President Donald who…………??

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Trump leaves leaders fearing the future as G-20 summit closes

The other 19 world leaders formed a unified front against President Trump. The “world has
never been so divided,” France's Emmanuel Macron said. Germany's Angela Merkel said she
“deplores” the U.S. decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. And top European
leaders said they have little faith that any trade agreement forged today could hold tomorrow.

By MICHAEL BIRNBAUM and DAMIAN PALETTA | 3:57PM EDT - Saturday, July 08, 2017


President Trump speaks with French President Emmanuel Macron during the Group of 20 summit on Friday in Hamburg.
 — Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images.

HAMBURG — President Trump and other world leaders on Saturday emerged from two days of talks unable to resolve key differences on core issues such as climate change and globalization, slapping an exclamation point on a divisive summit that left other nations fearing for the future of global alliances in the Trump era.

The scale of disharmony was remarkable for the annual Group of 20 meeting of world economic powers, a venue better known for sleepy bromides about easy-to-agree-on issues. Even as negotiators made a good-faith effort to bargain toward consensus, European leaders said that a chasm has opened between the United States and the rest of the world.

“Our world has never been so divided,” French President Emmanuel Macron said as the talks broke up. “Centrifugal forces have never been so powerful. Our common goods have never been so threatened.”

The divisions were most bitter on climate change, where 19 leaders formed a unified front against Trump. But even in areas of nominal compromise, such as trade, top European leaders said they have little faith that an agreement forged today could hold tomorrow.

Macron said world leaders found common ground on terrorism but were otherwise split on numerous important topics. He also said there were rising concerns about “authoritarian regimes, and even within the Western world, there are real divisions and uncertainties that didn’t exist just a few short years ago.”

“I will not concede anything in the direction of those who are pushing against multilateralism,” Macron said, without directly referring to Trump. “We need better coordination, more co-ordination. We need those organizations that were created out of the Second World War. Otherwise, we will be moving back toward narrow-minded nationalism.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who hosted the summit in the port city of Hamburg, said there had been some areas of agreement. But she did little to hide her disappointment about U.S. actions on climate change.

“Wherever there is no consensus that can be achieved, disagreement has to be made clear,” Merkel said at the end of the summit. “Unfortunately — and I deplore this — the United States of America left the climate agreement.”

“I am gratified to note that the other 19 members of the G-20 feel the Paris agreement is irreversible,” Merkel said.

Perhaps as a way to emphasize global unity — minus the United States — Macron announced there would be another climate summit in Paris in December to mark the two-year anniversary of the climate accord.

On trade, G-20 leaders agreed to try to address what the White House claims is a global steel glut. Trump officials have threatened to restrict steel imports, risking the start of a global trade war, after it has repeatedly alleged that China subsidizes the industry, which helps it lower prices and put U.S. steel jobs at risk.

The promises to draw up policy changes on steel production were a victory, White House officials said.

But with the U.S. decision to impose steel restrictions still up in the air, Merkel said Saturday's agreements did little to resolve the future.

“The negotiations remain difficult, but we have been able to get satisfactory results in place,” Merkel said. “Now, what's going to happen tomorrow or the day after, I cannot make any predictions on.”

One official said that Europeans were sharply unsettled by their encounters with Trump — and they recognized that may be the intention of the White House.

“It seems clear that President Trump is committed to being less predictable and not necessarily seeing predictability as positive in foreign policy,” said the European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly assess the White House.

The summit came after Trump softened his opposition to some other multilateral institutions. After challenging the NATO defense alliance, he endorsed its all-for-one, one-for-all principles just ahead of the G-20 summit. And Trump has agreed to abide by the North American Free Trade Agreement, so long as it can be renegotiated.

White House officials also saw the potential to draw a win from the Hamburg summit, even if their expectations were measured. They hoped to explain Trump’s priorities and find compromises, even small ones.

Their assessment of the outcome was sharply different from Merkel's and Macron's cautious tone.

“It's been a really great success,” a senior White House official who was not authorized to speak on the record said on Saturday before Trump departed for the United States. “We are going to get some of the priorities of the administration” out of this summit.

White House officials pointed to several minor changes to the G-20's official statement on trade policy, saying it better reflects the Trump administration's point of view.

“We recognise that the benefits of international trade and investment have not been shared widely enough,” the G-20 countries said in a joint statement. “We need to better enable our people to seize the opportunities.”

Similar language was not in the G-20 agreement in 2016 before Trump's election.

The White House also won a bitter battle over its desire to include language that promoted U.S. fossils fuels in the final statement — wording that European leaders sharply opposed.

Trump also prodded other countries to intensify a review of the overproduction of steel, something Trump alleges has ravaged the U.S. steel industry because it cannot compete with cheaper prices from countries such as China. In response to the White House push, the G-20 agreed to share information about steel production by August and to publish a formal report with recommendations by November. There probably will not be consequences if the deadlines are missed, but it creates a formal process for the White House to amplify its complaints.

Global steel manufacturing has soared, with China accounting for half the world's production, compared with 15 percent in 2000, although the United States imports relatively little from China. Beijing agreed to the new G-20 steel requirements on Saturday.

Although the shifts may constitute short-term victories for Trump, one former senior official with the International Monetary Fund said Washington may have incurred long-term losses.

“It comes at a cost of eroding U.S. leadership,” said Eswar Prasad, a senior professor at Cornell University. “If even in calm times such rifts are exposed, it could make it more complicated for the group to work together in more complicated circumstances.”

Trump also had the chance to forge one-on-one relationships with leaders as the summit unfolded around him. It included his first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which stretched more than two hours, and also his first post-election meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Relations between the United States and Mexico have been strained since Trump took office, in part because of the U.S. leader's insistence that Mexico would pay for the creation of a new wall along the U.S. border. When reporters were briefly allowed in the room for their meeting on Friday and he was asked whether he still wanted Mexico to pay for the wall, Trump responded “absolutely.”

Peña Nieto did not agree to pay for the construction of the wall during the meeting, and a person briefed on the discussions said Trump did not press the issue during their talks.

There were other signs that Trump enjoyed the visit. At a dinner and reception for world leaders and their spouses on Friday night, Trump was among the last to leave. At an event on Saturday morning to announce an initiative to fund female entrepreneurship, Trump called Merkel “incredible,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “spectacular,” and declared that World Bank President Jim Yong Kim “would be a great appointment.”

On Twitter, Trump called the summit a “wonderful success” that was “carried out beautifully” by Merkel. He also said he had “an excellent meeting on trade & North Korea” with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Still, Trump did little to celebrate the G-20's outcome. President Barack Obama typically marked the end of global summits with a news conference, weighing in on issues he and other leaders discussed.

And on Saturday, many other world leaders, including Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, held lengthy briefings with reporters in Hamburg.

Trump had a different plan. When the summit ended, the president and his aides got in their motorcade, went right to the airport and flew back to the United States.

• Isaac Stanley-Becker and Abby Phillip contributed to this report.

• Michael Birnbaum is The Washington Post's Brussels bureau chief. He previously served as the bureau chief in Moscow and in Berlin, and was an education reporter.

• Damian Paletta reports on White House economic policy for The Washington Post. He also covers intelligence and national security for The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-leaves-leaders-fearing-the-future-as-g-20-summit-breaks/2017/07/08/daed41be-634f-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from the Los Angeles Times....

Trump's ‘America First’ approach receives a cold reception at global summit

By BRIAN BENNETT, DON LEE and MICHAEL A. MEMOLI | 5:15PM PDT - Saturday, July 08, 2017


President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump make their way to Air Force One on July 8th after the G-20 summit
in Hamburg, Germany. — Photograph: Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

PRESIDENT TRUMP's signature slogan — “America First” — lately got a tweak from administration aides eager to show that his nationalism is not at odds with the United States' traditional global leadership role. Their new version: “America first does not mean America alone.”

Yet America was undeniably alone as Trump on Saturday departed the annual summit of the so-called Group of 20 leaders here. With the leaders' final statement, it was evident that Trump's prioritization of American self-interest — on environmental agreements, trade, migration and more — left him, and thus America, often in unfamiliar isolation.

After two days of cordial smiles, handshakes and back-slapping, Trump expressed satisfaction with the summit. Even so, he was alone among leaders of the world's major economic powers in dissenting from its resolution affirming the Paris climate accord. And while he has threatened to abandon existing trade deals and penalize countries for what he sees as unfair trade practices, particularly on steel exports, the summit's closing declaration affirmed support for open markets and fighting protectionism.

After the more exclusive Group of 7 summit in May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had described the meeting as “six against one” — the one being the United States. As she closed the G-20 gathering that she hosted this week, Merkel again singled out the United States.

In a news conference, Merkel said she “deplores” America's decision to walk away from the Paris climate agreement and, despite Trump's comments, does not believe the administration is open to renegotiating the terms agreed to among more than 190 nations to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Merkel, as she has before, called on European countries to step into the vacuum that Trump is leaving on the world stage.

“We as Europeans have to take our fate into our own hands,” she said.

The new French president, Emmanuel Macron, who will host Trump next week in Paris to mark Bastille Day, echoed his ally Merkel. “The world has never been so divided,” he said.

In another break from past decades, the United States seemed closer to Russia — in goodwill if not on many issues — than with traditional allies such as Germany and France after Trump's genial tete-a-tete with President Vladimir Putin, which was the presidents' first meeting since Trump took office.

Trump's meeting with Putin, lasting more than two hours, was his longest with any leader. He raised Americans' concerns over Russian election meddling, according to aides, but the two presidents decided to put the matter behind them and move on to discuss how they can address their differences over Syria, Ukraine and North Korea.

Unlike many other leaders, including Putin, Trump didn't hold a news conference at the conclusion as Americans presidents typically have. Putin, in his meeting with reporters, denied again — as he did to Trump on Friday — that Russia interfered in the U.S. election, and said he thinks that Trump accepted his face-to-face denials.

Putin also said that Trump asked him many questions about Russia's alleged meddling, which Trump has called “a hoax” despite the consensus of American intelligence agencies that Russia did try to sway the election to Trump. FBI and congressional investigations also are probing whether Trump associates colluded with Russia.

White House officials declined to challenge Putin's view that Trump accepted his denials when questioned by reporters aboard Air Force One en route back to Washington.

Trump “will be happy to make statements himself” about his meeting with Putin, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.

He and Trump's top economic advisor, Gary Cohn, were sanguine about the summit's results, and singled out as constructive the leaders' discussions about dumping of cheap raw materials such as steel, limiting migration, and cracking down on terrorist financing.

“These things are never easy — to get 20 of your friends to agree where to have dinner tonight is really hard — but I thought the communique came together pretty reasonably,” Cohn said.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, since World War II, the United States has been the pre-eminent leader in championing open markets and forging a multilateral system of rules to resolve tough international disputes on trade and commerce as well as other issues.

Trump has repeatedly signaled his skepticism of multilateral institutions such as the European Union and forums such as the G-20. In Hamburg, rather than using the conference to build broad consensus around his populist ideas, he spent most of his time in private one-on-one discussions with leaders.

The president often retreated from the group's larger sessions — his daughter, Ivanka, sat in for him at one session on Saturday — in favor of such bilateral meetings. Trump had 13 individual meetings with other leaders over three days, including on Thursday in Warsaw, the White House said.

Trump and the other leaders of the G-20, whose member nations represent roughly 80% of the world's economic output, signed off on a joint statement that was seen as an accomplishment given the sharp differences and acrimony stemming largely from Trump's “America First” agenda.

“We have a G-20 communique, not a G-19 communique,” said one EU official after all-night negotiations to finesse the divisions. But the language on climate change, at least, made plain that the statement was in fact a G-19 communique, with the U.S. alone in opposition.

“They're calling the statement that they reached a consensus outcome, but it very explicitly points to a deep divide that really undermines the principle of consensus,” said Scott Morris, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington and a former Treasury official in the Obama administration.

The declaration's message on trade was ambiguous, reflecting the “heavy hand of the Trump administration,” said Ricardo Meléndez-Ortiz, chief executive of the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development in Geneva.

Trump wanted stricter language that allowed countries to punish unfair trade practices. But other leaders would not agree.

“We were able to say, well, markets need to be kept open. This is all about fighting protectionism and also unfair trade practices,” Merkel said.

Other European officials warned the United States was flirting with trade wars.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Friday the EU would retaliate swiftly. “We will respond with countermeasures if need be, hoping that this is not actually necessary,” Juncker said, citing American whiskey as one potential target for import taxes.

Complaints that China is dumping cheap steel into the global market came up in the summit, including from Trump. The countries commissioned a study on the steel market to be delivered in August.

Migration and refugees, as in recent years, were a focus. According to Cohn, Trump at one session addressed the “downward spiral of migration” and emphasized that “countries should build their own economy, make their own countries a better place for their citizens.”

The U.S. pressed for tough language about “the sovereign right of states to manage and control their borders” and had help from the United Kingdom and Italy. Italy especially is facing an unpopular migrant crisis as impoverished refugees displaced by war cross the Mediterranean from North Africa.

To be sure, U.S. dominance on the global stage did not suddenly decline with Trump. The rise of other developing nations, chiefly China, has increasingly diminished any single dominant power at events such as the G-20 summit.

And in the past the United States occasionally took on battles largely alone, struggling to get a consensus on issues such as currency manipulation, economic stimulus measures and trade surpluses. The G-20 has no power to enforce its will on sovereign nations, so it has sought to find common ground for action and co-operation, with limited success.

Trump seemed to make little headway in Hamburg to enlist other nations to more aggressively confront North Korea's nuclear threat.

He met with leaders of China, Japan and South Korea, as well as Putin, pressing them at length to come around to his view that North Korea's most recent launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile is a major escalation of Pyongyang's ambitions as a nuclear power, according to a U.S. official familiar with the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe closed-door discussions.

White House officials are dismayed to see China and Russia teaming up to advocate for a “freeze for peace” strategy in which North Korea agrees to stop moving forward with its nuclear weapons development, in exchange for the international community easing sanctions and making other concessions, the official said.

The administration counters that this strategy has been pursued multiple times with North Korea and each time Pyongyang has cheated and continued to advance toward building a nuclear-capable missile.

Trump avoided major gaffes and seemed to enjoy mingling with his fellow leaders. He did embarrass Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto by saying — in the presence of Peña Nieto, as well as Mexican and American reporters — that Mexico will “absolutely” pay for Trump's planned border wall, something the Mexican leader just as adamantly vowed not to do.

Despite friction with Merkel, Trump thanked her on Saturday for hosting the summit even as protesters clashed violently with police at times, burning cars and blocking roads.

“You have been amazing, and you have done a fantastic job,” he said.

• All reporting was from Washington D.C.

• Brian Bennett covers the White House and writes about national security and immigration as well. Since starting in the Los Angeles Times' Washington bureau in 2010, he has documented a pattern of excessive force by U.S. Border Patrol agents and revealed the first arrest on U.S. soil using a Predator drone. He reported for TIME magazine starting in Hong Kong in 2000, from Pakistan and Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks and was its Baghdad bureau chief in 2003 and 2004. A native of Riverside, California, he misses being able to pick avocados and oranges in the backyard.

• Don Lee covers the U.S. and global economy out of Washington, D.C. Since joining the Los Angeles Times in 1992, he has served as the Shanghai bureau chief and in various editing and reporting roles in California. He is a native of Seoul, Korea, and graduated from the University of Chicago.

• Michael A. Memoli has worked in the Los Angeles Times' Washington, D.C., bureau since 2010, where he now covers the White House and the 2016 presidential campaign. He has spent the last 11 years covering national politics based in D.C. (plus a dozen or so swing states in presidential election years). A New Jersey native, he graduated from Loyola University in Maryland.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-fg-trump-world-20170708-story.html

[Donald]

Mmmmm...par for the course for the rail worker....no evidence to his claims....fake news like your good friends at CNN🙄
Posts lefty news articles as some sort of attempt to divert attention...an old lefty militant unionist ploy😉

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Donald J. Trump: THE TRUTH; THE WHOLE TRUTH; AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH…

[Donald]

Ahhhh....no....it's a lefty rant from a lefty journalist, who is married to a lefty Ozzie Labour Party politician, and who is employed by a lefty tax payer funded state owned media organisation....actually the same sort of set up that you are employed by...you know ...sucks hundreds of millions of hard earned tax payer dollars every year to pay people who only work there because they can't get a real job like the rest of us😳

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

It's THE TRUTH; WHOLE TRUTH; and NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH!!

[Donald]

Oh....yeah.....and we are all going to live happily ever after in heaven😜

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

ROFLMAO....outed by his favourite son. I betcha Donald J. Trump is absolutely seething with rage.


from The Washington Post....

EDITORIAL: The Russia meddling story is no longer just smoke. It's fire!

Donald Trump Jr.'s damning interactions with Russians during the campaign.

By EDITORIAL BOARD | 7:44PM EDT - Tuesday, July 11, 2017

THERE CAN NO BE NO DOUBT. The Russia meddling story is not just smoke but fire. Donald Trump Jr.'s interactions with Russians during last year's presidential campaign were abnormal and alarming. An incriminating email chain has made it impossible for the administration to deploy its always flimsy argument of last resort — that the whole story is just “fake news”.

Not only Mr. Trump but also presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul J. Manafort are involved. Following a string of misleading and false statements, Americans must also wonder: Were other Trump associates involved? Did other meetings take place? Was President Trump aware of them? What more did the Trump camp know about Kremlin support for the Trump campaign?

And then there is this recurring question: How long can the rest of the Republican Party prioritize partisanship and agenda over decency and patriotism?

The emails were released by the younger Mr. Trump after he learned that The New York Times was about to publish them. They show that in June 2016 a publicist who had been involved with Donald Trump's 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow offered the president's son “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton]”. This “very high level and sensitive information” would be from “the Crown prosecutor of Russia”, an apparent reference to Russia's prosecutor general. It would be passed on as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump”.

Donald Trump Jr.'s  reply was damning: “If it's what you say I love it.” In subsequent emails, it was explicit that he would meet with a “Russian government attorney” in order to get the information.

The younger Mr. Trump and his apologists claim that he responded as would any campaign operative seeking dirt on an opponent. No. Any ethical operative confronted by a foreign power's attempt to meddle in this way in U.S. elections would refer the matter promptly to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Instead, Mr. Trump was enthused, drawing Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner into a meeting with someone he believed to be a Russian government attorney. Even if the Trump camp got no dirt on Ms. Clinton out of that meeting, the Russians could have used the email chain and subsequent meeting as leverage over Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner, who is now a top White House adviser. Mr. Trump's enthusiasm may also have communicated to the Kremlin that the Trump camp would welcome Kremlin election meddling. The Russians went on to run an anti-Clinton hacking campaign.

What now? The president's sole comment on the matter, relayed on Tuesday by principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is that “my son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency.” On Monday, Ms. Sanders herself said that “the only thing I see inappropriate about the meeting was the people that leaked the information about the meeting after it was voluntarily disclosed.” That's the only inappropriate thing? A responsible president should have something to say about the gross inappropriateness of this meeting and, speaking of transparency, about how and when he learned of it.

Senators questioning Christopher A. Wray, the president's nominee to lead the FBI, in a Wednesday hearing must demand that he detail any conversation he had with Trump administration officials and commit to co-operating fully with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in his investigation of the Trump-Russia connections. Lawmakers must pass a tough sanctions bill holding Russia accountable for its election meddling.

And Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wisconsin), must finally decide: Is this really okay? Are they really prepared to debase themselves in defense of a president whose closest advisers may have welcomed underhanded interference in America's election from a hostile foreign power?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-russia-hacking-story-is-no-longer-just-smoke-its-fire/2017/07/11/b8dc758c-665f-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html

[Donald]

Yeah...is in court yet?