Tag: Donald Trump
Trump Calls Spike Lee’s Oscar Speech a ‘Racist Hit on Your President’
Article via NYTimes
On Sunday night, Spike Lee won his first competitive Oscar, then made an acceptance speech that gained a standing ovation. But the events did not please at least one person apparently watching: President Trump. On Monday, he called Lee’s speech a “racist hit on your President.”
Lee opened his speech, after winning best adapted screenplay for “BlacKkKlansman,” by discussing slavery and his family’s experiences of it. “I give praise to our ancestors, who have built this country into what it is today along with the genocide of the native people,” he said.
“The 2020 presidential election is around the corner,” Lee said. “Let’s all mobilize. Let’s all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate.”
[Read our analysis of the ceremony.]
Lee did not mention the president in his speech, but that call to action seems to have angered him. “Be nice if Spike Lee could read his notes, or better yet not have to use notes at all, when doing his racist hit on your President,” Trump said in a tweet in the early hours of Monday morning.
The president’s policies had “done more for African Americans (Criminal Justice Reform, Lowest Unemployment numbers in History, Tax Cuts, etc.) than almost any other Pres!” the president added.
Trump did not dwell on the issue for long. Shortly afterward he tweeted about “oil prices getting too high,” and a forthcoming meeting with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea (“With complete Denuclearization, North Korea will rapidly become an Economic Powerhouse,” he wrote).
[Read Lee’s speech here.]
Theo Dumont, Lee’s publicist, said the director would not be commenting on Trump’s tweet.
“BlacKkKlansman” is based on the story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. In interviews around its release, Lee said he wanted to draw a link between the Klan and events today. “We had to connect David Duke to Agent Orange,” he told The New York Times, using his own term for the president.
At the end of “BlacKkKlansman,” Lee included footage of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that descended into violence when protesters clashed with counterprotesters. He then showed footage of Trump saying there was blame on “both sides” for those events.
When “Green Book” won best picture at the ceremony on Sunday, Lee made a disgusted gesture and started walking out of the theater as “Green Book” producers gave their speeches. Backstage, when asked by reporters about the coronation of “Green Book,” which detractors complain has a retrograde view of race, Lee replied, “No comment.”
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Worker fired from Trump golf course says Trump knew undocumented people were employed
Article via HuffingtonPost
An undocumented worker who was fired from one of President Trump‘s golf courses over the weekend said he believes Trump knew undocumented people worked at his various clubs.
Gabriel Sedano and multiple other undocumented workers spoke to NBC News about their experiences being employed by the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York. It was their first on-camera appearance since they were abruptly fired last week.
Sedano told NBC’s Kate Snow that he believes the Trump National Golf Club employers knew they were hiring undocumented workers.
“That’s what I think, because they need employees and they don’t check really good,” Serano told Snow. “I cannot be sure about that but he gotta know.”
Sedano said that he spoke to Trump multiple times over the fourteen years that he was employed as a maintenance worker at the club. Sedano told The Washington Post on Saturday that he “started to cry” when he was fired.
He is from Mexico and had worked at the club since 2005.
“I told them they needed to consider us,” Sedano said. I had worked almost 15 years for them in this club, and I’d given the best of myself to this job.”
About a dozen employees were abruptly fired last week from the New York golf club because they were found to be in the country illegally.
The firings followed reports last year that undocumented immigrants were hired and subsequently fired at a Trump property in New Jersey.
The workers in New York were told that the Trump company had recently audited their immigration documents, which were found to be fake, the Post reported. Those documents were submitted years prior to their firing.
Sedano and other workers interviewed by NBC said they presented false documents when they were hired by the Trump club. They told NBC they believe they were hired so that the organization could save money by paying low wages with no benefits to the workers, who were vulnerable due to their immigration status.
The president’s son, Eric Trump, in a statement to NBC pointed to the undocumented workers as “one of the reasons my father is fighting so hard for immigration reform.”
“We have tens of thousands of employees across our properties and have very strict hiring practices,” Eric Trump told the news network. “If any employee submitted false documentation in an attempt to circumvent the law, they will be terminated immediately. We take this issue very seriously.”
Trump has made his hard-line immigration policies a central issue of his presidency, most recently triggering the longest government shutdown in U.S. history over his demand for $5.7 billion in funding for a Southern border wall, which Democrats refused.
The attorney representing Sedano and other undocumented workers who were fired told NBC that they are heading to Capitol Hill to meet with Democrats.
Trump claimed women were gagged with tape. Then Border Patrol tried to find some evidence.
Article via Vox
An internal email, sent two weeks after Trump started making the claim, asked agents for “any information” about what Trump was describing.
It’s become a staple of President Donald Trump’s riffs on the horrors of the US-Mexico border, something he knows so well that he doesn’t even need it scripted on a teleprompter: Human traffickers gag women with tape so they can’t breathe before packing them into vans and driving them across the border illegally.
But two weeks after Trump had started talking about tape-gagged women — when a January 17 Washington Post article had questioned the claim — a top Border Patrol official had to email agents to ask if they had “any information” that the claim was actually true.
The email, shown to Vox by a source within Border Patrol, was sent as a “request for information” by an assistant Border Patrol chief, apparently on behalf of the office of Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan (referred to internally as “C-1”). It asked agents to reply within less than two hours with “any information (in any format)” regarding claims of tape-gagged women — and even linked to the Post article “for further info.”
Vox’s source indicated that they and others in their sector hadn’t heard anything that would back up Trump’s claims, but wasn’t sure if agents in other sectors had provided information. However, no one from the Trump administration has come forward to offer evidence for the claim, either before or after the internal Border Patrol email was sent. (Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.)
The text of the email, whose subject line was “Quick Turnaround: RFI taped-up women smuggled into the U.S.,” is as follows:
All,
We require your assistance on a quick turnaround for C-1.
Please forward any information that you may have (in any format) regarding claims “that traffickers tie up and silence women with tape before illegally driving them through the desert from Mexico to the United States in the backs of cars and windowless vans.” Reference the news article below for further info.
We require this information to be submitted to BPHQG2 by 1200 EST.
V/R,
Armando Sianez — Acting Assistant Chief
US Border Patrol Headquarters
It’s not clear where Trump is getting his information — but it doesn’t appear to be through official intelligence
Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the border is built on a lie: the idea that the US-Mexico border is a lawless place where American citizens are constantly in grave danger, and where criminals are able to smuggle drugs and people without any risk of apprehension. That big picture — as Vox and the rest of the media has made clear again and again — bears very little resemblance to the truth.
But the claim about women gagged with tape and packed into vans has attracted particular attention because it’s quickly become a centerpiece of Trump’s rhetoric — according to the Post, as of Friday he’d made 10 references to it in 22 days — without anyone knowing exactly where he got it from.
Border experts have told the Post and other reporters that they’ve never heard of anything like what Trump is talking about.
But it’s extremely hard to prove that such things have never happened — especially because the president has access to classified information that experts speaking to journalists do not.
That’s where traditional fact-checking tends to run into a wall. While journalists might suspect that Trump is making things up, it’s possible that he’s just repeating something he heard in a briefing (or, less plausibly, read in an intelligence report) that wasn’t open to the public.
The internal Border Patrol email provided to Vox, however, makes that seem a lot less likely.
Requests for information to the field usually aren’t made to get information backing up particular claims — much less claims being made by the president, and much less claims the president had been making for, at that point, two weeks. The implication of the email is that — after CBP had already been asked for evidence by the Post and declined comment— high-level border officials didn’t have any evidence they could point to to prove that Trump was telling the truth.
It’s possible that Trump got his intel from another agency — such as Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and that CBP simply didn’t know anything about it (which would raise its own set of questions about inter-agency intelligence-sharing).
But that is much less likely than the possibility that Trump heard something that wasn’t actual intelligence, and repeated it as truth.
As the Post points out, Trump started talking about tape gags the day after a meeting with representatives of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing Border Patrol agents. It’s possible that the claims first came up in that meeting. (NBPC did not respond to Vox’s request for comment.) If that’s true, union officials were talking about things that the management of their agency knew nothing about.
That could mean that Border Patrol management is simply out of touch with the realities of the border.
Or it could mean that one of Trump’s favorite border riffs is a piece of thirdhand gossip that Border Patrol had to scramble to try to back up.
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Former White House insider releases explosive book
Cliff Sims, author of “Team of Vipers,” speaks out on “GMA” about his experiences in the Oval Office with the president and the reaction to the book. (via ABCNews)
Trump backs students from Lincoln memorial confrontation
Article via CBSNews
President Trump has weighed in on the controversy surrounding a confrontation Friday at the base of the Lincoln Memorial involving three groups. The incident was caught on video that went viral. The story behind it has evolved several times since first coming to light, and accounts still differ.
The trouble involved a group of five black men shouting vulgar insults while protesting centuries of oppression, dozens of white Catholic high school students visiting Washington for a rally to end abortion and Native Americans marching to end injustice for indigenous peoples across the globe who have seen their lands overrun by outside settlers.
Mr. Trump tweeted his support Monday night for the students from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Kentucky, as some news reports questioned whether early criticism of them was warranted:
Covington Catholic was closed Tuesday. A letter from the school’s president Robert Rowe, obtained by CBS affiliate WKRC, said the school would close “to ensure the safety of our students, faculty and staff.”
At the base of the memorial Friday, the three groups met for just a few minutes in an encounter that again cast a spotlight on a polarized nation.
At first the focus was on a short video showing one of the high school students, Nick Sandmann, wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat and appearing to smirk while a crowd of other teens laughed derisively behind him as a 64-year-old Native American veteran, Nathan Phillips, played a traditional chant on a drum.
Pull back farther and a different view emerges, however, in a separate video showing members of a group calling itself the Black Hebrew Israelites taunting everyone on the mall that day, calling the Native Americans who had gathered there for the Indigenous Peoples March “Uncle Tomahawks” and “$5 Indians” and the high school students “crackers” and worse.
It was an ugly encounter of spewed epithets but one that nevertheless ended with no punches thrown or other violence.
“I would caution everyone passing judgment based on a few seconds of video to watch the longer video clips that are on the internet, as they show a much different story than is being portrayed by people with agendas,” Sandmann, a junior, said in a statement released late Sunday.
Sandmann’s statement does seem at odds with some video from the confrontation that showed students from Covington Catholic laughing at Phillips’ Native American group and mockingly singing along with him, as well as interviews with Phillips, who said he heard the students shout “Build that wall!” and “Go back to the reservation!”
The fullest view of what happened came from a nearly two-hour video posted on Facebook by Shar Yaqataz Banyamyan. It showed members of his Black Hebrew Israelite group repeatedly interacting with the crowd as people from the Indigenous Peoples March and the high school students vigorously argued with them for a few minutes.
Sandmann said in his statement the students from his all-male high school were waiting for their buses near Banyamyan’s group when the latter started to taunt them. One of the students took off his shirt and the teens started to do a haka – a war dance of New Zealand’s indigenous Maori culture, made famous by the country’s national rugby team.
Phillips, an elder of the Omaha tribe, and Marcus Frejo, a member of the Pawnee and Seminole tribes, said they felt the students were mocking the dance and walked over to intervene.
Phillips and Sandmann locked eyes, their faces inches apart. Both men said their goal was simply to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. But caught on video, the encounter still went viral.
The high school students felt they were unfairly portrayed as villains in a situation where they say they were not the provocateurs.
“I am being called every name in the book, including a racist, and I will not stand for this mob-like character assassination,” Sandmann said in his statement.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington apologized for the incident, promising an investigation that could lead to punishment up to expulsion if any wrongdoing by the students was determined.
The Indigenous Peoples Movement felt the encounter was a reminder the U.S. was founded on racism and Mr. Trump’s presidency is rekindling hatred based on skin color.
“Trump has riled up a reactionary voting block that reminds us that we are a nation founded on patriarchy, genocide and racism. Trump is clearly giving these archaic instincts license, encouraging the kind of aggressive goading that I witnessed,” movement spokesman Chase Iron Eyes said in a statement.
Phillips is now offering to travel to northern Kentucky to meet with the students for a “dialog about cultural appropriation, racism, and the importance of listening to and respecting diverse cultures,” according to the Lakota People’s Law Project.
“Race relations in this country and around the world have reached a boiling point,” the group quotes Phillips as saying. “It is sad that on the weekend of a holiday when we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., racial hostility occurred on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, where King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”
Banyamyan posted his own reaction on Facebook, referencing the dozens of high school students in their Make America Great Again gear coming over to his group of five and chanting. In a rambling video, he also praised Phillips and compared Sandmann to the devil.
After the sun set and the Covington high school students left, Banyamyan’s video showed a few police officers stopping by to check on his group as they were wrapping up their protest. One of the officers said they were worried by the number of people who briefly massed in that one spot. One of the Black Hebrew Israelites said there were no problems.
“We weren’t threatened by them,” he said. “It was an OK dialogue.”
‘If there’s a concrete wall in front of you, go through it,’ Trump said in 2004 speech
Donning an emerald green graduation gown, Donald Trump stood grinning on the stage at Wagner College in Staten Island as a faculty member offered a glowing introduction in May 2004: “A New York original. Everyone knows something about him and everyone has an opinion concerning him,” the faculty member said.
Trump was there to give the commencement address to the class of 2004 and to accept an honorary doctorate of humane letters. He drew laughs from the crowd while describing his transition from real estate magnate to television celebrity — “I’m a star, and there’s nothing like it.” He took a half-baked stab at self-deprecation, joking that the Guinness Book of World Records “has me down as the greatest personal financial comeback of all time.”
But even then, talk of concrete walls managed to seep its way into Trump’s monologue — only this time, as Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah pointed out Wednesday on “The Daily Show,” the message was a bit different from the one he would preach years later as president.
“I’ll tell you, to me, the second-most important thing after love what you do is never, ever give up,” Trump told the students, motioning his hands and raising his index finger the same way he does at campaign rallies. “Don’t give up. Don’t allow it to happen. If there’s a concrete wall in front of you, go through it. Go over it. Go around it. But get to the other side of that wall.”
Read more via TheWashingtonPost
Kanye West wants everyone to know he’s still team Trump
Kanye West’s bromance with President Trump appears alive and well as 2019 dawns — with the wacky rapper giving his pal a shout-out on Twitter, praising his MAGA hat and dropping hints that he could run for the White House in 2024.
“Trump all day” West tweeted at about 3:30 p.m. on New Year’s Day, a comment that got a decidedly mixed reaction from his followers.
“I have to assume this is a reference to a kid named Trump on the youth football team I coach. It’s his first name. He’s okay, but cries when I scream profanities at him, so he’s got a ways to go,” wrote Three Year Letterman.
But the rapper — whose F-bomb filled, cringe-worthy October visit to the White House appeared to leave even the president at a loss for words — was undeterred.
“Just so in 2019 you know where I stand,” he tweeted before apparently accusing Democrats of controlling black people.
“They will not program me. Blacks are 90% Democrats That sounds like control to me,” wrote West, Kim Kardashian’s other half.
While many fans supported West’s cryptic posts, others weren’t so sure.
“He’s so annoying lately omg,” tweeted a woman named rafael.
“WHY DO YOU HAVE TO DO THIS KANYE,” added sadboi.
But West took it all in stride.
“Love everyone,” he said in another tweet, adding minutes later that God was on his side.
“We will change the world. God is on my side. I am a Christian. I am a tax payer. I am myself. God is with us,” he wrote, followed up by another post: “Free thought.”
He then dropped the hint about the White House, tweeting only: “2024,” firing up some of his fans.
“President Kanye West and First Lady Kim Kardashian West RUN THAT S–T!!!” tweeted someone calling themselves NaeomiCampbell.
But not everyone was buying it, with one poster saying West needs psychiatric help.
“He’ll be committed by then .. you know ..51/50 Ward B s–t..it’s all in motion ..manic episode after manic episode..no one helping him..everyone a yes person….hospitalization will be coming,” declared CaliRams909.
But the rapper continued — praising Trump and defending wearing his MAGA hat, which he wore to the White House.
“One of my favorite of many things that the trump hat represents to me is that people can’t tell me who I should do because I’m black. That’s real racism,” he said in a tweet that was later deleted and reposted without the last sentence.“From now on I’m performing with my mutherf–king hat on.”
Trump Threatens to Close Border if Congress Won’t Fund Wall
WASHINGTON — On the seventh day of a partial government shutdown, President Trump threatened on Friday to close the southern border and cut off aid to Central America if Congress refuses to fund a wall.
“We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall & also change the ridiculous immigration laws that our Country is saddled with,” Mr. Trump tweeted Friday. “Hard to believe there was a Congress & President who would approve!”
“We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall & also change the ridiculous immigration laws that our Country is saddled with,” Mr. Trump tweeted Friday. “Hard to believe there was a Congress & President who would approve!”
Mr. Trump escalated his threats as up to 800,000 government workers were left in limbo and with Congress not set to take up the issue again until after the new year. “At this point, it looks like we could be in for a very long-term shutdown,” Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina and a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, told CNN.
Democrats stood firm against agreeing to funding for a border wall, according to a spokesman for Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and the incoming House speaker. “Democrats are united against the President’s immoral, ineffective and expensive wall, the wall that he specifically promised that Mexico would pay for,” the spokesman, Drew Hammill, said in a statement. Mr. Hammill also noted that the White House has made no formal outreach to Ms. Pelosi since Dec. 11, when Ms. Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, met with the president at the White House.
Mr. Trump also reiterated his threat on Twitter on Friday to cut off aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador as punishment to countries he claimed “are doing nothing for the United States but taking our money.”
Migrants have been fleeing Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, choosing to join caravans and confront Mr. Trump’s threats to prevent them from crossing the border over the dangers of life at home.
Mr. Trump has made threats to shut down the border completely before. Last month, Mr. Trump said he would close the border “permanently” if Mexico refused to send asylum seekers back to their native countries.
His latest warning comes as Democrats are preparing to take control of the House of Representatives and have shown no sign of caving on his demands for $5 billion for a border wall. Democrats are considering three different ways to reopen the government, none of which include money for Mr. Trump’s proposed wall, his signature campaign promise.
In a series of tweets on Friday morning, Mr. Trump also complained that the North American Free Trade Agreement cost the United States so much money “that I would consider closing the Southern Border a ‘profit making operation.’”
In another sign that the White House sees no end to the shutdown in sight, Mick Mulvaney, the budget director who is set to take over as acting White House chief of staff in the new year, said on “Fox & Friends” on Friday that Mr. Trump would remain in Washington through New Year’s Eve.
Mr. Trump, who had been scheduled to spend a 16-day stretch over the holidays at his private club in Florida, has postponed the trip because of the shutdown. His wife, Melania Trump, left on Thursday for the Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago, a spokeswoman said.
When asked about Mr. Trump’s threat to close the border entirely, Mr. Mulvaney said that “what the president is trying to do, and rightly so, is shed some light on what’s happening here.”
Mr. Mulvaney also sought to divide Democrats, indicating that while he believed Mr. Schumer might be willing to come to a compromise on wall funding, “the more we’re hearing this week is that it’s Nancy Pelosi who is preventing that from happening.”
Article via NYTimes
Trump demands Mexico send migrants back to countries of origin after border patrol fires tear gas
Trump tweeted Monday that Mexican officials should remove migrants from the border by airplane, bus or “any way you want.”
President Donald Trump tweeted Monday that Mexican officials should ship the thousands of Central American migrants seeking entry into the U.S. back to their countries of origin by any means necessary, claiming that “many” are “stone cold criminals.”
Trump suggested that Mexico send the migrants back to countries such as Guatemala and Honduras by airplane, bus, or “anyway you want.” The president also threatened to shut down the U.S. Southern Border “permanently” if needed.
The tweet comes after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials fired tear gas on hundreds of migrants who sought to enter the U.S. on Sunday near San Diego. That interaction led to U.S. officials shutting down the San Ysidro Port of Entry between San Diego and Tijuana for more than six hours.
In a statement, border patrol said it used tear gas and pepper spray after several migrants tossed rocks at agents, who were struck. No injuries were reported.
“DHS will not tolerate this type of lawlessness and will not hesitate to shut down ports of entry for security and public safety reasons,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a Sunday statement.
Some migrants, meanwhile, said they sought to cross over illegally after they were denied access at the port of entry, where they could claim asylum. It is not illegal to seek asylum.
The hundreds of migrants who assembled along the Mexican side of the border on Sunday morning were a part of a larger group of about 6,000 who crammed into shelters in Tijuana. Many of the migrants are fleeing violence in their home countries.
Article via NBCNews