President Trump

The White House has hung a painting of President Donald Trump depicting a moment after an assassination attempt against him last summer — bumping the official portrait of one of his predecessors, Barack Obama

Trump signs order to ‘make America’s showers great again’

Donald Trump is going to “make America’s showers great again” by easing rules restricting water flow, the White House says.

The US president is ordering the energy secretary to rescind a change introduced by Barack Obama that restricted multi-nozzle showers from discharging over 2.5 gallons of water per minute overall.

This served “a radical green agenda that made life worse for Americans”, the White House said, as Trump criticised the “ridiculous” amount of time he says it takes to wet his hair in the shower.

There’s a lot of chatter about Bill Maher meeting with President Donald Trump. The noted and vocal Trump critic accepted a private dinner invitation from the president, which the comedian and late-night HBO host graciously accepted. He doesn’t care if his liberal audience finds this a deplorable act, promptly saying these people could f**k off: it’s the president of the United States. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime invitation. You go no matter who occupies the White House. Maher reportedly came with a copy of every insult he hurled at Trump; he autographed it.

h/t DS

Donald Trump has labelled people accused of vandalising the Trump Turnberry golf resort as “terrorists”.

Grafitti was sprayed on the clubhouse in red paint and the course was dug up and daubed with the words “Gaza is not for sale”

The US president said those who caused damage at the Ayrshire resort should be “treated harshly” by authorities.

Donald Trump has said he is “not joking” about wanting to serve a third term as US president.

The US Constitution says that “no person… shall be elected more than twice”, but some Trump supporters have suggested there could be ways around that.

Asked in an interview with NBC about the possibility of seeking a third term in the White House, Trump said “there are methods which you could do it”.

“I’m not joking… a lot of people want me to do it,” he added. “But, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”

MAGA foreign policy is driven by a haunting sense of America’s vulnerability and decline.

US president Donald Trump’s MAGA brand of foreign policy has been treated with contempt and consternation by much of the world. He has incited the ire of neoliberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, as well as many European intellectuals, who rarely have much positive to say about America anyway. To them, Trump epitomises a destructive American arrogance and imperial delusions.

“Why is Donald Trump doing what he is doing?” This is the question raised by European intelligentsia these days as they try to recover from the shock of the American presidential election, which they all believed would be won by the Democrat champion Kamala Harris.

France’s currently fashionable TV philosopher Michel Onfray raises the question in a number of programs, as do op-ed writers in newspapers in London, Brussels and Berlin, and Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.

Move fast and break things” was Mark Zuckerberg’s motto in launching Facebook 20 years ago. It seemed the antithesis of management-school custom and practice. But it worked, to be imitated after a fashion by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other digital tycoons with similar success. Donald Trump is now seeing if it works in government.

The smart money in Washington was that after the fiasco of Trump’s first term, his second would see a more emollient president, one careful of his reputation. He would reach out, consult, become a peacemaker, in his desperation to become a Nobel president like Barack Obama.

How wrong that has proved. Trump is doing what few leaders dare do. He is being a cultural revolutionary, a Mao Zedong, a grandiloquent system smasher. He wants to reorder Washington’s role in the US and the US’s role in the world. He knows that he may have just two years before “the system” – the electoral cycle, the judiciary and state governments – blocks his path. If he truly wants revolution he must break things, and fast.

President Trump’s foes are hopeful that White House chaos will rid them of this turbulent president. So far, though, Americans are happier than ever that Mr. Trump’s circus is in town — and many welcome the very disruptions that make Washington insiders queasy.

“The true New Yorker,” John Updike said, “secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” On social media, many MAGA foes are just as convinced that the 77.3 million people who voted for Mr. Trump are playing some electoral practical joke.

US President Donald Trump has revoked security clearances from his previously defeated Democratic election rivals, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, as well as a number of other top former officials.

The move comes after Trump said in February he was revoking security clearance for his predecessor Joe Biden. He confirmed that move in the latest announcement, adding that he was also revoking the security clearance of “any other member” of the Biden family.

“I have determined that it is no longer in the national interest for the following individuals to access classified information,” Trump’s memorandum read.

Three months into his second term, President Trump hit the highest approval rating he’s ever had as commander-in-chief — while more Americans say the country is on the right track than at any point since 2004, a new poll found.

That’s the good news, according to an NBC News Poll released Sunday

Donald Trump’s dramatic realignment of U.S. policy away from Ukraine and towards Russia will have consequences no one can now anticipate. We can hope they will be mostly positive. But one thing should be clear: If Trump had not done something like this, America’s Ukraine policy was steering directly towards a disaster which would have crippled his presidency early on and accelerated the decline of American power.