I/IV. http://www.vox.com/2017/4/30/15488350/donald-trump-pennsylvania-rally
What Trump didn’t tell his supporters about his first 100 days Updated by Alexia Fernández Campbell@[email protected] Apr 30, 2017, 1:30pm EDT [Video] President Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania Saturday night was a classic Trump campaign stop. He attacked the media, snarled about the Washington swamp, stoked fears about illegal immigrants, and promised a future in which “dying factories will come roaring back to life.” It also featured a special twist to mark Trump’s first 100 days in office: an alternative telling of his presidency so far, in which all of his policy plans are well on track. “What we’ve delivered is 100 days of action,” Trump told thousands of supporters at the Farm Show building in Harrisburg. There’s certainly been a lot of activity since Trump took office. The problem is, his actions haven’t yielded many results, or at least not the results he promised his supporters. As Vox reporters noted here, Trump has really only accomplished three of the 30 things he promised to do by Saturday. You wouldn’t have known that from the rally. Trump blamed his clear failures — like failing to repeal Obamacare, and get funding to start building the wall — on others. And he assured his backers he will win on those issues soon enough. “We’ll build a wall folks,” he said at one point, “don’t even worry about it.” Trump rates media’s performance Trump was clearly agitated about all the press coverage surrounding his first 100 days in office, with journalists pointing out how little he did that he said he would do. So he started his rally by belittling reporters, reminding his supporters that Washington journalists were busy cavorting in a ballroom with Hollywood celebrities at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “I could not possibly be more thrilled to be more than 100 miles away from the Washington swamp, spending my evening with all of you,” he said, adding that his rally had a “much, much larger crowd.” “If the media’s job is to be honest and tell the truth,” he added, “we would agree the media deserves a big fat failing grade.” Trump reminds everyone of all the action The truth, as Trump portrayed it, is that people are “exhausted” by all the action of his first 100 days. Often, he implied that his executive orders had made much larger impacts than they actually have, or that his policy plans are much farther along than they actually appear to be in Congress. For example, Trump talked up about his plan to provide “tax relief for the middle class and lower the business tax,” which he said would make “companies expand and companies come back into our country and companies not leave our country.” But Trump didn’t mention that his plan hasn’t even been drafted into a bill for members of Congress to vote on. He doesn’t mention that it’s a skeletal wish-list with no details about how Congress is supposed to offset the trillions of dollars in revenue that will be lost. Trump blames others, makes more promises Tax reform, at least, still lies ahead for Trump. But he has already suffered setbacks on major issues for his base, including his promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and to start building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Here, too, Trump offered his supporters a far rosier picture than the one that has emerged from Capitol Hill. Obamacare is so bad, Trump said, that it’s going to self destruct without his help. But even so, Trump promised that Republicans would pass a bill that lowered health insurance premiums and deductibles and still gave everyone access to affordable health care — even though there’s no evidence of such a bill existing. “We’re going to get that damn thing passed quickly,” he said. As for the border wall, Trump’s supporters didn't forget his promise to get started on it. At least three times during the evening they chanted “Build the wall! Build the wall!” Trump didn’t get enough Republican support to pass a supplemental spending bill that sets aside a few billion dollars to start building the wall — a fact he was quick to blame on Democrats. “If the Democrats knew what the hell they were doing, they would approve it so easy,” Trump said. “Obviously they don’t mind illegals coming in and they don’t mind drugs coming in.” He told his supporters to go home, go to sleep, and rest assured that he will build the wall. And he promised that he was on his way to Make America Great Again. II/IV. http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/28/15457946/trump-100-hundred-days-winners-losers 3 winners and 4 losers from Trump’s first 100 days Updated by Dylan Matthews@[email protected] Apr 28, 2017, 1:40pm EDT Trump’s first 100 days have seen him achieve a relatively small number of his stated goals. Sure, there have been some regulatory rollbacks, an immigration crackdown, and a Supreme Court confirmation. But otherwise Trump has endured court rulings frustrating his efforts to crack down on “sanctuary cities” and travel from Muslim countries, and has gotten next to nothing accomplished in Congress. That being said, the first 100 days definitely left some political actors better off than others. Here’s who finished the period better than they started it, and who took some hits. Winner: Obamacare Anti-Trump Activists March To Trump Tower In New York Kevin Hagen/Getty Images Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote on November 9, the day after the presidential election, predicting what Donald Trump and Paul Ryan would do to the Affordable Care Act with their newfound governing majority: There is now a governing majority capable of repealing Obamacare. All of it. Republicans will almost certainly control the Senate, and definitely control the House, and while the law took a filibuster-proof majority to pass, House Budget Committee Chair Tom Price has designed a bill that would repeal it but work through the budget reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority in the Senate. Price's bill would end the Medicaid expansion and repeal tax credits for low-income Americans. It would repeal the taxes used to finance the law and its mandate. This plan would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, cost 22 million people health insurance. There’s some reason to suspect the Republicans in Congress wouldn’t go full steam ahead. It’s hard to deny 22 million people health insurance without paying an electoral price for it. They could do the transition gradually, or phase out Medicaid expansion first, since Medicaid recipients are poor enough that they rarely vote for Republicans anyway. But after six years of Republican pledges to repeal and replace, it’s hard to imagine the first part of that equation not happening. Emphases mine. In retrospect, the only part of that assessment that really held up was the caveat. Here we are, 100 days into Trump’s presidency, and the odds of a meaningful repeal package passing Congress are barely higher than they were when Obama himself was president. This was clearest on March 24, the day that Ryan threw in the towel on his initial effort to pass the American Health Care Act, and the whole repeal effort appeared moribund. Now, the AHCA persists as a kind of zombie bill, with a current effort underway to get ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus members on board by making the bill even harsher, by letting states limit protections for people with preexisting conditions and get rid of requirements that insurance plans cover “essential health benefits.” But as my colleague Dylan Scott has noted, anything that gets the Freedom Caucus on board risks alienating less conservative House members in the Tuesday Group, who are extremely concerned that the legislation will cause thousands of their constituents to lose insurance. And sure enough, as soon as the Freedom Caucus concessions were announced, previously undecided House Republicans not in that Caucus started declaring their opposition. Even if the effort somehow makes its way through the House, it’s DOA in the Senate, where only three Republican no votes can sink the whole thing — and where some of the bill’s provisions could be subject to a 60 vote threshold, which Republicans will never meet in a million years. Having Trump as president is still unquestionably worse for the health of the law, especially the insurance marketplaces, than having Hillary Clinton in office would’ve been. The sheer uncertainty Trump has created about whether the law’s cost-sharing subsidies, which defray copays and deductible costs for low-income families, will continue has risked market chaos. But to paraphrase Joe Biden, Obamacare is alive and the American Health Care Act is (mostly) dead. That’s got to count as a win for the largest piece of American welfare state expansion since the 1960s. Winner: Big business Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin And National Economic Director Gary Cohn Brief The Media At The White House Mark Wilson/Getty Images Donald Trump famously promised in May 2016 to turn the Republican Party into a “workers’ party.” The implication was clear: Republican elites before him like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney prioritized deregulation for businesses and tax cuts for the rich, and offered little or nothing for working-class people, specifically working-class white people. Instead, the party relied on social issues like abortion and immigration to earn their votes. But Trump would be different. He wouldn’t be bought off by the globalists. He would defend Social Security and Medicare, crack down on trade, and wouldn’t be a toady of Wall Street like Crooked Hillary. Whoops. The first signs that this was just a lie came during the transition. Trump announced that he was literally handing over control of economic policy to Goldman Sachs — GS alums Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, to be precise. He also turned over his foreign policy to an oil executive, Rex Tillerson. But he also named staffers who challenged the conservative-libertarian economic consensus that Mnuchin and Cohn reflected. Most notably, there was Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, who as CEO of Breitbart laid out a comprehensive economic nationalist platform in strident opposition to the laissez-faire policies of Paul Ryan. As Julia Hahn, a Breitbart writer turned Bannon deputy at the White House, wrote in October, “The open borders, internationalist worldview of Clinton and Ryan stands diametrically opposed to the ‘America first’ agenda of Donald Trump.” Stephen Miller, the president’s chief policy adviser, is slightly more conventional in his economic views, but also called for a nationalistic reimagining of trade and immigration policy, agreeing with Bannon that legal immigration is the real problem. As the administration took office, the battle lines became clear. On one side were the nationalists: Bannon, Hahn, arguably Miller. On the other were what Bannon and his allies pejoratively termed the “globalists”: Cohn, Jared Kushner, Ivanka, the “New York gang.” And as my colleague Andrew Prokop has written, the New York gang appears to have decisively defeated the nationalists so far. The nationalists have gotten an immigration crackdown, that’s true (more on that later). But they wanted more than that. They wanted to either stay out of the Syrian conflict or back Assad. They wanted to pivot away from NATO and toward Putin's Russia, lessening sanctions on the latter. They wanted to crack down on foreign trade. And while they were basically fine with repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes, these aren't nearly as significant priorities for them as they are for the Mnuchin/Ryan wing of the party. And on foreign policy, and trade especially, the nationalists have been rejected. Bannon and trade advisor Peter Navarro wrote up a draft executive order withdrawing from NAFTA, only for billionaire Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and ultra-establishmentarian Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to, with help from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, persuade Trump to abandon the idea for now. Trump has gone back on his promise to label China a currency manipulator, a move which would have opened the door to trade tariffs. He did slap some tariffs on Canadian lumber, but then again so did George W. Bush. Meanwhile, the finance-connected wings of the administration seem to be setting the priorities. Mnuchin and Cohn are speeding ahead with a tax reform effort that is anything but worker-centered, and would in fact raise taxes on millions of working families so as to radically cut taxes on corporations and particularly owners of pass-through companies … like the Trump Organization’s subsidiaries. The White House is supporting congressional efforts to keep trying to repeal Obamacare’s taxes. And Trump issued executive orders seeking to dismantle key financial regulations and to make it easier for companies to move overseas to evade taxes. Whatever this is, it isn’t “economic nationalism,” and it’s not creating a “workers’ party.” It’s the kind of economic policy that big business has been craving for years, to the exclusion of the priorities of the Bannon wing. Winner: Jeff Sessions Attorney General Sessions Addresses Ethics And Compliance Initiative Conf. Mark Wilson/Getty Images It was lonely being Jeff Sessions for the past four years. He was a vocal proponent of cracking down on immigration, both legal and illegal, at a time when the Gang of Eight was trying to build Republican support for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship, and the party as a whole was becoming convinced that they needed to reach out to Latinx voters to have a chance in hell of winning again. He was also an old-school, tough-on-crime conservative as the right became more and more open to large-scale criminal justice reform, including reducing sentences for non-violent offenses, expanding the use of non-prison punishments, and cracking down on police abuses like civilian shootings and civil asset forfeiture. Hardcore conservatives like Ted Cruz were saying stuff like, “Too many young men, in particular African-American young men, find their lives drawn in with the criminal justice system, find themselves subject to sentences of many decades for relatively minor non-violent drug infractions.” Rand Paul made ending mass incarceration the centerpiece of his presidential bid. And then along came Donald Trump. He was an unapologetic demagogue on immigration who launched his presidential campaign by declaring that Mexico was sending rapists across the border. His rhetoric on crime evokes some strange combination of 1980s New York Post headlines and Escape from New York. It’s no surprise that Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump in the primaries, and appeared with him at a campaign event as early as August 2015. Once Trump, against all odds, took the White House, Sessions’s moment had finally arrived. Criminal justice and immigration enforcement are obviously issues in which the legislature has input, but prosecutorial discretion means that executive agencies have a lot of power. Lucky for him, Trump was willing to make him attorney general, giving him sweeping authority over both issues. And while Sessions’s former aide and close ideological ally Stephen Miller has stumbled at times — like during the botched rollout of the Muslim country travel ban, where Miller’s own press statements helped the effort get blocked in court — Sessions has nonetheless come to totally dominate criminal justice and immigration policy in the Trump years. Since Trump and Sessions took over, border apprehensions have dramatically plummeted as immigrants avoided crossing in fear of the new administration. Overall immigration arrests have spiked. The administration adopted a new policy of arresting immigrants at courthouses, including immigrants there to file restraining orders. And while both the travel ban and an executive order targeting “sanctuary cities” got held up in court, the administration’s effort to review and potentially crack down on H1-B visas for high-skilled workers was not. Same goes for criminal justice policy. Sessions ordered a sweeping review of all "consent decrees" — agreements between the federal government and local police departments to make the departments enforce civil rights laws and avoid brutality and discrimination — and said that they "reduce morale of the police officers." He reauthorized the use of private prisons and closed a commission meant to ensure prosecutors don’t use junk science in prosecutions. He is slowly but surely trying to roll back much of the progress made under Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch and to avoid all but the most cursory federal oversight of police departments that brutalize black communities and violate civil rights. In other words, he’s getting exactly what he wanted on the two issues closest to his heart. Loser: Donald Trump President Trump Signs Aluminum Imports Memorandum At The White House A “Memorandum on Aluminum Imports and Threats to National Security” - nice. Olivier Douliery - Pool/Getty Images Donald Trump does not, it appears, care all that much about getting policy goals accomplished. His borderline indifference to health reform was startling to witness. He’s even been remarkably disengaged on tax reform, where he stands to gain millions of dollars by giving himself tax cuts. But he does care about being popular. Oh boy, does he care. As just the latest example, consider this anecdote from a Friday piece in Reuters: More than five months after his victory and two days shy of the 100-day mark of his presidency, the election is still on Trump's mind. Midway through a discussion about Chinese President Xi Jinping, the president paused to hand out copies of what he said were the latest figures from the 2016 electoral map. "Here, you can take that, that's the final map of the numbers," the Republican president said from his desk in the Oval Office, handing out maps of the United States with areas he won marked in red. "It’s pretty good, right? The red is obviously us." George W. Bush did a lot of stuff wrong — really, really wrong — but he did not spend four years constantly radiating insecurity about having lost the popular vote. Trump’s first 100 days, by contrast, have featured the president and his aides again and again denying that he lost the popular vote, exaggerating the extent of his Electoral College victory, and generally convincing the American people that his skin is a nanometer deep and that hearing he’s not the most popular man in the world will cause him to crawl into the fetal position under his desk and not leave for hours. So let’s evaluate Trump by his own standard: popularity. Follow Brian Klaas ✔ @brianklaas Approval at 100 days (Gallup) JFK: 83% Nixon: 62% Carter: 63% Reagan: 68% Bush: 56% Clinton: 55% W Bush: 62% Obama: 65% Trump yesterday: 39% 10:22 AM - 28 Apr 2017 15,839 15,839 Retweets 21,327 21,327 likes And keep in mind, all of these other presidents (save for the Bushes’ post-Gulf War and post-9/11 surges, respectively) saw their approval ratings drop further as their terms progressed and they made more and more unpopular decisions. Trump will be very lucky to be at 39 percent by the time of the midterms next November, and even if he is, he’ll likely face devastating House losses of the kind that Obama experienced in 2010 and Bush did in 2006. It’s true that Trump is probably making money hand over fist by being president. And that surely gives him some joy. But at the end of the day, he just wants to be liked. And he really, really isn’t. Loser: Vladimir Putin Russian President Putin Attends Russian-Japanese Business Dialogue In Tokyo “My only friend … everyone I know goes away, in the end.” Ma Ping - Pool/Getty Images Vladimir Putin had some clear goals when he intervened in the US presidential election. He saw in Hillary Clinton someone eager to intervene against Russian interests in Syria, who’d take a tough line on further incursions into Ukrainian territory, and who was committed to maintaining sanctions against Russia to keep the pressure on. And he saw in Trump someone willing to make radical changes: someone who’d praised him repeatedly, who was critical of NATO, who seemed comfortable with Bashar al-Assad’s butchery and willing to consider a pivot to his side, who’d back Russia up at the UN and recognize its conquest of Crimea, and who’d lift sanctions. Well, Putin’s intervention worked. Trump got elected. And it’s hard to see what policies he’s won in the process. Trump didn’t cozy up to Assad; he bombed Assad. When Exxon asked for a waiver so they could drill for oil in Russia, the Trump administration turned them down. Trump declared that Crimea had been “taken” by Putin. America’s financial contributions and treaty commitments to NATO are unchanged. The sanctions have not been lifted. US troops are still in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — whose past working on oil deals with Putin might have given Russia hope — said that Russia’s election hacking was “serious issue, one serious enough to attract additional sanctions.” It’s still early going. But so far, Putin has gotten very little in the way of actual policy changes from the Trump administration. It’s enough to make you wonder if it was worth hijacking another country’s election in the first place. Loser: Immigrants Customs And Border Protection Patrols U.S. Border As Illegal Crossings Plummet Migrants about to be deported back to Mexico. John Moore/Getty Images If you want to get a sense of the psychic toll that Trump's presidency has already taken on immigrant communities, I encourage to read this feature by Vox's Dara Lind on how a Latino community in Austin, Texas, is coping. Many stayed in their homes for weeks out of fear (unfounded fear, as it turned out) of roadside checks by ICE agents. Victims of domestic abuse expressed fear of coming forward, which is understandable given the new "courthouse arrest" policy of the Trump administration. In February, the community faced ICE raids, which one Texas judge says ICE told him was meant as punishment for the city's liberal immigration policies. While Bush and Obama had conducted raids in Austin too, Lind writes, "the fear triggered by the January 2016 raids was nothing compared with the current panic." The nature of the Trump administration, and the fact that its raids often happen in public, has created a climate of fear and uncertainty that paralyzes millions of undocumented Americans. Making matters worse is the administration’s clear message that no one is safe — even at least one DREAMer who came here when he was 9 and got explicit protection under the Obama administration has been deported. The damage done by the administration is both direct and indirect. There are the direct deportations, which were cruel and harmful when Obama did them too but which Trump’s increased immigration arrests signal he’ll ramp up. Then there’s the climate of fear, which has increased with the uncertainty over whether Trump will continue Obama’s deportation protection programs, and due to his overall rhetoric of fate and fear and venom directed at immigrant communities. But there’s also profound damage done through the sense that all the pain of the Trump years was intended, that it was something that immigrants’ native-born neighbors and countrymen in fact voted for and welcomed. They endorsed a candidate who promised all this and delivered, and many if not most of them did so because of his unusually anti-immigrant message. Undocumented immigrants have gotten a clear signal that their president hates them. But they’ve gotten a signal that their country hates them too. Loser: The global poor Girls read an educational book at an adolescent youth center in Uganda. Low contraceptive usage has fueled fertility, with 59 percent of girls in Uganda pregnant by the age of 20. Girls read an educational book at an adolescent youth center in Uganda. Low contraceptive usage has fueled fertility, with 59 percent of girls in Uganda pregnant by the age of 20. Neil Thomas/Corbis via Getty Images One of Trump’s most underrated horrifying policy decisions was his reimposing of the “global gag rule.” At this point, it’s kind of a tradition for Republican presidents to issue executive orders banning federal funds from going to foreign family planning organizations that provide information on abortion. Republicans put it in place when they take office, Democrats repeal it upon their inauguration, then Republicans put it in again, and so on and so forth. So it wasn’t surprising that Trump issued an executive order on this. The actual content of the order, however, was shocking. A my colleague Sarah Wildman explained, the policy historical has only applied to organizations receiving family planning funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). That's bad — the rule actually increases abortions, including unsafe ones that kill women — but it limited the impact to a budget of about $608 million annually. Trump, however, expanded the rule to include all global health spending, including from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Peace Corps, even PEPFAR, America's enormously successful anti-HIV/AIDS program launched by George W. Bush. That totals $9.5 billion every single year. The humanitarian toll this will cause should not be underestimated. It could force PEPFAR to individually ask hundreds or thousands of clinics if they’ve ever referred people for abortions, and to deny money for live-saving HIV drugs to clinics that answer in the affirmative. Scott Evertz, Bush's director of the Office of National AIDS Policy, told Slate's Michelle Goldberg, "It would have been impossible to treat HIV/AIDS in the developing world as the emergency that PEPFAR said it was if the global gag rule were to be applied to the thousands of organizations with which those of us involved in PEPFAR would be working." And this appears to only be the beginning of Trump’s assault on the global poor. Foreign Policy obtained a draft document from Trump’s budget team proposing sweeping cuts to USAID, including a 25 percent cut to global health programs. "That will end the technical expertise of USAID, and in my view, it will be an unmitigated disaster for the longer term," Andrew Natsios, who led USAID under Bush, told Foreign Policy. "What you’re basically doing is eviscerating the most important tool of American influence in the developing world, which is our development program." Tom Kenyon at the global health group Project Hope added, "There's just no question people would die from this." It's likely that this, like many of Trump's budget cuts, will face strong opposition in Congress, but even if a small fraction of these cuts go through the results would be lethal. Trump’s policies on immigration and climate change are also affronts to the global poor. There is no single policy that the United States could adopt that would do more good for more people than expanding access to low-skilled immigration. An average Nigerian worker can increase his income almost 15-fold just by moving to the United States, and residents of significantly richer countries like Mexico can more than double their earnings. By acting to reduce the number of people from poorer countries who can live and work in the US, Trump is actively working to increase global poverty. And by rolling back Obama-era climate mitigation measures, Trump is accelerating a global process whose effects on extreme weather and sea level rise are almost certain to hurt residents of poor countries more than those of rich countries (and in some cases already are). The Netherlands can afford to build dykes and sea walls to defend itself from the rising ocean. Bangladesh cannot. By fighting climate regulation, Trump isn’t just helping to doom the planet, he’s specifically hurting the most vulnerable people on earth. III/IV. http://www.news18.com/news/world/india-contributing-nothing-to-one-sided-paris-climate-deal-says-donald-trump-1388051.html India Contributing Nothing to One-sided Paris Climate Deal, Says Donald Trump News18.com Updated: May 1, 2017, 7:32 AM IS Washington: US President Donald Trump has said India, Russia and China are contributing “nothing” to the “one-sided” Paris climate deal and promised to make a "big decision" on the agreement. He said the US was being unfairly targeted by asking to pay money. "I will be making a big decision on the Paris accord over the next two weeks and we will see what happens," he said in a speech to mark the first 100 days of his presidency in Pennsylvania, a state that helped tip the election in his favour. "...like the one-sided Paris climate accord. Where the US pays billions of dollars (for the Paris Climate Accord) while China, Russia, and India have contributed (to pollution) and will contribute nothing," Trump alleged as the audience booed to the Paris Agreement. The Paris climate deal within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 2015 by 194 countries and ratified by 143. It aims to hold the increase in average global temperature to below 2 degrees above pre-industrial level by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. ALSO READ | 'Indian-American Muslim Kid' Hasan Minhaj Defies Orders to Roast Trump PTI reported that Trump claimed that it is estimated that for compliance with the agreement could ultimately shrink America's GDP by $2.5 trillion over a 10-year period. "That means factories and plants closing all over our country," he said and alleged that the Washington’s “dishonest” media would not report because it is part of the problem. "Their priorities are not my priorities, and they are not your priorities, believe me," he said. ALSO READ | '100 days of Trump Admin Show Positive Trend for Indo-US Ties' "They are all part of a broken system that has profited from this global theft and plunder of American wealth at the expense of the American worker. We are not going to let other countries take advantage of us anymore because, from now on, it is going to be America first," Trump said. (With PTI inputs) IV. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/indian-american-muslim-comedian-roasts-trump-as-fan-base-toasts-him/articleshow/58445681.cms Indian-American Muslim comedian roasts Trump as fan base toasts him Chidanand Rajghatta | TNN | Apr 30, 2017, 05.45 PM IST WASHINGTON: Only in America can a first-generation Indian-American Muslim kid get on this stage and make fun of the US President. It was a line delivered more in wonderment and admiration for America and its First Amendment than as a joke by Hasan Minhaj, son of Indian immigrants from Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, as he roasted Donald Trump at the White House Correspondent's Association dinner, a Washington tradition where the President takes it on the chin and gets to land a few on his critic. Trump was not present, because, as Minhaj said only half-in-jest, "he can't take a joke." Minhaj's own joke, involving Putin, went: "The leader of our country is not here. And that's because he's in Moscow. As for the other guy, I think he's in Pennsylvania because he can't take a joke." Speaking for himself, Minhaj said he was chosen to deliver the year's WHCA dinner address because "No one wanted to do this, so of course it lands in the hands of an immigrant." Assigning a significant section of his 25-minute act to skewering the Trump administration and the President's aides, Minhaj termed the present moment the "Golden Age of Lying" and called President Trump the "Liar-in-chief." He mocked Trump's purported war-mongering, his apparent penchant for golf and lack of attention to serious issues, and his odd media habits. "He tweets at 3am... sober. Who is tweeting at 3am sober? Donald Trump, because it's 10am in Russia. Those are business hours!" went one of the more sulphurous jibes. The media wasn't spared either. On MSNBC's breathless promotion of its Trump tax scoop: "I have one quick request. MSNBC, please tell Rachel Maddow to chill about Trump's tax returns. There's not going to be a line item in there saying 'bribes from Russia'." And on CNN's hyping of trivial events to "breaking news": "I'm not going to call you fake news, but everything isn't breaking news. You can't go to DEFCON One just because Sanjay Gupta found a new moisturiser." Reflecting only half-in-jest about the credibility crisis afflicting the media, Minhaj observed: "I don't have a solution on how to win back trust. But in the age of Trump, I know that you have to be more perfect now than ever. Because you are how the president gets his news. Not from advisers. Not from intelligence agencies. You guys." The San Francisco-born Minhaj rounded off his shtick by predicting that "It's 11pm, so in three hours the President will be tweeting about how bad Nicki Minaj bombed at this dinner." Wrong. Trump lit into the WHCA dinner even before Minhaj's jokes. In remarks to his adoring fan base in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the US President spent ridiculed the event and the media, saying he could not possibly be more thrilled to be more than 100 miles away from "Washington's swamp." Elite reporters, he claimed, would "love to be with us" but were trapped at the dinner, which will be "very, very boring," adding that the political media "deserves a very, very big, fat failing grade" for its coverage of his first 100 days. In Washington about a 100 miles away, Minhaj counted days left of the current Trump administration, saying, "We're 100 days in, 1,360 days to go." Best of Hasan Minhaj jokes "Who would have thought that with everything going on in the country now, that a Muslim would be standing on this stage, for the 9th year in a row." -- a reference to President Obama attending the event for eight years amid right-wing rumors that he is a Muslim "Let the man putt putt! It keeps him distracted. Tell him he has a great body for bobsledding. The longer you keep him distracted, the longer we're not at war with North Korea!" -- On Trump's purported war-mongering. "I've been watching House of Cards just to relax. Oh, a vice president pushes a journalist in front of a train? How quaint." "Mike Pence isn't here. Apparently one of you ladies is ovulating. Good job, ladies. Because of you we couldn't hang out with Mike Pence." -- on Pence's comment that he would not eat a meal with any woman who is not his wife. On Ivanka Trump: "If she was here, I would ask the question we're all thinking. Why? Why do you support this man? We all love our parents, but we wouldn't endorse them for president. My dad? The guy who tries to return underwear to Costco? No!" Latest Comment I hope this pig crack jokes on his own community one day, if he has guts and if he is not a supporter of his religion's barbaric practicees. I doubt Prashant Gopal Badve "This has been one of the strangest events of my life. If this goes poorly, Steve Bannon gets to eat me." "It's 11pm, so in three hours he will be tweeting about how bad Nicki Minaj bombed at this dinner. He'll be doing it completely sober." -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
