Mary Trumps tell-all will not make her uncles re-election bid any easier. The presidents late-night walk of shame is already a classic campaign moment. His nieces allegation that he paid someone else to take his college entrance exams resonates as true, because of his reported disdain for reading and capacity to inadvertently invent new words like swiffian.

Adding insult to injury, Maryanne Trump Barry, Trumps sister, appears to be the key source for this smorgasbord of dysfunction. She is a retired federal judge who left the bench with an ethics cloud over her head. Fittingly, as Mary Trump lacerates multiple sets of vital organs, her pen a stiletto, she thanks her aunt for all of the enlightening information.

It is score-settling time, Trump-style. Go big or go home. Few are spared.

Too Much and Never Enough doubles as mesmerizing beach reading and a memorable opposition research dump, in time for the party conventions. Think John Bolton-quality revelations, but about Trumps family. It is the book Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury, likely wishes he had written but isnt kin so he couldnt. It is salacious, venomous and well-sourced.

Sadly, it is also a book born of tragedy and pain. The authors father, Fred Trump Jr, died in his early 40s. He drank hard, was jettisoned by his father and siblings, and treated as a cautionary tale. Mary Trump is angry, not self-pitying. Although she casts her book as a warning to the American public, it is 200-plus pages of revenge served with the benefit of time and distance. Yet the narrative remains compelling.

Fred Jr found joy in flying and serving his country. He was a member of the national guard and a TWA pilot. In most homes, that would be deemed an achievement. But the Trumps were not most folks. Fred Sr saw his oldest son as weak. His brother Donald humiliated him, his mother Mary stood by and watched. As for Fred Jrs military service, Trump pre found little value there. As for Donald, bone spurs were his path to avoid Vietnam.

When Fred Jr was dying, in 1981, the future president thought it an opportune time to go to the movies. Past became prelude. When Roy Cohn, Trumps friend and consigliere, was dying of Aids a decade later, Trump walked away again. A stunned Cohn reportedly remarked: Donald pisses ice water.

But it was the aftermath of Fred Srs death that put Mary Trump and the older generation on a collision course. Fred Jrs two children were cut out of Fred Srs will. Maryanne and her brothers did their best to thwart their claims to an inheritance.

Tensions spiraled, then subsided. The matter was settled, and the parties filed a stipulation in surrogates court. Ostensibly, the agreement barred disclosure regarding Fred Sr and his legacy. Maryanne was an executor of the estate. Ironically, she has emerged as her nieces muse. The judge leaked like a sieve.

According to Too Much and Never Enough, Trump and Cohn played a pivotal role in Maryannes elevation to the federal bench. At the time, she was only an assistant federal prosecutor, an usual launchpad to a federal judgeship. Strings were pulled. When Maryanne had the temerity to tell Trump his presidency was failing, her niece now writes, he reminded her that he made her. Like Fred Sr, Trump brooks no hint of disloyalty.

A New York Times investigation in the origins of Trumps wealth brought the past roaring back. Questions surrounding the family fortune abounded. Tax evasion appears as one possibility. After resisting overtures for assistance from Susanne Craig of the Times, Mary Trump began to cooperate. In the process, she came to doubt the rationale for her own settlement.

As for Aunt Maryannes role in the mess, Mary Trump lumps her in with the rest of them: They all knew where the bodies were buried because they buried them together.

This may be the first time a family member of a sitting president has publicly accused him of paying a surrogate to take the SATs a claim the alleged surrogates widow denies. Looking back, Trumps obsession with Barack Obamas college transcripts appears to have been a fusion of envy, projection and racism. As an institution of learning, Trump University was truly created in its namesakes image.

Amid all this, mockery is unavoidable. And as Mary Trump observes, the president hates to be mocked. Think of Stormy Daniels dishing about Toad and Mario-Kart an image best forgotten.

The author also stresses that Trumps prejudices mirrored his parents. Both Trump and his father were sued by Richard Nixons justice department, for housing discrimination. Mary Trump also contends that Fred Sr regarded Jew as a verb and was scandalized when the first Italian American family moved into the neighborhood. Trumps mother, she writes, derided Elton John as a little faggot. The author was in a same-sex relationship at the time.

Trumps nostalgia for all things Confederate approaches the organic. In his view, hoisting the Confederate battle flag is free speech but Colin Kaepernick taking a knee is blasphemy. As an election strategy, it doesnt seem to be working. Below the Mason-Dixon line, Trump trails Joe Biden in Florida and North Carolina and is in a tight fight in Georgia.

In this cycle, race-based appeals energize communities of color and repel suburbia. Trump generally turns off college-educated women.

Theres more, of course. Mary Trump writes that if the president can in any way profit from your death, hell facilitate it, and then ignore the fact that you died. As her book appears, Covid-19 cases are exploding, the pandemic moving to the countrys interior. More than 200,000 Covid-related deaths are projected by election day. The Grim Reapers scythe is unsheathed.

Trump is undeterred. He falsely claims the situation is improving and demands schools re-open while his White House looks to numb us into submission. A modern-day Moloch, the president expects the nation to sacrifice itself. Not everyone appears willing, least of all his niece.

See the rest here:

Too Much and Never Enough review: Mary Trump thumps Donald - The Guardian

Donald Trump taints everything he touches. If he supports a cause, he damages it. If he takes a stance, the instinct of most self-respecting liberals is to rush to the opposing side. So when Trump rails against China, a favourite bete noire, it can make a progressive pause.

Thats especially true when the US president lurches so easily into casual bigotry referring to the coronavirus as kung flu and when his hypocrisy is so rank. Thanks to his former national security adviser, John Bolton, we know that, for all his talk, Trump begged Beijing to meddle in this years election in his favour, breezily granting US blessing to what Amnesty International calls the gulag of camps in Xinjiang, in which China holds a million Uighur Muslims against their will.

And yet, just because Trump exploits Chinas human rights abuses when it suits him doesnt mean those abuses dont exist or that we shouldnt be paying attention. Most western interest has been aroused by the plight of Hong Kong, on which Beijing last week imposed a new and crushing national security law, a move the Economist rightly described as one of the biggest assaults on a liberal society since the second world war.

The new law criminalises dissent. Lest there be any doubt, within hours of the laws passage a man was arrested for no greater offence than carrying a banner calling for independence for Hong Kong. Now national security cases can be tried before government-appointed judges, in secret and without a jury or on the Chinese mainland, where justice is what the ruling party says it is, and where prosecutors have a near-100% conviction rate.

Whats more, the new law applies globally: in theory, anyone anywhere deemed to have subverted the Chinese state could have their collar felt by the long arm of Beijing. That may sound fanciful, but in a speech on Tuesday the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, described Operation Fox Hunt, Chinas continuing global campaign against Chinese nationals abroad. Beijing insists its an anti-corruption drive, but Wray said it had coerced expat political rivals, dissidents and critics some of them US citizens to return home, often by threatening their families. One target was passed a message that said: Return to China promptly or commit suicide.

The last six months have revealed more about China under President Xi Jinping than the previous six years, wrote John Sawers, the former head of MI6, this week. To which a fair reply is: only because we didnt want to look. Of course, its understandable that the west notices when things happen in Hong Kong: it was a British colony until 1997, and to this day it remains where China meets the world, as one longtime observer puts it. But the evidence of the Chinese Communist partys willingness to crush not just opposition but difference goes far beyond Hong Kong, and that evidence has been there from the start.

The repression of minorities in Tibet and especially Xinjiang has escalated sharply. The horrific plight of the Uighurs has been hard for reporters to document, but the publication last November of the China Cables, a cache of secret documents, confirmed the existence of a vast prison network in Xinjiang where a million people, mainly Muslim, have been held captive; former inmates speak of torture and rape. These are brainwashing detention centres, designed to strip Uighurs of their cultural memory and identity. The existence of this gulag, the largest mass incarceration of an ethnic-religious minority since 1945, is a grievous crime, a stain on humanity. And yet it is barely mentioned.

Less than a fortnight ago, an investigation by the Associated Press revealed that the Chinese government is forcing intra-uterine devices, sterilisation and even abortion on hundreds of thousands of women, in a bid to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population. All this as it encourages some of the countrys Han majority to have more children. The AP quoted experts who called it a form of demographic genocide.

Those who have long watched Chinas rulers can see the pattern. This has been the project of the Chinese Communist party: to tame and domesticate Tibet, then to do the same to Xinjiang and now to Hong Kong, says Nicholas Bequelin, who monitors the region for Amnesty International. He fears this record suggests an obvious next target: Taiwan, as China pursues what it sees as its manifest destiny, complete reunification. Such a move raises the prospect of war.

This is where those unmoved by arguments rooted in human rights might prick up their ears. Chinas conduct cannot be walled off as somehow unconnected to the rest of the world.

You dont have to engage in Trump-style name-calling to know that the authorities in China sat on the news that there was human transmission of coronavirus for nearly a week a move that surely had lethal consequences. You can listen to specialists such as Bequelin who have concluded that Beijings ambition is to dismantle systems that protect democracy and human rights.

How, then, should the rest of the world react? One option would be to brand China a rogue superpower, to shun it as a pariah. But thats hard to do when the US is itself in the hands of a rogue president. How to condemn Chinas suppression of peaceful protest when Trumps response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations was to tweet, When the looting starts, the shooting starts? It did not escape Beijings notice that Republican senator Tom Cotton published his notorious op-ed call to send in the troops on the eve of the anniversary of the crushing of the protests in Tiananmen Square.

Nor does trolling and insulting Beijing get results, even if it gives Trump and his lieutenants a Twitter sugar-rush. No one should want to trigger a new cold war; we know from bloody experience what happens when cold wars turn hot. Besides, in the hands of Trump, its all too easy to see how a conflict with China would spill over into suspicion and hostility directed at the Chinese diaspora. Sanctions such as those Trump is expected to sign into law next week may fail if Beijing has decided it can take the economic hit.

In the age of coronavirus, with future global pandemics likely, there has to be some engagement with a country of the heft and importance of China, the worlds second largest economy. So perhaps the answer begins in finding allies and taking on the undramatic, often unglamorous work of diplomacy, anchored in basic notions of reciprocity. At its simplest, it would mean saying to China: If you want to keep selling us your tinned tomatoes produced in Xinjiang, then you have to ensure they are verifiably forced-labour-free.

Practical, hard-headed, advancing bit by bit towards something better: none of that is Trumps strong suit. But faced with a mighty power behaving so cruelly towards those it rules, it is essential.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Read more:

Trump is a bigot and a hypocrite, but hes right to condemn China - The Guardian

Seaside Vacation town Provincetown, Massachusetts, US, on July 10, 2020 is taking COVID-19 seriously ... [+] mandating mask-wearing and limiting the number of customers in stores, but still having fun with masks on their statues. (Photo by Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Back in April, President Donald Trump was widely and rightly ridiculed for claiming that people should inject themselves with disinfectant and fire UV light under their skin in order to cure themselves of the COVID-19 coronavirus. But on one of those points he was closer to the truth than perhaps even he realised.

Fast forward to July in the U.K. and after months of denying their effectiveness, based on the scientific evidence available, today heralds the biggest hint that the government is about to mandate the wearing of face coverings when inside shops.

Speaking in a Facebook Q&A video, Boris Johnson hinted at the change saying: "We are looking at ways of making sure that people really do have face coverings in shops."

Adding, "the balance of scientific opinion seems to have shifted more in favour of them than it was, and we're very keen to follow that".

While it has been known for some time that the virus can be spread by droplets from the nose and throat landing on surfaces and then being transmitted by touch, this shift from the government comes at a time when the World Health Organisation (WHO) is now acknowledging that indoors, the virus can stay suspended in the air and thus be transmitted in that way.

On the WHO's website, it states that, "There have been reported outbreaks of COVID-19 in some closed settings, such as restaurants, nightclubs, places of worship or places of work where people may be shouting, talking, or singing.In these outbreaks, aerosol transmission, particularly in these indoor locations where there are crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces where infected persons spend long periods of time with others, cannot be ruled out".

If, as appears likely, the mandatory wearing of a face covering while in a store is implemented, the implications for retail will be far-reaching. Because while in other countries, most notably in south-east Asia, the wearing of face coverings, has become an accepted part of their culture, in the west it is far less so.

Time was when, before leaving the house, the checklist would be wallet and keys, that became wallet, keys and phone and is now likely to be replaced by, phone, keys and face covering. And if that is true, along with social distancing measures, shopping will be changed forever.

Educating us to wear face coverings is being likened to the campaign in the seventies to get us all to wear seat belts, but this feels closer to home, somehow more personal. Shopping, or at least the physical act of shopping in a store is all about using all our senses, and wearing a face covering will, for many, intrude on the enjoyment of the experience.

And the coronavirus has accelerated the shift towards online shopping. According to Retail Week, multichannel retailers saw a record 71% boost in online sales compared with 2019 as physical stores opened up in June.

Trump Was Closer To The Truth

But there is hope.

Because a new study has shown that 99.9% of coronaviruses can be killed when exposed to far-UVC light, meaning that Trump's comments at the press briefing in April were not as far fetched as we at first thought.

For years is has been known that UVC light can kill bacteria but at frequencies too damaging to humans. However, far-UVC light has a very limited range and cannot penetrate through the outer dead-cell layer of human skin or the tear layer in the eye, so its not a human health hazard.

The study, carried out by researchers atColumbia University Irving Medical Center, has used far-ultravioletC (UVC) light, at a wavelength which is safe for humans, to kill more than 99.9% of coronaviruses that are found present in airborne droplets. In other words, the form of droplets which is now believed to be suspended in the air in indoor, poorly ventilated areas.

Lead author, David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, said: Based on our results, continuous airborne disinfection with far-UVC light at the current regulatory limit could greatly reduce the level of airborne virus in indoor environments occupied by people.

As we all seemingly become more, rather than less, fearful of the virus amid fears of entering a second wave, could the development of commercial applications of "air disinfection" in this way become the saviour that retail, hospitality and many other sectors need?

And with the prospect of finding a vaccine, likely to be years away, if ever, could this represent the pathway back to normality which we all now crave?

Continue reading here:

Donald Trump Gave Us A Clue To How To Save Retail, Its Just That We Didnt Take Him Seriously - Forbes

Of course, this guy has taken us past more tipping points than an Olympic hurdler.

Ferguson: Let me ask you another thing about the new book. Your second book, your first novel, The White House Mess, was in the form of a White House memoir, and Make Russia Great Again is also a White House memoir. You seem to have an affinity for that very particular literary form.

Buckley: Yes, my first novel was a fauxor as we say now, a fakeWashington memoir by a White House chief of staff named Herb. This is my 19th book, a fake memoir by a White House chief of staff named Herb. So Im ready for the reviewers to say, well, Buckley has traveled the gamut from A to B, or from A to A.

Ferguson: Probably best to say youve come full circle.

Buckley: Well, its a kind of bookend. I probably wont be writing another White House memoir. But its a fascinating, very rich subliterary genre. Everyone who works at the White House for more than five minutes writes a memoir. The White House dog keeper wrote a memoir. I think it was like 500 pages. They all tend to have two themes: One, it wasnt my fault; and two, it would have been much worse if I hadnt been there.

Herb, the main narrator in the new one, hes sort of a likable schlub. Hes basically an innocent. He used to be the food and beverage manager at Trumps other resort, Farrago-sur-Mer. Trump calls him, and hes fired his six chiefs of staff at this point, and he begs Herb to come on board. Id say hes a good guy in a bad place. His observations are naive and innocent, and therefore, I think, the comedy is amplified.

Ferguson: Theres a peculiar psychology to White House staffersmaybe its true in all of politics. They all have an element of hero worshiptheyre there to serve this superior person in rank and statureand yet at the same time they, of all people, are more exposed to the weaknesses that all aspiring great men and women are heir to.

Of course, with Trump theres an additional complication in the psychology. You have a great line in which Herb finally becomes self-aware.

Buckley: He says, It had gotten to the point where I felt virtuous merely by not saying something that was false.

Yeah, in a normal White House, which this seems not to be, the relationship between principal and staffer could probably be called a healthy codependence. Theyre both there for their own reasons. A good leader like Bush 41you loved the guy because he was lovable, and he was good, and it wasnt about him. He may well be the most selfless man ever to occupy the White House.

With this guy, its different. Its frankly hard at this point to imagine why anyone would want to work for him. I think the Im doing this for the good of the country explanation rings a little bit hollow.

Ferguson: Have you read John Boltons book? Its only 600 pages.

See the original post:

Christopher Buckley on Satire in the Age of Trump - The Atlantic

Donald Trump Jr. told reporters Friday that he expects Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to block presidential campaign events under the guise of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whitmer told the Associated Press last month she would think very seriously about trying to block the president from hosting a campaign rally in Michigan, where her executive orders require masks in all public spaces and limit the size of gatherings and events.

We know that congregating without masks, especially at an indoor facility, is the worst thing to do in the midst of a global pandemic, Whitmer reportedly said. I just know we have limitations on the number of people that can gather and that were taking this seriously.

The governors office provided a comment after this story initially published.

The governor is focused on saving the lives of Michiganders, and remains unbothered by partisan games and political attacks, Communications Director Zack Pohl said in a statement. If the Trump Administration was as concerned about protecting the publics health as it is about hosting dangerous rallies that can be breeding grounds for spreading COVID-19, perhaps there would be a national pandemic response plan or federal mask-up campaign to combat this virus that has already killed tens of thousands of Americans across the United States.

The presidents son, who is in self-imposed quarantine after his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle tested positive for COVID-19, said he thinks the cancellation of political events would happen for partisan reasons. He said there are ways to hold campaign events safely, by requiring masks and keeping people six feet apart from one another.

I have a feeling a lot of the governors in the swing states, the liberal governors are going to do whatever they can to quash events and quash rallies, Trump said. Given the sort of partisan manner in which Gretchen Whitmer has handled everything as it relates to Michigan, it would be little shock to me whatsoever that she would do whatever she can, under the guise of corona(virus) of course.

Whitmer issued an executive order on June 5 allowing indoor social gatherings and organized events of up to 50 people. Outdoor social gatherings and organized events of up to 250 people are also allowed.

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence visited Michigan for events organized by the White House in May and June.

The president gave remarks at a Ford Motor Company facility in Ypsilanti Township, while Pence spoke at an outdoor venue in Sterling Heights where attendees were spaced six feet apart. The governors office said Trumps May visit opposed an executive order barring non-essential tours of manufacturing facilities.

Trump Jr.s remarks came on the same day Whitmer issued an executive order requiring Michigan residents to wear masks in public spaces, both indoors and outdoors, or face a misdemeanor charge. Whitmers order, which takes effect immediately, includes some exceptions for children and people who have a medical reason preventing the use of a face covering.

Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes said Whitmers new order isnt about politics in a Friday statement.

This is about saving lives, stopping the spread of COVID-19 and moving Michigan beyond this crisis, she said.

At a Friday press conference, Chief Medical Executive Dr. Joneigh Khladun said Michigans fight against the infectious respiratory disease is nowhere near over.

There were 67,683 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Michigan and 6,024 deaths as of Thursday. A total of 52,841 people have recovered as of July 3.

Michigan is experiencing a spike in new confirmed cases in July after the number of new cases found each day gradually decreased during the last few months. Over the last month, Michigans daily increase in coronavirus cases has climbed from 150 to 444.

The presidents son argued any bans on political events would only serve to hurt the Trump campaign while benefitting presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Trump said Biden has been hiding from voters instead of hitting the campaign trail.

Michigan is an important state for the presidents reelection hopes. The president won Michigan by only 0.3% in 2016, becoming the first Republican to take the state in nearly three decades thanks to a narrow 10,704-vote margin.

It is an important state to us, but I imagine they will do whatever they can to create an obstacle for us, Trump said.

COVID-19 PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus.

Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible.

Use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home (door handles, faucets, countertops) and carry hand sanitizer with you when you go into places like stores.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has also issued an executive order requiring people to wear face coverings over their mouth and nose while inside enclosed, public spaces.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

READ MORE:

Michigan sees largest one-day coronavirus case increase in 7 weeks

Michigan at tipping point in fight against coronavirus

Michigan sees largest one-day coronavirus case increase in 7 weeks

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Donald Trump Jr. expects Gov. Whitmer to block campaign rallies under guise of COVID pandemic - MLive.com

Donald Trump working on merit-based immigration order, and DACA - world news - Hindustan Times "; forYoudata += ""; forYoudata += ""; forYoudata += ""; count++; if (i === 7) { return false; } }); forYouApiResponse=forYoudata; $(forutxt).html('Recommended for you'); $(foruContent).html(forYoudata); } } }); } else if(forYouApiResponse!=''){ $(forutxt).html('Recommended for you'); $(foruContent).html(forYouApiResponse); } } function getUserData(){ $.ajax({ url:"https://www.hindustantimes.com/newsletter/get-active-subscription?usertoken="+user_token, type:"GET", dataType:"json", success: function(res){ if(res.length>0) { $("[id^=loggedin]").each(function(){ $(this).hide(); }); } } }); } function postUserData(payLoad, elm){ var msgelm=$(elm).parents(".subscribe-update").nextAll("#thankumsg"); $.ajax({ url:"https://www.hindustantimes.com/newsletter/subscribe", type:"POST", data:payLoad, contentType: "application/json", dataType: "json", success: function(res){ if(res.success===true){ $(msgelm).show(); 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Donald Trump working on merit-based immigration order, and DACA - Hindustan Times

Both as president and in business, Donald Trump is often accused of being overconfident and self-serving. And according to his niece Mary Trump's upcoming book, "Too Much and Never Enough," Donald learned that from his dad Fred's obsession with famous 1950s self help author, Norman Vincent Peale.

Peale, a ministerwho "preached self-confidence as a life philosophy," according to Politico, wrote best-selling self-help book "The Power of Positive Thinking" in 1952, which has since been translated into 15 languages and has sold more 7 million copies.

And while Donald Trump was only 6 when the book was released, Mary says Donald's father was immediately drawn to Peale's teachings. So much so that his family joined the author's church, Marble Collegiate, in midtown Manhattan. (Donald was later married to first wife, Ivana, there in 1977.)

"Fred wasn't a reader, but it was impossible not to know about Peale's wildly popular bestseller," Mary writes in "Too Much and Never Enough," which is set to be released on July 14."The title alone was enough for Fred, and he decided to join Marble Collegiate although he and his family rarely attended."

Mary,55, who holds a Ph.D. from Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies and has taught graduate courses in trauma and developmental psychology, writes that Fred was attracted toPeale's "shallow message of self-sufficiency."

"Peale's doctrine proclaimed that you need only self-confidence in order to prosper in the way God wants you to."

For example, Peale wrote in "The Power of Positive Thinking" that "[O]bstacles are simply not permitted to destroy your happiness and well-being. You need be defeated only if you are willing to be."

Mary writes that Peale's view confirmed what Fred Trump has always thought: "He was rich because he deserved to be." (Fred Trump was a real estate developerwhohad anet worth at around $250 million to $300 million at the time of hisdeathin 1999, according to The New York Times.)

Peale's book touts mantras like "Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities!"

A worn copy of Norman Vincent Peale's, "The Power of Positive Thinking."

MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images

"A sense of inferiority and inadequacy interferes with the attainment of your hopes, but self-confidence leads to self-realization and successful achievement," Peale wrote.

According to Mary's book, Fred viewed self-doubt as a weakness and passed on these attitudes to Donald "in spades."

Donald Trump and his father, Fred Trump, at the opening of Wollman Rink in Manhattan's Central Park in 1987.

Dennis Caruso | New York Daily News | Getty Images

In 2015, then-presidential hopeful Donald Trump told a crowd at the Iowa Family Leadership Summit that he remembered Peale's church sermons.

"You could listen to him all day long. And when you left the church, you were disappointed it was over. He was the greatest guy," Trump said,according to Politico.

Though Peale had a massive following, he also had critics.According to Politico, Peale was known as "God's salesman" and called a con man because "his simple-minded approach shut off genuine thinking or insight."

Neither a spokesperson for the White House or Marble Collegiate responded to CNBC Make It's request for comment. But on Tuesday, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews said in a statement that Mary's book "is clearly in the author's own financial self-interest."

In the book, Mary says she did not write it to "cash in or out of a desire for revenge." Instead, the events over the last three years that Donald Trump has been president "forced" her hand, she says, and she could no longer remain silent.

"By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the altar of Donald's hubris and willful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy," she writes.

InJune, Donald's younger brother Robert Trump unsuccessfully tried to block the publication of the book in court, saying that his niece, who is the daughter of his and Donald's late brother Fred Trump Jr., is subject to a nondisclosure agreement and "not allowed to write the book."

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How this 1950s self-help guru shaped Donald Trump's attitude toward life and business - CNBC

U.S. President Donald Trump says he will soon sign an executive order on immigration that includes a path to citizenship for young immigrants who arrived in the United States illegally when they were children.

In an interview with Spanish-language television network Telemundo, Trump said DACA is going to be just fine, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program under which young migrants have been allowed to stay in the United States temporarily.

"We're going to have a road to citizenship," he said.

However, this "does not include amnesty," White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement after Trumps television interview.

The White House statement said the executive order would establish a merit-based immigration system and reiterated that Trump would work with Congress on a legislative solution that "could include citizenship, along with strong border security and permanent merit-based reforms," but no amnesty.

The Trump administration has previously tried to end DACA, an Obama-era program that protects more than 700,000 immigrants.

Trump did not give details about the larger immigration order he says he plans to sign, only saying that it will include DACA, and I think people are going to be very happy.

When asked if the measure will be an executive order, as opposed to a congressional bill, Trump said the Supreme Court gave him tremendous powers to pass an executive order when they ruled on DACA last month.

The courts ruling said that the administration had not given adequate justification to rescind DACA. The courts ruling did not say whether DACA recipients have a permanent right to live in the United States and did not prevent Trump from trying again to end the program.

Deere said Trump is working on an executive order to establish a merit-based immigration system to further protect U.S. workers. Trump said he plans to sign it in the next four weeks.

The president has long said he is willing to work with Congress on a negotiated legislative solution to DACA, one that could include citizenship, along with strong border security and permanent merit-based reforms, Deere said in a statement.

Republican Senator Ted Cruz criticized Trumps plans, saying in a tweet, "There is ZERO constitutional authority for a President to create a road to citizenship by executive fiat."

Congressional lawmakers have tried on several occasions in recent years to pass comprehensive immigration reform but failed over deep divisions between Republican and Democratic proposals.

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Trump Says He Will Grant Road to Citizenship for Young Migrants - Voice of America

Trumps June 22 order of temporarily suspending various categories of visas for immigrants did little to hurt the foreign students. However, a new order has now asked students to leave the US if their school or university is conducting online classes in fall 2020.

According to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcements order announced on July 6, only those students will be allowed to stay in the country whose university is taking in-person classes or a mix of online and in-person.

The agency has also made it clear that no new visas will be issued now and the students with existing stamped visas will not be allowed to enter the country. ET Online decodes some of the most pressing queries playing on Indian minds.

What if you have an H-1B visa but no job?One of the biggest drawbacks of the H-1B visa is that a visa holders lawful status in the US is based solely on employment. H-1B recipients cannot stay unpaid for more than 60 days.

H-1B visa holders who are out of work for up to 60 days (or until your status expires if its sooner than 60 days) have to either find another employer to sponsor them or apply for a change in visa status.

For those who manage to find a job, the new employer can file a petition and they can actually start working even before approval is obtained.

In case the H-1B visa holder fails to get employed, they have an option to apply for a "change of status to F-1, L-1 or H-4, based on what they qualify for.

These actions are necessary because unlawful presence in the US can invite a ban for 3 to 10 years, depending upon the overstay.

What if my visa status is about to expire?The US Presidents move to impose visa restrictions would not hurt those who may be employed but whose visa status is about to expire.

So, for those who find themselves in this situation, its crucial that their employer files an extension petition with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) before the status expires.

In case an H-1B visa holder is past the 60-day grace period, they can apply for a nunc pro tunc decision (retroactively to correct an earlier ruling) with the USCIS through their attorney or employer.

The USCIS holds discretionary powers. Considering the coronavirus pandemic as exceptional circumstances, the immigration agency may grant an approval with an extension, allowing the visa holder to stay in the country.

What about those married to H-1B holders, or those with H-4?Spouses and children (other than US citizens) of H-1B visa holders would also be hit hard by Trump's proclamation.

According to the order, if an H-1b visa holder hasnt received the approval then the spouse will not either.

Spouses of the H1-B visa holders whose visas expired and weren't renewed before June 23, will now have to wait until the next year. The same applies to those whose visas are not stamped.

However, those who have a valid H-4 but are currently out of the US, will be able to return without any difficulty.

The new order also doesnt affect those H-4 holders who have applied for H-4 Employment Authorization Documents. While it is still a point of contention and the DHS has recently proposed to disallow dependents to apply for employment authorization, there does not seem to be any hiccups for the time being.

What if you are in India to get your visa stamped?Trumps proclamation is also likely to hurt those who were in their home country for the renewal of their visas.

H-1B visa holders and their spouses who do not have their visa stamped, will now have to wait for 6 months as Trumps executive order bans issuing of any new visa until December 2020.

The order implies that those who do not have a valid visa stamped on their passports as of June 24 will not be allowed to enter the US till the year-end. The curbs, however, does not impact those who managed to get their visa H-1B or dependent stamped before June 24. These people can travel back to the US any time they want.

What if you have a valid work visa?Those with a valid work visa have nothing to worry about. According to the executive order signed by Trump, new H-1B visas will not be issued. So those who have a valid visa, irrespective of whether they are currently in the US or not, wouldnt be affected by the visa freeze.

The proclamation would also not affect those with a valid status in the United States.

Also, the visa holders whose families are already present in the US shall not be impacted by the visa ban.

What happens to those with H-1B this year?Trump's latest ban on immigration visas will hurt people who have already applied for this year's lottery the most. With the lottery opening for applications in early-April, the cap for all categories was maxed out by April 19, 2020.

Under those who have been selected, two broad categories emerge foreign nationals who have applied for an H-1B as fresh applicants, and those who are already in the country on different visas, but now want to switch to the H-1B.

For those trying to convert to H-1B, as long as they are within the United States, the ban won't affect them. As soon as they get approved in the lottery system, they receive an I-94 which allows them to legally stay in the country. However, in case they have left the country or do so now, they will need a visa to get back which is where the ban comes in. For foreign nationals planning to move to the US on fresh visas, this ban would hamper their plans to join work this year October is the earliest employment start date for CAP H-1Bs. With visa processing slated to resume only after December 31, there could be further delays as well.

What happens to parents with H-1B, children status?"Household members" of non-immigrants, like elderly parents and partners, do not qualify for a derivative visa. Hence, they are allowed to enter the US on a B-2 visa.

This visa is exempted from Trumps executive order.

Meanwhile, children of those on H-1B are issued an H-4 visa. This means that whatever happens to their parents is likely to happen to them as well. However, US citizen children of the H-1B visa holders will remain unaffected by the proclamation.

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What Donald Trump has really done: The most troubling visa queries, answered - Economic Times

Soon after the Supreme Court ruled, on Thursday morning, against Donald Trumps effort to stop a Manhattan prosecutor from obtaining his tax returns, the President lamented how unjust the decision was. Courts in the past have given broad deference, he tweeted. BUT NOT ME! He elaborated: This is all a political prosecution, he said. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration! POTUS is, as ever, a whiny loser.

His whinging, though, should not obscure the fact that Trump, yet again, has escaped to fight another day. In a 72 ruling, the Justices, including two Trump appointees, reaffirmed the principle that no one, not even the President, is above the law. But the decision allowed Trump to continue fighting in lower courts over the terms under which he must comply, a ruling that makes it all but certain that he will not have to turn over his tax returns before this falls Presidential election. He may lament PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT, but Trump seems to have once more managed to avoid having to produce information about his sketchy finances before facing voters. Losing just might be a form of winning after all. Sure enough, that was exactly what Trumps advisers took to claiming. This was a win for the President, the Administrations press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, declared from the White House lectern. Asked about Trumps angry tweets, McEnany simply dismissed them as general comments. It is a big win, she added, before also saying, confusingly, that the President agreed with the dissenters in the case. I would underscore the victory here.

This is classic Trump Administration doublespeak. Reality is whatever the Trumpians say it is. The Supreme Court decision can be both terribly unfair and a great win. And why not? Trump has made a career of turning bad news into good, of rewriting bankruptcies and divorces and unfulfilled promises into spectacular accomplishments. After his Republican Party lost the House of Representatives, in 2018, Trump called the midterm-election results a Big Victory. After the special counsel Robert Mueller submitted a report, in 2019, documenting ten instances in which the President engaged in obstruction of justice, Trump called the report complete and total Vindication. But his problems now seem to be piling up, and I am not just referring to the question of when and how he will finally have to turn over his tax returns. As the coronavirus surges once again across America, polls show Trump losing more support by the day. This week, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report issued its July Electoral College ratings and determined that, as of right now, the Presidential election looks like a Democratic tsunami. Even the reliably pro-Trump polling agency Rasmussen registered the President at the lowest approval level of his tenure, with just thirty-nine-per-cent support. No wonder Trump is whining. He is always about ME! The question of the moment is this: With Americans suffering so deeply from the pandemic and the attendant economic crisis, and with a national election to decide his fate only a hundred and seventeen days away, can Trump pull off his most epic act of winning by losing yet?

In her scorching new book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the Worlds Most Dangerous Man, Trumps niece Mary Trump portrays her Uncle Donald as an abusive narcissist with a rampant and undiagnosed antisocial personality disorder, and she blames many of his evident character flaws on his father, Fred, a sociopath who withheld love from his son when he needed it mostas a small child. It might seem contradictorybeyond even Trumps standardsto claim in the course of a few hours that the Supreme Court had been wildly unfair to him and had also handed him a significant victory. But his niece, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, shows that this has long been Trumps way. In the early nineteen-nineties, she notes, when his business was in increasingly serious trouble and banks were refusing to extend him any more credit, Trump found a long list of others to blame. Nothing was ever fair to him, she writes. At the same time, Trump had to please his father by continuing to portray himself as a wild success. The future Presidents demanding patriarch would not accept anything less. In the books particularly to-the-point conclusion, Mary Trump describes the toxic positivity that she says is his family legacy. The President, in other words, is simply incapable of accepting a harsh or unpleasant reality. He has no choice but to deny it. Losing is winning for him. It has to be.

This is also the strongly held view of various Trumpologists outside of his family, who have discerned in the Presidents biography a long history of being unable to deal with truly negative circumstances. He actually holds very few tools in his kit. Hes not equipped for compromise or changing direction. Indeed, he only knows how to move forward on the path he has determined, one of Trumps biographers, Michael DAntonio, told me. This is why he got into trouble with his bankruptcies way back whenhe failed to accept that he was a bad manager of complex organizations, and kept trying it until he was hemmed in by lenders who refused him further credit. Like Mary Trump, DAntonio said he believed that Trump is incapable of processing bad news and dealing with it. Letting in negative feedback is almost painful for him. In fact, it almost seems to me like he either cannot hear, or really hold in his mind, the bad news that he should receive and then let guide him in making adjustments, DAntonio told me.

The problem for Trump now is that, although his willful inversion of reality may work for him as a coping mechanism, it is wildly unsuited as a formula for governance, especially during a public-health crisis, when facts matter and spin is irrelevant. The coronavirus pandemic and the recession are the ultimate bad news for a President who cant bear it. On Wednesday, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, travelled to Brussels to speak to the European Parliamenther first appearance outside of Germany since the start of the pandemic. As always, she was understated but unyielding. You cannot fight the pandemic with lies and disinformation, she said. Here in Washington, where the grim march of the coronavirus is unrelenting, it sounded like a message aimed right at the man in the White House.

But President Losing-Is-Winning has an increasingly inarguable set of facts to wrestle with. The U.S. has repeatedly set records for new cases in recent days. The spike is sharp, and it is broad: the numbers are now going up in thirty-three states. In some, the pandemic is spreading at an alarming rate: a rise of thirty-eight per cent in new cases in California this week, twenty-eight per cent in Texas, twenty-five per cent in Florida. With more than a hundred and thirty thousand Americans already dead, a new projection this week suggests that more than two hundred thousand Americans will die of the coronavirus by November. Even a graphic on the Trump-friendly Fox News on Thursday was devastating. It showed total cases, total deaths, and new cases. Underneath the first two numbers was the phrase Most in the World.

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Donald Trump, President Winning-by-Losing, Is, in Fact, Losing - The New Yorker

Mary Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and the niece of the president of the United States, knows of what she speaks.

"It's difficult to understand what goes on in any family perhaps hardest of all for the people in it. Regardless of how a parent treats a child, it's almost impossible for that child to believe that parent means them any harm," she observes in her new book, "Too Much and Never Enough," as she parses the legacy of the patriarch, Fred Trump Sr. "Abuse can be quiet and insidious just as often as, or even more often than, it is loud and violent. As far as I know, my grandfather wasn't a physically violent man or even a particularly angry one. He didn't have to be; he expected to get what he wanted and almost always did."

Mary's father, Fred Trump Jr., was crushed by those expectations and by his struggle with alcoholism, which she lays out in harrowing and courageous detail. (As a child, she once encountered her father laughing while aiming a shotgun at her mother's face, for example.) Fred Jr.'s demise is a key narrative arc of the book, but the two people who loom largest over the entire affair are Fred Sr. and one of his other sons, Donald both of whom she describes as deeply intertwined, driven and disturbed.

"Financial worth was the same as self-worth, monetary value was human value," Mary writes. "The more Fred Trump had, the better he was. If he gave something to someone else, that person would be worth more and he less. He would pass the attitude on to Donald in spades."

In a book filled with firsthand accounts of dysfunctional family gatherings, references to decades of unsettling reporting about the Trumps, documentation of financial grifting, and many episodes of parents and siblings jousting with one another over money, egos and abandonment, Mary draws a portrait of a surreal, scarred clan that might have been forgotten had one of its members not found his way into the White House. But the fact that Donald morphed from huckster to celebrity to president makes her account seminal and indispensable.

Mary's clarity, training, discipline and sharp eye help make her a reliable narrator, and she's a fluid, witty writer to boot. Much of what's she's written about I've covered as a journalist and an author (Donald unsuccessfully sued me for libel for my 2005 biography, TrumpNation). Everything in her book that I'm familiar with is spot on. There is plenty in the book, however, that I wasn't aware of, and I suspect that's the reason the president and his siblings have gone to court to try to halt its publication. The Trumps know that Mary's understanding of her family is authentic she's a true insider in an era when "insider" accounts of the president are a dime-a-dozen and that what she's written is likely to be indelible.

The subtitle of Mary's book is "How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man," and she makes her case diligently and chronologically. Fred Sr. was steely and unforgiving, while his wife, Mary, lived in his shadow, emotionally distant and demanding. The Queens mansion where Donald grew up as his father's favorite is an intimidating pile that Mary calls The House. In the basement of The House, Fred Sr., a teetotaler, kept an elegant bar outfitted with everything but alcohol and guarded by a collection of life-sized wooden statues of Native American chiefs standing along a wall. An oil painting of a lovely Black nightclub singer with "generous swaying hips" backed by a Black jazz band hung on a wall nearby. That was apparently as close as Fred Sr. wanted Black people to get to his family. The son of a German immigrant, he slurred any person of color seeking to rent an apartment from him as "die Schwarze." Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer and mob confidante, came into the Trumps' lives when Fred Sr. and Donald retained him to battle a Justice Department probe of racial discrimination at Trump properties in the 1970s.

Fred Sr. ruled the roost, and in Mary's view he did so as a sociopath, driving her father to ruin and forcing her Uncle Donald to adapt to his binary, winner-take-all view of the world. Losing was unacceptable, and the power of positive thinking was everything. "Just give it a quarter of a turn on the mental carburetor," Fred Sr. advised Fred Jr. as the way to conquer alcoholism. Mary writes that after Fred Jr. died, the Trumps apparently schemed to disinherit her and her brother, cutting off their health insurance when they wouldn't play along.

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Donald, more than any of his four siblings, reveled in Fred Sr.'s hothouse. He stole one of his brother's trucks as a child just so he could see how anguished his brother might become. He bucked authority as a teenager, prompting his parents to send him to military school. According to Mary, he paid someone to take the SAT exams for him so he could get into a better college. When Fred Sr. slipped into dementia soon before dying, Donald, strapped for cash, maneuvered unsuccessfully to push his siblings aside and gain control of an estate worth several hundred million dollars. Although Donald's entire career was built on Fred Sr.'s wealth and connections, Donald treated his father dismissively in his final years. Then again, Fred Sr. treated most people dismissively, and Donald is what Mary describes as a "Frankenstein's monster," shaped by his father's pathologies.

Fred Sr. lacked the marketing savvy and media know-how of his son, so he helped push Donald into the spotlight and risked the family fortune along the way so he could bask in his son's glory. Donald thrived on the attention and took advantage of the license afforded by his father's wealth, eventually adopting "cheating as a way of life." Mary takes the media to task for searching for a "strategy" in anything Donald does and for soft-pedaling what she describes as multiple psychological disorders, which, by her account, check a variety of boxes in diagnostic manuals. She thinks that Donald, at a minimum, suffers from an "antisocial personality disorder" and a longstanding but undiagnosed learning disability.

"The fact is, Donald's pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he'll never sit for," she writes.

Mary's understanding of her family was also shaped by reporting in the New York Times. A landmark expose the Times published in 2018 about the Trump family's tax dodging and financial chicanery relied on her as a key source. She provided the paper with pivotal documentation that showed how the Trumps used a shell company to skim millions from the family business to avoid estate and income taxes. It was the Times's forensic work, using her documentation, that revealed the skimming to her and to readers and also made her realize that her aunts and uncles had most likely been cheating her out of significant sums of money as well.

For all of that, the tone of Mary's book isn't bitter. She maintains a sense of humor about some of the absurdities she's encountered (Donald was slow to pay her when she helped ghostwrite one of his books) and is forgiving, to a point, about the myriad shortcomings of her various relatives. But she is clearly disappointed. The book is ultimately a melancholy account of aunts and uncles who openly disdain Donald but are afraid to get in his way. The book quotes Donald's eldest sister, Maryanne, a former federal judge, saying that Donald "has no principles. None!" Maryanne is also quoted dismissing the possibility that her brother will be elected president: "He's a clown this will never happen." The fact that Donald was elected also informs the book's melancholy, with Mary stunned that tens of millions of voters were capable of embracing or overlooking her uncle's "blatant racism" and his "casual dehumanization of people."

Other observers have picked up on some of this over the years, of course. Liz Smith, the late New York gossip columnist, had a street-smart understanding of Trump. "There's something about him that's ever juvenile. It's hard to believe he's a grown-up person who went to college," she once told me. "He's like a kid, and he's got that brash, narcissistic thing that works for him. He has enormous appeal to the masses because of that."

But Mary understands that's not a benign matter anymore. "Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information," she writes. "This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows he has never been loved."

Writ large on an international stage amid a pandemic and social upheaval, and with the powers of the presidency at Donald's disposal those resentments metastasize into something wildly menacing.

"He has suffered mightily," Mary writes of Donald's worldview, "and if you aren't doing all you can to alleviate that suffering, you should suffer too."

Timothy L. O'Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

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A guided tour into the troubled mind of Donald Trump - Newsday

President Donald Trump lashed out again atMeet the Press host Chuck Todd, calling for him to be fired after the Sunday show aired an edited clip of Attorney General William Barr talking about the Justice Deparments decision to drop the Michael Flynn case.

This is certainly not the first time that Trump has targeted Todd: Hes tweeted or retweeted about him 14 other times since taking office, while the president has been on a tear about NBC and its parent company, Comcast, in some of his public statements and at briefings and rallies.

In the clip shown on Sundays Meet the Press, Barr, in an interview with CBS News Catherine Harridge last week, is asked, When history looks back on this decision [to drop the Flynn case], how do you think it will be written?

Well, history is written by the winners. So largely it depends on who is writing the history, Barr said.

Meet the Press cut the clip there. Todd, in a roundtable conversation with Richard Haass, Peggy Noonan and Kristen Welker, then said I was struck, Peggy, by the cynicism of the answer. Its a correct answer. But hes the attorney general. He didnt make the case that he was upholding the rule of law. He was almost admitting that, yeah, this is a political job.

A spokesperson for Justice Department, Kerri Kupec, objected to the editing, writing that what was left out was when Barr went on to say in the CBS News interview, But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law. It helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.

She wrote, Very disappointed by the deceptive editing/commentary by @ChuckTodd on @MeetThePress on AG Barrs CBS interview. Compare the two transcripts below. Not only did the AG make the case in the VERY answer Chuck says he didnt, he also did so multiple times throughout the interview.

The show said that it was an honest error. Meet the Press tweeted back to Kupec on Sunday, Youre correct. Earlier today, we inadvertently and inaccurately cut short a video clip of an interview with AG Barr before offering commentary and analysis. The remaining clip included important remarks from the attorney general that we missed, and we regret the error. In coverage of the Flynn case last week, there was also plenty of commentary and coverage that focused solely on the soundbite, history is written by the winners and not the rest of Barrs quote.

Late on Sunday, Trump, on a Mothers Day tweetstorm, picked up on the error, and accused Todd of intentionally leaving out the rest of Barrs remarks. He also tweeted the name of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. The president has previously suggested that NBCs license should be challenged, even though the FCC licenses individual stations, not networks. Pai also has said that the FCC does not have the authority to act on an issue of program content.

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Donald Trump Lashes Out Again At Chuck Todd, Calls For Him To Be Fired Over Edited Meet The Press Clip - Deadline

Curious to know why the Globe stopped short of asking Trump to leave office, I reached out to Bina Venkataraman, the papers editorial-page editor. She told me by email that the editorial board has considered demanding Trumps resignation, most recently over the Ukraine scandal that led to his impeachment, but to date it has refrained from taking that step. She said that an election year raises the bar in terms of the rationale and timing that would justify doing so. However, Venkataraman emphasized that the Globe has not ruled out the possibility. When we deliberate about such questions, she told me, we consider all kinds of factors, including the timing, the potential to influence the outcome, whether its the best position to take for the country in the moment as well for institutions and democratic norms over the long run, [and] what precedents it sets for the editorial board. She also pointed out that the paper had recently called on Attorney General William Barr to step down over what it alleged was his serial misconduct. (Its worth noting, too, that the Globe columnist Michael Cohen, although not a member of the editorial board, has demanded Trumps resignation several times.)

Barbara McQuade: What would happen if Trump refused to leave office?

The Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer thinks the fact that Trump so recently survived impeachment is probably another reason editorial pages and congressional Democrats have been loath to demand his resignation. But he suggests that deeper factors may also be at work. Zelizer says that after decades of anti-government rhetoric from the right, a lot of Americans have come to expect that Washington will fail them, and this has shaped how the country responds to incompetent leadership. Its this feeling that this is the best we can get, he says. The degree to which we have become inured to failure, he says, was vividly demonstrated during George W. Bushs presidency. Even though Bush presided over a series of historic disasters9/11, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and the global financial meltdownhe served two full terms in office.

Our political culture does seem to have developed a high tolerance for failure. As the CIA director under Bush, George Tenet oversaw two intelligence debacles: 9/11 and the Iraq War. Yet he kept his job until June 2004, more than a year into the Iraq fiasco, at which point he insisted that he was not leaving in shame or disgrace. He told CIA employees it was a personal decision, and had only one basisin fact, the well-being of my wonderful familynothing more and nothing less.

Business culture has perhaps also numbed us to the prospect of failure without consequence. In the corporate world, poor performance is no impediment to lavish compensation. When the Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg was fired last December after two 737 Max planes crashed and the entire fleet was grounded, he walked away with a $62 million payout. Executives seem to rake in millions no matter how badly their companies fare.

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Why No One Is Calling on Trump to Resign - The Atlantic

American Comeback, the Trump campaign titled a new ad out this week. THIS NOVEMBER, the ad proclaimed, making clear the comeback he is referring to is not just the countrys struggle with the coronavirus pandemic but the restoration of his own political fortune, THE GREATEST COMEBACK STORY IS WRITTEN.

That Trumpin the throes of the worst public health crisis in more than a century and the most devastating economic downturn since the Great Depressionis writing rosy history long before it has actually happened might seem audacious. It borders on the fanciful when considering the slew of numbersthe steadily mounting death toll, near-record unemployment and a majority of Americans dissatisfied with his handling of the crisisthat sketch a future trending in the opposite direction. But this is a page from a playbook Trump has used many times before.

At key points in Trumps long and public lifefrom his nadir in the 1990s to The Apprentice more than a decade later to his embattled campaign a decade after that and finally to his tumultuous presidencyTrump has used the idea of the comeback as a critical weapon in his arsenal of self-invention. A believer in a binary worldview that was a core teaching of his flinty fatherthere are winners and losers, and he always must be the former, not the latterTrump has used comeback as a fortifying piece of rhetoric that masks periods of failure, delaying a reckoning until theres something to brag about. Others might wait for actual evidence that a comeback has occurred, but Trump repeatedly has advertised his comebacks months and even years in advance. He has used it to bend in his favor unflattering media narrativesto tweak perception, to alter realityto conjure power, positivity and a sense of propulsion, especially at junctures when hes running low on all three.

The world that he lives in and projects, there are just two roles in it, Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me. Youre a winner or a loser. And if theres a moment that youre not quite a winner, youre almost a winner. Youre practically a winner. Its a cloak that contains winning as a part of it.

Its his way of saying, I had a setback, and now Im coming backbut he never says he had a setback, former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me.

He also uses it as a starting off point to build momentum, added Marcus, who worked for Trump from 1994 to 2000. It was a word that he pushed off on.

Comeback, said Sam Solovey, a contestant on the first season of The Apprentice, who prepped for the show by reading every Trump book and biography, is the placeholder until victory is at hand.

It helped him get to the White House. And now, forced by circumstance to abandon his victory lap messaging of Keep America Great, Trump is reaching for it again as he tries his hardest to stay there.

Its just as critical to 2020 as it was in 2016, if not more so, former Trump aide Jason Miller told me. If hes the outsider, if hes the insurgent, he wins reelection. If hes viewed as the insider, the one whos the power holder in a tumultuous time, then winning becomes much tougher.

My name is Donald Trump, he said in the intro of the first show of the first season of The Apprentice, launching into a quick series of words and pictures associated with success. For Trump, the reality television show on NBC, which debuted in 2004, was a chance to cement his comeback taleand to do it in the way that he wanted, sandwiching what he took to calling his glitch or his blip basically between brackets of unfettered triumph. But it wasnt always easy, he explained. About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back. And I won.

In the first half of the 90s, Trump constantly skirted financial ruin, facing for years the possible permanent tarnishing of the image he had cultivated in the 70s and 80s as an infallible deal-doer. Donald was broke, Stephen Bollenbach, the CFO Trumps lenders made him hire, would say. He was worse than broke. He was losing money every day. Even so, Trump talked about his comeback, not when his struggles began to wane but practically from their start.

All Donald knew was that he was still a story, Wayne Barrett wrote in his seminal biography. In the spring of 91, according to Barretts reporting, Trump announced to a consultant that he was determined to return to the cover of Time. He said he would be the comeback of the century.

In 1992, he redoubled his efforts, earning honeyed headlines on the cover of New York magazine and on the front page of the Washington Post. He refused to reflect on the past, skated through the present and relentlessly spun toward the future. Im not going to look back and say it was tough and blame myself, he told the Sunday Times of London. I could be even bigger than ever.

Gossip columnists marveled at Trumps ability to shape the nature of the story. I mean, Linda Stasi of the New York Daily News told the Boston Globe in 1994, its not like hes the president.

Business bigwigs, meanwhile, marveled at it because it wasnt true. I think his recovery is an illusion, a real estate executive who did frequent business with Trump said to the reporter from the Globe. Its like the emperor has no clothes. I guess if you keep repeating it long enough people begin to believe it.

And he did. And they did.

And it worked.

In 1995, not quite five months after Trump successfully started selling stock in his failing casinos in New Jersey and his resurgence was looking legitimately less and less like a mirage, some of New Yorks business and government leaders honored Trump at a luncheon in Manhattan for what they dubbed the comeback of the decade. The lieutenant governor called him the comeback kid. Bill Fugazy, a limo company tycoon and onetime Roy Cohn crony, gave Trump a glass-encased boomerang. You throw it, he said, and it always comes back.

In 1996, in articles about Trump, the Daily News and the New York Times used comeback in headlines. By this time, thanks to the casino deal plus at-long-last development on a plot of land he was involved with on the Upper West Side, those headlines were no longer wrong. I think it says, Trump said, what Ive been doing over the years has been right. (Sound familiar?)

And in 1997, out came The Art of the Comeback, the sequel of sorts to The Art of the Deal. It never occurred to me to give up, to admit defeat, Trump (really Kate Bohner) wrote. He simply skips over the losing part. It is the unspoken chapter in the ongoing narrative, said Solovey, the first-season Apprentice contestant. He left out the Art of Losing.

Hence the intro to the show in 04. That same year, too, on multiple occasions, he made the claim that the Guinness Book of World Records listed him as having made the greatest personal financial comeback of all time. Its true. It did, in 1999 and 2000, a Guinness World Records spokesperson told me, before the Records Management Team decided the concept of a comeback was not standardizable across the globe. To use it the way he wanted to use it, he didnt need it to be.

He kept comeback as a cudgel, of course, when he turned toward politics.

In 2015, a little more than a month before he came down the escalator and officially entered the fray as a presidential contender, he gave a speech to the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Florida. Our country is not going to have a comeback, he said, with any politician.

The rest of 2015 and into 2016, for most of the campaign, he didnt use the word that muchuntil he needed it, in October, when polls pointed to him losing to Hillary Clinton and perhaps by a lot. I know how to make a comeback, he said in a speech October 3 in Loveland, Colorado, referring to his experience in the 90s. I dont even think of it as a comeback, he said that same day in a speech in Pueblo, Colorado. It was just, like, you know, we had tough periods, good periods, tough periods. We just knew that things were going to be just fine.

Americas comeback begins on November 8, he said in a speech in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on October 15, a week after the uncovering of his lewd comments on the Access Hollywood tape, when many figured his candidacy surely was doomed.

Hes never stopped using the word as president. But it started to tick up at the turn of the year. He was always going to run in 2020 by talking about a comeback.

But he wanted to run on one he was saying had just occurredand that he had engineered. Three years ago, we launched the great American comeback, he said in his State of the Union address the first week of February. Were in the midst of the great American comeback, he said repeatedly that month and into early March.

At that point, though, the dire reality of the coronavirus and its consequences began to become clear. It was no longer a credible pitch. The Trump campaign this year was going to be about KAGKeep America Greatbut now its another round of MAGA. Make America Great Again. Again. Trump not only has not shied away from using the word comeback but has doubled down, simply shifting from trumpeting one to forecasting anotherto trying, as is his wont as a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale, to speak it into existence, never, ever losing, always either winning or on the way.

Theres going to be a comeback very, very quickly, as soon as this is solved, he said in a coronavirus briefing on March 18. And it will be solved. We will win. And there will be a comeback.

Were going to have a very quick comeback, he said on Fox News on March 24.

Well be the comeback kids, he said in the briefing on April 15. All of us. All of us.

He has very few moves, Marcus, the former Trump publicist, told me, and one of those moves is the comeback move.

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Donald Trumps Lifelong Obsession with Comebacks - POLITICO

Economists largely do not share the presidents rosy view, nor his assurances that the third and fourth quarters of 2020 will automatically transition into an economic rebound.

I remember working in the White House in 2009 and feeling the world was ending when we lost roughly 700,000 job a month, said Jesse Rothstein, a former senior economist in the Obama administration who is now a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Now, we lost 20 million jobs in one month. There is just no comparison.

For Trump, the pivot to the economy is a messaging play for his White House legacy and his re-election campaign. If he can cast himself as the wartime president who resurrected the economy from a pandemic, that is a far better political narrative than the one the Democrats are pushing: that Trump underplayed the viruss threat and oversaw an ad hoc and ill-fated response effort.

The president and the White House are looking for ways to boost economic growth by urging Americans to return to work, as well as considering tax cuts for the next relief package bound to please Wall Street and goose the stock market, which Trump views as its own form of polling.

Many Republicans close to the White House privately believe the markets will rebound long before the employment numbers do. One Republican close to the administration said the White House is in denial about the true scale of the carnage to the jobs market, according to interviews with six senior administration officials and close White House advisers.

Publicly, White House officials are keeping up Trumps optimistic message of a recovery in the last two quarters of the year, even if it seems unlikely that Americans will want to fully participate in large-scale events like concerts or sports games, or attend celebrations, dine out or even travel.

We understand why the economy is slowing down. And we expect that we can reverse it, senior adviser Kevin Hassett said on Sunday on CBS Face the Nation. Whereas in the Depression, there were a lot of other things, a lot of policy errors and so on, that made the whole thing drag out. Also on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned that the unemployment rate could go as high as 25 percent.

There's no work from home for the more than 2 million farmworkers deemed 'essential,' putting them at risk of exposure.

If you look at the Congressional Budget Office, he added, they currently forecast that the second half of the year will be one of recovery. You know, God willing, thats whats going to happen. And I think that thats the view thats pretty much shared by the White House.

Conservative political groups and economists have been echoing this message in recent days, calling for Congress to cut or suspend the payroll tax in the next congressional package and move to relax social-distancing guidelines as soon as possible.

On a private call with conservatives last week, the director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, predicted that the U.S. would see an economic rebound in the summer months, and argued that the White House was trying to move from the stage of rescuing the economy to boosting and incentivizing growth, said one person on the call even if, to outsiders, it felt like the economy was still in free fall.

The high unemployment rate only raises the stakes for getting the economy opened as quickly as possible, said Stephen Moore, an informal economic adviser to the Trump campaign and the White House dating back to 2016. Were starting to see the victims of the shutdown. What the data is telling us is that people laid off were the lowest-income and minimum-wage workers. That makes it all of the more imperative to move as quickly as possible.

Critics of the Trump administration, including many health officials, do not agree with the sudden reopening of the economy without greater capacity to test Americans for the virus or trace the path of infections. Trumps own top health officials have largely disappeared from public events and briefings.

It is not unrealistic that there will be some type of economic bounce-back, said Rothstein, the economics professor and former Obama official. Whether it could be the third quarter depends on the president doing his job at some point and getting the public health part of this done. We dont seem any more ready to reopen than we did two months ago.

Even the White House, with its superior resources and medical professionals, is struggling to contain the virus after one of the presidents valets and the vice presidents top spokesperson tested positive for Covid-19 last week, diagnoses that concerned top administration officials who work in close quarters and attend meetings without wearing masks.

Hassett on Sunday called the White House a scary place to go to work right now, and Vice President Mike Pence opted to avoid the White House over the weekend after his top spokesperson tested positive. Pence was tested for the coronavirus on Sunday, one official said, and it came back negative.

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Trump sticks with positive messaging as coronavirus misery piles up - POLITICO

It was a mic drop designed to thrill conservatives and infuriate liberals and the media.

Kayleigh McEnany, the latest White House press secretary aiming to become the acceptable face of Trumpism, had been asked if she wanted to take back a bold prediction in February that we will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.

I guess I would turn the question back on the media, and ask similar questions, McEnany said on Wednesday. Consulting her briefing book, she reeled off a list of outlets and articles she said had downplayed the threat.

Ill leave you with those questions, she said, and maybe youll have some answers in a few days.

And with a triumphant smile she stepped away from the lectern, ignoring shouted questions. Reporters wore surprised and stony faces, then relaxed into wry smiles. It was a classic piece of whataboutism as practised by pundits on cable news.

The TV president now has a TV emissary, a spokesperson who sometimes takes her eyes off the reporters in the room and looks directly into the camera. McEnany is from what the president likes to call central casting: a polished performer, devout Christian and devout Trumpian. And she is only 32.

Kayleigh McEnany: beautiful, Christian, conservative designed by nature to enrage MSNBC viewers, tweeted Ann Coulter, a rightwing author and commentator, referring to the liberal-leaning network whose hosts often eviscerate the president.

Read or listen to her words prior to her decision to jump on the Trump train. She is a completely different person

But to critics, McEnany is a Trump apologist trying to explain the inexplicable and excuse the inexcusable. They characterise her as an opportunist motivated by fame and power rather than any ideological faith. They say she has abandoned her religious principles to normalise a president widely condemned as a misogynist and racist.

The eldest child of a roofing contractor, McEnany is from Plant City, Florida, which she describes as the worlds strawberry capital. She attended the Academy of the Holy Names Catholic high school in Tampa and found time to volunteer for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004. She moved to Washington to study at Georgetown, took an exchange year at Oxford to study politics and served an internship in the Bush White House.

After graduating in 2010, she worked for three years as a production assistant at Fox News for Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and father of Sarah Sanders, Trumps second press secretary. In 2012, she wrote a tweet about Barack Obama, the countrys first black president, that has come back to haunt her: How I Met Your Brother Never mind, forgot hes still in that hut in Kenya. #ObamaTVShows.

McEnany wanted a job in front of the camera but couldnt get a break. Eventually she decided to become a student again, first at the University of Miami School of Law, then transferring to Harvard. Huckabee told the New York Times last month: I think one of the reasons that Kayleigh went on to law school was because she didnt see she was going to have an on-air opportunity at Fox any time soon.

But in 2015, McEnany received some intriguing career advice over cocktails from Michael Marcantonio, a fellow summer associate at a law firm and a Democrat. In an interview with the New York Times, he recalled telling her Donald Trump is going to be your nominee, adding that if a smart, young, blond Harvard graduate wanted to get on television and have a career as a political pundit, you would be wise to be an early backer.

McEnany did so. Networks were struggling to find eloquent champions of the Trump cause but she fitted the bill. She became a paid contributor on CNN, feeding the outrage machine and the concept of cable news as combat sport.

A political commentator acquainted with McEnany, who did not wish to be named, said: They brought her on board when it became pretty clear that there were few people who were willing to defend Donald Trump that were somewhat sane. Most people who were credible and experienced were not willing to put their names or reputations on the line to defend Donald Trumps crazy during 2016.

In June 2015, McEnany had described Trumps comments about Mexican migrants as racist and dismissed him as a showman. She quickly changed her tune. The source said: She is unrecognisable. If you were to read or listen to her words prior to her decision to sell her soul and jump on the Trump train, she is a completely different person.

To Trump supporters, McEnanys ability to rile liberals made her something of a heroine. Even at the nadir of the Trump candidacy, when an Access Hollywood tape revealed him boasting about grabbing womens genitalia, she had his back, saying: Those comments are despicable [but] he apologised for them.

Sean Hannity, a Fox News host, wrote in a forward to McEnanys book, The New American Revolution: The Making of a Populist Movement: Outnumbered 8-to-1, or if she was lucky, 7-to-2, Kayleigh never backed down in fighting for the conservative movement supporting Donald Trump.

Jason Miller, who also appeared as a pro-Trump pundit on CNN and is now co-host of the podcast War Room: Pandemic, said: Keep in mind that she went through a couple of years of being a CNN political commentator where she was rumbling with Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper and Chris Cuomo and Van Jones and Ana Navarro and every other hater thats out there.

So if Kayleigh can go toe to toe with the toughest anchors and commentators on TV, shell do just fine with the White House press corps.

Once Trump had stunned the world by winning the White House in 2016, McEnany joined the Republican National Committee as spokeswoman, then moved to the Trump campaign in a similar role. She would sometimes work 18 or 20 hours a day, according to Tim Murtaugh, director of communications for the Trump campaign.

Kayleigh was fantastic, he said. Shes smart, shes energetic, shes engaged and shes the most prepared person that I know. She has a keen grasp of policy and is able to turn what are sometimes complicated policy matters into language that is easily digested by the listener.

Murtaugh accused opponents of discriminating against McEnany because of her looks and gender.

The first thing the liberals want to do when they see an attractive young woman in a position like this is they want to question her intelligence. And I would just say to people, you underestimate Kayleigh McEnany at your own peril. I dont think that theyre turning out too many dummies from Oxford and Harvard Law School.

Murtaugh also recalled how McEnany organised a Bible study group with other staff that met weekly in a conference room at campaign HQ in Arlington, Virginia. Since the pandemic lockdown, the group has continued to meet virtually.

Like many evangelicals, McEnany apparently sees no contradiction between Trumps behaviour and Christian values. Two years ago, when she had a preventative double mastectomy because of a BRCA2 genetic mutation that had put her at high risk of breast cancer, she wrote: My faith in Jesus Christ was my strength that day.

I will never lie to you. You have my word on that

She is an ardent admirer of Ravi Zacharias, a preacher whose organisation included a study centre in Oxford. She wrote in 2013: Oxford needed a Christian to respond to Richard Dawkins. Found that in Ravi, who has dismantled atheism. This week her sister, Ryann, who also works for the Trump campaign, tweeted: Watching my sister take the stage for her first White House press briefing last Friday was a surreal moment! Gods spirit was ever-present in that room and undeniably flowing through you.

In 2017 McEnany married Sean Gilmartin, a pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays. She posed with Blake, the couples five-month-old daughter, at the White House lectern after her debut briefing, the first by a press secretary in more than 13 months, where she declared: I will never lie to you. You have my word on that.

She now has three briefings under her belt. She has echoed Trumps false and misleading statements but avoided major controversy and, importantly, avoided stealing too much of his limelight.

Kurt Bardella, a political analyst and Trump critic who bested McEnany in a debate on gun control on MSNBC, said: Kayleigh is very on point, succinct, direct and speaks with a lot of confidence and comfort from the podium.

Like Conway, Bardella believes, McEnany saw a chance for career advancement and seized it.

Outside of the president, the White House press secretary traditionally is the most visible person in the administration. This is something that she will be able to live off of for the rest of her life.

I dont think that its diehard ideological alignment more than just an opportunity. Donald Trump is a person with no ideology or core conviction. This is someone whose core ideology is nothing more than whatever is transactional and advantageous to him at that moment in time.

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Kayleigh McEnany the 'acceptable' face of Trumpism who infuriates liberals - The Guardian

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Rosie ODonnellhas confirmed she is helping former nemesisMichael Cohenwrite a spicy tell-all about his years working for President Trump, aspreviously revealed by Page Six.

ODonnelltold the Daily Beastthat she visited the then-jailed lawyer in prison for six hours and agreed to help with his memoir, an unlikely partnershipPage Six first revealedat the beginning of March.

Its pretty spicy, she promised of the book.

HOW PAST OUTBREAKS SHAPED CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE IN US

Hes in the midst of writing it, and is nearly done writing it, and hopes that itll be out before the election, she told the site.

ODonnell said she struck up her unlikely friendship with Cohen as he was in the upstate Otisville federal prisonserving a three-year sentencefor lying to Congress and making illegal hush-money payments.

I wrote him a letter the day that Trump got impeached, ODonnell, 58, told the Daily Beast, saying she found his inmate number online.

She forgave him for his attacks on her in a letter she says left him so moved he started crying.

Rosie O'Donnell is reportedly working with Michael Cohen for a tell-all about Donald Trump. (Bruce Glikas/WireImage)

In that letter, she told Cohen that she found it mind-boggling that he was sitting in jail for doing exactly what the boss told you to do.

No matter how long it took you, youll be known and respected for that as much as any horror youve committed through him, she wrote.

The letter sparked an unlikely friendship between the pair, with the former View host eventually visiting him in prison for six hours, she said in the interview published in part on Saturday.

TIPS ON TALKING CORONAVIRUS WITH YOUR KIDS

Michael and I talked a lot about how he got involved in Trump, how its a cult, and what role he played not only in Trump Inc., she told the site in an interview published Saturday.

The 53-year-old disbarred lawyer then discussed his impending tell-all about his years with Trump, with ODonnell offering advice following her own success penning memoirs.

He told me what chapters he was doing in his book, and on my way home, I was writing about what had happened between us, and I gave him my breakdown of things that should be in chapters.

I said, You should tell this story as a chapter, you should tell this story as a chapter,' she said of the advice she gave.

Despite their troubled relationship in the past, ODonnell said she always felt she could relate to Cohen because he always looked to me like someone from my neighborhood.

He grew up on Long Island like I did, hes a few years younger, and he reminds me of my brothers. I look at this guy and go, How did he fall under the spell of that charlatan? she said.

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Cohen last monthappeared set to leave prisonamid the coronavirus pandemic a move laterrescinded by a judgewho says he needs to accept the consequences of his criminal convictions for serious crimes that had far reaching institutional harms.

This article originally appeared in Page Six.

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Rosie O'Donnell working with Michael Cohen on tell-all about Donald Trump - Fox News

But President Donald J. Trump? He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody... and not a single major daily newspaper would call for his resignation. I admit that -- just like the original Trump quote it references -- that Fifth Avenue statement is a bit hyperbolic, but think about it:After three years of political and actual carnage under Trump, including Robert Mueller's description of acts that amounted to, he told Congress, obstruction of justice; Trump's "fine people on both sides" reaction to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville where a counter-protester was killed; his rampant conflicts of interest and credible accusations of his violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution; his close to 17,000 false statements; a travel ban that primarily targets mostly Muslim-majority countries; impeachment for alleged extortion of a foreign government (he was acquitted in the Republican Senate), and the gross mishandling of a deadly pandemic, you'd think somebody on an editorial board might say it's time for the President to leave.

But this has not happened. Why not?

Not knowing the answer, I set out to talk to a lot of smart people to find out why.

I did this because history would lead you to believe that most of the editorial boards of America's newspapers/digital sites would have stepped up to that plate already. To be clear, editorial boards are the group of writers and editors behind the daily editorials on the news -- appearing in the editorial pages -- that reflect the newspaper's values. These are separate from the "op-eds" commissioned by opinion editors from outside writers that reflect a range of views -- often at odds with those of the editorial board.

Pulling no punches on Nixon and Clinton

The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment for Nixon and sent them to the House; he resigned before they could vote on them.

Twenty-four years later, in 1998, more than 100 newspapers called for the resignation of President Bill Clinton, both during the Kenneth Starr investigation and the subsequent impeachment trial for obstruction of justice and perjury, over his affair with a White House intern.

Peter R. Bronson, then-editorial page editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, told the Times, "'As soon as we saw the Starr report and got knee deep, we said, 'This really smells, we've seen enough, the evidence is compelling and damning,''' Mr. Bronson said.

The ground shifts

And Trump's offenses were much more far reaching than Clinton's: he used American foreign policy to leverage a political favor, and he's also certainly had a fair share of tawdry scandals

What has changed?

Just about everything, it seems, beginning with the media: the explosion of 24/7 news networks and the endless horizon of internet-on-demand caused some newspapers to fold or shrink and lose relevance. The lucky few left standing wobbled through a decade trying to claw their way back into news dominance. Papers lost advertisers, lost readers and increasingly lost influence with the public, particularly the editorial pages: so much opinion journalism was readily available from so many other new online sources.

Why have so many editorial pages railed -- over and over -- against Trump's behavior in the most vehement terms, through scandal, impeachment, botched pandemic response and much more, and yet they won't call for him to go?

Editorial boards' new reluctance

I put this question to more than a dozen experts, media columnists, editorial writers, academics and White House reporters. What emerged was not one simple explanation, as journalism professor Jay Rosen of New York University explained it, but a number of factors that have discouraged editorial pages around the country from taking this bold step.

Central to these, according to John Avlon, a senior political analyst at CNN and the former editor in chief of the Daily Beast, is that "the reality of the hardened partisanship is beyond reason. We've become really unmoored from our best civic traditions." And one of our best civic traditions used to be holding political leaders to account -- demanding, in extreme situations, that they resign.

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Why aren't editorial boards screaming: Trump has to go? - CNN

Donald Trump is culpable in the deaths of thousands of Americans by using the coronavirus pandemic to boost his electoral prospects and line the pockets of big business, Prof Noam Chomsky has said.

In an interview with the Guardian, the radical intellectual argued the US president was stabbing average Americans in the back while pretending to be the countrys saviour during the worst health crisis in at least a century.

He said Trump, who will seek re-election later this year, had cut government funding for healthcare and research into infectious disease for the benefit of wealthy corporations.

Chomsky said: Thats something that Trump has been doing every year of his term, cutting it back more. So [his plan is] lets continue to cut it back, lets continue to make sure that the population is as vulnerable as we can make it, that it can suffer as much as possible, but will of course increase profits for his primary constituents in wealth and corporate power.

Chomsky also said the president had abandoned his duties by forcing individual state governors to take responsibility for combating the virus: Its a great strategy for killing a lot of people and improving his electoral politics.

Asked to clarify if he viewed Trump as culpable in the deaths of Americans, he said: Yes but its much worse than that, because the same is true internationally. To try and cover up his criminal attacks against the American people, which have been going on all of this time, hes flailing about to try and find scapegoats.

The professor said Trumps decision to freeze payments to the World Health Organization, would lead to deaths in Yemen and across the African continent.

Chomsky was speaking in an interview to mark the launch of the Progressive International, a global initiative to unite, organise and mobilise progressive forces around the world.

First convened by Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, and Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, it aims to mount a fightback against the increasing rise of rightwing populist movements around the globe.

Other members include Katrn Jakobsdttir, the Icelandic prime minister, former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell, the authors Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy, and Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador. In September, pandemic permitting, the council will convene for an inaugural summit in Reykjavik.

Also speaking in an interview to mark the launch, Varoufakis said articles he and Sanders wrote in the Guardian two years ago were among catalysts for launching the Progressive International.

He said: Its been urgent for quite a while now. If anything Im worried that were coming to the party too late. I hope not..

Expressing anger at the EU response to the pandemic as a very sad dereliction of duty, he said the crisis could tear apart the euro single currency bloc. I dont think the eurozone can survive it. But it can survive long enough to deplete huge amounts of wealth and social capital. Europe is rich enough, it can pretend and extend.

EU leaders have agreed to draw up a 540bn (480bn) package of emergency measures. However, there is a deep split between countries demanding grants for stricken economies, such as Italy and Spain, and northern members such as Germany who favour loans.

The launch of Progressive International comes amid growing calls to drastically alter the global economic and political status quo as Covid-19 continues to expose and exacerbate entrenched levels of inequality and poverty.

Pressure had also been mounting since the 2008 financial crisis to reverse more than four decades of government retreat from intervening in the economy, amid widespread dissatisfaction with modern capitalism from supporters and detractors.

Faced with rightwing nationalist responses and the growing urgency to combat global heating, McDonnell said the new organisation would help develop and promote a more progressive vision of the future.

Speaking to the Guardian, he said: This initiative comes at just the right time. Its about the nature of society we want. Its also about how we tackle the real threat upon us from climate change.

Comparing the threats from rightwing populism to the rise of Nazism in 1928 when he was born, Chomsky said two approaches were being promoted in the response to Covid-19.

He said: One is lets take the savage, Reagan, Thatcher approach and make it worse. Thats one way. The other way is to try to dismantle the structures, the institutional structures that have been created; that have led to very ugly consequences for much of the population of much of the world, [and] are the source of this pandemic. To dismantle them and move on to a better world.

Its not easy. There are forces fighting back. The International is going to be facing similar attacks. To overcome them, it depends on the peasants with the pitchforks.

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Trump is culpable in deaths of Americans, says Noam Chomsky - The Guardian

In the third week of April President of the United States Donald Trump signed the executive order to suspend immigration during the coronavirus pandemic for 60 days. The entry of certain immigrants, those who were seen to present a risk to the US labor market during the economic recovery, was banned for two months.

The order blocks some individuals outside the US from settling permanently by obtaining what is informally known as a 'Green Card'. The measure applies to requests for permanent residence based on employment in the US and requests based on familial ties but contains several exceptions.

Now Trumps administration wants to keep using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to maintain this order for several more months, or even years, according to the information revealed by The Wall Street Journal.

Also reported with the 60-day immigration ban issued on 22 April, the White House wants to reengage Donald Trumps plan to close the borders and even build the wall he has been campaigning on since before he was even elected President.

Before the coronavirus pandemic hit the world, his plan to close the border with Mexico would have never succeeded, but now that the outbreak is getting worse south of the border Trumps wish may just come true.

On Thursday four Republican senators were pressuring the US President to further restrict work visas due to coronavirus job losses, arguing that foreign students and specialised workers take jobs away from Americans.

Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas, Charles Grassley of Iowa, and Josh Hawley of Missouri submitted a letter urging the suspension of all new guest worker visas for 60 days, as well as the suspension of other guest worker visas for at least a year.

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Donald Trump could freeze immigration for years - AS English