President Donald Trump skipped a session devoted to climate change at the G7 summit here, a snub aides wrote off as a scheduling conflict but nonetheless reflects Trump’s isolation on the issue.
As other leaders were taking their seats around a large round table, the chair reserved for Trump sat empty. The summit’s host, French President Emmanuel Macron, gaveled the meeting to order anyway and launched into an explanation of a wrist watch made from recycled plastic.
Later, the White House said Trump’s schedule prevented his attendance.
“The President had scheduled meetings and bilaterals with Germany and India, so a senior member of the Administration attended in his stead,” press secretary Stephanie Grisham said.
But the leaders of both those countries — German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — were both seen attending, at least for the start of the session.
An official said the staffer who replaced Trump worked for the National Security Council.
Speaking afterward, Macron seemed to shrug off Trump’s absence.
“He wasn’t in the room, but his team was,” Macron said at a news conference. He urged reporters not to read too much into Trump’s decision to skip the session, insisting the US is aligned with the rest of the G7 on issues of biodiversity and combating fires in the Amazon rainforest.
Still, Macron acknowledged Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord — a move that angered European nations, who remain part of the pact. Macron said it was no longer his goal to convince Trump to return to the agreement.
In the lead-up to the G7, Trump’s aides said he wasn’t entirely interested in the climate portions of the summit, believing them a waste of time compared to discussion of the economy.
After past G7s, Trump complained that too much time was spent on issues he deemed unimportant, like clearing oceans of plastics.
But Macron made climate one of the main focuses of this year’s gathering anyway, scheduling the session on Monday and insisting the leaders address the Amazon fires.
That was bound to create divisions between Trump and the other leaders. Trump has loosened environmental regulations in the United States, even as he claims that water and air are at their cleanest levels ever.
President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president’s private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.
Behind the scenes: During
one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, “I got it. I got
it. Why don’t we nuke them?” according to one source who was there.
“They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across
the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it
disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?” the source added, paraphrasing the
president’s remarks.
Asked how the briefer reacted, the source recalled he said something to the effect of, “Sir, we’ll look into that.”
Trump
replied by asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could
handle and reiterating his suggestion that the government intervene
before they make landfall.
The
briefer “was knocked back on his heels,” the source in the room added.
“You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished.
After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with
this?'”
Trump also
raised the idea in another conversation with a senior administration
official. A 2017 NSC memo describes that second conversation, in which
Trump asked whether the administration should bomb hurricanes to stop
them from hitting the homeland. A source briefed on the NSC memo said it
does not contain the word “nuclear”; it just says the president talked
about bombing hurricanes.
The
source added that this NSC memo captured “multiple topics, not just
hurricanes. … It wasn’t that somebody was so terrified of the bombing
idea that they wrote it down. They just captured the president’s
comments.”
The sources said that
Trump’s “bomb the hurricanes” idea — which he floated early in the first
year and a bit of his presidency before John Bolton took over as
national security adviser — went nowhere and never entered a formal
policy process.
White House response:
A senior administration official said, “We don’t comment on private
discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national
security team.”
A different senior administration official,
who has been briefed on the president’s hurricane bombing suggestion,
defended Trump’s idea and said it was no cause for alarm. “His goal — to
keep a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland — is not bad,”
the official said. “His objective is not bad.”
“What
people near the president do is they say ‘I love a president who asks
questions like that, who’s willing to ask tough questions.’ … It takes
strong people to respond to him in the right way when stuff like this
comes up. For me, alarm bells weren’t going off when I heard about it,
but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into ‘the
president is crazy’ narrative.”
The big picture:
Trump didn’t invent this idea. The notion that detonating a nuclear
bomb over the eye of a hurricane could be used to counteract convection
currents dates to the Eisenhower era, when it was floated by a
government scientist.
The idea
keeps resurfacing in the public even though scientists agree it won’t
work. The myth has been so persistent that the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. government agency that predicts
changes in weather and the oceans, published an online fact sheet for the public under the heading “Tropical Cyclone Myths Page.”
The
page states: “Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the
storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive
fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land
areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say,
this is not a good idea.”
About 3 weeks after Trump’s 2016 election, National Geographic published an article titled, “Nuking Hurricanes: The Surprising History of a Really Bad Idea.” It found, among other problems, that:
Dropping
a nuclear bomb into a hurricane would be banned under the terms of the
Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty between the U.S. and the former
Soviet Union. So that could stave off any experiments, as long as the
U.S. observes the terms of the treaty.
The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required. A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20×1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.
If we think about mechanical energy, the energy at humanity’s
disposal is closer to the storm’s, but the task of focusing even
half of the energy on a spot in the middle of a remote ocean
would still be formidable. Brute force interference with
hurricanes doesn’t seem promising.
In addition, an explosive, even a nuclear explosive, produces a
shock wave, or pulse of high pressure, that propagates away from
the site of the explosion somewhat faster than the speed of
sound. Such an event doesn’t raise the barometric pressure after
the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the
atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground. For
normal atmospheric pressure, there are about ten metric tons
(1000 kilograms per ton) of air bearing down on each square
meter of surface. In the strongest hurricanes there are nine. To
change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you
would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter
inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion
(500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It’s difficult to
envision a practical way of moving that much air around.
Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a
chance to grow into hurricanes isn’t promising either. About 80
of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but
only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year. There is no
way to tell in advance which ones will develop. If the energy
released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released
in a hurricane, it’s still a lot of power, so that the hurricane
police would need to dim the whole world’s lights many times a
year.
President Donald Trump defended calling himself “the chosen one” in a set of tweets Saturday, explaining that he and the reporters present at the press gaggle understood he was joking.
“When I looked up to the sky and jokingly said ‘I am the chosen one,’ at a press conference two days ago, referring to taking on Trade with China, little did I realize that the media would claim that I had a ‘Messiah complex,’” Trump wrote. “They knew I was kidding, being sarcastic, and just … having fun.”
“I was smiling as I looked up and around,” he continued. “The MANY reporters with me were smiling also. They knew the TRUTH…And yet when I saw the reporting, CNN, MSNBC and other Fake News outlets covered it as serious news & me thinking of myself as the Messiah. No more trust!”
When I looked up to the sky and jokingly said “I am the chosen one,” at a press conference two days ago, referring to taking on Trade with China, little did I realize that the media would claim that I had a “Messiah complex.” They knew I was kidding, being sarcastic, and just….
….having fun. I was smiling as I looked up and around. The MANY reporters with me were smiling also. They knew the TRUTH…And yet when I saw the reporting, CNN, MSNBC and other Fake News outlets covered it as serious news & me thinking of myself as the Messiah. No more trust!
Trump called himself “the chosen one” and looked up at the sky on Wednesday as he spoke to reporters about trade and China, leading some pundits to accuse the president of having a messiah complex.
Trump defended the comments to reporters on Friday night.
“Let me tell you, you know exactly what I meant,” Trump said. “It was sarcasm. It was joking. We were all smiling. And the question like that is just fake news. You’re just a faker.”
On Friday, Trump announced he would raise tariffs on China by 5 percent in response to the country’s retaliatory tariffs on the United States.
The media freaked out over Trump’s “chosen on” comment because he knows his large evangelical base has called him chosen by God.
Want to see a perfect example of a “dog whistle”?
Donald Trump defended his ridiculous comments he was “God’s Chosen One” as nothing more than sarcasm, and actually we’re the ones who think he has a Messiah complex.
But actually this is not true.
It’s very well documented American evangelicals, such as Vice President Mike Pence, truly believe Donald Trump is divinely chosen, anywhere in a range from “an imperfect vessel of God” to Jesus himself reincarnated.
From common comparisons to the Biblical King Cyrus:
Trump’s “Christian policy liaison” preached that God told him personally that Trump would win the GOP nomination and help pave the way for the Second Coming:
The president of Godfactor said “God was speaking through Trump,” to motivate Christians to defend their ability to discriminate against gay people and minorities:
Televangelist James Robinson screamed at attendees of the Liberty Council’s “Awakening” conference to vote for Trump, comparing him to the disciple Paul:
Trunews evangelical host Rick Wiles told his listeners while broadcasting at a Trump rally, “God has picked him up and used him as a battering ram to beat down the walls of the New World Order”
The fact is Trump knows making insane comments about him being anointed by God will motivate his base because virtually all of the people listed above Trump has placed on religious White House advisory panels and have been inside the Oval Office.
Lewis Ziska, one of the United States’ leading climate-change scientists, has quit the USDA’s Agriculture Department and says he’s protesting the Trump administration’s attempts to bury one of his studies. The study, which was published in Science Advances, was about how rice loses nutrients to the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere—which has implications for the 600 million people who depend on rice for most of their calories. Ziska, who’s worked at the USDA for 20 years, says the Trump administration questioned the findings of his study and attempted to minimize its press coverage. “This was a joint decision by ARS national program leaders—all career scientists—not to send out a press release on this paper,” a statement released by the USDA said in response to Ziska’s complaint.
Several government employees recently reported that they’d lost their jobs over climate-change disagreements and a Politico investigation showed that the USDA regularly buried its own climate-research discoveries. “You get the sense that things have changed, that this is not a place for you to be exploring things that don’t agree with someone’s political views,” Ziska said.
President Donald Trump gushed over himself during a freewheeling press spray on Wednesday, insisting that victims of mass shootings adore him.
“I went to the hospitals,” Trump said when asked about his recent visits to hospitals in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio following two massacres that left 31 dead. Trump then made bizarre remarks on the victims, complaining that there was no media coverage of their adulation for him:
“The people that were so badly injured that I was with, they love our country. And frankly, do you want to know the truth? They love their president. And nobody wrote that. Nobody wrote that. Because you didn’t write the truth. New York Times doesn’t like to write the truth. They totally love our country and they do love our president. So when I went to Dayton, when I went to El Paso, and when I went into those hospitals, the love for me, and me maybe as a representative of the country, but for me, and my love for them, was unparalleled. If you read the papers, it was like nobody would meet with me. Not only did they meet with me, they were pouring out of the rooms. The doctors were coming out of the operating rooms. There were hundreds and hundreds of people all over the floor, you couldn’t even walk on it.”
President Trump on Wednesday said his administration is once again seriously considering an executive order to end birthright citizenship months after several lawmakers cast doubt on his ability to take such action.
“We’re looking at that very seriously,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House for Kentucky. “Birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land — walk over the border, have a baby, congratulations, the baby’s now a U.S. citizen.”
“We are looking at birthright citizenship very seriously,” he added. “It’s, frankly, ridiculous.”
The president proposed ending the practice that grants citizenship to those born in the United States during his 2016 presidential campaign. He revived the idea last year, saying he would sign an executive order to enact the change.
Numerous lawmakers, including several Republicans, quickly pushed back on the idea and argued Trump lacked the authority to make such a change using an executive order. They cited that birthright citizenship is a right enshrined under the 14th Amendment.
Trump responded to the criticism by saying birthright citizenship would be ended “one way or another.”
The president has sought various ways to crack down on illegal and legal immigration throughout his presidency.
His administration enacted and later reversed a “zero tolerance” policy that led to the separation of thousands of migrant families; Trump has sought changes to asylum laws to keep refugees in Mexico while they wait to be processed; and the White House last week rolled out a rule that would make it more difficult for some immigrants to obtain green cards.
The Trump administration announced earlier Wednesday it would unveil a new rule that would allow migrant families to be held indefinitely, ending a procedure known as the Flores Settlement Agreement that requires children to be held no longer than 20 days.
President Donald Trump claimed “I am the chosen one” in attempting to tell reporters he will resolve an ongoing trade war with China that could potentially lead to a recession.
“The fake news of which many of you are members is trying to convince the public to have a recession. “Let’s have a recession!” the United States is doing phenomenally well. One thing I have to do is economically take on China. Because China has been ripping us off for many years,” Trump told reporters at the White House Wednesday.
“This isn’t my trade war, this is a trade war that should have taken place a long time ago, by a lot of other presidents. Over the last five or six years, China has made $500 billion. $500 billion. Ripped it out of the United States. Not only that — if you take a look, intellectual property theft. Add that to it. And at a lot of other things to it. Excuse me. Somebody had to do it. I am the chosen one. Somebody had to do it.”
“I’m taking on China on trade,” Trump said. “We are winning. We are the piggy bank. We are the ones the European Union wants to rob and take advantage of. The European Union, $200 billion. China, more than $500 billion. Sorry, I was put here by people to do a great job. And that’s what I’m doing. Nobody has done a job like I’ve done.”
President Trump doubled down Wednesday on his assertion that Democratic voters are being “disloyal” to Jewish people and Israel.
“In
my opinion, if you vote for a Democrat you’re being very disloyal to
Jewish people and you’re being very disloyal to Israel. And only weak
people would say anything other than that,” Trump told reporters as he
left the White House for a speech in Kentucky.
“The Democrats have gone very far away from Israel,” he added. Trump on Tuesday said Jews who vote for Democrats either “lack knowledge” or show “great disloyalty.” The comment came as he railed against Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar
(D-Minn.), who have been critical of the U.S.-Israel alliance. The
president questioned how the Democratic Party could defend them and
their views on Israel. Jewish
groups and Democratic lawmakers swiftly condemned Trump’s remarks as
anti-Semitic for questioning the loyalty of Jewish people in the United
States. Multiple exit polls after the 2016 election showed that more
than 70 percent of Jewish voters voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. It
wasn’t clear from Trump’s original remarks to whom he believed Jewish
Democratic voters were being loyal. Charging Jewish people with
disloyalty to the United States or having dual loyalty to Israel is an
anti-Semitic trope. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, tweeted Wednesday that Trump was “referring to disloyalty to Israel.”
Trump Accuses Jewish Democrats of ‘Great Disloyalty’ – The New York Times. This is routine for NYT and J St. But really disappointed a rep of ADL would feign confusion about @realDonaldTrump’s statement. POTUS is referring to disloyalty to Israel. https://t.co/XZ4775RyEP
Earlier on Wednesday, Trump quoted a right-wing conspiracy theorist
who said on a Newsmax show that Israeli Jews view the president like
the “second coming of God” and that American Jews who don’t support him
“don’t even know what they’re doing.” The
president has made support for Israel, including moving the U.S. Embassy
to Jerusalem and recognizing the country’s claim over the Golan
Heights, a centerpiece of his foreign policy. But his rhetoric
chastising Jewish people over their political leanings is likely to
inflame those groups and energize his opponents. “I have been responsible for a lot of great things for Israel,” Trump said as he left the White House.
President Donald Trump has vowed multiple times over the past two-and-a-half years to unveil his own replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act, but so far no actual plan has come to light.
As noted by CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, Trump was asked by a reporter in New Hampshire this week to describe his health care plan, and the president responded with a stream of gobbledygook.
“So, we have a great plan coming out,” the president began when asked about his plan. “It’s going to be — if we can take back the House because we’re not going to get the Democrats to vote for it, because they’re doing Medicare for all, which is going to take away your freedom, take away your doctors, take away everything that you should be able to have, and most importantly, it’s going to take away — we have 180 million people right now that have private insurance and they love it, and all of that’s going to be taken away. It’s absolute craziness.”
Instead of talking about his own health care plan, the president then proceeded to make false statements about Medicare for All.
“On top of everything else, they’re looking at 80, 90, 95 percent tax, because there’s no — there’s no way they can afford it,” he said. “But people don’t want to go to a hospital, to go to a doctor. They don’t want to go. They want to have their own doctor, number one, and we went through this with Obamacare, which we got rid of the individual mandate, by the way, which is very important.”
After all this, the president finally pivoted back to talking about his own health care plan, but he offered zero details about what it would contain.
“But we have a great health care plan,” he said. “If we get the House, we hold the Senate, we keep the presidency, we’re going to have great health care, much better than Obamacare, at much less cost.”
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump noted that his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, had wanted Russia out of what used to be the G8 “because Putin outsmarted him”.
“But I think it’s much more appropriate to have Russia in. It should be the G8 because a lot of the things we talk about have to do with Russia,” Trump said, just days before a G7 summit — minus Russia — in Biarritz, France.
Trump added, “I could certainly see it being the G8 again. If someone would make that motion, I would be disposed to think about it favourably…. “They should let Russia come back in, because we should have Russia at the negotiating table.”
Russia pushed out after Crimea
Russia was pushed out of the G8 in 2014 because of its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
It was not the first time Trump has floated the idea of Russia getting back together with the G7, which groups the United States, Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Italy and Canada.
TRUMP again calls for Russia to rejoin the G7:
“For most of the time it was the G8, it included Russia, and President Obama didn’t want Russia in because he got outsmarted. Well, that’s not the way it really should work." pic.twitter.com/5eRgHaSraq
In June 2018, Trump suggested Russia should attend a forthcoming G7 summit in Canada. A Kremlin spokesman seemed to reject the idea, saying Russia was focused on other formats.
Two days later, President Vladimir Putin said Russia did not choose the G7 and would be happy to host its members in Moscow.
Trump has periodically called for closer ties with Russia, although his administration’s policy has included strong sanctions against Moscow.
He is due to host the next G7 meeting in the United States next year.
