Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse



The United Nations has issued a damning condemnation of Donald Trump's policy that saw migrant children separated from their parents at the border, suggesting it "may amount to torture".

In a statement issued by the UN's Human Rights Council, experts said the president's recent executive order, ostensibly to halt the controversial separations, failed to resolve the problem and "may lead to indefinite detention of entire families in violation of international human rights standards".
 
[Thread] Stop whatever you're doing and read the @WhiteHouse plan for complete reorganization of the entire federal government. I have tweeted some highlights, but honestly can't begin to capture the horror.

Overall, it privatizes a lot, cuts, & consolidates power.

 


President Trump’s tariff on steel imports that took effect June 1 has caused a southeast Missouri nail manufacturer to lose about 50% of its business in two weeks. Mid Continent Nail Corporation in Poplar Bluff – the remaining major nail producer in the country – has had to take drastic measures to make ends meet. The company employing 500 people earlier this month has laid off 60 temporary workers. It could slash 200 more jobs by the end of July and be out of business around Labor Day.
 


The Trump administration feared it would be a “public relations nightmare”: a major federal study that concluded contaminated groundwater across the country, especially near military bases, was more toxic than the government realized. Political aides to President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt pressured the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry against releasing the results.

“The public, media, and Congressional reaction to these numbers is going to be huge,” an unidentified White House aide wrote, according to Politico. “The impact to EPA and [the Defense Department] is going to be extremely painful. We cannot seem to get ATSDR to realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be.” The study was not released.

That is, until Wednesday. Amid a media firestorm about the administration’s immigration policy, the ATSDR—a division of the Department of Health and Human Services—quietly published its 852-page review of perfluoroalkyls, or PFAS, which are “used in everything from carpets and frying pan coatings to military firefighting foams,” according to ProPublica. “All told, the report offers the most comprehensive gathering of information on the effects of these chemicals today, and suggests they’re far more dangerous than previously thought.”
 


WASHINGTON — President Trump likes nothing more than presenting himself as the ultimate deal maker, the master negotiator who can translate his success in business into the worlds of politics, policy and diplomacy. “That’s what I do, is deals,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-secretary-general-stoltenberg-nato-bilateral-meeting/ one day last month.

Except that so far he has not. As he threw in the towel on immigration legislation on Friday, saying that Republicans should give up even tryinguntil after the fall midterm elections, Mr. Trump once again fell short of his promise to make “beautiful” deals that no other president could make.

His 17 months in office have in fact been an exercise in futility for the art-of-the-deal president. No deal on immigration. No deal on health care. No deal on gun control. No deal on spending cuts. No deal on Nafta. No deal on China trade. No deal on steel and aluminum imports. No deal on Middle East peace. No deal on the Qatar blockade. No deal on Syria. No deal on Russia. No deal on Iran. No deal on climate change. No deal on Pacific trade.

Even routine deals sometimes elude Mr. Trump, or he chooses to blow them up. After a Group of 7 summit meeting this month with the world’s leading economic powers, Mr. Trump, expressing pique at Canada’s prime minister, refused to sign the carefully negotiated communiqué that his own team had agreed to. It was the sort of boilerplate agreement that every previous president had made over four decades.
 


In all my years, I have never seen anything quite like this: a U.S. president who https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/01/president-trump-has-made-3001-false-or-misleading-claims-so-far/?utm_term=.e02b8b3c6cf7 (lies) and demonizes at the drop of a hat. I don’t just mean President Trump makes statements that tend to be inaccurate or misleading or that he exaggerates, equivocates and, at times, shades the truth.

No, this president repeatedly makes declarations that are flat-out at variance with established facts; assertions that on their face cannot be true.
 


The remarkable truth about the “North Korean nuclear crisis” is that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — a tiny, isolated, and impoverished state — has been almost completely in charge of it since the global drama erupted almost three decades ago. The DPRK has determined both the tempo of events and the details of international diplomacy, right down to the conference agendas: what parties would meet, when and where the meetings would take place, and even what would be discussed. This is a drama with a purpose, for the outcome of this ongoing “crisis” has been the steady march of a most unlikely candidate into the ranks of the nuclear-weapons states.

Like it or not, this is a triumph of statecraft. To succeed in the effort that culminated last year — in the testing of a hydrogen bomb and an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the U.S. mainland — North Korea had to thwart a world community overwhelmingly opposed to its nuclear intentions. That meant gaming the great powers, not to mention most of the rest of the international community, for decades on end.

The Kim-family regime and its notorious peculiarities are endlessly mocked in the outside world. Be that as it may: A remote, closed-off, and seemingly buffoonish dictatorship has demonstrated time and again that it understands more about global power politics than do its powerful and purportedly sophisticated adversaries.

This month’s U.S.–North Korean summit in Singapore marks a truly historic milestone on the DPRK’s road to establishing itself as a permanent nuclear power. Whether Washington recognizes it yet or not, the encounter was a victory for Pyongyang — and a big one. Indeed, it is hard to think of any greater diplomatic coup for the North Korean regime since 1950, when missions to Moscow by “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung (grandfather to the current “Dear Respected Leader”) secured Stalin’s permission for a surprise attack on South Korea.

With a single stroke in Singapore, Kim Jong-un apparently defanged President Donald Trump, North Korea’s most formidable American opponent in the post–Cold War era; consolidated the recent advances in the DPRK’s nuke and missile programs; and positioned North Korea to reap even greater gains from its high-tension, long-term game plan in the months and years ahead. The Singapore summit, in other words, looks to have been a signal step toward making the world safe for Kim Jong-un and his regime.
 
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