Archive for the ‘Donald Trump’ Category

Donald Trump is unpopular in Britain. That’s why he’s being used to attack Boris Johnson – CNN International

Earlier this month, Trump took the unprecedented step of saying not only that he would prefer Boris Johnson's Conservatives to win, but controversially suggested that Johnson should do a pact with the rival Brexit Party, led by Johnson's rival, Nigel Farage.

Ever since the campaign got underway, Trump has been used as a weapon by many of Johnson's opponents -- most notably the main opposition Labour Party.

The claim itself is spurious. Johnson is a man who has just struck a deal with Europe and appears to have shifted significantly toward a friendly relationship with the European Union being his priority. The 500 million figure is easy to pull apart for anyone with access to a smartphone. And Johnson has repeatedly insisted that the NHS will not be on the table in any trade deal with the US.

True or not, it's a message that taps into a bias many voters will already have. "Labour has a structural advantage on the NHS," said Rob Ford, professor in politics at the University of Manchester. "The public simply trusts the Conservatives less than Labour and believes that the Conservatives are more likely to privatize parts of the NHS."

Making this election about the NHS helps Labour in more ways than simply hammering the Prime Minister. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has a confusing Brexit policy and doesn't cope well with questions on his plan. And as Ford explained, "Every voter who is talking about Boris selling the NHS to Trump is probably a voter who isn't talking about Boris getting Brexit done."

An indication of the perceived effectiveness of using Trump as an attack line can be seen in an analysis of paid-for Facebook ads from Labour and other groups that oppose Johnson.

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Donald Trump is unpopular in Britain. That's why he's being used to attack Boris Johnson - CNN International

Donald Trump uses sanctions more keenly than any of his predecessors – The Economist

IN DECEMBER 2017 the Democratic Republic of Congo was in ferment. Joseph Kabila, then the president, seemed to be weighing whether or not to stand in an election, even though he should have left office fully a year before, having served his two full constitutional terms. In Kinshasa, the capital, Mr Kabilas allies remarked casually that perhaps the president would stand again. It was at that moment that the American government imposed sanctions on Dan Gertler, an Israeli mining billionaire who is a close friend of Mr Kabila. Steve Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, announced that at the direction of President Trump, he was placing sanctions on Mr Gertler, together with 12 other serious human-rights abusers and corrupt actors. Mr Trump, he said, was declaring a national emergency with respect to serious human-rights abuse and corruption around the world.

The imposition of sanctions on Mr Gertler came as a shock to many companies operating in Congo. According to Tom Perriello, formerly Barack Obamas envoy to the Great Lakes region of Africa, it probably helped push Mr Kabila to his eventual decision to stand down in the elections that took place a year later, last December. Yet under the Obama administration, the Treasury had considered sanctions on Mr Gertler and backed off. Under Mr Trump, it did not hesitate. Indeed, his administration has been more enthusiastic than any other in history in using financial sanctions. Partly that is because the president is intent on bashing places like Iran and Venezuela. But that is not a complete explanation: sanctions have expanded everywhere. This stands in stark contrast to other parts of Mr Trumps foreign policy.

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According to data gathered by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a law firm, in his first three years in office Mr Trump has added over 3,100 people and entities to the sanctions list run by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a division of the Treasury. That is only slightly short of the 3,484 that George W. Bush added in his entire eight years in office. Last year, Mr Trump added 1,474 names to a list that is now around 7,500 long. The Trump administration has not just expanded sanctions but innovated with them toofor example, by stopping the trading of Venezuelan sovereign bonds.

America is not alone in imposing targeted sanctions: the European Union and the United Nations have programmes too. But Americas is of special importance because of the countrys position at the heart of the worlds financial system. When individuals suffer sanctions from the Treasury, their assets in America are frozen. But the effect goes further than that. Firms which operate in America, or make payments in dollars, cannot easily deal with individuals on the list. Such is the reach of the dollar that penalised individuals will struggle to open bank accounts, own assets or be paid, even in countries that are not close to Mr Trumps America. When companies face sanctions from Americas Commerce Department, as Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, does, it has a similar effectthey cannot buy from American firms.

Mr Trump has used sanctions as a bludgeon in high-profile disputes. In September, imposing measures on Irans national bank, he declared they would be the highest sanctions ever. Last month, when Turkeys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, launched an invasion of Syria, Mr Trump threatened to swiftly destroy Turkeys economy, as the Treasury imposed targeted sanctions on three Turkish officials. But more quietly, his administration has also punished unprecedented numbers of people accused of corruption and human-rights abuses in more unexpected places. Many such as Mr Gertler have been targeted under the Global Magnitsky Act, which came into force in 2016, and allows America to impose sanctions on people even from countries in which there is no national sanctions programme in place.

In October the Gupta brothers, two Indians accused of working with Jacob Zuma, South Africas former president, to loot state institutions, were added to the Treasurys list. Weeks later Mr Trump added Owen Ncube, the Zimbabwean security minister, to the list. America now sanctions 85 Zimbabweans. According to John Prendergast, an activist who co-founded The Sentry, a pressure group which investigates corruption and human-rights abuses in Africa, Mr Trumps use of the Global Magnitsky Act to go after crooks and murderers has been a game changer.

What has driven this surge in sanctions? According to Marshall Billingslea, an assistant secretary in the Treasury department, the growth reflects Donald Trumps innovative financial statecraft. Certainly, they seem an ideal tool for Mr Trump, who wants to put foreigners under lots of pressure but is reluctant to send troops or bombers to do the job. Sanctions are perceived to be an option for when words aren't good enough but war is too much, says Elizabeth Rosenberg, of the Centre for A New American Security, a think-tank in Washington, DC.

Mr Trumps personality is clearly a factor too. Mr Mnuchin has announced sanctions in person more than two dozen timesinstead of leaving it to more junior officials as previous treasury secretaries did. He has claimed to spend half of his time working on sanctions. The commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, has been almost as enthusiastic. Adam Smith of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher argues that unleashing sanctions on people and firms is quicker and cheaper than most of the other things that Mr Mnuchin and Mr Ross can do to bring about change. In an administration less steeped in the formal deliberative policy process than most, that matters, he notes.

That raises another question, howeverdo sanctions work? In a tactical sense, it seems fairly clear that they do. Targeted sanctions make people miserable, says Mr Smith. In October the Zimbabwean government declared a national holiday in order to organise protests against sanctions on its members. Mr Gertler has hired lobbyists including Alan Dershowitz, a prominent lawyer, to try to get off the list. The sorts of people who suffer sanctions in general do find that they need to deal with America and American companies.

Yet in a strategic sense, it is really not so clear that sanctions are achieving much. Mr Trumps government says that for sanctions to be lifted, Venezuelas president must step down, while Iran must transform its foreign policy. Such a full capitulation seems unlikely. Nor is it obvious that individuals are responding. Beyond increasing his lobbying bill, the sanctions on Mr Gertler did not evidently change his behaviour. He still flies to Kinshasa on his private jet each week and is still close friends with Mr Kabila, who retains considerable influence in Congo. He still collects royalties of around $30m per year on his mining interests. Glencore, one of the biggest mining companies in Congo, found a way around the Treasury by paying him in euros. If sanctions did help push Mr Kabila to step down, it was because they signalled Americas seriousness about seeing the back of him.

In a research paper, The Sentry, Mr Prendergasts outfit, points to successes in places like Liberia and Sudan in changing the behaviour of individuals targeted. But even it admits that all of the sanctions programmes it analysed suffered from poor conceptualisation, co-ordination, implementation, and enforcement. Diplomats are not always engaged in sanctions policy, which comes from the Treasury and Commerce, not their bosses in the State Department. The staff keeping lists of entities under sanctions up-to-date are stretched thinmany African sanctions programmes have nobody to manage them. That means they can sometimes be dodged. Overall the American government has little idea how well sanctions work or what their effects are, according to a report released last month by the Government Accountability Office.

Few will shed a tear for foreign officials who can no longer buy penthouses in Manhattan and the like. But people can be penalised in this way on the basis of entirely classified evidence. There is no way to appeal. And the costs affect more than just the individuals. One risk is that financial firms simply cut off whole countries to ease the cost of compliance. In Zimbabwe, for example, local banks by law cannot comply with American sanctions. That means that American banks will not deal with them. That is certainly not the cause of Zimbabwes economic problems but it does not help.

If they do not change behaviour, sanctions risk becoming less a tool of coercion than an expensive and rather arbitrary extraterritorial form of punishment. Over time, foreign powers could begin to create work-arounds that would make them less effective. If that happens, the Trump administration will have weakened one of Americas strongest non-military weapons. But work-arounds will not be easy to produce as long as America is the worlds pre-eminent financial centre. For the moment at least, Mr Trumps sanctions policy is a bright spot in an otherwise lamentable foreign-policy record.

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Donald Trump uses sanctions more keenly than any of his predecessors - The Economist

Conan the Dog: Donald Trump Really Wants to Show Off This One Dog He Knows – Vanity Fair

Update (November 26, 2019 at 1:05pm EST): Please let the record show that the back-and-forth about Conans gender continued for another day:

Well leave this to your Thanksgiving table debate league to settle once and for all.

The original article continues below.

Every Monday before Thanksgiving the president and first lady get their first big Amazon order of the season. Their enormous Christmas tree arrives. This year was no different; Melania Trump threw on a great coat and came out with her husbandgosh, whats his name? Hold on, itll come to me!to welcome it, per tradition. It all went off without a hitch once again. But this year, there was a surprise guest to help usher in the tree. The president introduced Conan, hero dog, who played a key role in the targeted raid that led to the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October, to the assembled press core. Like I always say, nothing says the holiday season like hosting a terrorist hunting dog at the White House.

Now, heres something: The dog is a girl. This according to Yahoo News Hunter Walker, the pool reporter sic-ed, as it were, on the president as he travels. Senior aides confirmed it on background, he wrote in his email, which goes out to press from all over the country. Shes a literal femme fatal. She is 100% that bitch, if you prefer.

Now, heres something else: Conan is actually a boy dog, also according to Yahoo News Hunter Walker, the pool reporter sic-ed, as it were, on the president as he travels. He issued a correction to his earlier report. I know! What a whirlwind!

But you know what? It doesnt matter. In this one video, that man refers to the pup behind him only as Conan and the dog, praising its capability for violence and intelligence like Conan is one of his golfing buddies. It makes sense that he would repeat the name of the dog and the word dog over and over again like a malfunctioning Dale Carnegie robot; my guy just learned what a dog was and what they do for a living, so he wants to repeat the word dog an absolute ton. See, it helps him remember what one is and also convinces everyone else that hes known it all along. Double whammy!

But in the end, its a useful, genderless compulsive speech pattern. Its like he doesnt see gender. He just sees a gorgeous dog, a beautiful dog, an intelligent dog, a kind of excitingly scary dog. Conan is neither man nor woman; it is simply a hot dog, in the presidents eyes.

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Conan the Dog: Donald Trump Really Wants to Show Off This One Dog He Knows - Vanity Fair

Trump ‘Crime Family…Belong in Prison,’ Says ‘The Art of the Deal’ Ghostwriter – Newsweek

The Art of the Deal ghostwriter said President Donald Trump and two of his adult children and a son-in-law all belong in prison.

Tony Schwartz co-authored Trump's notorious book, which was first published in 1987, and is now a vocal critic of the president.

"Crime family: Donald, Ivanka, Jared, Donald Jr. They all belong in prison," Schwartz tweeted on Monday evening.

President Trump is facing impeachment for alleged abuse of power by soliciting a foreign government's interference in the 2020 election to his personal benefit.

Trump is also facing probes by a number of bodies, including Congress and the New York attorney general, into allegations such as tax fraud, campaign finance violations, and his inauguration funds, among others.

The family real estate business, The Trump Organization, is caught up in some of those investigations.

The president's two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, currently run the Trump Organization.

His eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, was an executive there until her father entered the White House. She and her father both resigned from the company at the same time in 2017.

There are also a number of ethical concerns around the Trump family and its business dealings, such as Ivanka Trump's patent-seeking in China as her father wages a trade war against Beijing, and their alleged use of the presidency to promote their properties and businesses.

Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, has faced scrutiny for his dealings with foreign governments, in particular a bailout his own family's real estate business took from the Qataris, and his personal relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.

The Trump family denies any wrongdoing.

Back in May, Schwartz said, in light of everything we now know about President Trump, he would rename the book he wrote on behalf of the

"If I had to rename The Art of the Deal, I would call it The Sociopath," Schwartz said on CNN.

"Because he has no conscience, he has no guilt. All he wants to do is make the case that he would like to be true.

"And while I do think he is probably aware that more walls are closing around him than ever before, he does not experience the world in the way an ordinary human being would."

Then in June, when the journalist E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of sexual assault in the mid-1990s, adding to a list of women who have made such allegations against the president, Schwartz called him a "serial felon."

"A 16th woman yesterday accused Donald Trump of sexual assaultin this case rape, with very specific details," tweeted Schwartz.

"In what sane & decent world can this man continue as president of the United States?" continued Schwartz's tweet, adding that he believed Trump should be put on trial for repeated "violent criminal behavior."

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Trump 'Crime Family...Belong in Prison,' Says 'The Art of the Deal' Ghostwriter - Newsweek

Trump is lying about the new Apple factory – The Verge

In advance of Trumps factory tour today, I took a look at the strange relationship thats developed between Tim Cook and Donald Trump over the past three years. One of the things that popped up was one specific story that Trump would tell about Apple, in rally after rally and meeting after meeting. The idea was that Trump had somehow induced the company to build a new factory in the US, through some combination of tax cuts and trade policy, which was both very politically useful and also very much not true.

Today, perhaps not surprisingly, he told the lie again.

Were seeing the beginning of a very powerful and important plant, Trump said at the factory. Anybody that followed my campaign, I would always talk about Apple, that I want to see Apple building plants in the United States. And thats whats happening.

This is not true for a couple reasons one of them nitpicky and one of them a lot more serious. The nitpicky problem is that Apple isnt actually building a manufacturing plant. The company is building a new campus in Austin, but its miles away from the factory and the jobs are going to be very similar to the kind of white-collar design and engineering work that Apple does in Cupertino. Apple doesnt do its own manufacturing, and the plant Trump is standing in belongs to a contractor called Flex Ltd (formerly Flextronics).

But the bigger problem is that what Flex is doing isnt anything new. This particular factory has been manufacturing Mac Pros since 2013, when Cook first announced it would assemble them in the United States. Thats before Trump took office. So the idea that were seeing the beginning of something, or that Trump has done something during his presidency to bring about this particular instance of US manufacturing, just doesnt hold water.

Trump is talking as if Apple has created a brand-new factory in Texas to build Mac Pros. If all you saw was a five-second clip on the news, thats probably the impression you would get but it just isnt true.

People often get very worked up about whether a politician is technically lying when they say something that isnt true, or if theyve just stumbled into falsehood as if accidentally falling off a chair. But when you say the same false thing over and over again for a year and a half, its hard to call it anything else.

Speaking of which, Trump just aired the lie on Twitter as well:

You can see the video footage of Trumps tour for yourself below.

Things actually get worse if you keep watching. Later in the video, Trump takes back the mic for a quick aside on how his tariff policy has benefited the factory.

The nice part is, he doesnt have to worry about tariffs, Trump says. When you build it here, you dont have to worry about tariffs.

This is also not true.

In fact, Apple is currently paying tariffs on a number of Mac Pro parts, which must be imported from China to Texas before the final device can be assembled. (Ten of Apples requested tariff exemptions were issued earlier this year, but five others were denied, including taxes on the cooling system, charging cable, and various circuit boards.) Because Trumps current array of tariffs are levied on components but not finished devices, Apple actually doesnt pay tariffs on the iPhones and MacBooks that are assembled in China.

The net effect is a tax on electronics assembled in the US. Its more expensive to assemble Mac Pros in the US, not just because of labor and production costs, but explicitly because of the tariffs Trump has placed on intermediary goods. Apple even briefly flirted with moving Mac Pro production back to China, as a way of driving home the cost of those tariffs, although the company ultimately backed down.

The structure of those taxes could change in the future, and a tariff on phones and other electronics has already been formally proposed, although it keeps getting delayed. On the other hand, talks with China could be so productive that earlier rounds of tariffs are lifted completely. With that much uncertainty, its hard for anyone to be sure about the best way to arrange a supply chain.

But the result is an alarming level of falsehood even by Trump standards. He claimed to have brought Apple manufacturing to the United States while standing in a factory that had already been building Apple products for six years, and one that had nearly lost the gig not benefited because of Trumps trade policy.

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Trump is lying about the new Apple factory - The Verge