Trump uses Egypt attack to plug border wall, immigration restrictions

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In denouncing the terror attack on a mosque in Egypt, President Trump on Friday renewed his calls for for tighter immigration screening in the U.S, and a wall along the border with Mexico.

Trump said he would Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi “to discuss the tragic terrorist attack, with so much loss of life,” adding on Twitter: “We have to get TOUGHER AND SMARTER than ever before, and we will. Need the WALL, need the BAN! God bless the people of Egypt.”

Egyptian state media reported that at least 235 people died and more than 130 were injured during an attack on a Sufi mosque in Egypt’s North Sinai region, the deadliest attack ever on Egyptian civilians by Islamic militants.

Earlier Friday, Trump tweeted: “Horrible and cowardly terrorist attack on innocent and defenseless worshipers in Egypt. The world cannot tolerate terrorism, we must defeat them militarily and discredit the extremist ideology that forms the basis of their existence!”

In a readout after the call, the White House said Trump offered his condolences to the people of Egypt after the “heinous attack” on worshippers. Trump “reiterated that the United States will continue to stand with Egypt in the face of terrorism,” the statement said. “The international community cannot tolerate barbaric terrorist groups and must strengthen its efforts to defeat terrorism and extremism in all its forms.”

Trump has used previous terror attacks to promote immigration restrictions that are the subject of many political and legal disputes.

The administration’s proposed ban on immigration from six Muslim majority countries has faced a number of legal challenges. And congressional Democrats have moved to block funding for the proposed wall on the nation’s southern border.

Democrats said the nation has long screened immigrants in an effort to block potential terrorists, and they have accused Trump of making his proposals to keep Muslims and Hispanics out of the United States.

[USA Today]

Reality

Trump proposes a border wall with Mexico to keep out Egyptians and a Muslim ban that does not include Egypt as solutions to prevent terrorism after a terror attack at a mosque in Egypt.

Trump teeing off with Tiger Woods, but vows the round of golf will go ‘quickly’

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President Trump made a rare acknowledgement Friday of his plans to play golf, noting in a tweet that he was teeing off with Tiger Woods but stressing he will play “quickly” before returning to the burdens of the office.

Trump, who is spending Thanksgiving weekend at Mar-a-Lago, said he will play with the golf legend as well as Dustin Johnson, currently ranked the world’s No. 1 golfer.

The threesome is scheduled to tee off at the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Fla., about 20 miles north of the presidential retreat at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump was careful in his tweet to underscore he planned a quick round. He also said he was going to be talking to the president of Turkey and also focusing on the economy.

He also used his pre-golf morning to blast NFL players who “disrespect” the country, the flag and national anthem with their pre-game protests “without penalty.”
Since taking office, Trump has rarely acknowledged playing golf. In recent years, particularly during the 2016 campaign, he slammed President Obama repeatedly for playing the game, chiding his “work ethic” and even criticizing the president for going to Hawaii during the holiday and taking Secret Service personnel away from their families.

For his part, Trump pledged to largely forego golf while in office, saying he was “not going to have time to play golf.”

After a year in the Oval Office, however, published reports indicate he has played at least 34 times since the inauguration and has visited his golf courses more than 70 times.

In addition, the traveling press is rarely allowed to observe his rounds and aides traditionally decline to say when the golf is played.

This week, after the presidential entourage arrived in Florida, the White House had to correct itself after a spokesperson initially said she was expecting a “low-key day” while the president spent time at the Florida resort. Minutes later, the correction was that the president “will NOT have a low-key day.”

Abut 90 minutes later, however, the press poll noted the motorcade arriving at a Trump golf club near West Palm Beach and left some five hours later, the New York Post reported.

Aides were mum on how he spent the time period, which is roughly the length of a round of golf, unless you play quickly.

[USA Today]

Reality

Donald Trump has visited a Trump property, which he still owns and receives profits from, 34 out of his 45 weeks in office so far.

Trump slams NFL: Anthem protesting ‘continues without penalty to the players’

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President Trump slammed the National Football League on Friday for not implementing penalties for players who protest during the national anthem.

Trump said Friday the “hemorrhaging” NFL has allowed players to become “the boss.” His comments follow Thanksgiving games in which New York Giants defensive end Olivier Vernon knelt during the anthem.

“Can you believe that the disrespect for our Country, our Flag, our Anthem continues without penalty to the players. The Commissioner has lost control of the hemorrhaging league. Players are the boss!” Trump tweeted Friday morning.

A handful of players have continued to kneel during games as the NFL season enters its 12th week.

Trump, who had criticized players who kneel as a form of protest during the campaign, in September suggested NFL owners should fire players who kneel rather than stand during the national anthem. The comments, at a rally, started a feud between Trump and the players who began protesting in unity during the anthem at games.

The NFL said last month it has no plans to implement a ban on kneeling during the anthem. NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart said the commissioner planned to speak to the teams and owners “about how to use our platform to both raise awareness and make progress on issues of social justice and equality in this country.”

[The Hill]

U.S. diplomats accuse Tillerson of breaking child soldiers law

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A group of about a dozen U.S. State Department officials have taken the unusual step of formally accusing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of violating a federal law designed to stop foreign militaries from enlisting child soldiers, according to internal documents reviewed by Reuters.

A confidential State Department “dissent” memo, which Reuters was first to report on, said Tillerson breached the Child Soldiers Prevention Act when he decided in June to exclude Iraq, Myanmar, and Afghanistan from a U.S. list of offenders in the use of child soldiers. This was despite the department publicly acknowledging that children were being conscripted in those countries. [tmsnrt.rs/2jJ7pav]

Keeping the countries off the annual list makes it easier to provide them with U.S. military assistance. Iraq and Afghanistan are close allies in the fight against Islamist militants, while Myanmar is an emerging ally to offset China’s influence in Southeast Asia.

[Reuters]

Trump hails ‘invisible’ plane in remarks to coast guard: ‘The enemy cannot see it’

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Donald Trump returned to a favourite subject on Thursday, telling a US coast guard audience the air force was ordering a new plane that was “almost like an invisible fighter”.

The plane in question, the F-35, is not invisible, though it is unusually small and designed to be less visible to radar than conventional aircraft. Its development, however, has proved all too visibly costly and riddled with problems.

Trump first startled reporters with talk of an invisible plane in October, when he discussed the F-35 at a military briefing in hurricane-hit Puerto Rico.

“Amazing job,” Trump said then. “So amazing we are ordering hundreds of millions of dollars of new airplanes for the air force, especially the F-35. You like the F-35? … You can’t see it. You literally can’t see it. It’s hard to fight a plane you can’t see.”

He also said: “That’s an expensive plane you can’t see. As you heard, we cut the price very substantially. Something that other administrations would never have done – that I can tell you.”

According to the pool report of the president’s Thanksgiving Day visit to Coast Guard Station Lake Worth Inlet, in Florida, Trump told his audience he had discussed the “invisible” plane with “some air force guys”. He asked them, he said, if it would perform in a dogfight like similar planes he had seen in movies.

“They said: ‘Well, it wins every time because the enemy cannot see it, even if it’s right next to it, it can’t see it,’” Trump said.

The coast guard members laughed, some perhaps aware that the president speaking to them about the air force was a reversal of his remarks in Puerto Rico in October, when he spoke to an air force audience about the coast guard.

Contra to his earlier expressions of pride about being responsible for a cut in the cost of the F-35 – a claim that experts have said is at best contestable – Trump also told coast guard members of his pride in having increased military spending.

“We’re ordering tremendous amounts of new equipment – we’re at $700bn for the military. And, you know, they were cutting back for years. They just kept cutting, cutting, cutting the military. And you got lean, to put it nicely. It was depleted, was the word. And now it’s changing.”

Trump also said “nobody has the equipment that we have” and added a variation on a contention made earlier in the visit and on Twitter on Thanksgiving morning: that everything in American life, military or otherwise, has changed for the better since he became president.

Trump began his remarks by congratulating the coast guard for its response to recent hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. He said: “You know, the coast guard, always respected, but if you were looking at it as a brand, there’s no brand that went up more than the coast guard, with what happened in Texas.”

[The Guardian]

Media

Trump bizarrely responds to article suggesting he criticizes black people for racist reasons

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President Donald Trump on Thursday offered a bizarre but familiar response to a tweet with an article from The Washington Post’s liberal-leaning Plum Line blog suggesting that he criticizes prominent black people to play on racist sentiment within his base.

The article’s author, Greg Sargent, tweeted, “Trump regularly attacks high-profile African Americans to feed his supporters’ belief that the system is rigged for minorities,” to which Trump responded, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

Earlier this week, Trump went after LaVar Ball — the father of LiAngelo Ball, one of the three UCLA basketball players released from detention in China after Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this month — on Twitter.

After Ball refused to thank Trump for the president’s role in the release of the three players, who were accused of shoplifting from several stores in China, Trump called Ball an “ungrateful fool” and compared him to a “poor man’s version of Don King.”

Sargent’s article linked this to Trump’s other criticisms of well-known black people in sports and politics, calling it “a gratuitously ugly pattern.” It ended by suggesting that Trump engages in a “pattern of race-baiting” that “might be designed to resonate with” his supporters.

Throughout his career, Trump has gone after dozens of politicians, media personalities, and sports stars of many races, but his response to Sargent’s tweet was bizarre because, minutes later, he tweeted the same thing on its own.

Trump has previously tweeted things erroneously. For example, in late October, he wished a happy birthday to Lee Greenwood, the singer who wrote “God Bless the USA,” but tagged another Lee Greenwood who appeared to have protested Trump’s immigration ban.

[Business Insider]

Reality

Trump could have been unaware of a new UI change to the Twitter app, where if you are viewing a tweet the “new tweet” button won’t create a new tweet but issue a reply. But this tweet hasn’t been deleted.

Trump calls LaVar Ball an ‘ungrateful fool’

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President Donald Trump took to Twitter to continue to rail against LaVar Ball, the father of a UCLA basketball player who was detained for shoplifting in China.

At 5:25 am, ET, Trump rehashed his beef with Ball, who has been reluctant to thank the President for his role in his son’s release from China.

“It wasn’t the White House, it wasn’t the State Department, it wasn’t father LaVar’s so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long term prison sentence – IT WAS ME. Too bad! LaVar is just a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair,” Trump tweeted in part.

Trump called Ball an “ungrateful fool,” adding that getting his son home is “a really big deal.”

The tweets come after Ball said Monday in an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo that he didn’t know what the President had done to get his son and two other UCLA basketball players out of China.

After Ball’s refusal to thank Trump in an interview with ESPN a few days after the players’ release, the President said he should have left the three players in jail.

LaVar Ball’s 39 most amazing lines on Donald Trump in Monday’s CNN interview
“Did he help the boys get out? I don’t know. … If I was going to thank somebody I’d probably thank President Xi (Jinping),” Ball said Monday night when asked about his back-and-forth with the President by CNN’s Chris Cuomo.

“It wasn’t like he was in the US and said, ‘OK, there’s three kids in China. I need to go over and get them.’ That wasn’t the thought process,” he told Cuomo.

Ball suggested Trump, who frequently brought up the conversation he had with Xi about the release during a trip to Asia, should stay quiet.

“If you help, you shouldn’t have to say anything,” he said. “Let him do his political affairs and let me handle my son and let’s just stay in our lane.”

[CNN]

Trump’s team insists he has a ‘full schedule’ an hour before he goes golfing

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President Trump is at Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Palm Beach, Fla., for the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s the Wednesday of Thanksgiving week, a day that can generally be fairly described as low-key for most people. In fact, you’re not even reading this right now; you’re driving to a relative’s house or you’re trying to remember what you need to get at the grocery store.

“Low-key” is also how deputy White House press secretary Lindsay Walters described the day to the press pool Wednesday morning. Trump would make a few calls this week, she said, but otherwise not much going on.

Less than 10 minutes later, though, the White House asked the press pool for a correction.

“While the White House communications staff expects the press pool to have a ‘low-key day,’” the update from The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson wrote, “the president will NOT have a low-key day and has a full schedule of meetings and phone calls.”

Got that? Not Trump on vacation at Mar-a-Lago. Trump working hard at what he calls the “Winter White House.” Trump tweeted to that effect Wednesday morning.

Trump calls it the “Winter White House” so that people will see his time there as an extension of his normal work life. In one sense it is: A president is never actually off-duty. In most senses, though, it isn’t. Trump’s calendar is generally clear when he’s at Mar-a-Lago (or at his club in Bedminster, N.J.), with time instead reserved for playing golf.

But Trump consistently wants to give Americans the impression that he’s working when he’s at one of his private clubs. This is the president, after all, who on the campaign trail insisted that he probably wouldn’t have time to play golf if elected. It’s why he always talks about phone calls and meetings that aren’t on his official calendar, taking advantage of the public’s assumption that a president is working 24/7 to provide cover for the time he spends at leisure.

So we get a parade of tweets like these.

[Washington Post]

Donald Trump criticizes NFL anthem idea

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President Donald Trump continued to target NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and LaVar Ball, criticizing both in a series of tweets Wednesday.

Trump bashed a plan, as reported by The Washington Post, that would keep NFL teams in the locker room during the national anthem, saying it is “almost as bad as kneeling.”

According to the Post, some NFL owners believe that the league will change its policy during the offseason and keep players in the locker room to prevent demonstrations during the anthem. The Post report cites sources “familiar with the league’s inner workings.”

Players did not typically stand on the sideline for the national anthem until 2009, when the NFL changed its policy to bring the teams out before “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Free-agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick launched the wave of protests during the anthem last season when he kneeled to protest police brutality against African-Americans and other inequality.

Trump has criticized Kaepernick on multiple occasions and made claims that players who protest during the anthem should be suspended or released.

Along with his tweet about the national anthem, Trump added fuel to his developing rivalry with Ball.

The president appeared to take full credit Wednesday for intervening on behalf of three UCLA men’s basketball players, including Ball’s son LiAngelo Ball, after they were arrested and accused of shoplifting during a team trip to China.

[ESPN]

Trump: Vote For an Alleged Sexual Predator Because He’s Tough On Crime

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Doug Jones is a career prosecutor, famous for his role in convicting Ku Klux Klan members and terrorists. Roy Moore is a theocratic demagogue, famous for nullifying court orders and (allegedly) sexually harassing and assaulting so many teenage girls, he got himself banned from the Gadsden Mall.

On Tuesday, president Trump suggested that Alabamians should vote for Moore over Jones in the state’s upcoming special Senate election – because the alleged sexual predator’s rival was “soft on crime.”

“He’s terrible on the border, he’s terrible on the military,” Trump said of the Democratic Senate Tuesday. “I can tell you, you don’t need someone who’s soft on crime like Jones.”

Sometimes, it feels like the Trump administration’s overriding ambition is to prove that every liberal “caricature” of the American right was correct. With its health-care and tax plans, the White House confirmed that fiscal conservatism isn’t driven by a desire to reduce the deficit, but by a passion for increasing inequality. Meanwhile, with his vulgarity and (alleged) sexual predation, Trump has validated the notion that (much of) American religious conservatism is less concerned with upholding traditional sexual morality than subjugating women.

And now, with his remarks on the Jones-Moore race, the president has affirmed the left’s decades-old contention that “law-and-order” conservatism isn’t animated by a reverence for the rule of law, so much as reactionary rage at challenges to the social order – which is to say, the social hierarchy, (which is to say, in most cases, white supremacy).

Trump had already lent credence to this argument, when he pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, after Maricopa County’s favorite proto-fascist had directly subverted law and order, by refusing to honor a legally-binding court order. But at least in that case, there was a halfway coherent (if completely wrong and racist) argument that the Arpaio’s refusal to abandon racial profiling was motivated by a concern for countering violent crime.

But now, Trump has shed that fig leaf. If the president believes that an alleged, serial sexual abuser of teenage girls (who wants to deport law-abiding undocumented immigrants) is “tougher on crime” than a lifelong prosecutor (who has little interest in deporting law-abiding, undocumented immigrants) than what, do you suppose, he means by crime?

[New York Magazine]

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