Category Archives: Donald Trump

May 21st 2020

SPY PLANES ordinarily have to sneak into a countrys air space and risk getting shot down. Under the Open Skies treaty, they can saunter in with three days noticeand the pilots can enjoy a cup of coffee and a hot meal on the ground. The pact was agreed on in 1992 among 34 countries, each of which may fly unarmed reconnaissance flights over any part of another. More than 1,500 flights have been conducted to date. But on May 21st Mike Pompeo, Americas secretary of state, said that the United States would pull out of the accord, giving the requisite six months notice. John Bolton, Americas national security adviser until last September, hailed the news as another great moment in arms control history. Others view it as a calamity that makes the world more dangerous.

The treaty itself is a remarkable example of what arms-controllers call co-operative monitoring, a means of checking whether rivals are living up to various agreements, from nuclear pacts to rules governing military exercises. Each country is allowed to conduct an agreed number of flights on 72 hours notice, with a days notice of the precise flight path. Russia has often whizzed over the White House and, in 2017, irritated Donald Trump by flying over his golf course in New Jersey, according to the New York Times. No fancy spy gizmos are allowed. Planes may only carry cameras of 30cm-resolution, most of which use black and white wet-film. The resulting photos must be shared with any signatory who wants them. Personnel from the host state, sometimes half a dozen or more, may fly aboard the plane too, ensuring that everything is kosher.

America has made good use of the treaty, carrying out 201 flights since 2002, the vast majority of them over Russia or its ally Belarus. But hawks in the Trump administration complain that Russia has bent the rules. In his statement announcing Americas pull-out, Mr Pompeo levelled two main charges. The first was that Russia was unlawfully denying or restricting Open Skies observation flights whenever it desires. He pointed to Russian restrictions on flights near its border with Georgia, over Kaliningrad, an exclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania, and over military exercises last year.

His second complaint was that Russia was using flights to gather tactical military intelligence. Moscow appears to use Open Skies imagery in support of an aggressive new Russian doctrine of targeting critical infrastructure in the United States and Europe with precision-guided conventional munitions, he said. Mr Pompeo allowed that America might reconsider our withdrawal should Russia return to full compliance.

European officials, who had pleaded with the administration to remain in the treaty, are aghast. They acknowledge that Russia has not implemented the accord perfectly, but insist that the issues could have been resolved with time and effort. Earlier this year, for instance, Russia allowed flights over Kaliningrad to resume. Former American officials also push back at the view that the flights boost Russian targeting. The information Russia gleans...is of only incremental value in addition to Russias other means of intelligence gathering, noted Terry Benedict, a retired vice-admiral, in a congressional hearing in 2017.

What is lost is more significant. There are few occasions left where American and Russian airmen can chew the fat over the Rockies or Siberia. Flights are a normalising, collegial, routine which builds trust, says Melissa Hanham of the Open Nuclear Network, an NGO. More importantly, notes James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment, a think-tank, Americas withdrawal is a win for Russia, which has a number of spy satellites, and an FU to allies in Europe, many of which dont.

Of course, allies could ask America for satellite images. But these, unlike Open Skies photos, tend to be highly classified and, for that reason, cannot be shared as freely. General James Mattis, Mr Trumps first defence secretary, once noted that Open Skies imagery was a key visual aid during Russias invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Although some of the gap may be filled by commercial satellite imagery, which did not exist when the treaty was signed 28 years ago, planes can spot things concealed from ordinary satellite sensors. Open Skies aircraft may carry thermal-imaging cameras, for instance, which can detect such things as whether an aircraft is fully fuelled or bone dry.

A pressing question is now whether the treaty can survive Americas departure. On the one hand, Russia will no longer be able to fly over America, while still being subject to overflight from any one of Americas numerous friends in Europe. On the other hand, says Alberto Muti of VERTIC, an NGO that promotes the verification of international agreements, Russia still gets to monitor all of Europe, and will initially have more quota flights to do so (this will need to be reviewed by all parties). Moreover, because many European states lack their own specialised aircraft, and have piggybacked on American missions, NATO as a whole loses capacity to conduct flights. Russia is likely to remain in the treaty for the time being, at least.

The breakdown of Open Skies represents another blow to the architecture of global arms-control, which has had a torrid few years. In 2018 Mr Trump left a multinational nuclear deal with Iran. Last year he abandoned a cold-war missile pact which Russia had probably violated. Next year he may walk away from the last remaining cap on American and Russian arsenals, the New START treaty. As these accords crumble, so too do their intricate provisions for verification, such as inspections, data exchanges and, in the case of Open Skies, overflights. That makes each country ever more blind to what the others are doingand, perhaps, more likely to assume the worst. On May 21st Marshall Billingslea, Americas envoy for arms control, hinted at Mr Trumps willingness to run an arms race: We know how to spend the adversary into oblivion. If we have to, we will, but we sure would like to avoid it.

Original post:

Donald Trump abandons the Open Skies treaty - The Economist

President Donald Trump had a lengthy Q&A with reporters at the White House on Tuesday, but he was irritated by one journalist, CBS News Paula Reid, for her query or the way it was asked.

Reid asked: Mr. President, why havent you announced a plan to get 36 million unemployed Americans back to work? You are overseeing historic economic despair. What is the delay? Where is the plan?

Trump responded, Oh, I think we have announced a plan. We are opening up our country just a rude person, you are. We are opening up our country, and were opening it up very fast. The plan is each state is opening and it is opening up very effectively, and when you see the numbers I think even you will be impressed, which is pretty hard to impress you.

Trump had chided Reid before, when he held nightly coronavirus task force briefings that ended last month. He also abruptly ended a press briefing last week following an incident with CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang, CNNs Kaitlan Collins and PBS Newshours Yamiche Alcindor. He also complained about the attitude of Reid and Jiang in a recent interview with the New York Post.

Earlier this week he lashed out at Norah ODonnell, the anchor of CBS Evening News, over a segment that she did on 60 Minutes with coronavirus whistleblower Rick Bright.

Trump also defended hydroxychloroquine as a treatment or even prevention for coronavirus. He said that the drug has been proven to be unbelievably effective for malaria and lupus. What has been determined is it doesnt harm you, he said. Very powerful drug, I guess, but it doesnt harm you. So I thought as a frontline defense I thought it possibly would be good. I have had no impact from it. I feel the same. I havent changed, I dont think, too much.

The Food and Drug Administration warned in late April that the drug should not be taken to treat coronavirus outside a hospital setting or clinical trial, noting the risks for heart rhythm problems. The FDA has authorized emergency use when clinical trials are unavailable.

Trump on Monday said that he had been taking the drug for the past week and a half to prevent coronavirus. The presidents physician, Sean Conley, issued a note later in the day saying that he and Trump had had numerous discussions over the use of the drug, and we concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks.

The president also seemed to dismiss a Veterans Administration study on the use of hydroxychlorquine. that found no evidence that the drug reduced risks associated with the virus. It also found increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone.

Trump told reporters that there was a false study done where they gave it to very sick people, extremely sick people, people that were ready to die. It was given by obviously not friends of the administration. He earlier had referred to the study as a Trump enemy statement.

The VA analysis was published before peer review. It examined368 patients with coronavirus in the VA health system. Those in the study were around age 70, according to Physicians Weekly.

Continue reading here:

Just A Rude Person, You Are: Donald Trump Lashes Out At CBS News Paula Reid After She Asks Him, Where Is The Plan? - Deadline

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

On Thursday, the Washington Post published a long profile of former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and her campaign to be Joe Bidens VP. It included a photo by Dana Scruggs.

Yesterday, Donald Trumps official campaign Twitter account tweeted its own version.

It took me a while to figure out what the hell this was even supposed to be, but after talking to some Top Scientists (ie some colleagues) it was explained to me that it is Joe Biden smelling her hair. (Get it? Im very sorry if you get it.)

In the early days of the Trump presidency there was a regular refrain that you would hear from Resistance types. This is not normal. You dont see it very much anymore because after almost 4 years what isnt normal anymore? This. This is fucking insane. It is not normal for the presidents reelection campaign to post things like this.

Where did this image come from? Was it created by the campaign? (I reached out to them but havent heard back.) If I had to bet though I would guess this was something made by Trumps Keyboard Warriors on Reddit or something. Just a few days ago Trump was celebrating these folks!

Setting aside the fact that Donald Trump apparently doesnt think his internet hive supporters have seen Mad Men, it is true that Trump & co. rely onmedia that bubbles up from his supporters online. There was the GIF he retweeted of him hitting Hillary Clinton with a golf ball, the one he tweeted of him attacking CNN at a wrestling event, the Kingsman video of him shooting journalists to death. One of his earliest controversies was when he tweeted an image with Nazis on it instead of American soldiers. These are memes that his team is pulling from the depths of the internet. Team Trump is very proud of them. Indeed,the memes havebecome central to how the right wing exists online.

But that doesnt make it normal. Its not. Its insane!

Yesterday, Vanity Fair published a story by Peter Hamby about Joe Bidens somewhat tenuous relationship with the internet.

I asked Biden about the drubbing hes taking in the meme universe, in which hes often portrayed as doddering and creepy. Biden laughed it off, claiming that the vast majority of the voters out there, including young people, are not getting all their news from the internet.

In the story, Hamby talks to Rob Flaherty, Joe Bidens digital director. He asks about the worry that Biden losing the internet augurs poorly for his chances in November. Flaherty allays these worries: The job of a digital person is to build the program that is a reflection of the person they work for. Thats true, and Flaherty admits that in that sense, Trumps digital campaign succeeds. It is a reflection of the candidate. Trump is scammy as hell. Hes controversial and just sort of brazen. His program looks like that.

Biden and Trump are very different people, but this is a very on the nose example of how different they are. Donald Trump has internet poison. He has been Very Online for a decade now and he thinks in tweets and chases the ADD dopamine hitof Likes and Retweets. If you are not Very Online, figuring out what the hell he is even talking about requires research and effort, asuspension of disbelief. Joe Biden is very much offline. Probably too much! Andhis candidacy is characterized by its unflinching focus on normal people. People who do not live in the high-strung land of pure imagination that is social media.

And so we have two competing theories of the election: Trump is not normal. His campaign shows that. That is how he thinks he won in 2016 and how he thinks he will win in 2020. Bidens campaign argues that the former vice president is very much normal, and that normalcy is what normal people desperately want.

The question for November is: Whose theory is right?

Read the rest here:

Trump Thinks He Can Win the Election With Off-the-Rails Memes - Mother Jones

WASHINGTON The coronavirus crept into the heart of the West Wing this month, with White House staffers testing positive, the vice president and top officials starting to wear masks and the country's top public health officials going into self-quarantine.

But with President Donald Trump eager to put the crisis behind him, a familiar pre-pandemic routine has made an unlikely return: speeches in 2020 battleground states.

Traveling Thursday to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to tour a medical equipment distribution center, Trump took the stage to his familiar campaign rally soundtrack, addressing an audience dotted with red "Make America Great Again" hats.

While a crowd seated in folding chairs 6 feet apart was a far cry from a stadium packed with thousands of supporters, throngs of the president's fans lined the road beyond and gathered outside the facility many standing close together, mask-less holding campaign signs and flags.

Inside the venue, Trump again compared the new crowd spacing unfavorably to that at pre-pandemic rallies. "We like it the old way a little bit better," he said. "And we will be back to that soon, I really believe."

It was the second time in as many weeks that Trump had traveled to a state where he faces a tight race with former Vice President Joe Biden, using the power of the presidency to start hitting the unofficial campaign trail as he enters the next stage of campaigning during the coronavirus. Biden, meanwhile, has been confined to campaigning from a home studio.

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Trump is moving back onto the trail as the coronavirus has hit home. Following positive test results for the president's personal valet and the vice president's spokesperson, the White House this week began requiring all staffers to wear masks when entering and moving about the West Wing. Trump wasn't seen wearing a mask in Pennsylvania, although several administration officials sported them as they traveled on Air Force One with him.

Since his last rally in March, Trump had turned to his daily coronavirus briefings as a substitute, using the televised occasions to attack his adversaries, spar with reporters and shift the focus to issues like immigration. But advisers told the president that the freewheeling hourslong events were doing more harm than help.

After a news conference spiraled last month into the president's musing about whether injecting disinfectant could be a cure, aides were able to persuade Trump to scale back and start traveling across the country, instead, to give the image of a commander-in-chief leading the country through a crisis.

While the trip to Pennsylvania on Thursday and one a week earlier to Arizona weren't official campaign events and involved much smaller crowds, they served a similar purpose for Trump's re-election bid: drumming up local news coverage in key regions. Trump stayed mostly on script in Pennsylvania, touting his response to the coronavirus although he threw in several jabs at Biden.

"Under the previous administration, the stockpile was depleted and never fully refilled," Trump claimed. Of Biden's and the Obama administration's handling of the H1N1 pandemic, he added: "That was not well handled at all. It got very poor marks."

Trump's first trips on the coronavirus campaign trail have been to states his advisers expect to be closely fought until Election Day. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by only 1.2 percentage points, with a recent Fox News poll putting him behind Biden by 8 points.

Trump has privately fumed to advisers about his standing against Biden. During a briefing by advisers last month, Trump berated campaign manager Brad Parscale over internal polling that showed him behind in multiple key states, said people familiar with the briefings. One person described Trump as being in a "horrific" mood as Parscale walked him through the polling.

Trump's campaign has since tried to provide a more optimistic narrative to allies. In a call with surrogates this week, campaign officials said Trump had gone from 9 points down three weeks ago to a tie with Biden at 48 percent in internal polling from 17 states the campaign is targeting, according to an email summary of the call obtained by NBC News.

National polls released publicly haven't found the same result. Biden holds a 4.5-point lead nationally, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. In a CNN poll released this week, Biden held a 5-point national lead among registered voters, down from 11 points in the same survey a month ago. But when the poll looked just at battleground states, Trump led Biden by 7 points.

By comparison, a Monmouth University poll released last week had Biden ahead by 9 points, up from 4 points in Monmouth's April poll.

The official presidential travel may have some of the hallmarks of Trump's usual campaign events, but it isn't expected to be a long-term substitute. While the president's rallies have been on hold since early March, senior officials involved with the re-election effort are evaluating how best to organize potential gatherings and looking at states that are moving toward reopening as potential sites.

The campaign has pledged to hold rallies again before the general election in November, which the president has predicted are "going to be bigger than ever."

In the meantime, he remains focused on the idea that his re-election depends on a quickly rebounding economy and on pressuring reluctant state officials, such as Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, to get the process underway as soon as possible.

"We have to get your governor in Pennsylvania to start opening up a little bit," Trump said. "You have areas in Pennsylvania that are barely affected, and they want to keep them closed. You can't do that."

Shannon Pettypiece is the senior White House reporter for NBCNews.com.

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As the coronavirus crisis hits home, Trump hits the trail - NBC News

Donald Trump traveled to a medical equipment distribution facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, to tout a plan to replenish and upgrade the vital federal stockpile.

According to the pool report, the president and his entourage were led around by Owens and Minor employees, who explained their distribution system and the products they handle.

Trump and [White House chief of staff] Mark Meadows did not wear masks. Everyone else did.

Last week in Arizona, which like Pennsylvania will be a battleground state in November, Trump did not wear a mask while he toured a facility which made masks.

Then, to widespread comment, the James Bond theme song Live and Let Die played in the background.

The Pennsylvania event had the trappings of a campaign rally. For his remarks, Trump approached the podium to the sound of God Bless the USA.

He promised to create a stockpile [of medical equipment] that is not only the best-resourced in the world but also evolved to meet all of the new threats that can happen, things that youre not even thinking about right now.

He also announced that on the flight to Pennsylvania, he signed a new Defense Production Act authority to invest in US-based pharmaceutical producers.

All that social distancing, he said, noting that the facilitys employees were spaced 6ft apart. Look at you people. Thats pretty impressive. But we like it the old way a little bit better, dont we? And well be back, well be back to that soon. I really believe it.

The president also assailed the media a disaster and Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Referring to an occasion on which Biden garbled the name of the H1N1 virus, Trump asked the crowd: N1H1, who said that?

Sleepy Joe! he said, answering himself to a ripple of nervous laughter.

Trump argued that the Obama administration mishandled the response to H1N1, though the scale of that 2009 outbreak was nothing compared to the death toll and social disruption from Covid-19 this year.

According to figures from Johns Hopkins University, more than 1.4m cases have been confirmed in the US and nearly 85,000 people have died. The outbreak appears to be receding in New York, by far the worst-hit state, but new hotspots are being reported, some in traditionally Republican states.

Critics charge that the situation in the US has been made worse by Trumps mismanagement.

See original here:

Donald Trump goes maskless to tour medical equipment facility - The Guardian

Attorney General William Barr has enabled Donald Trump to use the Justice Department for his own purposes.Photograph by Carlos Barria / Reuters

Three years ago, President Donald Trump appeared to be politically wounded and legally encircled. On May 17, 2017, eight days after Trump had fired James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel, to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Memos written by Comey stated that Trump had asked him to let go of the F.B.I. investigation of Michael Flynn, Trumps national-security adviser, who had been fired after he lied to Vice-President Mike Pence and other officials about the nature of a phone call that hed had with the Russian Ambassador. As 2017 came to a close, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents about the call and agreed to serve as a coperating witness for Muellers investigation. Trumps effort to flout post-Watergate reforms, which were designed to prevent a President from pressuring the F.B.I. into halting a politically embarrassing investigation, appeared to have failed.

Yet now, six months before he faces relection, Trump, with the help of Attorney General William Barr, is successfully rewriting that history. Last Thursday, Barr dismissed the charges against Flynn, declaring him the victim of an F.B.I. plot. (The federal judge who oversaw Flynns case said that he would appoint a retired judge to review Barrs action, and whether Flynn should now be charged with perjury.) At Barrs direction, the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation of Comey, the F.B.I. officials who investigated the Trump campaign, and the C.I.A. officials who concluded that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election on Trumps behalf. Barr is flatly rejecting the findings of Mueller and the Justice Departments inspector general: that the F.B.I was justified in investigating the highly unusual contacts between the Trump campaign and a hostile foreign governmentwhich did, in fact, intervene in the race on Trumps behalfand that Trump and his aides had welcomed that aid and repeatedly lied about their own actions.

Instead, Barr, in an extraordinary act by an Attorney General, declared, last month, that the F.B.I. investigation of the Trump campaign was without any basis, an attempt to sabotage the Presidency, and one of the greatest travesties in American history. He added, in reference to his departments new investigationbut without citing any specificsthat the evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppinessbut that there was something far more troubling here. Those statements violated a long-standing Justice Department practice of not commenting on investigations before they have been completed. In a subsequent interview, Barr hinted that he might release the results of the ongoing probe, led by a federal prosecutor, John Durham, before the election. Barr said that a Justice Department policy prohibiting prosecutors from filing criminal charges or taking investigative steps to impact elections did not apply. The idea is you dont go after candidates, Barr said. But, you know, as I say, I dont think any of the people whose actions are under review by Durham fall into that category.

On Wednesday, the acting director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell, gave Republican senators records he had declassified that listed the names of three dozen Obama Administration officials, including Joe Biden, who requested to know the identity of an American citizen who had had a series of phone calls with foreign officials after Trump won the election. The citizen was Flynn. On Wednesday, those senators released the names of the officials and accused the former Vice-President of participating in a plot to entrap Flynn. Former national-security officials said that it is routine to request, or unmask, the names of Americans whose conversations with foreign officials contain intelligence, and noted that the practice has increased by seventy-five per cent under Trump. Ben Rhodes, a former top Obama adviser, tweeted, The unconfirmed, acting DNI using his position to criminalize routine intelligence work to help re-elect the president and obscure Russian intervention in our democracy would normally be the scandal here. Grenell replied in a tweet, Transparency is not political. But I will give you that it isnt popular in Washington DC.

Next Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to approve the nomination of John Ratcliffe, a pro-Trump Republican congressman from Texas, to replace Grenell as the director of National Intelligence. Ratcliffe caught Trumps eye when he assailed Mueller on national television during the former special counsels testimony before Congress. An individual involved in Ratcliffes confirmation effort said that the fact that the President trusts Congressman Ratcliffenot because they are friends but because hes observed his good judgment and the way he handles himselfthat affords a great opportunity to strengthen the relationship between the President and the intelligence community.

Former Justice Department and intelligence officials have expressed alarm at Trumps success at appointing partisan loyalists who they say echo the Presidents political messaging. David Laufman, a former head of the Justice Departments counterintelligence section, who worked on the Trump-Russia investigation, told me, I think we need to be careful not to be too lackadaisical in recognizing the significance of what is happening throughout our government, not just in law enforcement and intelligence but the attempted politicization of our public health system, citing attacks by Trump supporters on Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the governments top infectious-disease experts. Its everywhere, and it matters in ways that are increasingly important to the well-being of people in our country.

The transformation has been most striking at the Justice Department, an institution that, after Watergate, both Republicans and Democrats agreed should strive to remain politically neutral. Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University, said that, more than any other modern Attorney General, Barr has enabled the President to use the department for his own purposes. Ive lived through Attorneys General Mitchell and Meese, Gillers said, referring to John Mitchell and Edwin Meese, who served as Attorneys General in the Nixon and Reagan Administrations, respectively. Those guys were choir boys next to Barr. (A spokeswoman for Barr did not respond to a request for comment.)

Barr and some conservative legal scholars contend that the Constitution gives Presidents the power to run the executive branchwhich includes the Justice Department and the C.I.A.as they see fit. They view the post-Watergate oversight bodies created to investigate abuses by Presidents and their aidesfrom special counsels, such as Mueller, to the inspectors general appointed to oversee coronavirus spendingas unlawful infringements on Presidential power. On Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers joined Trumps personal lawyers in arguing, before the Supreme Court, that a House committee and New York City prosecutors should not be granted access to Trumps tax returns, because it would distract the President from his official duties and damage the office of the Presidency. Donald Ayer, who served as Deputy Attorney General under George H.W. Bush, told me that Barrs systematic trashing of the departments traditions of evenhandedness and independence have helped him make significant progress toward his goal of an autocratic President. He added, I think Barr is getting as much out of Trump as Trump is getting out of Barr. All for his own reasons of wanting the President to have complete and unchecked power.

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From the Justice Department to the Intelligence Community, Donald Trump and William Barr Have Won - The New Yorker

The announcement is a win for Trump who has pushed for major chipmakers to set up shop inside the US

Taiwanese computer chip giant TSMC announced Friday it will spend $12 billion on a state-of-the-art semiconductor foundry in the United States, creating thousands of jobs.

The announcement is a win for President Donald Trump who has pushed for major chipmakers to set up shop inside the US.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's largest contract microchip maker, produces the processors that provide the computing muscle for everything from iPhones, laptops and games consoles to servers and critical internet infrastructure.

Construction for the facility in Arizona is set to start in 2021 with production of 5-nanometre chips -- the smallest and fastest on the market -- beginning in 2024, TSMC said.

"This project is of critical, strategic importance... (for) leading US companies to fabricate their cutting-edge semiconductor products within the United States," a company statement said.

"TSMC welcomes continued strong partnership with the US administration and the State of Arizona on this project."

The firm said the factory would create 1,600 jobs -- and thousands more via supply chains -- and would churn out 20,000 semiconductor wafers a month.

Trump is keen to reduce reliance on Asia as tensions simmer with China over trade, tariffs, industrial espionage and national security.

Most of TMSC's factories are located in Taiwan. The Arizona facility will be the firm's second manufacturing site in the US.

TMSC said support was being offered from both the State of Arizona and the US government but it gave no details or where the plant would be located.

Foxconn, another major Taiwanese electronics company, announced plans in 2017 to build a huge plant in Wisconsin with Trump appearing at the ground-breaking ceremony.

But the project has fallen short of expectations with a smaller plant and fewer jobs than initially announced.

A political row also broke out over significant tax breaks Wisconsin gave Foxconn to set up shop.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

See the article here:

In Big Win For Trump, New $12 Billion Project To Arrive In America - NDTV

But don't assume that we'll be getting a look at the President's tax returns before heading to the polls on November 3. Chances are we still won't.

1) The Supreme Court could push the decision back down to the lower courts to sort out. And there were indications during Tuesday's oral arguments that we might be headed in that direction.

Later, in his year-end letter on the state of the judiciary, Roberts counseled his fellow judges to "celebrate our strong and independent judiciary, a key source of national unity and stability," and to "reflect on our duty to judge without fear of favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity and dispatch."

Issuing a definitive ruling on the tax returns of the President of the United States five-ish months before the 2020 election isn't the sort of thing that will knock down the growing perception that the court is too political.

"Chief Justice John Roberts signaled from the start that he is looking for a path that avoids absolute rules and could bridge, to some extent in these polarized times, the dueling sides.

"But even as he appeared ready to reject the hard-line Trump positions in both cases, if he opts for what the Justice Department raises as middle ground, the chief justice would ultimately make it difficult to enforce the subpoenas against Trump."

In short: The possibility exists that the court issues a ruling in late June or early July that forces the White House to comply with the House's subpoena of Trump's financial records. But there are several ways that the justices could get out of offering such a decision in the midst of a presidential campaign -- and it seems likely they will do just that.

Continued here:

Don't hold your breath on seeing Donald Trump's taxes before the election - CNN

THE SEPARATION of powers, the founders bulwark against tyranny, is not what it might seem. As James Madison explained in the Federalist Papers No. 47, the idea is not to keep the legislative, executive and judicial departments absolutely separate and distinct. Rather, Madison wrote, each must exercise a measure of control or agency over its fellow branches. Negotiating the overlapping portions of the Venn diagram has often fallen to the judiciary, as it did on May 12th, when the Supreme Court took up two challenges to President Donald Trumps quest to keep his taxes and other financial records secret.

Mr Trump is the first president since Richard Nixon to refuse to share at least some tax information with the American people. But in April 2019, with the Democrats back in control of the House of Representatives, three congressional committees subpoenaed years of papers from Mr Trumps banks and his accounting firm. A few months later Cyrus Vance, Manhattans district attorney, sought similar records for a grand-jury investigation into Mr Trumps alleged hush-money payoffs to an adult film star and a Playboy model before the election in 2016. Lower courts rejected Mr Trumps pleas to block the subpoenas, leaving the nine justices with the final say.

The first pair of cases, argued by telephone (the court is not meeting in person during the pandemic), concerned House subpoenas to Capital One and Deutsche Bank, two of Mr Trumps lenders, and Mazars USA, his accountant. The Oversight Committee had demanded documents to help it consider revising government ethics laws. The Intelligence and Financial Services Committees said they wanted to investigate money-laundering and foreign interference in the 2016 election.

Patrick Strawbridge, Mr Trumps lawyer, described the House efforts as a dragnet. He seemed to raise the eyebrows of Chief Justice John Roberts, though, when he cast doubt on all congressional oversight of presidents. Quite frankly, Mr Strawbridge said, the House has limited powers to regulate the presidency itself. Jeff Wall, supporting Mr Trump from the Department of Justice, added that the subpoenas were designed to undermine the president and the House had not even come close to explaining why it needs the documents.

The Houses lawyer, Douglas Letter, seemed to have precedent on his side. In 1927 the court observed that the power to secure needed informationhas long been treated as an attribute of the power to legislate. And in 1974 it unanimously ordered Nixon to comply with a subpoena for his White House tapes. But when pressed to identify a limit on Congresss subpoena power, Mr Letter faltered. Justice Samuel Alito, one of the courts most skilful questioners, backed him into a Socratic corner. There is really no protection, he asked, preventing the harassment of a president, because subpoenas require only a conceivable legislative purpose, and you cant think of a single example of a subpoena that wouldnt meet that test?

Justice Elena Kagan sought to elicit more persuasive responses from Mr Letter and vividly depicted Mr Trumps request as placing a ten-ton weight on the scales between the president and Congress. Yet even Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the liberal wing, worried that the House subpoenas might be unduly burdensome. He was bothered, he said, by the prospect of a red-baiting future Senator McCarthy haranguing a future Franklin Roosevelt.

When rulings arrive this summer, Mr Trump may win a majority in Trump v Mazarskeeping his finances out of the newspapers, for now. But he seems likely to lose Trump v Vance, the clash over the New York subpoena (if so, only the grand jury would be privy to Mr Trumps records while he remains in office). In Vance, Jay Sekulow, Mr Trumps lawyer, offered a royalist vision of the presidency shielded by absolute immunity from criminal investigation. But he struggled to explain how, in 1997, the court could unanimously order Bill Clinton to appear for depositions in a sexual-harassment suit, whereas a grand jury probing Mr Trumps alleged payoffs to paramours was constitutionally barred from peeking at the presidents papers.

Noel Francisco, the solicitor-general, defended Mr Trump on somewhat less outlandish grounds. Carey Dunne, ably representing Mr Vance, argued that the investigation was well within the scope of legal process permitted by this court since 1807. If the justices side with Mr Trump, Mr Dunne warned, presidents may wind up unchecked and above the law.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "On the money"

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The Supreme Court will not agree on the president's taxes - The Economist

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