Trump

Trump Jr. tweet turns URI mural into political brouhaha

By Angelena Iglesia 1 month ago



a group of people standing around a table: A section of a mural by Arthur Sherman painted in 1954 at the University of Rhode Island. [Courtesy of Pam Sherman]

© Provided by Providence Journal
A section of a mural by Arthur Sherman painted in 1954 at the University of Rhode Island. [Courtesy of Pam Sherman]

Donald J. Trump Jr. has dropped into a discussion about racial diversity and the future of two murals on display at the University of Rhode Island since the 1950s, ready to call it another case of a war memorial cancel-culture in higher education.

“Truly sick,” Trump said in a tweet on Thursday. “Don’t let the Left destroy America. God knows they’re trying hard to do just that.”

But the murals in question do not depict “the events of World War II” as reported by a Brietbart News item, which Trump Jr. promoted in a tweet that included his own comment.

The two murals depict life in the era of the GI Bill after the war.

As of Friday, the future of the murals, which

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Opinion | 7 ways Trump and his cabal are using government to corrupt the election

By Angelena Iglesia 1 month ago

Quick: What do all these things have in common?

The answer: In all these cases, Trump isn’t just stating claims. He and his cronies are also corruptly manipulating the levers of your government to make them into truths, or inflate them into issues that will garner news coverage that helps him in some way, or both.

Because the crush of governmental manipulation to serve Trump’s personal and political ends is so relentless, we often focus only on isolated examples as they skate past.

But we need to connect the dots. Taken together, they tell a larger story that is truly staggering in its levels of corruption:

Rushing coronavirus treatments. The New York Times just reported that scientists inside Trump’s own government are warning that the White House is laying the groundwork to increase pressure to approve a vaccine before Election Day, “even in the absence of agreement on its effectiveness

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Trump Praises Himself for Wanting to ‘Get Along’ With Russia

By Angelena Iglesia 2 months ago

Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

At a small campaign rally in Latrobe, Pa., President Trump on Thursday praised himself for wanting to “get along” with Russia and said that when he hears people talking about Russia in the news he “turns it off.”

“They always say, ‘Trump is radical, he is off the — he is too radical, he will get us in wars,’” Mr. Trump said. “I kept you out of wars. What happened in North Korea? I got along with Kim Jong-un. They said that’s terrible. It’s good that I get along. If I get along with Russia, is that a good thing or bad thing? I think it’s a good thing.”

He went

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Government watchdog says Trump action puts Census at further risk

By Angelena Iglesia 2 months ago

A government watchdog said Thursday that it already considers the 2020 Census to be at high risk for problems, as the data collection endeavor faces a looming deadline next month.



a close up of food

© Justin Sullivan/Getty Images


In a new report, the Government Accountability Office says that the administration’s decision to cut short the counting period puts it at greater risk of producing an inaccurate count, noting that the agency has designated the 2020 Census to be “high risk” since 2017.

“Delays, the resulting compressed timeframes, implementation of untested procedures, and continuing challenges such as COVID-19 could escalate census costs and undermine the overall quality of the count,” the agency wrote.

The Census Bureau told CNN in a statement Friday that it had a completion rate of 79.2% for the 2020 census and its goal remains “a complete and accurate census that produces high quality data.”

“We appreciate GAO’s on-going efforts to keep

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Trump pandemic border policy sends asylum seekers back to Ortega’s Nicaragua

By Angelena Iglesia 2 months ago

Valeska Alemán, 22, paid a price for that notoriety. She was detained twice. Interrogators pried off her toenails. When she decided to leave the country, the United States seemed a natural destination: The Trump administration has been vocal in its opposition to Nicaragua’s crackdown — and its support of the country’s young protesters.

But by the time Alemán arrived at the U.S. border in July, the administration had launched a pandemic-era policy that sends Nicaraguans directly back to their country without letting them apply for asylum. Seventeen days after crossing into Texas, she was put on a plane back to Managua with more than 100 other Nicaraguans, almost all of them opponents of President Daniel Ortega.

Her backpack was full of documents to show U.S. immigration officials that the government appeared ready to kill her. The officials wouldn’t look at them. When she landed back in Nicaragua, it felt as

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‘The Case For Trump’ Book Review

By Angelena Iglesia 6 months ago

President Donald Trump during a news conference in the Rose Garden in Washington, D.C., April 30, 2018 (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

The Case for Trump, by Victor Davis Hanson (Basic Books, 400 pp., $30)

Victor Davis Hanson’s newest book is also one of his most personal. Hanson is a celebrated historian of war, a retired professor of classics, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a National Review columnist. But he is also a farmer in California’s Central Valley. He routinely peppers his articles and even his academic work with telling details about farming life and social realities in Selma, a town outside Fresno where he lives in the same house in which he was born and raised. In this book, as in his others, the glimpses of Selma come only in support of Hanson’s wider thesis, never as part of an effort to tell his personal story. Nevertheless,

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Trump Meets Every Criteria for an Authoritarian Leader, Harvard Political Scientists Warn

By Angelena Iglesia 6 months ago

Two political scientists from Harvard University have identified four warning signs that indicate if someone poses a dangerous authoritarian risk to a nation. No U.S. politician, at least dating back to the Civil War, has come close to ticking off all four boxes, one of the authors told Newsweek—until Donald Trump came along.

Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have authored the new book How Democracies Die, which details the warning signs Trump showed as a candidate. In a healthy democracy, they argue, those traits should have derailed his bid for the presidency.

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President Donald Trump met all the warning signs for an authoritarian leader during the 2016 presidential campaign, two Harvard political scientists write in their new book, “How Democracy Dies.”
JUSSI NUKARI/AFP/Getty Images

“Trump was easily identifiable as someone who is not committed to the democratic rules of the game,” Levitsky told Newsweek on Thursday. “There

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Trump Signs Bill Reopening Government for 3 Weeks in Surprise Retreat From Wall

By Angelena Iglesia 6 months ago

WASHINGTON — President Trump agreed on Friday to reopen the federal government for three weeks while negotiations continued over how to secure the nation’s southwestern border, backing down after a monthlong standoff failed to force Democrats to give him billions of dollars for his long-promised wall.

The president’s concession paved the way for the House and the Senate to both pass a stopgap spending bill by voice vote. Mr. Trump signed it on Friday night, restoring normal operations at a series of federal agencies until Feb. 15 and opening the way to paying the 800,000 federal workers who have been furloughed or forced to work without pay for 35 days.

The plan includes none of the money for the wall that Mr. Trump had demanded and was essentially the same approach that he rejected at the end of December and that Democrats have advocated since, meaning he won nothing concrete

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Video of Trump Killing Media in Shooting Played at One of His Resorts

By Angelena Iglesia 7 months ago

At a time when our nation is facing an epidemic of mass shootings, supporters of President Donald Trump, at a conference held at one of the president’s resorts, showed a violent depiction of a fake Trump massacring members of the news media using a gun and other weapons, The New York Times reported Sunday night.

American Priority, a group that supports the president, hosted the conference at Trump National Doral Miami. Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., and Florida Gov. Rick DeSantis were all scheduled to speak at the event. But Huckabee Sanders and a source close to Trump Jr. denied either saw the video.

Bloomberg technology reporter William Turton surfaced a video matching the description from the Times on YouTube. The video appears to have been uploaded by YouTube account TheGeekzTeam in July 2018, and the account has posted other videos

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Trump Signs ‘Families First’ Relief Bill Into Law: Here’s What That Could Mean For You

By Angelena Iglesia 7 months ago

While his administration and congressional leaders continued to hammer out a trillion-dollar COVID-19 stimulus package, President Trump signed into law Wednesday evening the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, the second bipartisan coronavirus relief bill Congress has passed so far — the first providing around $8 billion in emergency funding for emergency prevention and response efforts. So what’s in the “Families First” bill? Below is a breakdown of its key provisions.

The Families First law addresses the following key priorities, among others:

  1. provides additional funding for nutrition and food assistance programs, particularly in light of schools being shutdown and additional needs for elderly assistance programs
  2. expands paid leave benefits
  3. expands unemployment benefits
  4. provides coronavirus testing at no cost to consumers
  5. temporarily increases the Medicaid federal medical assistance percentage

Food and Nutrition Assistance Funding: Families First infuses significant federal money — nearly a billion dollars’ worth — into various nutrition assistance programs,

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