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Post by Admin on Dec 30, 2017 18:42:07 GMT
The interview took place in a golf club dining room, after Mr Trump played a round with his son, Eric, and professional golfer Jim Herman. According to Mr Schmidt - who was in Florida to cover the trip - the president was talking about the tax bill when he agreed to the interview. "He's very proud of the bill," the journalist said. Mr Schmidt said a lot of club members spoke to the president in the dining room. "I think he enjoys that sort of banter, saying hi to the members, and shaking hands," he said. In the interview, Mr Trump said the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the US election will be "fair". He said Republican politicians "love him", claimed he "saved coal", and boasted that he knows more about health care and taxes than "any president that's ever been in office". He's also sure he'll win the next election. "We're going to win another four years for a lot of reasons, most importantly because our country is starting to do well again," he said.
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Post by Admin on Jan 1, 2018 18:31:25 GMT
It is a tactic borne of frustration and dissatisfaction. Its impact has been to overload the circuits of government – from Capitol Hill to the White House to the Pentagon to the State Department and beyond. In the face of his own unhappiness, the president is trying to raise the pain level wherever he can. The permanent campaign has long been a staple of politics in this country, the idea that running for office never stops and that decisions are shaped by what will help one candidate or another, one party or another, win the next election. Trump has raised this to a high and at times destructive art. He cares about ratings, praise and success. Absent demonstrable achievements, he reverts to what worked during the campaign, which is to depend on his own instincts and to touch the hot buttons that roused his voters in 2016. As president, he has never tried seriously to reach beyond that base.
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Post by Admin on Jan 3, 2018 18:45:06 GMT
US President Donald Trump has said his nuclear button is "much bigger" and "more powerful" than North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's.
Mr Trump's tweet is the latest contribution to the bickering, increasingly personalised feud between the nuclear-armed leaders.
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Post by Admin on Jan 4, 2018 18:53:11 GMT
Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has described the Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian. Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.” Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him. He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.”
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Post by Admin on Jan 6, 2018 18:55:40 GMT
The presidency-as-production has been a good starter — Mr. Trump is, after all, the president of the United States — but history suggests that the means of his rise could be the means of his undoing. His understanding of the presidency is more informed by the values and folkways of show business (specifically, reality-based entertainment, from “The Apprentice” to professional wrestling) than by any larger sense of duty or dignity. And no show lasts forever. Theatricality, it is true, is an essential element of power. Whether onstage or on a throne, whether in the Oval Office or the House of Commons, great leaders are often great performers, able to embody national purposes and hopes, projecting strength and resolve in moments that threaten to give way to weakness and despair. In the night before the Battle of Agincourt, Shakespeare’s Henry V is racked by doubt and anxiety and fear, only to emerge in the sunlight to transform his men into a fabled “band of brothers.” President Donald J. Trump: Year One The White House Roosevelt’s point in his observation about the need to ration his exposure was that Agincourts should be the exception, not the rule. Dwight Eisenhower, who served in the years of the rise of television, used to make the same point. “I keep telling you fellows I don’t like to do this sort of thing,” he told advisers who urged him to go on the air more often. “I can think of nothing more boring, for the American public, than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half-hour looking at my face on their television screens.” Presidents, as John F. Kennedy once observed, are subject to “clamorous counsel” — everyone, it can seem, has thoughts on how they could do the job better. When he was being told what to do and how to do it, Eisenhower — who, beneath his serene surface, had more than a bit of a temper — once replied: “Now, look, I happen to know a little about leadership. I’ve had to work with a lot of nations, for that matter, at odds with each other. And I tell you this: You do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it’s usually called ‘assault’ — not ‘leadership.’” He went on: “I’ll tell you what leadership is. It’s persuasion, and conciliation, and education, and patience. It’s long, slow, tough work. That’s the only kind of leadership I know, or believe in, or will practice.”
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