Tag: Fox News

Trump: ‘I am bringing out the military’ to stop border crossings

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President Trump said in an early morning tweet on Thursday that he is “bringing out the military” to secure the border with Mexico, calling it a “National Emergency.”

“Brandon Judd of the National Border Patrol Council is right when he says on @foxandfriends that the Democrat inspired laws make it tough for us to stop people at the Border,” Trump tweeted. “MUST BE CHANDED [sic], but I am bringing out the military for this National Emergency. They will be stopped!”

Trump tweeted last week that he would use the military to stop a caravan of migrants from Central America, which has reportedly swelled beyond 7,500, if Mexico did not stop it.

“I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught — and if unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!” Trump tweeted.

He said Wednesday night at a rally in Wisconsin that the “military are ready” to help secure the border against the caravan, according to NBC News.

The Mexican ambassador to the U.S., Gerónimo Gutiérrez, said Monday that Mexico will continue to work to halt illegal immigration into its country and work with the Trump administration to block the caravan from passing into the U.S.

Pentagon spokesman Capt. Bill Speaks told The Hill that the military is working through the logistics and is monitoring the situation at the border closely.

“At this time, I can only confirm that the Department of Defense continues to monitor events along the Southwest U.S. border, including the status of the migrant caravan heading north through Mexico,” Speaks wrote in an email.

“We anticipate receiving a request for assistance (RFA) from the Department of Homeland Security and are currently working with DHS to determine the specifics of our support to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”

[The Hill]

Trump: Saudi Arabia has ‘been a great ally to me’

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President Trump on Tuesday said Saudi Arabia has “been a great ally to me” amid an international diplomatic crisis over allegations that Saudi agents killed a U.S.-based Saudi journalist in Istanbul.

Trump told Fox Business Network’s Trish Regan that the U.S. response to Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance will depend on “whether or not they knew about it.”

“Saudi Arabia’s our partner, our ally against Iran,” he said. “They’ve been a great ally to me.”

“They’re investing tremendous amounts of money,” he added, referring to America’s $110 billion arms deal with the Saudi kingdom.

Trump earlier in the day denied having any financial interests in Saudi Arabia, pushing back on speculation that he is treading lightly with the Saudis over Khashoggi because of his financial conflicts of interest.

The president, a longtime business mogul, has long-standing and close business ties to the Saudis, with Saudi businessmen spending significant amounts of money at his hotels and properties over decades.

One Saudi royal billionaire, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, purchased Trump’s yacht and a stake in New York’s Plaza Hotel in the 1990s when Trump was in financial distress.

Trump’s business ties to the kingdom have come under intense scrutiny in recent days as Trump has repeated Saudi leadership’s denials of involvement in Khashoggi’s disappearance.

Turkish authorities say Saudi agents killed and dismembered the Washington Post journalist in Istanbul’s Saudi consulate.

Trump, after praising Saudi Arabia during the Fox Business interview, added, “With all of that being said, you can’t do what we’ve been reading about. We’re gonna learn a lot about it.”

He then discussed the $110 billion arms deal, saying if the U.S. doesn’t give the weapons to Saudi Arabia, the country will turn to “Russia or China.”

“Aren’t we just hurting our own country?” he asked, responding to critics who have said he should end the arms deal. “Because here’s what’s going to happen — [they’ll] buy them from China, buy them from Russia.”

“We’re not really hurting them, we’re hurting ourselves,” he added. “I don’t want to give up a $110 billion order.”

[The Hill]

Trump calls Stormy Daniels ‘Horseface’ as defamation suit dismissed.

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President Donald Trump lashed out at adult-film star Stormy Daniels and her attorney Tuesday morning, vowing to “go after” the pair, who he referred to as “Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer.”

The tweet from Trump comes a day after a federal judge in California handed the president a rare legal victory in his ongoing legal battles with Daniels.

Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti – who has been teasing a possible run for president against Trump in 2020 – wasted little time in responding in kind to the insults, calling Trump a “disgusting misogynist and an embarrassment to the United States.”

“Bring everything you have,” Avenatti crowed, “because we are going to demonstrate to the world what a complete shyster and liar you are.”

Also firing back on her (usually) not-safe-for-work Twitter feed, Daniels wrote, “Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present your president.”

“[H]e has demonstrated his incompetence, hatred of women and lack of self control on Twitter AGAIN!” Daniels wrote.

The barrage of Twitter barbs follows a ruling Monday by US District Court Judge S. James Otero that dismissed Daniels’ defamation claim, one of two lawsuits she filed against the president.

Otero ruled that a tweet Trump sent earlier this year mocking Daniels’ credibility was free speech protected by the First Amendment.

The judge noted that Daniels had “sought to publicly present herself as an adversary” to Trump, and that to deny him the ability to engage in responding to her allegations “would significantly hamper the office of the President.”

An attorney for the president, Charles Harder, characterized that ruling in a statement as “a total victory for President Trump and a total defeat for Stormy Daniels.”

The court also ordered Daniels to pay Trump’s legal fees and costs associated with defending the lawsuit. The amount has yet to be determined.

Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti quickly filed a notice of an intention to appeal the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The dismissal of the defamation claim has no bearing on Daniels’ separate lawsuit challenging the validity of the non-disclosure agreement she signed in 2016 to keep quiet about her allegations of a sexual tryst with Trump in 2006.

Trump has denied her allegations.

The defamation claim from Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, was originally filed in New York federal court earlier this year. The lawsuit claimed Trump acted with “actual malice” and “reckless disregard for the truth” when he posted a tweet mocking her claim that she was threatened by an unknown man to stay silent. The case was later transferred to federal court in California.

In an April appearance on ABC’s “The View,” Daniels and Avenatti released a sketch of the man she claims menaced her and her toddler daughter in 2011 in a Las Vegas parking lot shortly after she granted an interview to In Touch magazine about her alleged relationship with Trump, then a real estate mogul and reality-TV star.

Daniels alleges the man told her to “leave Trump alone” and to “forget the story.”

The magazine didn’t publish its story about Daniels claims until January of 2018 – after the Wall Street Journal published the first accounts of a non-disclosure agreement signed just weeks before the 2016 election.

In interviews with The View and on CBS’ 60 Minutes earlier this year, Daniels intimated that either Trump or his then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, must have been behind the alleged threat.

To date, no evidence has emerged to support the claim.

One day after Daniels revealed the sketch – Trump ridiculed the claim on Twitter as “a sketch years later about a non-existent man.” He called it a “total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools.”

[ABC News]

Trump says those who made ‘false statements’ about Kavanaugh ‘should be held liable’

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Hours after his Supreme Court pick was sworn in Saturday, President Donald Trump said on Fox News that those who made up “false” stories about Brett Kavanaugh should be penalized.

Trump, talking with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, said he hated watching the slew of sexual assault allegations grow against Kavanaugh and dubbed all the accusations “fabrications” with “not a bit of truth.”

“I think that they should be held liable,” Trump told Pirro. “You can’t go around and whether it’s making up stories or making false statements about such an important position, you can’t do that. You can destroy somebody’s life.”

Pirro started the segment by congratulating the president on Kavanaugh’s swearing-in then asked about the accusations and whether any of those who came forward or promoted “falsehoods” should suffer “consequences.” She specifically asked about allegations brought by Julie Sweatnick, who was represented by lawyer Michael Avenatti.

Swetnick alleges she witnessed efforts by Kavanaugh and his classmate Mark Judge to get teenage girls “inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang-raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys.”

Avenatti has been dueling with the president for months in court representing porn star Stormy Daniels, who alleges an affair with Trump and signed a hush money deal to stay quiet.

[USA Today]

Trump Rips Eric Holder For His ‘When They Go Low, We Kick Them’ Remark: ‘It’s a Disgrace’

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President Donald Trump weighed in on recent remarks made by his former 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder.

This week, Clinton told Democrats that they “cannot be civil” with Republicans until they take over the House and/or the Senate and Holder rebuked former First Lady Michelle Obama‘s saying of “when they go low, we go high,” changing the expression to “when they go low, we kick them.”

When asked by Fox News anchor Shannon Bream about how critics point to him as the root cause of the incivility in America, Trump says he didn’t “think so.”

“My rallies have been very peaceful and even at the beginning when there seemed to be conflict, they sent paid people to disrupt our rallies,” Trump said. “And when you do that, you know, bad things happen. But they were the ones that started everything. So noo, it wasn’t us. It was totally the other side. I would have a rally and paid people were going into those rallies causing trouble. And in many cases, it didn’t work out so well for those people.”

“But not okay to punch them,” Bream pushed back.

Trump then pivoted to Holder and Clinton’s remarks.

“When I hear Holder making a statement like he did today, I think it’s a disgrace,” Trump continued. “And Hillary, I really understand. She just doesn’t get it. She never did. She never will. And that’s why she lost the election.”

Bream concluded the interview by expressing hope that civility can be restored in this country, something that the president agreed with.

[Mediaite]

White House Will ‘Look Into’ Fox News’ Decision to Stop Broadcasting Trump Rallies

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The White House has vowed to “look into” a decision taken by Fox News to stop broadcasting Donald Trump’s rallies live and in full because they’re no longer bringing in high ratings. Politico reports viewing figures for Trump rallies have dropped and tend to be similar to, or even below, those for regular programming. The network only showed clips of his three rallies over the last week, rather than broadcasting the whole events uninterrupted. The report states White House figures are concerned Trump is losing control of a key platform ahead of the midterms. One senior White House official told Politico they were unsure why the network is cutting away from the rallies, saying officials planned “to look into that” and that they expect White House Communications Director Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive, to be in touch with his former colleagues about the move.

[The Daily Beast]

‘It was totally the other side’: Trump tells Fox News that ‘my rallies have been very peaceful’

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President Donald Trump on Wednesday tried to rewrite the history of his campaign rallies, during a late night interview with Fox News.

Trump has recently lashed out at Democrats for “incivility” — with more anger than was seen when the alt-right murdered Heather Heyer during their 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Fox News personality Shannon Bream noted the increasing public shunning of conservatives.

“When you press people on that, they will say you started this by encouraging people to rough up protesters and by going after people with nicknames and all kinds of things,” Bream said. “How do you respond?”

“I don’t think so,” Trump responded, despite having asked his supporters to rough up protesters during the 2016 presidential campaign

“My rallies have been very peaceful,” Trump claimed. “And even at the beginning, when there seemed to be conflict, they sent paid people to disrupt our rallies.”

“When you do that, you know, bad things happen,” he warned.

“They were the ones that started everything,” he claimed. “No, it wasn’t us. It was totally the other side.”

[Raw Story]

Reality

Trump has approved of violence against those who disagree with him 28 times.

http://www.stopthedonaldtrump.com/tag/violence-approval/

Trump promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on Twitter

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The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that George Soros, a wealthy Hungarian-American businessman who has donated millions of dollars to progressive causes, is paying people to protest President Donald Trump is a staple of the conservative ecosystem.

Last week, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham tweeted “SOROS STRIKES AGAIN” after Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) was confronted in a Senate elevator by survivors of sexual assault.

Now the President of the United States is getting in on the anti-Semitic action, claiming that protests against his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, were “Paid for by Soros and others” in a Friday tweet.

This was the first time Trump has mentioned Soros on Twitter, per the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale. However, The Atlantic’s David Frum noted Soros was one of the “three identifiable “faces of international finance”” featured in a 2016 Trump campaign ad that was widely criticized for its anti-Semitic overtones.

The Washington Examiner’s Dave Brown noticed that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) floated the conspiracy theory about Soros paying Kavanaugh protesters during an appearance on Fox Business less than 90 minutes before Trump’s tweet.

Ana Maria Archila, one of the sexual assault survivors who was filmed confronting Flake last week, responded to Trump’s tweet in a statement, saying, “No one can pay for someone’s lived experiences.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, “The Hungarian Jewish billionaire, Holocaust survivor and philanthropist figures prominently in anti-Semitic tweets, with claims that he directly uses his largess to fund false flag events. One noteworthy allegation claims that Soros was responsible for the deadly ‘Unite the Right’ rally in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Va. Other tweets refer to his Jewish heritage in pejorative terms and claims that he’s trying to undermine Western civilization.”

ThinkProgress’ Casey Michel recently explained the anti-Semitism behind conservatives’ Soros conspiracy theories:

Of course, as with most conspiracies, there’s a far darker reality lurking behind the notion that Soros is responsible for all the ills facing down nationalist movements. While most of those pushing Soros-based conspiracies don’t come out and say that Soros is evil because he’s Jewish, it doesn’t take much sleuthing to discern the anti-Semitism behind the conspiracies. Between the imagery of Soros pulling strings to the fact that Soros has effectively replaced “the Rothschilds” as the go-to for any conspiracy about an international cabal thwarting the people’s will, it’s not hard to catch the bigotry lacing the rising conspiracies about Soros.

Conservatives have a history of attempting to smear survivors of traumatic events as paid “crisis actors.” Sexual assault survivors’ attempts to confront Kavanaugh’s supporters have not been received well by Republicans.

The Washington Post reported in January 2017 that people were paid to attend Trump’s campaign launch announcement.

[ThinkProgress]

How Fox News Gets Away With Using KKK Talking Points

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At Stop The Donald Trump we are constantly pointing out Fox News has spent a lot of energy in creating an alternative reality for their viewers by ignoring key facts, withholding context, and making stuff up.

Fox also uses strategy of vilifying the rest of the news media (“The liberal media!”, “The mainstream media”) which has been so successful that most Fox News viewers only get their information from Fox News.

This is a dangerous recipe that makes it very easy for Fox to get away with overtly racist arguments because if you’ve lived in this worldview they created and maintained for the past 20+ years it is all very normal.

So when Fox News ignores systemic racism and on a daily basis repeats ideas like “blacks must try harder to get ahead”, “Irish, Italians, and Jewish minorities overcame prejudice and now it’s African American’s turn”, and generations of slavery and Jim Crow is not a factor in discussions on upward mobility, what would seem cruel, ridiculous, and missing important context to the rest of the world, a regular Fox News viewer doesn’t blink.

Like remember when Megyn Kelly shoutted “Santa Claus is white kids! He just is!” and nobody on her panel did a double-take.

This is because their viewers have been conditioned for decades to fear minorities, foreigners, other religions, paint liberals as Jesus-hating communist baby murders who want to turn your kids gay, and because of the mistrust they instill of other actual news media, they can outright lie to their viewers.

Some examples include:

  • Saying the United Nations was laughing with Trump and not at him.
  • Giving full credit to a booming economy Trump was gifted to by Obama.
  • Claiming the FISA judge was unaware the Steele Dossier was funded as opposition research.

There has been two specific moments that normalized white supremacy enough where Fox News has been able to be more open with their racism.

  1. Milo Yiannopoulos’ “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right”
  2. The candidacy and election of Donald Trump.

What Milo did in his successful Breitbart article was paint the alt-right as just another conservative movement by downplaying the white supremacist origins and made the ideas of a white nation more palatable to a larger audience.

And people forget that article was widely shared, written about, and discussed in conservative circles, including months of sympathetic portrayals of the alt-right on Fox News, right up until (and during) Charlottesville. 

That really pushed white nationalism into the open and mainstream.

And I could talk for hours about Trump, but in short his election validated his racist, sexist, and xenophobic comments and made them more everyday normal. Case in point, Trump attacked a sexual assault survivor to a cheering crowd and it’s not a scandal today.

If we recognize we live in a country where racism has all been normalized because of the efforts of Fox News and Republican radio hosts, it makes sense that someone like Tucker Carlson can literally repeat talking points of the KKK verbatim (“It’s okay to be white”) and it is seen as acceptable and popular to a Fox New audience. 

Kellyanne Conway Defends Trump’s Mockery of Dr. Ford: ‘Pointing Out Factual Inconsistencies’

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White House special advisor Kellyanne Conway ran defense for President Trump on Wednesday after he seemed to mock Christine Blasey Ford‘s misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

Conway spoke to Bill Hemmer and Sandra Smith on Fox News, and the discussion started off with the condemnation Trump has received for his rally remarks last night. Conway argued that Trump was merely highlighting the argument that no evidence or new witnesses have turned up in support Ford’s claims ever since they became public.

“We are not managing the scope, the witnesses, anything like that. At the same time, the president is pointing out factual inconsistencies. By Ford’s own testimony there are gaps in her memory, there are facts that she cannot remember. How she got home, how she got there. Where the house was, what the date was. If those pretending they want to find the truth, don’t say we can’t find the truth when she doesn’t know all the facts. That’s part of the testimony she put in under sworn statements”.

Conway went on to argue that the Democrats have weaponized the #MeToo movement against Kavanaugh, somewhat suggesting that they only care as long as they are the victims. She also bragged about how many likes Trump got on a tweet of his shortly after Kavanaugh testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“That’s a lot of likes for a presidential tweet,” she touted.

[Mediaite]

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