Trump has two golf resorts in the country -- one near Aberdeen and the other at Turnberry. Their combined losses nearly doubled to £19 million ($25 million) in 2016, according to accounts filed in the U.K.
Trump resigned as director of the Scottish companies before his inauguration in January 2017, but remains the owner via a trust set up when he became president. His son Eric is a director of both resorts.
Trump valued each of the resorts at "over $50 million" in a disclosure form published in June by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.
However, last year's deficit means the projects have lost a combined £40.5 million ($53 million) since Trump acquired them, and the president continues to provide financial support.
He has supplied both businesses with huge loans: at the end of 2016 they owed him £152.5 million ($200 million).
(Reuters) - Outside the Morgan County fair in McConnelsville, in a rural swath of Ohio that fervently backed U.S. President Donald Trump in last year’s election, ticket seller John Wilson quietly counts off a handful of disappointments with the man he helped elect.
The 70-year-old retired banker said he is unhappy with infighting and turnover in the White House. He does not like Trump’s penchant for traveling to his personal golf resorts. He wishes the president would do more to fix the healthcare system, and he worries that Trump might back down from his promise to force illegal immigrants out of the country.
“Every president makes mistakes,” Wilson said. “But if you add one on top of one, on top of another one, on top of another, there’s just a limit.”
Trump, who inspired millions of supporters last year in places like Morgan County, has been losing his grip on rural America.
According to the Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll, the Republican president’s popularity is eroding in small towns and rural communities where 15 percent of the country’s population lives. The poll of more than 15,000 adults in “non-metro” areas shows that they are now as likely to disapprove of Trump as they are to approve of him.
In September, 47 percent of people in non-metro areas approved of Trump while 47 percent disapproved. That is down from Trump’s first four weeks in office, when 55 percent said they approved of the president while 39 percent disapproved.
Russians' lawyer says new documents show Trump Tower meeting not about dirt on Clinton
(CNN)An attorney for the Russian billionaire who allegedly pushed for the June 2016 meeting between senior members of Trump's team and a Russian lawyer says he has documents showing the meeting wasn't really about dirt on Hillary Clinton.
An email exchange and talking points provided to CNN are the latest indication of how some of the meeting participants plan to make their case about why the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. did not amount to collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.
The new information stands in contrast with the initial email pitching the meeting to Trump Jr., which promised damaging information on Clinton.
The emails provided to CNN between Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and publicist Rob Goldstone -- who arranged the meeting with Trump Jr. -- show Veselnitskaya asked the morning of the meeting for a Russian-American lobbyist to be added because of his knowledge of the Magnitsky Act, the legislation that put in place US sanctions discussed at the meeting.
And a five-page talking points memo also provided to CNN shows Veselnitskaya's case to repeal the Magnitsky Act to improve US-Russia relations, with a passing reference to a possible financer of Clinton's campaign.
The June 2016 meeting with Trump Jr., President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has attracted intense interest because Trump Jr. was told he would get damaging information on Clinton amid allegations of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
The documents were provided by Scott Balber, who represents Aras and Emin Agalarov, the billionaire real estate developer and his pop star son who requested the June 2016 meeting.
Balber, who went to Moscow to obtain the documents from Veselnitskaya, said in an interview with CNN that the emails and talking points show she was focused on repealing the Magnitsky Act, not providing damaging information on Clinton.
Kakistocracy is a term that was first used in the 17th century; derived from a Greek word, it means, literally, government by the worst and most unscrupulous people among us. More broadly, it can mean the most inept and cringeworthy kind of government. The term fell into disuse over the past century or more, and most highly informed people have never heard it before (but to kids familiar with the word “kaka” it might resonate.)
As I wrote my new book with E.J. Dionne and Tom Mann, One Nation Under Trump, I kept returning to the term. Kakistocracy is back, and we are experiencing it firsthand in America. The unscrupulous element has come into sharp focus in recent weeks as a string of Trump Cabinet members and White House staffers have been caught spending staggering sums of taxpayer dollars to charter jets, at times to go small distances where cheap commercial transportation was readily available, at times to conveniently visit home areas or have lunch with family members. While Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign after his serial abuse, others—including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, remain in place.
In a gift to the struggling coal industry, a new air pollution rule finalized by the EPAwill allow Texas coal plants to emit almost twice as much sulfur dioxide than an earlier proposal by the Obama administration. Aside from being a key component in forming haze, sulfur dioxide exacerbates respiratory illnesses such as asthma and contributes to acid rain.
“The new proposal is a sham,” said Dan Cohan, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. “It does nothing. It sets a cap that’s higher than what those plants have been emitting for the past few years.”
For the last decade, hit by a double whammy of cheap natural gas and renewables and the cost of complying with air pollution rules, coal plants across the country have been shutting down. The Regional Haze Rule, which under the Obama administration required Texas to cut sulfur emissions by more than 55 percent — from about 218,500 tons a year to about 93,000 tons, costing utility companies $2 billion — could’ve been the final straw for many of the state’s aging and outdated coal plants.
The rule was issued in 1999 and required states to submit plans to improve visibility in national parks and wilderness areas by 2007. Texas was one of 34 states to miss the deadline and, last year, after the state proposed a plan that would have taken 141 years to achieve reasonable visibility in Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains national parks, the Obama EPA forced a plan on the state.
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