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June
6, 2017
By Joe Kloc
U.S.
president Donald Trump, whose golf course in
Ireland once requested permission from local
authorities to build a wall to protect against
sea-level rise, pulled out of the Paris climate
agreement; defended the decision by saying he was
elected not by Paris but by Pittsburgh, a city he
lost in 2016; and proclaimed June to be National
Ocean Month. White House press secretary Sean
Spicer said that Trump was the "best messenger"
for his administration, and a poll found that 61
percent of Americans think Trump hurts his
administration when he speaks. Trump asked his
Twitter followers to figure out the "true meaning"
of a word he invented as part of a sentence
fragment he tweeted the previous night, Trump's
communications director resigned, four candidates
asked to fill the job opening told the White House
they did not want to be considered, and other
potential candidates equated the job to "career
suicide" and "a horrific bungee-jumping accident."
One White House official issued a statement saying
that Trump had a "magnetic personality" and
"exuded positive energy," and another White House
official told a reporter that Trump had become
"glum," gained weight, trusted no one, and "now
lives within himself." Trump's son-in-law, Jared
Kushner, who is currently a person of interest in
the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign for
allegedly attempting to establish a secret
communication channel between the Trump
Administration and the Kremlin, was reported to
have met in December with Sergey Gorkov, a former
FSB classmate of Russian president Vladimir Putin,
who later appointed Gorkov as head of the
state-owned VneshEconomBank, which was sanctioned
by the United States and later the European Union
in 2014. The White House said the meeting between
Gorkov and Kushner covered diplomatic issues, and
Gorkov said it was a business meeting. Trump
tweeted a news story claiming that anonymous
sources say Kushner did not attempt to set up
communications with Russia, and Trump also tweeted
that it is "very possible" stories citing
anonymous sources are "made up." A Republican
congressman from Nebraska refused to say whether
people were "entitled to eat," Veteran's Affairs
secretary David Shulkin said the aim of reducing
the number of homeless veterans to zero was not
"the right goal," and a Gallup poll found that
more than half of those living in military
communities in the United State now disapprove of
Trump, who once compared his efforts to avoid
sexually transmitted diseases to those of "a
soldier going over to Vietnam." Three men in
London drove a van into a crowd, exited the
vehicle, and attacked patrons of a nearby market,
killing seven people; and Trump tweeted in
response to the attack that it was time to "get
down to business" and then went golfing for the
23rd time since he took office. A Democrat in Iowa
withdrew from a race for a seat in the U.S. House
of Representatives because she had received death
threats, and a Republican state representative in
Texas threatened to shoot his Democratic
colleague. A G.O.P. county chair in Oregon
recommended that Republicans employ private
militias, and a former Trump campaign official was
sentenced to seven years in prison for organizing
an armed militia to aid in a standoff against the
U.S. government. A conservative radio host called
for "a more violent Christianity," a noose was
found at the National Museum of African-American
History and Culture, a white man in California
shouted racial slurs at a black man and then
attacked him with a machete, a white man shouting
racial slurs ran over two members of the Quinalt
tribe with a monster truck, and a white man riding
a Portland train drank sangria while shouting
racist slurs at a woman wearing hijab, then
stabbed to death two people who attempted to
intervene. "I'm sorry the world is so cruel," said
a bystander to one of the dying
men. |
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