Tag: President of the United States

Cultural displacement, masquerading as economic and border security anxiety, is chipping away at societal cohesion on both sides of the Atlantic. There are, of course, many drivers of this divide, including economic anxiety about globalization, wage stagnation, and career displacement, along with a perceived loss of community values due to continuing immigration and a fear of immigrant crime and foreign terrorism, often driven by exaggerated claims about the threat. The result is that for many Americans, demographic change and immigration pose a direct challenge to established concepts of identity and pre-existing social hierarchies. In 2000, some 2 percent of Americans identified themselves as multiracial. By 2045, white Americans will no longer be the majority in the United States. Europe’s experience with identity—both at the national and supranational level—has been quite different: In many European Union countries, diversity is a newer issue than it is in the United States. What can the United States and European countries learn from each other’s experiences contending with these turbulent forces? Perhaps the core lesson is how many similarities there are in the populist and nativist messaging both sides of the Atlantic are facing, and thus in the shared challenge for those of us who oppose it. Of course, there is plenty the United States can do to get its own house in order. In addition to the Trump administration revamping its heartless policy prescriptions for asylum-seekers on the southern border, Trump himself must dial back his hostile rhetoric regarding immigrants, which provides powerful fuel for those who are already fearful.

My experience as the senior Europe analyst in the U.S. intelligence community under the Obama administration and first few months of the Donald Trump presidency gave me a front-row seat to the early stages of major dysfunction and Trump’s hostility toward Euro-Atlantic institutions. Cultural displacement, masquerading as economic and border security anxiety, is chipping away at societal cohesion on both sides of the Atlantic. There are, of course, many drivers of this divide, including economic anxiety about globalization, wage stagnation, and career displacement, along with a perceived loss of community values due to continuing immigration and a fear of immigrant crime and foreign terrorism, often driven by exaggerated claims about the threat. In 2000, some 2 percent of Americans identified themselves as multiracial. By 2045, white Americans will no longer be the majority in the United States. Europe’s experience with identity—both at the national and supranational level—has been quite different: In many European Union countries, diversity is a newer issue than it is in the United States. While countries such as the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands have had significant histories as colonial powers and subsequent experience with robust immigration, most European countries are considered fairly new immigrant nations compared to the United States or Canada. What can the United States and European countries learn from each other’s experiences contending with these turbulent forces? Perhaps the core lesson is how many similarities there are in the populist and nativist messaging both sides of the Atlantic are facing, and thus in the shared challenge for those of us who oppose it. In addition to the Trump administration revamping its heartless policy prescriptions for asylum-seekers on the southern border, Trump himself must dial back his hostile rhetoric regarding immigrants, which provides powerful fuel for those who are already fearful.

The prime minister was asked on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show what the “brutal” Brexit negotiating advice was that Trump had talked about in their joint press conference outside the prime minister’s Chequers country retreat. Trump leaves the UK this afternoon to fly to Helsinki to meet the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. On Friday, Trump had said he gave May “a suggestion, I wouldn’t say advice” about how to handle the Brexit talks, without revealing what it was. I gave her a suggestion, not advice. May indicated she would seek to fight off any challenge, saying: “I want to focus people’s minds on how you ensure you achieve that prize, the benefits of leaving the European Union.” She added: “I have always said I’m in this for the long term.” However, her immediate prospects took a blow, when the MP who took over from David Cameron said he was resigning as a junior minister so that he could vote against the government in the Commons in the taxation (cross border trade) bill on Monday. Robert Courts said that he had taken the “very difficult decision” to resign “to express discontent” in votes. “This seems to be a hopeless way to negotiate, to accept what the other side says at an early stage of negotiations as holy writ.” He added: “This is why I think she is a remainer, who has remained a remainer.” But Rees-Mogg repeatedly declined to call for a change of leader, instead saying it was necessary for May to change policy. He said ERG members would mount a show of strength on Monday evening, by voting for hard-Brexit amendments on the customs bill. “The inevitable consequence of the parliamentary arithmetic,” he said, “is she will need to change it [Brexit policy] if she is to keep the party united.” The prime minister was initially embarrassed by Trump when he gave an interview to the Sun, published on the morning of the press conference, in which he appeared to say that May’s Brexit plan would prevent a trade deal with the US and said Johnson would make a good prime minister. Trump subsequently apologised to May in private and partially backtracked on the remarks on Friday, saying that the UK should pursue its own Brexit policy and trade negotiations but: “Just make sure you can trade with us.” Marr also asked May if she believed Trump had “a medical problem” with stairs because he frequently takes her hand when the pair find themselves facing a step or two.

Biden, seen as a potential Democratic party candidate against Donald Trump in 2020, did not mention the US president by name but linked his anti-immigrant drive and that of European populists and the far right to pre-war fascists who were willing to create scapegoats to retain their grip on power. “In ways that evoke memories of the 30s, frustrated and disaffected voters may turn instead to strongmen,” he told a conference in Copenhagen. Now it is immigrants, the outsider, the other.” Joe Biden: the liberal everyman spoiling for a fight with Trump as 2020 looms Read more Biden said: “Rather than some dramatic assault on democracy, however, ... our institutions and freedoms are slowly but determinedly being sanded down, little by little, each small step designed to curb institutional safeguards and concentrate power in the hands of individual leaders. “All round the world, repressive governments are borrowing from one another’s playbook, deriding a critical free press as fake news and questioning, indeed delegitimising, an independent judicatory, hamstringing civil society with increasingly repressive laws. He said: “Voters [are] worried that politicians are not looking out for them. Borders seem less real. Terrorist attacks feel inescapable. There are fears about unrelenting migration. Some are concerned that the demographic and cultural foundations of their society are going to be forever changed or erased.” He said globalisation had deepened rifts, divorced productivity from labour and created less demand for low-skilled labour. “There is no other democracy anywhere in the modern world that invites its population to vote on its future, decides by a wafer-thin majority to go in a completely different direction to where it has been going for 40 years against the explicit and stated wishes of those that have to inhabit that future – the young.” Blair warned that faith in democracy was in decline, saying: “There is more than a mild flirtation in the west with what we can loosely call rule by the ‘strongman’ ie the leader who has supreme control over the levers of government, sets a direction and dismisses all opposition to it with varying portions of disdain or repression,” the former prime minister said “We must understand the attraction of this model since its footprint is growing.” Harper, the former Canadian prime minister, said: “Democracy is ultimately justified on its record and for a lot of our citizens in the last 30 years their outcomes have not been very good for a long period of time.” The Danish prime minister, Lars L?kke Rasmussen, said he was less worried by the assault on western democracy from Russia than one from allies within the western alliance.

Donald Trump on Saturday said his summit with Kim Jong-un in Singapore would be a “one-time shot”. You know, the way they say you know if you’re going to like somebody in the first five seconds, you ever hear that one? I think very quickly I’ll know whether or not something good is going to happen.” Trump spoke as he prepared to depart for Singapore and the first meeting between a North Korean leader and a sitting US president. The two leaders’ relationship began with a long period of mutual threats and abuse but a surprise and rapid diplomatic thaw has endured despite Trump’s abrupt cancellation of the summit late last month. He added: “This is a leader that’s really an unknown personality, people don’t know much about him. There’s a good chance it won’t work out. “And by the way, we have worked very well with their people, they have many people now in Shanghai, our people have been – in Singapore – our people have been working very, very well with the representatives of North Korea and I think we’re going to come out fine.” Asked about suggestions that even granting a meeting to Kim meant conceding valuable ground, he said: “Only the fake news says that. Donald Trump at G7: 'US is not a piggy bank to be robbed' Read more “I think it would be an asset to have Russia back in,” Trump told reporters on Saturday. “I think it would be good for the world, I think it would be good for Russia, I think it would be good for the United States, I think it would be good for all of the countries in the G7.” Trump blamed Barack Obama for not doing enough to counter Russian aggression in Ukraine, stating: “Obama can say all he wants but he allowed Russia to take Crimea. “I would say the level of relationship is a 10,” he said, claiming “we have a great relationship” with the leaders of countries including Germany, France and Canada.

The first ever meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un will take place in Castle Greyskull, the White House has confirmed. Castle Grayskull, Eternia will welcome the US president and North Korean leader in a historic meeting that is scheduled to take place June 12th after an initial false start. ‘It was very bigly of me to re-arrange this meeting on neutral ground,’ began President Trump. ‘I look forward to a full and frank discussion about how great I am.’ Grayskull was agreed upon by both parties as it has often been a battleground for good and evil in the past. ‘This will be the first time Castle Grayskull will be used as a meeting point for evil and evil though, as far as I’m aware,’ said Prince Adam of Eternia. Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have both been invited to visit the Hall of Wisdom before the summit, an invitation that both men have declined.

Tommy Thompson and former University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Donna Shalala, a Democrat, both say Wisconsin Republicans are in for trouble come November. Thompson went so far as calling Trump "a bully." She is running for Congress in the Miami, Florida area. "Governor Thompson and I worked together in an era in which it didn't matter whether you were a Republican or a Democrat," Shalala said. Democrats have good ideas. Republicans have good ideas. Republicans have good ideas. Thompson won the gubernatorial election in 1994 with 67 percent of the vote by appealing to Democrats and independents as well as Republicans. Thompson said. "There clearly is unhappiness with the current leadership and it's being reflected across the country in local elections as much as it is in national election," she said.

The White House backed away from Donald Trump’s newfound support for gun control on Friday, only hours after the US president met with the National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist in the Oval Office. Is Trump moving to the centre on guns? The background check system is something that he’s still very much interested in improving.” She insisted, though, that this support did “not necessarily [mean] universal background checks” and also threw cold water on Trump’s statements that he supported raising the age limit to buy an assault weapon to 21. But he also knows there’s not a lot of broad support for that,” she said. Those statements seemed to have prompted an emergency White House meeting with the NRA on Thursday night. “Some of you people are petrified of the NRA. His comments suggested that, after a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, left 17 people dead and sparked a youth movement for gun control, he was interested in breaking with the gun-rights group on key issues. Trump and the NRA had already expressed conflicting public views on whether to raise the legal age to purchase certain weapons. Trump’s public remarks infuriated some NRA members. NRA members on Trump's plans for gun control: 'Every word of it was a betrayal' Read more Democrats, who had cheered Trump’s statements on Wednesday, expressed concern that he was now reverting to his previous pro-guns stance.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Saturday accused the Democrats of playing politics with classified information, asserting that their memo countering GOP allegations about the conduct of the FBI’s Russia probe was a trap meant to “blame the White House for lack of transparency.” Citing national security concerns, the White House notified the House Intelligence Committee on Friday that the president was “unable” to declassify the Democratic memo. White House counsel Don McGahn said in a letter to the committee that the memo contains “numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages” and asked the committee to revise it with the help of the Justice Department. “The Democrats sent a very political and long response memo which they knew, because of sources and methods (and more), would have to be heavily redacted, whereupon they would blame the White House for lack of transparency,” he tweeted. Even before reading the GOP document, Trump pledged to make it public. The Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, California Rep. Adam Schiff, criticized Trump for treating the two documents differently, saying the president is now seeking revisions by the same committee that produced the original Republican memo. She tweeted that Trump’s blocking the memo is “hypocrisy at its worst.” The head of the House committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who produced the GOP memo, encouraged Democrats to accept the Justice Department’s recommendations and “make the appropriate technical changes and redactions.” Trump has said the GOP memo “vindicates” him in the ongoing Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller. The House Intelligence Committee voted Monday to release the Democratic memo. Ryan also said he thought the Democratic document should be released. Trump declassified the GOP-authored memo over the objections of the FBI, which said it had “grave concerns” about the document’s accuracy. They noted that federal law enforcement officials had informed the court about the political origins of Steele’s work and that some of the former spy’s information was corroborated by the FBI.