Monthly Archives: April 2020

First he was the self-described wartime president. Then he trumpeted the total authority of the federal government. But in the past few days, President Trump has nurtured protests against state-issued stay-at-home orders aimed at curtailing the spread of the coronavirus.

Hurtling from one position to another is consistent with Mr. Trumps approach to the presidency over the past three years. Even when external pressures and stresses appear to change the dynamics that the country is facing, Mr. Trump remains unbowed, altering his approach for a day or two, only to return to nursing grievances.

Not even the presidents re-election campaign can harness him: His team is often reactive to his moods and whims, trying but not always succeeding in steering him in a particular direction. Now, with Mr. Trumps poll numbers falling after a rally-around-the-leader bump, he is road-testing a new turn on a familiar theme veering into messages aimed at appealing to Americans whose lives have been disrupted by the legally enforceable stay-at-home orders.

Whether his latest theme will be effective for him is an open question: In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday, just 36 percent of voters said they generally trusted what Mr. Trump says about the coronavirus.

But the president, who ran as an insurgent in 2016, is most comfortable raging against the machine of government, even when he is the one running the country. And while the coronavirus is in every state in the union, it is heavily affecting minority and low-income communities.

So when Mr. Trump on Friday tweeted LIBERATE, his all-capitalized exhortations against strict orders in specific states including Michigan were in keeping with how he ran in 2016: saying things that seem contradictory, like pledging to work with governors and then urging people to liberate their states, and leaving it to his audiences to hear what they want to hear in his words.

For instance, Mr. Trump did not take the opportunity to more forcefully encourage the protesters when he spoke with reporters on Friday.

These are people expressing their views, Mr. Trump said. They seem to be very responsible people to me. But he said he thought the protesters had been treated rough.

In a webcast with Students for Trump on Friday, a conservative activist and Trump ally, Charlie Kirk, echoed the message, encouraging a peaceful rebellion against governors in states like Michigan, according to ABC News.

On Fox News, where many of the opinion hosts are aligned with Mr. Trump and which he watches closely, there have also been discussions of such protests. And Mr. Trump has heard from conservative allies who have said they think he is straying from his base of supporters in recent weeks.

So far, the protests have been relatively small and scattershot, organized by conservative-leaning groups with some organic attendance. It remains to be seen if they will be durable.

But Mr. Trumps show of affinity for such actions is in keeping with his fomenting of voter anger at the establishment in 2016, a key to his success then and his fallback position during uncertain moments ever since.

In the case of the state-issued orders, Mr. Trumps advisers say his criticism of certain places is appropriate.

Stephen Moore, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and an economist with FreedomWorks, an organization that promotes limited government, said he thought protesters ought to be wearing masks and protecting themselves. But, he added, the people who are doing the protest, for the most part, these are the deplorables, theyre largely Trump supporters, but not only Trump supporters.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump again praised the protesters. I have never seen so many American flags, he said.

But Mr. Trumps advisers are divided about the wisdom of encouraging the protests. At some of them, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, has been compared to Adolf Hitler. At least one protester had a sign featuring a swastika.

One adviser said privately that if someone were to be injured at the protests or if anyone contracted the coronavirus at large events where people were not wearing masks there would be potential political risk for the president.

But two other people close to the president, who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, said they thought the protests could be politically helpful to Mr. Trump, while acknowledging there might be public health risks.

One of those people said that in much of the country, where the numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths are not as high as in places like New York, New Jersey, California and Washington State, anger is growing over the economic losses that have come with the stringent social-distancing restrictions.

And some states are already preparing to restart their economies. Ohio, where Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, took early actions against the spread of the virus, is planning a staged reopening beginning on May 1.

Still, as Mr. Trump did throughout 2016, as when he said torture works and then walked back that statement a short time later, or when he advocated bombing the Middle East while denouncing lengthy foreign engagements, he has long taken various sides of the same issue.

Mobilizing anger and mistrust toward the government was a crucial factor for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election. And for many months he has been looking for ways to contrast himself with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and a Washington lifer.

Vice President Mike Pence, asked on NBCs Meet the Press about the presidents tweets urging people to liberate states, demurred.

The American people know that no one in America wants to reopen this country more than President Donald Trump, Mr. Pence said, and on Thursday the president directed us to lay out guidelines for when and how states could responsibly do that.

And in the presidents tweets and public statements, I can assure you, hes going to continue to encourage governors to find ways to safely and responsibly let America go back to work, he said.

But Mr. Trump himself has seemed at sea, according to people close to him, uncertain of how to proceed. His approval numbers in his campaign polling have settled back to a level consistent with that before the coronavirus, according to multiple people familiar with the data.

His campaign polling has shown that focusing on criticizing China, in contrast with Mr. Biden, moves voters toward Mr. Trump, according to a Republican who has seen it.

Trump finally fired the first shot with his more aggressive stance toward the Chinese government and its leader, Xi Jinping, said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trumps former chief strategist. Xi is put on notice that the death, economic carnage and agony is his and his alone, Mr. Bannon said. Only question now: What is Americas president prepared to do about it?

Mr. Trumps campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has advocated messages that contrast Mr. Trump with Mr. Biden on a number of fronts, including China.

But inside and outside the White House, other advisers to Mr. Trump see an advantage in focusing attention on the presidency.

Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, has argued in West Wing discussions that there is a time to focus on China, but that for now, the president should embrace commander-in-chief moments amid the crisis.

Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and a friend of Mr. Trumps, said on ABCs This Week that he did not think ads criticizing Mr. Biden on China were the right approach for now.

Ultimately, Mr. Trumps advisers said, most of his team is aware that it can try to drive down Mr. Bidens poll numbers, but that no matter what tactics it deploys now, the presidents future will most likely depend on whether the economy is improving in the fall and whether the viruss spread has been mitigated. Those things will remain unknown for months.

This is going to be a referendum, Mr. Christie said, on whether people think, when we get to October, whether or not he handled this crisis in a way that helped the American people, protected lives and moved us forward.

Continued here:

Trump, Head of Government, Leans Into Antigovernment Message - The New York Times

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones' newsletters.

In the middle of a horrific crisis claiming the lives of thousands of Americans a day, President Donald Trump decided it was a fine time to undermine democracy.

Last week, as the coronavirus continued to burn through the United States, Trumps campaign sent out an email from him soliciting contributions for his reelection effort and made a dangerous accusation: the 2020 election cannot be trusted. The first line of the emailwhich likely was sent to hundreds of thousands, if not more, people on Republican and conservative email listsreads, Its no secret that the Democrats are trying to steal the Election out from under me. The letter asserts that Democrats have been plotting against me from the very beginning and are deploying fraud to rig the game because they know they cant beat me at the ballot box.

Less than seven months from Election Day, Trump was trying to undermine the process and cast doubt on its legitimacy. Without spelling out the matter at hand, he was responding to recent calls for an expansion in voting-by-mail as a way to hold elections safely during a pandemic. His letter referred to possible chaos from ballot harvestinga term for volunteers or political operatives collecting absentee or mail-in ballots. But there has been no proof that such activity leads to significant fraud. Seventeen states already have some form of mail-in elections, and many others allow for absentee voting through the mail. (Remember, Trump falsely insisted after the 2016 election that there had been millions of fraudulent votes cast against him.)

So as the country struggles with how to hold elections during a pandemiclook at the mess that occurred recently in Wisconsin when Republicans successfully fought to hold an election that the governor wanted to postponeTrump is telling his supporters that he (and they) are victims of a dark plot to rig the election. This echoes his demagogic rhetoric from the 2016 campaign trail. He repeatedly insisted then that he could only lose due to shenanigans, contending that rampant fraud was being mounted to swipe that election from him. He devised a nonsensical paradigm: if he won, the election was honest; if he lost, the election was crooked.

His rhetoric during that campaign was treacherous in and of itself; Trump was inviting his supporters to disbelieve the election results, should he lose. But it harmed American democracy in another critical way. His talk of a tainted election influenced how President Barack Obama and his top aides responded to the ongoing Russian attack on the election. With Trump griping about the contest being rigged, Obama and his crew feared confronting the Russian assault (which was helping Trump) too forcefully in public; they worried that Trump would point to such action as evidence of the non-existent rigging he was decrying. That is, because Trump was raising unfounded questions about the election, the Obama White House did not want to introduce into the mix other concerns about its legitimacywhich Trump could use as ammo. (See? Obama says the Russians are helping me? Theyre just doing that to cheat and rig the election against me.) Trumps trash-talking of the election boxed in the Obama administration, and Obama, rightly or not, opted to not highlight Moscows intervention in the campaign to the degree he could have. (Obama and his advisers tended to believe that Hillary Clinton would win, despite Moscows effort, and that the Russian interference could be addressed after the election.) This year, as Trump administration officials have warned that Russia again is interfering in the American election, Trump once more is pushing a baseless allegation of voting fraud as a diversion.

One thing Trump is good at is setting up narratives. He told his supporters in 2016 that a Trump loss would be evidence of a dishonest election. Consequently, if he had failed, he had his folks ready to believe Trump had been swindled and primed for a holy-hell reaction. Trump recently has created a self-serving plot line for the coronavirus crisis: if the situation improves, he can claim credit; if it does not, the governors are to blame. And now hes jeopardizing the 2020 election by establishing a risky cover story: the Democrats are attempting to rip off the voters and stop Trump with illegal means.

And Trump is trying to raise money with this pitch. His letter asks its conservative and Republican recipients to send his campaign money it can use for an Election Defense Fund. A reader who clicks on the donation button is directed to a page requesting between $5 and $2800 dollars. The fine print at the bottom of the page notes that the money will go to the Trump campaign and the Republican Party in a 75/25 split. Maybe a donation will end up at an election defense fund. Maybe it will not.

Trump has been trampling on norms since he tramped into the White House. And much of the public and media has become inured to his creeping authoritarianism. In any normal circumstance involving any normal presidential candidate, a charge that the other party is stealing the election would prompt headlines, scrutiny, and a demand for proof. It would provoke cable television outrage. Whats the evidence? What harm does such a talk do? Does this encourage disrespect for elections and discourage voting? How could a president be so irresponsible and reckless with his rhetoric and so cavalier about undercutting American democracy? This email drew no such attention.

Trumps excesses and extremes have been normalized. They no longer shock. Some barely even seem to warrant comment. After all, whats one fundraising letter when Trump is profoundly mismanaging the US governments response to a pandemic, lying, bullying, and proclaiming his own greatness at the daily Trump follies to distract from his actions and inaction that have contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans? Yet this give-me-money missive is a double-warning. First, Trump can be expected to continue to push this line in the coming months to sabotage the election. Second, he may well be preparing to deny results that do not keep him in the White House. While the nation is fixated on public health and economic crises of the moment, Trump and his lieutenants are looking ahead to the fall and readying an attack on the foundation of American self-governance. He is signaling how ugly this election will be and how much damage he is willing to cause to protect his own political health.

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Here We Go: Trump Has Started Accusing the Dems of Stealing the 2020 Election - Mother Jones

Donald Trumps conduct in a week when Wednesdays record number of coronavirus deaths doubled next day to a new record of 4,591 can only be understood if you realize that the president is not a 73-year-old man with the experience and maturity that suggests. Trump is actually a 10-year-old having aged in reverse dog years. He has the crimped emotions and empathy of a deluded superhero (only I can fix it), the limitations of a C-student, and the work ethic of a pre-teen who resents any challenge to his fragile ego and responds positively only to praise. All he does now is try to make to reality disappear.

Seeing Trump as a captive of his immaturity is a way to anticipate and perhaps defend against his dangerous behavior that is getting worse as the stakes get higher. A know-it-all, hes opening the countrys parks, gyms, and restaurants not just against the advice of experts and the views of 80 percent of the country, but of usual sycophants like Sen. Lindsey Graham and a long list of CEOs, who constituted the highest IQ on a call ever but who for all their smarts, found their names read off without their permission. If you took a drink every time Trump called them and red state governors people who love our country as opposed to Democrats, whom he calls half-wits and whiners, youd be intoxicated by 7 p.m.

Trump requires close supervision, strict limits on his screen time, and guidance on how to tell real doctors from single-named celebrity ones like Dr. Oz.

To advance his plan, Trump cited large areas where the virus has been totally eradicated to justify premature emancipation. Is the large area hes referring to called Mars? Or is it South Dakota, one of those 29 states ready to open any moment, yet with a spot so hot the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls had to close after 777 workers tested positive?

Thats tragic for those who consider bacon one of the four major food groups, and for Trumps argument. If a part of the country isnt infected, just give it a few days without social distancing and it will be. If an area is opened before it should be, wait a few days, and it will be reinfected. If Trump did his homework, hed know that after the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who acted to stop Democrats from harming the presidents economy, called students back to Liberty University, he saw the town hit by 78 new cases.

Parental guidance is advised. Trump requires close supervision, strict limits on his screen time, and guidance on how to tell real doctors from single-named celebrity ones like Dr. Oz, who told Trumps good buddy Sean Hannity that a mortality rate of 2 to 3 percent is an appetizing trade-off for jump-starting the economy. He needs a constant reminder that car accidents and smoking arent contagious.

Hes right about one thing: We cant believe the job hes done.

And how about getting Trump to put in a days work on a matter of life and death? Until D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowsers mid-March stay-at-home directive confined him to the White House,Trump spent much of the crisis at rallies and golfing. Hes home (mostly alone) now but still needs to spend less time in front of the TV, which only generates ill-advised tweet storms, and attend a meeting or two of his task force in the Situation Room, where the seating chart changes daily depending on who up and whos down in the presidents clique.

If Trump had anyone on staff not afraid of his cruel temper, he might have fixed his testing problem before the press noticed that his Power-Point presentation passing as a plan did nothing to increase that essential step in the process. While hes taken credit for tests that are the envy of the world and sniffed that hes president, not a guy clutching swabs in a parking lot 2,000 miles away, hes still stuck on his March 6 lie that anybody who wants to get a test can get a test and that Barack Obama didnt leave him one when the virus didnt exist back then.

At a rate of 3 million tests in three months, a majority of the country would be tested in six years. Cornered, Trump turned to Dr. Deborah Birx. After a word salad shes as famous for as for her scarves didnt fool anyone, Trump took his ball and left, clocking his shortest briefing ever on Thursday.

That didnt end the criticism. The next morning he was assailed by his arch-nemesis Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whos held his fire the last couple of weeks to move from the ungrateful ledger to the grateful one to wheedle ventilators out of the national stockpile Jared Kusher thought was his. Cuomo pleaded that a national problem required a national strategy and federal funds. Why dont you show as much consideration to your states as you did to your big businesses and your airlines? he asked. What am I supposed to do, send a bouquet of flowers?

Trump still has a childlike belief he can spin the virus, putting 60,000 deaths on the house, having chosen a model that predicted 2.2 million fatalities if he did nothing and by that faulty reasoning, congratulating himself for a job so well done no one can believe it.

What no one can believe, except the hardest core of his base, is that a con man in a gimme cap and a superhero cape clings to the notion he alone can fix everything, including a broken Dow Jones, and get us all to Splash Mountain at Disneyland without testing Mickey. Hes right about one thing: We cant believe the job hes done. On top of all the deaths that wouldnt have happened if thered been an adult in the White House, its too much to take in.

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Donald Trump Keeps Trying to Make Reality Disappear - The Daily Beast

U.S. President Donald Trump listens to a question with Vice President Mike Pence during the daily coronavirus briefing at the White House in Washington on April 23, 2020. or the next two months, and maybe longer, the process of accepting new permanent U.S. residents, people who can become citizens, will be suspended.

JONATHAN ERNST/Reuters

With his sudden declaration on Monday that, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!, Donald Trump distilled his presidency, and his brand, into a single tweet.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump signed that executive order. For the next two months, and maybe longer, the process of accepting new permanent U.S. residents, people who can become citizens, will be suspended. But the border will remain open for many temporary foreign workers people who do not enjoy the same rights as Americans, and who wont become citizens.

During the Trump era, Canadians have been allowed to feel superior on a host of issues, immigration not least among them. Our self-image is accurate to an extent.

Under the Harper Conservative government, Canada regularly accepted around a quarter of a million immigrants a year far above the American immigration rate. The Trudeau Liberal government has been steadily boosting that level, to more than 300,000 a year, the most since the 1910s.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the shutdown of international travel, will slow the flow this year. For decades, Canada has been considerably more comfortable with immigration the welcome of new citizens than the U.S. Once the crisis passes, that reality will remain. But like the U.S., albeit to a lesser extent, Canada does have a system for importing in an underclass of low-wage, temporary, non-citizen workers. And employers reliance on that system exploded over the past decade.

In some areas, such as certain types of labour-intensive agriculture, the use of temporary foreign workers has become so ingrained as to have become necessary. Elsewhere in the job market, from fast food to retail, there is no reason for employers to be allowed to import low-wage, temporary workers. There may be shortages of trained people in some highly skilled and often highly remunerated fields, but Canada has no lack of people capable of working a drive-thru.

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The abuse of Canadas official Temporary Foreign Worker program peaked in 2012, when employers brought in 200,000 people. Fast food restaurants appear to have used the program to deflate wages, the opposite of what should have happened in a tight labour market. If theres high demand for lower-wage workers, then their wages should rise and in a labour market marked by a high degree of inequality, thats desirable. Instead, the TFW program was used to tamp down wages at the bottom of the income scale.

The Harper government recognized the problem, and by 2015 the TFW program was significantly cut back to 73,000 new temporary work visas. It has risen slightly under the Trudeau government, to about 84,000.

However, even as the official program for temporary, non-citizen labour was being trimmed, an unofficial program was sprouting. In 2018, more than 350,000 permits were issued to foreign students to study in Canada. These students are mostly coming to attend a legitimate university or college program. But as The Globe and Mail reported last year, some are being recruited to work in fields such as fast food and trucking, with paid attendance at a questionable career college as their legal route into the domestic job market.

The student visa system is in effect being abused by businesses, private schools and recruiters to bring in temporary, low-wage workers. These workers are even forced to pay for their temporary, minimum-wage employment.

In an ideal world, everyone working in Canada would be either a citizen or on a clear path to becoming a citizen, as landed immigrants and refugee claimants are. This page has repeatedly argued that a widespread reliance on guest workers with lesser rights represses low-end wages, and is un-Canadian.

The bottom line is that Mr. Trump got things backward. He is shutting down immigration, while leaving the door open for temporary non-immigrants. Canada should be doing something closer to the opposite.

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There are legitimate debates about exactly how many immigrants is the right number whether the high rate of immigration under the Harper Conservatives, or the slightly higher and rising rate under the Trudeau Liberals. Either way, the path to the creation of new Canadians must remain open, and will. As for the temporary importation of non-permanent, low-wage, never-to-be-Canadians? Beyond agriculture, that path should be narrowed, and rarely trod.

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Canada should study Donald Trumps immigration plan, and do the exact opposite - The Globe and Mail

NicolaSturgeon was quizzed on President Donald Trump's decision to furlough his workforce in Scotland by Channel 4'sKrishnan Guru-Murthy.Scotland's First Minister did not directly address the US President but warned all businesses with "deep pockets" to think carefully before relying on taxpayers' money during the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Guru-Murthysaid: "We now know that Donald Trumps staff in Scotland are being furloughed.

"So Scottish taxpayers money will be going to pay the bills that might have been picked up by the President's business.

"Do you think that is an appropriate use of your taxpayers' money?"

Ms Sturgeon replied: "It is right the Government has given unprecedented support to businesses when we are asking businesses to do unprecedented things.

READ MORE:Nicola Sturgeon told to 'move on' from independence dream

"But businesses should think carefully about whether they need that support.

"So that as much of the support as possible is going to those that need.

"If a business has got deep pockets of its own it should be relying on them before the taxpayer."

During the same interview with Channel 4, Ms Sturgeonrevealed some of the potential measures the Scottish Government is looking at implementing in order to re-open schools.

At this difficult time for frontline doctors and nurses, sign up here toshow your support now to our brave NHS Heroes.

Ms Sturgeon stated that children may be split into two groups and rotated between staying at home and going to school so that class sizes are reduced.

Scotland's First Minister said: "We want to get kids back into schools as quickly as possible but we might have classrooms with desks further apart for social distancing.

"Maybe not all school children will be able to be in school at the same time."

Mr Guru-Murthy asked:"Are your experts telling you it is possible that schools could go back before the summer holidays?"

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Ms Sturgeon replied: "I couldnt say for certain but I dont want children to be outside of school for a day longer than is necessary so there may be points in between where you have classes split into two.

"Dont take this as a decision, we are thinking things over.

"One half is in school on some days and the other half is in school on other days, to reduce the number of children in classes at any one time.

"These are the kind of creative things we are going to have to think about if we are going to get normality back but still do what we have to do in suppressing this virus."

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Sturgeon fires warning to Donald Trump over furloughing Scottish staff 'think carefully!' - Express.co.uk

President Trumps campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has been paying $15,000 a month the equivalent of the top White House salary to Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the wife and girlfriend of Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., respectively, for campaign work.

This article was originally published at Salon

The payments, the existence of which was revealed in March by the New York Times, reportedly came through one of Parscales private companies, Parscale Strategy.

Lara Trump is a senior campaign adviser, and Guilfoyle, formerly a senior campaign adviser, is currently chair of Trump Victory Committee, a joint fundraising vehicle between the campaign and the Republican National Committee.

Its unclear why the campaign didnt pay the pair directly, but the payments would allow the campaign to sidestep federal electionrules that require it to publicly disclose all spending.

I can pay them however I want to pay them, Parscale told Huffington Post, which first revealed the amount of the payments.

Its unclear when the payments began, and though Huffington Post did not specify which of Parscales firms was making them, the Times report cited two sources that named Parscale Strategy. (Guilfoyle was reportedly overheard complaining to Parscale that her checks were late.)

These payments reveal how the murky web of campaign finance has become evenmurkier in the Trump era, and how easy it is to blur individual roles, organizational hierarchiesand payment flows to live between the famously fuzzy lines of federal electionlaw.

Parscale has also operatedat least two other firms: the now-defunct Giles-Parscale; and Red State Data and Digital, which has purposely ambiguous financial connections to the campaign and affiliated groups.

In 2017, the AP reported that Giles-Parscale (not Parscale Strategy) hadhired Lara Trump as a liaison, a job the Raleigh News & Observer later specified as comprising digital, fundraising, and merchandising efforts.

At the time, AP reported, Giles-Parscale was doing digital work for America First Policies, the dark-money affiliate of the America First Action Super PAC. Parscale along with Pence adviser Nick Ayers and Paul Manafort associate-cum-federal inmate Rick Gates had co-founded AFP in 2017, just before hiring Lara Trump. By the time Parscale left to become Trumpscampaign manager in February 2018, AFP had paid Parscale Strategy millions of dollars.

Its unclear whether Lara Trump left Giles-Parscale, but she received the alleged $15,000 monthly payments from Parscale Strategy separately. Parscale sold his half of Giles-Parscale for a reported $10 million in mid-2017. (The 2016 Trump campaign had paid the company $94 million.) Financial records from America First Policies do not show that the group made any payments to Giles-Parscale that year.

Parscale Strategy has since been paid more than $37.8 million from a range of clients, according to the ethics watchdog groupCREW, including the Trump campaign, the RNC, joint fundraising committeesand the America First Action Super PAC.

A third Parscale firm, Red State Data and Digital, has been paid a combined $3.3 million by America First Action and its dark-money affiliate America First Policies, according to CREW.

Lara Trumps $15,000 monthly payments float somewhere in the nexus between Parscale Strategy and its clients the Trump campaign, America First Action, the RNCand the nominally unaffiliated America First Policies.

Though America First Policies is legally barred from engaging in political activities, it shares offices and employees with America First Action, the Trump campaigns super PAC. Those two organizations have paid Red State Data and Digital (again, also a Parscale firm)a combined $3.3 million, CREW reported.They are apparently Red States only known clients.

Guilfoyle also has several direct connections to Parscales firms. CREW reported that in the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, America First Policies a Parscale client ran a series of digital ads featuring Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr.Those ads did not name candidates, but ran in locations where races were tight.

A former Fox News personality, Guilfoyle left the network in 2018. She began dating Donald TrumpJr. two years ago and began joining him at campaign events. In a 2019 press release, Parscale announcedthat Guilfoyle would join the Trump campaign as a senior adviser.

The RNC had paid Parscale Strategy millions for digital ads, payments it reportedly suspended at Parscales request in September of last year. In January of this year,Guilfoyle became the head of Trump Victory Committee, a joint fundraising committee shared between the Trump campaign and the RNC.

The payment amount $15,000 a month also does not seem coincidental.

First, $15,000 a month, or$180,000 a year,is the top White House salary. The Trump administration pays more top White House salaries than previous administrations, and in another, possibly related, break with tradition, all Trump White House employees are presumed to have signed a non-disclosure agreement contingent upon their hiring. The Trump campaign also requires employees to sign NDAs.

In August 2018, former Trump adviser Omarosa Manigault-Newman released a tape of Lara Trump offering her $15,000 a month for a campaign job in December2017, immediately after Manigault left the White House. At the time, Lara Trump was an adviser to the campaign but had also reportedly been holding high-level meetings at the White House, a move experts believe is illegal. Manigault considered the proposed paymentto be hush money.

It sounds a little like, obviously, that there are some things youve got in the back pocket to pull out, Lara Trump said on the tape. Clearly, if you come on board the campaign, like, we cant have, we got to

Oh, God no, Manigault replied.

In another passage from the tape, Trump explains that the offer wasintended to reflect ManigaultsWhite House salary.

So, I know you, you were making 179 at the White House. And I think we can work something out where we keep you right along those lines, Trump said. Specifically, let me see, I havent even added up the numbers. But we were talking about, like, 15K a month. Let me see what that adds up to. Times 12. Yeah. So thats $180,000. Does that sound like a fair deal for you?

According to ABC News, either the Trump campaign, the RNCor America First Action are also paying former presidential security chief and Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller $15,000 a month for security services connected to the 2020 Republican National Convention. Another Trump adviser, John McEntee, who left the administration in 2018 because of a gambling addiction, was hired by the campaign at $14,000 a month hours after he walked out of the White House. The campaign also offered $15,000 a month to former ad director Gary Coby.

Trump reportedly charges donors $15,000 for a photo with him.

ABC News also reported that America First Action and the RNC paid Parscale 15 separate monthly installments of $15,000 betweenMarch 2017, when he first hired Lara Trump, and June 2018.

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Eric Trumps wife and Donald Trump Jr.s girlfriend are on the 2020 campaign managers payroll at $15K a month - Raw Story

Updated April 24, 2020 18:18:11

US President Donald Trump has thrown more cold water on reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was gravely ill but declined to say if he had been in touch with officials there.

"I think the report was incorrect," Mr Trump said at a daily White House briefing, adding that he had heard it was based on "old documents."

Reports in the US media that Mr Kim was "gravely ill" have been repudiated by various sources from South Korea, China, and the nuclear-armed state itself.

Jim Sciutto, CNN's chief national security correspondent, said a US official told him Mr Kim was in "grave danger" after surgery.

But South Korea's presidential office said Mr Kim appeared to be handling state affairs as usual and that it had no information about the rumours regarding his health.

Mr Trump had said he might contact North Korean officials to inquire about Mr Kim but gave no indication he had done so.

The two leaders have had regular communications over the past couple of years.

"We have a good relationship with North Korea, I have a good relationship with Kim Jong-un and I hope he's OK," Mr Trump said.

Daily NK, a Seoul-based website, reported on Monday that Mr Kim, who is believed to be about 36, was recovering after undergoing a cardiovascular procedure on April 12.

It cited one unnamed source in North Korea. The state-controlled media in North Korea has been silent on Mr Kim's whereabouts.

However, Mr Trump said earlier in the week that reports had not been confirmed and he did not put much credence in them.

"If he is in the kind of condition that the reports say that would be [a] very serious condition," Mr Trump said.

"I just hope he's doing fine. I've had a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un. And I'd like to see him do well. We'll see how he does. We don't know if the reports are true."

Two South Korean government officials rejected a CNN report citing an unnamed US official that said the United States was "monitoring intelligence" that Mr Kim was in grave danger after surgery.

The US Government's latest information on the North Korean leadership is that Mr Kim still remains out of sight and there is a dearth of reliable information about the reasons for his absence, according to a source familiar with current intelligence reporting and analysis.

US officials acknowledge Mr Kim does have a history of health problems and is overweight, and say this does at least raise a credible possibility he has suffered some kind of health crisis, the source said.

Reuters/ABC

Topics:government-and-politics,world-politics,leadership,donald-trump,unrest-conflict-and-war,korea-democratic-peoples-republic-of,united-states

First posted April 24, 2020 17:16:44

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Donald Trump says reports on illness of North Korea's Kim Jong-un are incorrect - ABC News