Tag: Trump egotism

Video emerges of Trump ranting about ‘crazy’ Beto O’Rourke’s crowd size during El Paso hospital visit

AlterNet logoFollowing mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend, President Donald Trump visited both of those cities on Wednesday — and a video posted on Twitter shows that even when he was visiting a hospital, Trump couldn’t resist insulting Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke.

In the video (which was filmed at University Medical Center of El Paso), Trump can be seen exchanging pleasantries with hospital staff with First Lady Melania Trump at his side. And when he discusses visiting El Paso in February to speak at a rally, Trump brags about attracting a larger crowd than O’Rourke (who also had a February event in that city).

“That was some crowd,” Trump says of his February rally in El Paso. “We had twice the number outside. And then you had this crazy Beto. Beto had like 400 people in a parking lot, and they said his crowd was wonderful.”

View the complete August 8 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Trump attacks local leaders as he visits two cities grieving from mass shootings

Washington Post logoEL PASO — On a day when President Trump vowed to tone down his rhetoric and help the country heal following two mass slayings, he did the opposite — lacing his visits Wednesday to El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, with a flurry of attacks on local leaders and memorializing his trips with grinning thumbs-up photos.

A traditional role for presidents has been to offer comfort and solace to all Americans at times of national tragedy, but the day provided a fresh testament to Trump’s limitations in striking notes of unity and empathy.

When Trump swooped into the grieving border city of El Paso to offer condolences following the massacre of Latinos allegedly by a white supremacist, some of the city’s elected leaders and thousands of its citizens declared the president unwelcome.

View the complete August 8 article by Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, Jenna Johnson and Felicia Sonmez on The Washington Post website here.

State Department aides won’t rule out existing authorizations allowing for attack on Iran

Officials would not commit on seeking congressional approval for military action, either

Senior State Department officials wouldn’t commit to a Senate panel Wednesday that the Trump administration will seek congressional authorization for a potential military conflict with Iran, nor would they promise that existing military authorizations would not be reinterpreted to allow attacks on Iran.

Rather, the Trump administration officials said they would consult and inform lawmakers of any administration plans to carry out military strikes on Iran, including actions related to the defense of U.S. troops and partner forces.

“We will certainly act in accordance with the law and seek consultations with Congress,” said David Hale, undersecretary of State for political affairs, during an appearance before the Foreign Relations Committee.

View the complete July 25 article by Rachel Oswald on The Roll Call website here.

Trump’s July 4 celebration will cost millions — and it will take a while to know how much

Washington Post logoThe B-2 bomber could cost $700,000. Two F-22s fighters, about $300,000. The Blue Angels demonstration team, close to $320,000. And two F-35 jets, upward of $660,000.

These figures, based on a conservative analysis using Pentagon flight-cost estimates and other military data about the aircraft, highlight something the Trump administration has left murky as it plans its Independence Day celebration in Washington: how much it will cost.

The aerial review portion of President Trump’s expanded July 4 event could cost more than $2 million, as about two dozen aircraft soar by the Mall in a show of military might.

View the complete July 3 article by Dan Lamothe and Colby Itkowitz on The Washington Post website here.

Washington Prepares for a July 4 Spectacle, Starring and Produced by President Trump

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — Two Bradley armored vehicles rumbled into place on Wednesday in front of the Lincoln Memorial, to be joined later by two Abrams tanks parked nearby. Cranes were putting into place the scaffolding for Jumbotron screens. And workers raced to finish a red, white and blue stage where President Trump will preside over one of the most unusual Fourth of July celebrations the capital has known.

The audience for Mr. Trump’s speech will include thousands of troops assembled by the White House to create a made-for-television moment in which the nation’s commander in chief is surrounded by the forces that he leads.

Weather permitting, the traditional songs for each branch of the military will be played while their officers stand by the president’s side and a procession of aircraft, including Air Force One and the Blue Angels, roars through the skies overhead. Hundreds of guests, many of them handpicked by the Republican National Committee, will watch from bleachers in a V.I.P. section erected close to the podium.

View the complete July 3 article by Michael D. Shear and Thomas Gibbons-Neff on The New York Times website here.

Trump plans rally in Greenville, NC, on day Mueller is set to testify

President Donald Trump will hold a rally in Greenville, NC, on July 17, according to his campaign website.

The rally at Williams Arena is the same day former special counsel Robert Mueller is set to testify before Congress on his investigation into the Trump campaign, The Hill reported. Mueller will “publicly testify before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees,” according to the Associated Press.

The Keep America Great rally is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. Only two tickets per person are available for those registering to attend the Greenville rally, according to the website.

View the complete July 2 article by Noah Feit on The Charlotte Observer here.

Of course Trump might reject a 2020 loss. He still rejects the results of a race he won.

Washington Post logoAs the presidential 2016 election wound down, a low rumble formed. Should Donald Trump lose the race, people wondered, would he accept the election results? Or, instead, would the country be ripped apart by a candidate and his fervent base of support refusing to accept what actually happened? In the third and final debate, Trump demurred on a question centered on that issue.

“I will look at it at the time,” he said of accepting the election results. He added that “what I’ve seen is so bad,” what with the media being “dishonest and so corrupt” and with the existence of “millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn’t be registered to vote.”

This wasn’t a new claim by Trump. He seized upon a 2012 report from the Pew Center on the States that noted that state voter rolls often included people who’d died or moved because registrars were slow to update their records. As we reported at the time that Trump made this claim, there was no evidence that votes were actually cast on behalf of many — or, really, any — of these dead people. (An author of the report made the rounds after Trump’s comments to note that there was no suggestion of fraud in his work.) The report simply served as a comfortable sort of gray area into which Trump could slot suggestions about how the system was stacked against him.

View the complete June 24 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

Trump Delayed Pence’s Tiananmen Square Speech in Hopes of Landing Xi Meeting

Vice President Mike Pence was set to deliver a speech criticizing China’s human rights record on June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre — until Donald Trump stepped in.

The president delayed the speech to avoid upsetting Beijing ahead of a potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Group of 20 meeting in Japan at the end of this month, according to several people familiar with the matter. Trump also put off U.S. sanctions on Chinese surveillance companies that Pence planned to preview in his remarks.

The speech was tentatively rescheduled for June 24, just days before the Osaka summit. But with Beijing signaling that Xi might not agree to a meeting, there is now debate within the administration about when Pence should deliver the speech and how hard he should be on the Chinese.

View the complete June 14 article by Jenny Leonard and Jennifer Jacobs on the Bloomberg News website here.

Nobody told Trump that the D in D-Day doesn’t stand for Donald

How do we adequately commemorate our war dead? The soldiers and sailors and airmen and women who gave their lives in places like Normandy, and Anzio, and Palermo, and Inchon, and Khe Sanh, and Ia Drang, and Fallujah, and Sangin? How do we pay homage to our fellow citizens who were ordered to a foreign land to fight for their country and lost their lives doing it?

We have Memorial Day ceremonies every year at veterans cemeteries at home and abroad. We have monuments, like the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the memorials to the dead of World War II and Korea. And we have anniversaries like the one that just happened in Normandy, France, to commemorate the landing on D-Day, June 6, 1944, now 75 years ago.

We’ve had them before. Thirty-five years ago, on June 6, 1984, the 40th anniversary of D-Day, President Ronald Reagan went to Normandy and gave a speech commemorating the dead which many think a classic. Twenty years before that, Dwight David Eisenhower, who commanded Allied forces on D-Day in 1944 and gave the order for the invasion, went to Normandy and gave an interview to Walter Cronkite of CBS News on the anniversary of the landings.

View the complete June 8 article by Lucian K. Truscott from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Trump’s ‘truly bizarre’ visit to Mt. Vernon

The 45th president — no student of history — marveled at the first president’s failure to name his historic compound after himself.

President Donald Trump had some advice for George Washington.

During a guided tour of Mount Vernon last April with French president Emmanuel Macron, Trump learned that Washington was one of the major real-estate speculators of his era. So, he couldn’t understand why America’s first president didn’t name his historic Virginia compound or any of the other property he acquired after himself.

“If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump said, according to three sources briefed on the exchange. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”

View the complete April 10 article by Eliana Johnson and Daniel Lippman on the Politico website here.