiers who died in war as "losers" and "suckers."

"Jackson was a penniless frontier orphan who through sheer grit and determination became a lawyer, Army general, plantation owner, politician, and president," Clavin said."Trump is a son of privilege." He concluded with an even stronger note:"Trump's efforts to overthrow an election by sending a mob into the Capitol would certainly make him one of Jackson's arch nemeses. Trump is fortunate that Jackson is not around today, for the seventh president did not tolerate traitors or treason."

Nobody should glorify Jackson, a bonafide white supremacist who committed what could reasonably be called genocidal crimes.Like Trump, he created a cult of personalitythat whipped up his supportersinto angry mobs. Historians like Schlesinger have made the case that Jackson's populism was authentic asClavin wrote to Salon, Jackson was, "for his time, a champion of the common man" but it never extended beyond the white male population. Trump's supposed populism is largely a matter of parroting whatever he absorbed from the right-wing media ecosystem.

Like Jackson, Trump has immense sway over his followers, and in theory he could have rallied them behind causes that would have helped "the high and the low, the rich and poor." It's obvious he has no such vision, and only wanted touse hispower to amplify his tantrum over losing an election into a full-on constitutional crisis. So here's the short answer: Trump is toxic in many of the same ways Andrew Jackson was, butlacks any of his redeeming qualities.

View original post here:

Is Trump like Andrew Jackson? Yeah in all the bad ways, and none of the good ones - Salon

The schedule has always been a challenge to accomplish what we need to accomplish in the timeframe, said Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) Were committed to do it and well use every available tool to get there.

And the potential hurdles are many from high-powered lawyers representing the former presidents inner circle to the tech companies sitting on potential witnesses' communications to possibly even fellow lawmakers who aided Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

But they're already getting results from some corners. A select committee aide said the panel has received responses from seven executive-branch agencies to its first, sweeping set of Trump administration document requests. The aide added that the National Archives and Records Administration, which vets the release of such material, has identified two separate tranches of Trump White House documents that it has forwarded to the former president for review, a legally required step before the committee can obtain them or fight any objections from Trump.

Now that the panel is fully staffed, it's hoping to build on those bureaucratic wins to shake loose the documents it needs while also readying a wave of subpoenas. Select panel Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said Wednesday that a list of subpoena targets would be released as soon as this week.

"Theres a lot that we have to unwind, and there are so many variables in the process," Thompson said in an interview.

Thompson told POLITICO recently that he hopes to complete the committee's inquiry this spring, an extraordinarily tight deadline for an investigation of such scope and scale. The panel is attempting to piece together Trumps pre-Jan. 6 efforts to overturn his election loss, his attempt to mobilize the Justice Department in support of that crusade and the thinking behind his effort to call supporters to Washington on the day Congress gathers to certify presidential election results.

Also on the panel's to-do list is exploring reforms to the Electoral Count Act that governs that certification process. It's a huge mandate but the select committee is clearly taking a different route than comparable congressional investigations as it builds its probe from scratch.

For example, it started hiring staff in June and already has held one public hearing and issued blanket document requests to various companies and agencies. On the other hand, the first Trump impeachment in 2019 relied on three House committees that had been fully staffed for months when the inquiry began.

We're moving with great rapidity, said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the panels seven Democrats and a manager of that 2019 impeachment. We're also going to forgo some of the time-consuming steps and where we do meet resistance we intend to push back hard and fast.

That includes quick subpoenas. In other high-profile Trump-focused inquiries in recent years, lawmakers have taken a deliberate approach that often started with a request for voluntary cooperation and waited weeks before using compulsory means. Such a strategy was meant to guard against legal scrutiny when the subpoenas ultimately ended up in federal court.

But those tactics also enabled Trump to run out the clock on investigations that dogged his presidency, leaving Democrats empty-handed or fighting to obtain materials for years-old probes.

The Jan. 6 panel is hoping to get a boost from the Biden DOJ as it takes a more urgent tack in trying to obtain sensitive information. Where Trumps DOJ intervened to block House inquiries supporting executive privilege and immunity claims that Democrats viewed as outlandish Bidens administration has indicated it wont stand in the way.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., speaks during a House select committee hearing on the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 27, 2021. (Jim Bourg/Pool via AP) | Jim Bourg/Pool via AP

Schiff also expressed hope that Biden's DOJ would support House efforts to hold recalcitrant witnesses in contempt of Congress, giving sharper teeth to congressional subpoenas.

Nearly a month has passed since his panels initial document requests to federal agencies. which the committee says have resulted in thousands of pages of documents turned over to investigators. In addition, Trumps lawyers are poring over documents provided by the National Archives as they consider whether to invoke privilege to shield some records from congressional investigators. Trump is in the midst of a 30-day review period set out in public records law, due to elapse in early October.

Now, the committee is turning its attention to Trump allies and companies who may resist their demands to turn over reams of private messages and communications. Democrats are aware that any probe could be cut short by a Republican takeover of the House and are wary of efforts by Trump allies to drag their heels behavior that frustrated previous House investigations, sometimes for years.

The panels two Republican members, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, agreed with Democrats that the committee whose members huddled at the Capitol on Monday for an update from staff wants to move as fast as it can.

You'll see us use every tool at our disposal to get answers quickly, Cheney said. While the panel wouldnt rush it," Kinzinger agreed that well be moving.

Olivia Beavers contributed to this report.

Read more here:

Jan. 6 investigation accelerates as it turns toward Trump - POLITICO

Former President Donald Trump said "we'll see what happens" when asked when the country would "get President Trump back" on Saturday. Trump is pictured during his "Save America" rally in Perry, Georgia on September 25, 2021. Sean Rayford/Getty

Former President Donald Trump has suggested he could be inexplicably reinstated as president due to "tremendous voter fraud."

In remarks to conservative media network Real America's Voice, Trump seemingly indicated that baseless conspiracy theories that claim he will quickly regain the presidency if it were a possibility. Host Gina Loudon, who has also served as co-chair of the group Women for Trump, asked the former president when the country would "get President Trump back" at his rally in Perry, Georgia on Saturday.

"Well we're going to see," Trump replied. "There's been tremendous voter fraud. And it's being revealed on a daily basis and we'll see what happens."

Newsweek reached out to the office of Trump for comment.

No credible evidence of substantial voter fraud has been uncovered in the more than 10 months since Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to President Joe Biden, while the election results have long since been certified and finalized. Trump has continued to fight the outcome despite there being no legal pathway for him to be declared the winner or return to office without winning another election.

Trump said he was "looking back" to "find out what happened" during his Saturday interview, while also stressing that some states were "making their rules and regulations" for upcoming elections. The former president said that Republican-backed efforts to change voting laws on issues like ballot signature verification and voter identification would have an impact on future elections.

"I think you're going to be incredibly impressed by what's happening and I think maybe by the next election," said Trump, who has repeatedly hinted that he will be a 2024 candidate without making a firm commitment to run.

Despite Trump's claims that he "won" in 2020, his lawyers failed to convince multiple judges he appointed amid dozens of failed legal challenges in the aftermath of the election. The ex-president has continued to claim that evidence shows massive fraud was a factor in his loss, although no such evidence has been presented and further investigation have only confirmed Biden's victory.

The results of a controversial audit in Arizona's Maricopa County, conducted at the behest of the Republican-controlled state Senate, on Friday found that Trump lost the county to Biden by a slightly larger margin than in the official results. Regardless, fact-free assertions that the exercise provided evidence of fraud and calls for the election to be "decertified" persisted. Trump himself presented a wildly inaccurate summary of the results during his Georgia rally.

"We won at the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn't believe," Trump told the crowd on Saturday. "They had headlines that Biden wins in Arizona, when they know it's not true. He didn't win in Arizona. He lost in Arizona based on the forensic audit."

More:

Donald Trump Suggests He Might Be Reinstated Due to 'Tremendous' Voter Fraud - Newsweek

While Donald Trump battles Bill de Blasio over the mayors decision to dump the former president as operator of a Bronx golf course, the city is playing through proposing a new firm to run the Ferry Point links.

A notice published Monday shows a company called Ferry Point Links LLC is set to be awarded a 13-year Parks Department deal to take over the Jack Nicklaus-designed 18-hole course at the foot of the Bronx-Whitestone bridge.

A firm incorporated under that name in late August, state corporation records indicate sharing both an executives name and address with one of the citys biggest homeless shelter operators, CORE Services Group.

An attorney for the former president vowed to fight the city and the proposed new golf course operators for control of the links, charging Trump is a victim of political retaliation.

A spokesperson for the city Department of Parks and Recreation said that CORE will be teaming up with Bobby Jones Links, an Atlanta company that will be managing the operation of the concession. CORE Services Group did not respond to requests for comment Monday, and Bobby Jones Links was not immediately reachable.

According to the notice posted in Mondays City Record, Ferry Point Links, LLC will pay a minimum of $300,000 a year to the city or a share starting at 7% of the gross proceeds and gradually escalating to 10% by year 13, whichever is higher.

Those terms are slightly more favorable to the operator than those granted to Trump in 2012, in a 20-year deal struck to salvage a troubled project. Trump also committed $10 million to build a clubhouse.

The Parks Department and city Franchise and Concession Review Committee have a hearing scheduled for Oct. 12, with the new concession projected to launch Nov. 15 the day after the one-term presidents deadline to vacate the course.

Following the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, de Blasio cited Trumps role in stirring up a mob to invade the U.S. Capitol as reason to terminate all city contracts held by the then-presidents firm.

The city purged its deals with the Trump Organization, which at the time included two ice rinks, the Central Park carousel and the Bronx golf course.

Inciting an insurrection against the U.S. government clearly constitutes criminal activity, de Blasio said at the time. The City of New York will no longer have anything to do with the Trump Organization.

While the other deals were about to expire anyway, the golf course was supposed to be Trumps through 2035, under a deal forged during Mike Bloombergs mayoralty. The Trump Organization, which runs high-end links from Florida to Scotland, fought back.

In a lawsuit pending in Manhattan Supreme Court, Trump Organization lawyers argue that de Blasio did not establish grounds to kill the ex-presidents 20-year deal.

In a default notice to the Trump Organization, then-Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver said that the then-presidents actions will cause the Licensed Premises to be associated with a violent insurrection against the federal government and would repel tournaments from the Trump-branded course.

The Trump Organization is demanding $30 million in damages and a freeze to de Blasios termination of the golf course deal.

Ken Caruso, an attorney representing the Trump Organization in the pending suit, said de Blasio is off course.

The city has no right to award the license to another operator, said Caruso. The Trump Organizations long-term license for this property is legally binding, enforceable, and remains in full force and effect.

He called the contract cancellation a mere pretext that Mayor de Blasio used as a cover for his political retaliation.

And Caruso said Trump would do combat with the new golf course operator, too.

The citys position has no legal merit and we will continue to vigorously defend our right to possession and control of the property for the remainder of the 20-year term, against both the city and anyone to whom the city purports to issue a replacement license, Caruso added.

Jack Brown, the registered agent for Ferry Point Links LLC, has no known history of managing golf courses. He has, however, been a major provider of homeless services under de Blasio, headquartered at the same address on Main Street in DUMBO.

Brown is CEO of CORE Services Group, which has $544 million in current contracts for family and single adult shelters and $804 million since its first city contract in 2014. The group also operates facilities in Washington.

The nonprofits filings with the Internal Revenue Service show Brown made $869,000 in 2019 from CORE and related organizations. Brown previously led a halfway house organization, Community First Services, critiqued by defense lawyers as providing inadequate services.

A 2012 New York Times investigation found that Brown left a trail of exaggerations and self-dealing as the chief executive at Community First, out-bidding himself for contracts and fabricating an academic credential. The newspaper also found that, while Community First was contractually obligated to provide inmates with support services and pathways to jobs, clients received little more than three meals a day and a bed.

Brown has defended the record of his organization and at a 2017 community meeting called the Times article riddled with inaccuracies and denied claims that there were any problems with its contracts.

CORE Services website boasts it is proud to provide critical services to more than 3,000 individuals every day.

The city launched its search for a new entity to manage the Ferry Point golf course soon after sending Trump its cancellation notice Jan. 15.

In April, the Parks Department informed concessionaires that it had entered negotiations with an unnamed company to take over the Ferry Point Park golf course, and that competitive bidding was not feasible due to the existence of a time-sensitive situation where the existing concession has been terminated.

Sign up and get the latest stories from THE CITY delivered to you each morning

Read more:

NYC Moves to Turn Trumps Bronx Golf Course Over to Homeless Shelter Operator - THE CITY