There’s something about Bernie..!
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has the highest approval rating of any U.S. senator in a new poll.
The Morning Consult poll showed a 75 percent approval rating for the Vermont senator. Sanders, who lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton last year, has remained popular. He is now a vocal critic of President Trump.
Are you ready for World War III?
A statement released by “the joint command operation center of Syrian allies,” a group that includes Russia and Iran, warned the U.S. against further military actions in the war-torn country, following a missile strike on a Syrian air base last week.
Referring to its defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad‘s regime, the group warned that they would support Syria and its people “with all means that we have.”
“The United States crossed red lines by attacking Syria, from now on we will respond to anyone, including America if it attacks Syria and crosses the red lines,” the statement read. “America knows very well our ability and capabilities to respond well to them, [and] we will respond without taking into consideration any reaction and consequences.”
The statement did not include critical details like what kind of military operation would cross such a red line, or what kind of response would be made on the part of Syria and its allies, but noted that they would work to “liberate” Syria from occupation.
“Rest assured that we will liberate Syria from all kinds of occupying forces, it does not matter from where they came to the occupied part of Syria,” the statement warned. “Russia and Iran will not allow the United States to be the only superpower in world.”
Some in the media are hailing this past week as Trump’s best as president, so let’s take a look at the highlights:
As for the other events of the best week of Trump’s presidency, it’s really par for the overused course. Representative Devon Nunes used information given to him by executive branch sources and then ran and told the president rather than sharing said information with his House colleagues. So now we are in the unique position where only the Senate has the moral authority to investigate the Russia allegations.
On the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation won’t mean too much for the balance of the court as it replaces one conservative with another, but that seat should have belonged to President Obama’s nominee. Changing the filibuster rules will eventually favor Democrats, but by that time the real damage could be more conservatives replacing more liberal voices on the Court. Somehow I think the republic will survive, but Congress will need to step in and pass laws to mitigate some of the legal damage.
The Trump presidency is fast approaching its 100th day, the usual, if outdated, benchmark of presidential accomplishment, and it hasn’t done much in the way of legislation. Most of the action has been done via formerly-hated-by-conservatives executive orders, and there don’t seem to be any grand laws in the sausage grinder at the moment. The believable media has made a great deal about Trump’s unpredictability and his penchant for reacting when personally affronted or moved, as evidenced by the Syria gambit. It’s really only a matter of time before this manifests itself in something far more dangerous, and darker.
If you can fathom it.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
Donald Trump is set to meet with China’s president, Xi Jinping this weekend. The meeting has pushed the Russian/Trump collusion conversation out of the way as the media now focuses on what the two men will talk about.
In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump berated China so this meeting between the two men should be interesting.
In addition to that, North Korea is acting up again and Donald Trump is expected to ask about China’s role in diffusing that situation.
But will that be the full scope of their discussion? What about all the products Donald Trump still make in China? Should we not expect him to inquire about better prices or better deals?
Despite President Donald Trump’s calls for American companies to manufacture their products in the U.S., shipments of his daughter’s branded, Chinese-made dresses have continued to land on U.S. shores since he took office, documents reviewed by NBC News show.
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will have a lot to talk about during their first meeting Thursday, including the Trump’s allegations of Chinese currency manipulation and the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to Beijing’s “unfair” trade practices.
“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” Trump told his cheering supporters last year on the campaign trail in Indiana. “There are no jobs because China has our jobs.”
Some of those jobs are apparently still filled by Chinese workers assembling dresses for a licensee of Ivanka Trump’s namesake clothing line.
Since Election Day, the apparel brand run by Trump’s daughter has imported 56 shipments of Ivanka Trump products from China and Singapore, part of a total of 215 shipments from Asia since Jan. 1, 2016.
What do you expect? The man has been a total failure since Russia bulldozed him into the White House!
Just 34 percent of the country approved of the job Trump is doing, down from 44.1 percent in March, according to the latest survey this week from Investor’s Business Daily/TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence (IBD/TIPP). The president’s approval rating remained well underwater, with 56 percent of the respondents disapproving of his job performance.
Some key supporters have begun to migrate away from Trump, notably Republicans, independents and white men. Trump’s approval among Republicans dropped to just 74 percent, a 14-percentage-point tumble from last month, according to IBD/TIPP. His approval among independents fell 11 percentage points to 29 percent. Among white men, one of Trump’s strongest demographic bases, his approval rating fell from 58 percent to 49 percent.
Remember the good old Obama Administration, the one the Republicans accused of treason and fascism and abuse of power because the president had the audacity to use…executive orders? That’s when America was great, right? Congress obstructed the president from improving people’s lives so he leaned on the only legal authority he had to run the country.
Now we have a president (shudder) who can only use executive orders to get things done, and the GOP naysayer whistle-blowers are blowing smoke. They all-of-a-sudden love Trump’s use of orders to undo what they consider to be outrageous acts of governmental control like net neutrality or protecting consumer privacy or allowing states and local governments to set up retirement accounts for people who don’t have them at work or clamping down on pollution and coal-belching plants that spew noxious fumes into the atmosphere.
Imagine what this president could do with a Republican majority Congress.
And that’s exactly the point. He obviously does have a majority. The problem is that he has no power base. This is why Trump will be hard pressed to get much done during the catastrophe that will be the next three years and nine months.
Power comes from influence, fear, a united group that sees a way forward and leadership that uses its moral, ethical and electoral mandates to move legislation through the congress. Donald Trump has very little of any of this. And he’s no LBJ. Trump was opposed by the party regulars and the conservative wing that actually had some ideas written down. He was opposed by right-leaning news outlets, many of which wrote that he didn’t have the personality or character to be an effective president. And of course, he was opposed by a majority of voters on election day, which makes it extraordinarily difficult for him to claim any kind of mandate for his platform.
We were told that he was a master negotiator and a strong personality who could persuade legislators and world leaders if only he could get them into a room to negotiate with him. We were told that he would be pragmatic and try to get the best deal possible. We were told that he would strong arm recalcitrant lawmakers into seeing that if they didn’t support him they would face some unlovely music at the ballot box come 2018.
You can stop laughing now.
What we have instead, and the Republicans in Congress now know this, is a president who lacks the knowledge of policy necessary to make deals. In the health care debacle, Trump was throwing ideas and promises around simply to appease the conservatives. The law he was fighting for was a disaster by any measure. He made threats; the GOP stalwarts ignored them. He fulminated on Twitter, then caved. The country is better off. For now.
But the die has been cast. Trump does not have the negotiating skills or the knowledge or the leverage necessary to get difficult laws through this Congress. He’s decided to move on to tax reform, which makes repealing the ACA akin to the niceties of a PTA meeting. The health care debate didn’t affect a vast majority of Americans, but taxes will. And each tax and each deduction has an interest group and lobbyists behind it. Plus, the windfall the GOP thought they would have from the ACA repeal is nowhere to be found. Congressional leaders have little to fear from a man who’s going to make a habit of leading from behind. The fight over tax reform will take longer, and we know that Trump has no attention span beyond the next news cycle. What will he do with all that time?
At some point in the near future, Republicans running in 2018 will need to make the critical decision about whether they will continue to follow Trump through the maze he’s created, or whether they’re going to go their own way and render him even more superfluous. If they don’t fear him, I can say with reasonable certainly that there will be a further split in the party. The result will not be pretty.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
Apparently, Donald Trump’s words during the 2016 presidential campaign have meaning. That’s according to a ruling by a federal judge who agreed with plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing Trump of inciting violence against them at one of his rallies.
A federal judge in Kentucky is the latest to take Trump at his word when he says something controversial. Judge David J. Hale ruled against efforts by Trump’s attorneys to throw out a lawsuit accusing him of inciting violence against protesters at a March 2016 campaign rally in Louisville.
At the rally, Trump repeatedly said “get ’em out” and “get ’em the hell out of here” before, according to the protesters, they were shoved and punched by his supporters. Trump’s attorneys sought to have the case dismissed on free speech grounds, arguing that he didn’t intend for his supporters to use force. But Hale noted that speech inciting violence is not protected by the First Amendment and ruled that there is plenty of evidence that the protesters’ injuries were a “direct and proximate result” of Trump’s words.
“It is plausible that Trump’s direction to ‘get ’em out of here’ advocated the use of force,” Hale wrote. “It was an order, an instruction, a command.”
