Trump orders a dress code in the White House - Financial Times

by: Jo Ellison

Donald Trump is trying to implement some sartorial rigour within his administration. According to intelligence from the White House, the president believes his staff should “have a certain look” and aspire to “be sharply dressed”. Men should wear a tie. Female colleagues have been told to “dress like a woman”, whatever that means. Perhaps he wants them to swing through the White House on tree vines, wearing jungle pelts in the manner of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Jane?

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As with so many of his executive orders so far, it’s predictably disappointing. And possibly misguided. One of the few joys to find in this new world order is in observing just how uniformly shambolic and ill-matched it is. I assumed the administration’s chaotic deportment was in fact a marvellously choreographed campaign to deflect “the opposition party” from the fine details of the day.

What better way to disguise your flailing incompetence at a press briefing, for example, than by wearing a tie of such exceptional ugliness that no one will really hear what you’re trying to say? Sean Spicer knows how to make headlines. The White House press secretary’s clumsy attempts to explain the botched military operations that led to the death of civilians and a Navy seal following a raid on Yemen last week were overlooked as focus fell instead on the diagonally striped monstrosity in poison yellow and navy tied around his neck.

I just assumed the tie was sartorial spin. Call it Project Blind: dull the people to the ineptitude of your policymaking and practice by wearing an eye-wateringly unattractive wardrobe. Donald Trump’s ill-fitting suit, Fanta complexion and feathery comb-over are already well documented: but he looks almost suave compared to the unshaven Steve Bannon, with his livid red proboscis, stained T-shirts and straining shirt buttons. So slovenly is he, and so swollen with choler, he seems to ooze with an especially Chaucerian brand of humour. Watching him slumped in his flannel shirts in the Oval Office, I am reminded of The Nun’s Priest Tale: “For God’s love, as tak som laxatyf.”

Then there’s Mike Pence, who wears smarter white button-down shirts, electric-coloured ties and navy suits, with all the self-possession of a Weeble. Or secretary of defence James Mattis, cadaverous in camo. Attorney-general Jeff Sessions wears pocket-sized suits and ties in reflux yellow and spotted vermilion: he carries them both with the skittery, overly keen mien of a warm-up host.

For comic opportunities alone, I hope Trump has directed his female staffers to follow the lead of Kellyanne Conway in their efforts to look “like a woman”. The counsellor to the president is the undisputed star of this fashion circus: a feisty, former cheerleader who, to judge by the state of her inauguration ensemble, takes her style inspiration from the Peruvian refugee Paddington Bear.

; a muddle of lurid jackets and look-at-me ensembles in primary brights — citrine, vermilion, blood — that are every bit as jarring as her coarse rhetoric. She embraces the type of womanly power glamour observed by weather girls and newscasters: her sleeveless dresses testify to a woman’s right to bare arms or, in the case of the ruffled gold jacket she wore to canvass at Trump Tower last November, the right to resemble a gilded valance sheet. But time has been cruel to Conway. Where once she might have been described as perky, the first weeks in office have lent her sleep-starved, kohl-rimmed looks the ravaged expression of a raptor. I can’t wait to see what she’ll wear next.

Whatever about “dressing sharp”. It must take a concerted effort, a willingness even, to look so collectively dreadful. It’s also in keeping with the evolution (or should that be devolution?) of world-leader style. After years of slick homogeny on the political stage — slim, dark-suited, smug — we’re now seeing a return of the fashion maverick: think Yanis Varoufakis and his football manager leathers, or Nigel Farage in his Toad-of-Toad-Hall Crombie and tulip-pink ties.

Similarly, British prime minister Theresa May’s affection for a voluminous tartan suit by Vivienne Westwood has been much discussed in recent weeks. As with the fabled leopard-print shoes in which she strode to power, May has worn the suits in moments of political — and personal — vulnerability, to announce her determination to lead the Conservative party, for example, or lay down a challenging Brexit strategy. Like Spicer’s tie, the tartan suit has proven a nifty decoy: capable of sucking up headlines and loud enough to distract from the political business of the day.

It may look daft, but the wacky wardrobe is a formidable weapon: bad clothes stimulate alternative conversations, they’re diverting and normalising. Conway’s flowerpot hats are awful, Bannon’s flak jacket is filthy and Spicer’s ties are plain obnoxious, but they all throw light on the individual that wears them. They give the wearer personality. Even more significantly, the clothes are humanising: one could almost feel sorry for Spicer; while Bannon’s gorilla-like bearing has become as morbidly fascinating as his guerrilla-style of governance. It’s all quite stupefying to behold — which, presumably, is the point.

So rather than insist his aides smarten up, if I were Trump I’d order everyone to keep on clowning around: brighter ties, Hawaiian print shirts, lots of gold lamé. Dressing like a fool never seemed so wise.

@jellison; jo.ellison@ft.com

If your opinion is against Trump it is fake - Huffington Post

Natalie Jackson
Senior Polling Editor, The Huffington Post
Bright and early Monday morning, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to express his frustration with polling numbers on his policies. He specifically compared “any negative polling” to the CNN, ABC and NBC election polls and labeled them all “fake news.”


This tactic seems to be Trump’s modus operandi for dealing with anything that casts him in a negative light ― publicly call it “fake” and claim he knows better. He’s trying to manipulate the public into not believing the polling numbers that we know he’s rabidly consuming.

Unfortunately for Trump, that’s not how polling works. Polls, when done right, represent the views of millions of Americans ― with some room for error, of course, since they’re based on samples of a few hundred or a thousand people. The specific polls Trump called out are very high quality and were actually very close to the national election outcome.

The ABC News poll, conducted in partnership with the Washington Post, showed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton up by 4 points in their final national poll, 47 percent to 43 percent. Clinton won the national popular vote, by a little more than 2 percentage points, 48 percent to 45.9 percent. The poll underestimated Clinton’s vote by 1 point and Trump’s vote by 2.9 points. That’s a pretty good performance, well within the poll’s margin of error.

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll also had Clinton winning by 4 points. That poll showed higher third party and undecided vote proportions and had Clinton with only 44 percent and Trump at 40 percent. But the 4-point margin was within a reasonable range of the result.  CNN’s final election poll was conducted nearly 2 weeks prior to the election on Oct. 20-23, and had Clinton up by 5 points, a bit farther from the actual result, but not outrageous for 2 weeks prior to the election.
Trump’s problem with these polls isn’t that they weren’t true representations of Americans’ opinions. It’s that they didn’t show him winning the popular vote ― which he didn’t win, another fact he has sought to discredit by claiming 3-5 million people illegally voted. Now he’s doing the same thing with polling about his policies.

Technically he’s correct that “people want border security and extreme vetting.” Some people do. Trump’s immigration policies are popular with a segment of Americans, but how many support the policy depends on how pollsters ask about the policy. Only one poll shows a majority of Americans approving of Trump’s travel ban policy, but in several polls a majority disapproves.


However, Trump isn’t just trying to claim majority support. He clearly seeks to discredit all negative opinions with comments like “any negative polls are fake news.” This is unusual and alarming behavior from a president.

Plenty of presidents probably haven’t liked their polling numbers before. President Barack Obama probably wasn’t thrilled that his health care law has been mostly viewed unfavorably since 2010. President George W. Bush couldn’t have been satisfied with his job approval ratings, which steadily declined throughout his second term.

But neither Obama nor Bush tried to discredit American opinion. Trump seems to think he can ignore anything that isn’t favorable to him, and that we should just believe his decisions are best for the country based on his own “accumulation of data.”


We shouldn’t believe that from Trump or from anyone else. As I wrote last week, if the data aren’t cited and you can’t see the source, that’s the first indication that you shouldn’t believe it’s real. The same standard applies to the president.

Trump is smart: He’s attacking institutions that have public trust issues, and he gets a double whammy by hitting media polling. But even if you dislike polls, the claim that “any negative” information is fake is a dangerous one. If he uses it for polls, he’s likely to use it for other facts as well. That’s a very authoritarian tactic.

Don’t let Trump get away with labeling anything he doesn’t like “fake.” Keep making your voice heard in polls and in every way possible.



MORE: Donald Trump Political Opinion Polls
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Illegal immigrants from Mexico falling since 2009 - Pew Research

President Donald Trump appears to think building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border will solve unauthorized immigration and other issues at the border. Stats from the last few years tell a completely different story. 

Trump signed two executive orders Wednesday that call for the immediate construction of a wall and issue directives to crack down on unauthorized immigration, increase security at the southern border and expand agencies’ deportation powers.

The order describes building the wall as a measure “to prevent illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, and acts of terrorism.” Prioritizing a wall ― with an estimated cost in the billions ― has been widely condemned by Latino groups and lawmakers as a discriminatory attack on immigrants.

Building a wall to keep Mexicans out is also out of touch with the current realities of unauthorized immigration. Since the recession, more undocumented Mexican immigrants are actually leaving the country than entering it, according to the Pew Research Center.

And as the Mexican economy has improved, the number of people attempting to illegally cross into the U.S. from Mexico has dropped dramatically over the last 15 years, according to Quartz:

As of 2014, the majority of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. are from Mexico, according to Pew’s population estimates, but their numbers have been declining.  

At the same time, unauthorized immigration from other countries has risen, driven by people coming from Central America, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Pew notes that many of the people from those regions are entering the country legally and overstaying their visas ― something a wall won’t prevent.

On Wednesday, Trump claimed the wall would also help Mexico prevent unauthorized immigration from countries to its south. He addressed the “unprecedented surge of illegal migrants” from Central America, many of whom are families seeking asylum from violence in their countries. 

Central Americans outnumbered Mexican immigrants apprehended at the United States’ southern border in 2016. The total number of apprehensions increased last yearcompared to 2015, but was still lower than in 2014 or 2013. The apprehension figures give a sense of trends in the larger number of total illegal border crossings, according to U.S. Border Control.

Building a wall is impractical for other reasons. It won’t address actual enforcement needs, officials in Texas borderlands told HuffPost’s Roque Planas. U.S. Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) said a physical barrier isn’t an effective security measure for the area’s rough terrain and protected natural areas. Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said the Rio Grande Valley area is heavily patrolled by authorities and that they’ve already “reached [their] maximum capacity in enforcement.”

What’s more, it’s not clear how the wall will be funded. Republican leaders said Thursday that Congress would front $12 billion or more for its construction, without clarifying if they’d offset the costs with other cuts. Trump has insisted Mexico will pay for the wall, but Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has repeatedly refused: He reiterated his stance on Wednesday.

Nieto was scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House next week, but said on Thursday that he was canceling. Nieto’s decision followed Wednesday reports that he was considering whether to keep the meeting. Trump lashed out on Twitter earlier Thursday, threatening to cancel as well, but Nieto pulled the trigger first.

During his presidential campaign, Trump frequently targeted immigrants and blamed them for American job losses, criminal activity and terrorism. He claimed Mexico was purposely sending “the bad ones” to the U.S., suggesting Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists.

Trump has made China great again - New York Times

Trump has made China great again

America’s rivals and enemies have enjoyed a very good 10 days.

One clear beneficiary has been ISIS, which has spent years trying to persuade Muslims that the United States is at war with Islam. ISIS wants to eliminate the world’s “gray zone,”the places where Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Jews live in harmony.

No wonder that ISIS-affiliated social media gleefully posted President Trump’s executive order this weekend, as Rukmini Callimachi of The Times reported. Trump’s call for a Muslim ban, like his unsubtle attempt to implement one, plays right into ISIS’ desire to eliminate the gray zone. The president of the United States himself now seems to agree that Muslims and non-Muslims can’t live together.

Besides the immorality and apparent illegality of Trump’s order, it’s worth weighing the strategic effects as well. Yes, it is conceivable that barring visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen would keep out a future terrorist. But it’s highly unlikely.

They are already intensely vetted, and previous attackers have generally come from other countries. “The end result of this ban will not be a drop in terror attacks,” as dozens of American diplomats wrote, in a dissenting draft memo that leaked. Instead, “it will be a drop in international good will towards Americans and” — because of the chilling effect on travel — “a threat towards our economy.”

New York Times

The presidency is not for an amoral man - Economist

CAN a bad man be a good president? The potential urgency of this question took Lexington on a cross-country pilgrimage to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. The museum, which reopened in October after an expensive overhaul, attempts to weigh the flaws of the 37th president against his undoubted merits, starting with his intelligence, daunting capacity for work and a poker-player’s willingness to take calculated risks in geopolitics.

Much thought has gone into burnishing the reputation of the only president to resign the office. A new display for the selfie generation allows visitors to photograph themselves on the Great Wall of China next to a life-size Nixon cut-out, recalling his history-making visit in 1972. Little-known moments of physical courage are remembered. Carefully preserved bullets and glass fragments testify to a nearly fatal mob attack on his car while visiting Venezuela in 1958 as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president—the display explains how Nixon prevented a bloodbath by ordering his Secret Service agent to hold fire.

The museum hails Nixon for rallying a “silent majority” of Americans who felt ignored and disdained by bossy, self-dealing elites. Captions suggest that Nixon balanced a conservative’s wariness of big government with a pragmatist’s willingness to wield federal authority to heal chronic ills, whether that involved desegregating schools in the South to an extent that had eluded his Democratic predecessors or creating the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up rivers so polluted that they caught fire. This empathy for America’s forgotten, damaged places was all the more remarkable because—as the museum admits via filmed interviews with aides and family members—Nixon was a brooding introvert, “suspicious” to the point of paranoia.

The Watergate scandal that felled Nixon is presented in a side-gallery filled with sombre black, red and grey panels bearing labels like “Dirty Tricks and Political Espionage” and “Obstruction of Justice”. In the brightly lit main halls an elegant display explains how Nixon recorded White House conversations with hidden microphones, to preserve his presidency for posterity. An old-fashioned telephone plays such recordings as “Daddy, Do You Want to Go Out to Dinner?” a 1973 call from Nixon’s daughter, Julie. Walk a few yards into the Watergate gallery and the taped recordings are of the president growling about Jews in his government, snarling, “Generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards.” Blazered volunteers earnestly describe Nixon’s strong and weak points. They work hard, with one guide spending long minutes explaining Maoist China to two youngsters perched on the canary-yellow sofas in a replica of his Oval Office from around 1969.

Alas for keepers of the Nixon flame, the museum—whose historical displays have become more candid over the years, notably when the complex became part of the official presidential library system in 2007—is too honest for its own good. The museum would like visitors to judge Nixon the man, which is why it includes a sculpture of a favourite dog curled up in an armchair and tours of the modest cottage where he was born, back when Yorba Linda was a rural backwater. But it ends up telling a story larger than any one individual. It reveals how close America’s ship of state came to being wrecked by a particularly lethal sort of bad leader: one guided by a broken moral compass.

The museum quotes one eyewitness to Watergate saying of Nixon’s resignation: “The system worked.” It nearly didn’t, though. A pilgrimage to Yorba Linda offers several troubling lessons. First, Nixon employed in his cabinet and White House many clever men with brilliant CVs. They did little to rein in the thugs and glinty-eyed loyalists infesting his inner circle, though some grandees did resign out of principle—notably the attorney-general and deputy attorney-general, who both quit rather than obey Nixon’s orders to fire a special prosecutor closing in on him (in the end the solicitor-general did the deed). Second, and perhaps unintentionally, the museum suggests that if the Supreme Court had not forced Nixon to release White House tapes of his ordering illegal acts, many partisans might have continued to look the other way. A striking interview, filmed in 2008, shows Bob Dole, a young senator back in 1973 who later became a party leader and presidential candidate, conceding that he tried to convince himself that sinister aides were behind every misdeed. “I didn’t want to make myself believe Nixon did this, that he actually participated,” he explains in a telling tangle of words.

A piece of cake, until you get to the top

Next, the museum records Nixon fulminating against perceived tormentors in the press. But photographs also show him acknowledging its reach by speaking in a newly opened West Wing briefing room—a facility whose future is currently in doubt. Today, amid confected rows about “fake news”, reporters who unearthed a new Watergate would start with roughly half the country ready to disbelieve them. Finally, the Nixon museum shows how the symbolic power of the presidency can cow dissent, even in this sceptical age. Tours end with a peek into a lovingly restored Sea King helicopter used by four presidents. A reverential guide points out a chic white racing stripe along the dark green fuselage, painted at Jacqueline Kennedy’s suggestion. He adds, lightly, that the aircraft is the one that carried Nixon into enforced retirement, and museum-goers look no less impressed.

Indoors, a diorama recreates that departure from the South Lawn of the White House, portraying the former presidential couple in their helicopter seats and quoting Pat Nixon’s lament to her husband: “It’s so sad, it’s so sad.” The staging lends the scene dignity and pathos. But the moment was not sad, it was a merited disgrace. No political leader is an angel. Good men have been bad presidents (cf, Jimmy Carter). But the presidency is the wrong job for an amoral man.

Mexican wall is only one option to stop illegal immigrants - NBC News

NEWS FEB 2 2017, 6:34 AM ET
Trump’s Wall Is Only One Potential Option for Border

BUDAPEST, Hungary — From Donald Trump's promise to make Mexico pay for a wall to Kenya's planned 435-mile security barrier along its boundary with Somalia, borders are big business.
"There were more borders and barriers being built in the last 10 years than ever before," says Thomas Tass, the chairman of Borderpol — an organization of border security agents and officials.
The border security market was worth $15.6 billion in 2015, according to estimates from marketing firm Strategic Defense Intelligence (SDI). It is expected to grow to $23.7 billion by 2025.


The border fence on the Hungary-Serbia on Oct. 2, 2016. Reuters
Researchers from the University of Quebec say there are now at least 65 physical barriers along national borders around the world.
And while Trump's vow suggests there will be no sign of construction slowing, governments around the world are doing more than just putting up walls.
The big question for those watching the borders is how to keep criminals and terrorists out, without infringing on the rights and safety of legitimate travelers.
To accomplish this balancing act, border agencies — and the security companies that supply them — are deploying smarter technology as well.
"Border management programs are basically the biggest business for the security industry now," says Frank Doherty, the European operations director for border technology firm MSA.
The company offers "intelligent fences" that can detect intruders as well as ground sensors and expensive high-range security cameras that can see up to 15 miles away.
MSA has mainly focused on the Middle East, and is now seeing opportunities to increase its business in Europe. But Doherty says Europeans don't want highly visible, fortified barriers that are popular in countries such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia or Oman.
"In Europe they're more covert," he told NBC News. "They want to know the intruder is there but they don't necessarily want to show everybody that they're stopping them coming in."
The largest share of the market is expected to be maritime surveillance with which SID project manager Mainak Kar said is driven in part by demand for unarmed drones, helicopters and patrol vessels to monitor the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
"Instead of active aggressive measures like armed patrol boats, electrical fences, a lot of equipment will be surveillance based just to know when and how people are coming in," Kar said.
Security agencies are also deploying a decidedly low-tech, but perhaps the most user-friendly method available: sniffer dogs.
"The dogs are still renowned as the best method of detecting a scene," says Colin Singer, managing director of Wagtail UK. His dogs are trained to sniff out a variety of scents ranging from drugs or tobacco to human beings.
"They're very accurate, so the use of the dogs is a favorite method by border agencies because of their accuracy and speed," he added.
Related: Here's What the U.S.-Mexico Border Looks Like Now
While public opinion may be aligning against globalization and the free movement of people, information sharing among security agencies remains a powerful tool in the fight against crime and terror.
Attila Freska, chief operating officer of Securiport, a company that provides security information management services to governments, says by better utilizing all the available data, security forces have something akin to "a crystal ball."
"Most people have a data footprint," he told NBC News. "But even if there is no data footprint, that's a flag. People buying expensive tickets for a flight with cash — that's a flag these days."
Interpol also makes freely available its extensive databases which include the red notices flagging arrest warrants for international suspects.
The organization also has a database of stolen and lost travel documents that lists some 70 million passports, according to Royce Walters, assistant director for terrorism and border security at Interpol.
He says it takes a fraction of second for a border agent to get information from the database, just by scanning a passport.
"Pretty much before you can finish swiping it, it's already hit the database and come back with information as to if there's a problem," he says.
Walters says another available database has millions of sets of fingerprints, "everything from small-time petty thieves, all the way up to terrorists that were identified during the war in Afghanistan and Iraq."
Despite such advances, sometimes a physical barrier is deemed necessary.
Hungary put up hundreds of miles of fencing along its borders with Serbia and Croatia in 2015 to stop waves of migrants who were crossing over to gain access to other European Union countries.
Hungarian Interior Ministry Deputy Secretary Matyas Hegyaljai told NBC News that the country, which typically received about 20,000 illegal migrant crossings each year, saw 400,000 crossings in 2015.
When border patrols and police were not enough to contain the influx, the country took action.
"We have an obligation to defend not only Hungary, but the European Union," Hegyaljai said.


Migrants enter Hungary at the border with Serbia on Aug. 27, 2015. BERNADETT SZABO / Reuters
Hegyaljai suggested the fence could come down if the situation improves. "This is not a wall, forever, like on some other border lines," he added.
Tass, with Borderpol, says the challenges faced by Hungary provided a "litmus test of what the border management community will encounter in the months and years ahead."
ISIS has also changed the equation, and put pressure on the so-called Schengen system — which allows travelers free passage to other EU countries without passport checks.
The Islamist group has urged its fighters to use migrant routes to enter Europe. That includes two suicide bombers who had trained in Syria before taking part in the attacks Paris in November 2015.
"The real challenge for the entire civilized global community is the foreign fighters," says Peter Vincent, an assistant director for international policy at Borderpol.
But Vincent, who is a former official in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, says it is "unfortunate" to see European countries building fences and worries that strict controls put in place to stop terrorists will instead impact on lawful travelers.
"The trick for all of us is to have the proper safeguards in place to detect and capture that very small minority of committed terrorists, while the same time providing asylum and refugee status … to those that are truly fleeing terrorism, not committing acts of terrorism," he added.
According to Securiport's Freska, different legal structures between countries and privacy concerns mean there is no perfect solution to border security.
"You look at water and how it flows," he said. "You may build a dam in one area, it will flow around as we see over and over again."
NBC News

Trump presidency offers Opportunity to World’s Autocrats to world autocrats - New York Times

Trump Presidency Could Offer Opportunity to World’s Autocrats
By ROD NORDLAND
FEBRUARY 1, 2017
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Kim Jong-unmight seem an unlikely player in the global jockeying to get on the new American president’s good side, given the North Korean leader’s implied threats as recently as New Year’s Day to launch nuclear missiles at the United States.
But Mr. Kim apparently sees in President Trump “a good opportunity for him to open a kind of compromise with the new American administration,” North Korea’s highest-ranking defector, Thae Yong-ho, said in an interview with CNN last week.
The bromance between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mr. Trump is the most prominent example of a trend that has swept the world, instilling new hope for a strongman-friendly America in countries like the Philippines, Turkey or Egypt, and among nationalists in many other places who hope to follow in Mr. Trump’s footsteps and gain political power.
Many appear to see a Trump presidency as an opportunity to engage with a like-minded leader who has stated nationalist aims. Others may hope for respite from criticism over their human rights records or authoritarian tendencies. Some, like Mr. Kim and Mr. Putin, might see an opportunity to further their national aims in a new geopolitical order.
The historian Timothy Garton Ash, writing in The Guardian, called the Trump presidency “a new era of nationalism” in which “the nationalists are giving one another the Trumpian thumbs-up across the seas.”
The Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, who called former President Barack Obama a “son of a whore” for the Obama administration’s criticism of an officially sanctioned assassination campaign against drug dealers in the Philippines, was quick to congratulateMr. Trump on his election victory. The Philippine president said last week that Mr. Trump had sent him a message of support.
Mr. Duterte, who has threatened to break off relations with the United States, a longtime ally, and turn to China instead, made the announcement during an appearance at the Miss Universe pageant in Manila. (Like Mr. Trump, who owned Miss Universe until 2015, Mr. Duterte has long reveled in appearing in public with beauty queens.)
Mr. Duterte appeared unfazed by Mr. Trump’s order last week blocking refugees from the United States and curtailing immigration from some mainly Muslim countries, saying on Sunday that “I will not lift a finger” to help Filipinos facing deportation from the United States, according to The Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Even those who were contemptuous of Mr. Trump when he was a reality show star considered a long-shot to win the presidency have changed their tune.
In June, after Mr. Trump said he would bar Muslims from entering the United States, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey demanded that Mr. Trump’s name be removed from Trump Towers Istanbul. Mr. Erdogan, an Islamist, has arrested or fired 100,000 opponents and jailed 40,000 more after an unsuccessful military coup last summer.
After Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Erdogan shifted his stance. “I believe we will reach a consensus with Mr. Trump, particularly on regional issues,” Mr. Erdogan said this month during a meeting with Turkish diplomats. Some cracks appeared to show after Mr. Trump’s immigration order Friday: Mr. Erdogan called the move “frankly disturbing.” But he said he would still meet with Mr. Trump at an unspecified date and raise the issue then.
And the name of Trump Towers remains unchanged.
In Egypt, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who has smarted from American criticism about the country’s human rights record and about the military coup that brought him to power, appears to be welcoming Mr. Trump’s leadership. In December, after a phone call from Mr. Trump, Mr. Sisi agreed to delay a vote in the United Nations Security Council on Israeli settlements.
Mr. Sisi’s silence in the face of the executive order on refugees was conspicuous, despite widespread sentiment in the region that it was anti-Muslim.
In Kazakhstan, the country’s “president for life,” Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose poor human rights record is well documented, said Mr. Trump had called him in December and complimented him on the “miracle” he had wrought in his country over its 25 years of independence. Mr. Trump was apparently not referring to Mr. Nazarbayev’s 2015 re-election, which the Kazakh leader won with 97.7 percent of the vote.
Mr. Trump has also been lauded by nationalists in Europe, where his anti-immigration messages resonate on a continent that has been swamped with refugees from wars in countries like Syria and with economic migrants. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has welcomed Mr. Trump’s victory, as have far-right leaders such as Marine Le Pen in France.
Some of the enthusiasm by authoritarian leaders for Mr. Trump’s presidency seems to be linked to his stated inclination to overturn the world order. That may include rethinking alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or tackling long-running issues such as North Korea and its nuclear arms program — now overseen by Mr. Kim.
In reality, Mr. Kim is still a long way from becoming a friend of Mr. Trump, despite the assertions last week by Mr. Thae, the North Korean defector.
Mr. Kim’s anti-American statements have been belligerent even after the election of Mr. Trump, who responded to a supposed North Korean missile threat by posting on Twitter, “It won’t happen!” That led Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert, to worry in the magazine Foreign Policy that “Donald Trump is already tweeting us into war with North Korea.”
However, Mr. Trump did suggest last year that if he were elected he might meet with Mr. Kim. The offer left the foreign policy establishment shuddering at what many would see as a serious breach of protocol, essentially acknowledging the leader of a state that the United States does not recognize.
“I would speak to him. I would have no problem speaking to him,” Mr. Trump said during an interview with Reuters in May.
The North Korean and American leaders may find other common ground. When Mr. Trump signed an executive order declaring Jan. 20, his inauguration day, as a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion,” social media feeds lit up withcomparisons to declarations from North Korea’s regime of similarly named occasions.
For leaders like Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Sisi, the Trump presidency could provide a respite from criticism of their increasingly repressive governments, and it might even validate their tactics.
Like other authoritarian leaders, Mr. Erdogan has been a firm ally of the United States and a prickly critic of it. Turkey hosts American military bases and is a member of NATO. But many of Mr. Erdogan’s supporters blamed the United States for the attempted military coup, and Mr. Erdogan has chafed under human rights criticism from Washington of its crackdown on opponents and the news media.
Turkish officials have said they are hopeful that the American military will end its cooperation with Kurdish fighters in eastern Turkey. The Pentagon considers the Kurds to be valuable allies, while the Turks see them as terrorist supporters of Kurdish PKK rebels inside Turkey.
Turkey has reason to be hopeful. Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, published comments on Election Day calling for stronger support for the Turkish government. Mr. Flynn’s consulting company, Flynn Intel Group, had a contract at the time with a Turkish business association loosely affiliated with the Erdogan government.
Mr. Erdogan, who has jailed more journalists than any other leader in the past year, was almost gleeful after Mr. Trump shouted down the CNN reporterJim Acosta at a news conference in January, responding to CNN and BuzzFeed reports on intelligence briefings regarding unsubstantiated allegations of Russian efforts to blackmail Mr. Trump.
“Those who carried out that game back then in Turkey have done him wrong again during the news conference,” Mr. Erdogan said after the event, referring to CNN. “And Mr. Trump put the reporter of that group in his place.”
Even with all the friendly words, it is unclear whether Mr. Trump and thin-skinned leaders like Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Duterte will be able to maintain their warm relationships.
In Manila, for example, Mr. Duterte’s appreciation of Mr. Trump’s support was qualified. He said he sent a reply to Mr. Trump, via Miss Universe organizers, complaining about his apparent exclusion from Mr. Trump’s inauguration. “I said tell him, ‘Friend, I didn’t go to the inauguration because I wasn’t invited.’”
New York Times

Donald Trump Plans to Undo Dodd-Frank Law, Fiduciary Rule - Wall Street Journal

Donald Trump Plans to Undo Dodd-Frank Law, Fiduciary Rule
MICHAEL C. BENDER and DAMIAN PALETTA
Feb. 3, 2017 1:00 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump on Friday plans to sign an executive action to scale back the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law, in a sweeping plan to dismantle much of the regulatory system put in place after the financial crisis.
Mr. Trump also plans another executive action aimed at rolling back a controversial regulation scheduled to take effect in April that critics have said would upend the retirement-account advisory business.
“Americans are going to have better choices and Americans are going to have better products because we’re not going to burden the banks with literally hundreds of billions of dollars of regulatory costs every year,” White House National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “The banks are going to be able to price product more efficiently and more effectively to consumers.”
Mr. Trump will use a memorandum to ask the labor secretary to consider rescinding a rule set to go into effect in April that orders retirement advisers, overseeing about $3 trillion in assets, to act in the best interest of their clients, Mr. Cohn said in the White House interview. He said the rule limits consumer choice.
Mr. Trump also will sign an executive order that directs the Treasury secretary and financial regulators to come up with a plan to revise rules the Dodd-Frank law put in place.
Mr. Cohn said the actions are intended to pave the way for additional orders that would affect the postcrisis Financial Stability Oversight Council, the mechanism for winding down a giant faltering financial company, and the way the government supervises big financial firms that aren’t traditional banks, often referred to as systemically important financial institutions.

“This is a table setter for a bunch of stuff that is coming,” he said.
The changes Mr. Cohn described are sure to face a fight from consumer groups and Democrats, who say postcrisis regulations are protecting average borrowers and investors from abusive practices, while making the financial system more resilient and bailouts less likely.
This path also may create political problems for Mr. Trump, whose populist campaign was successful in swaths of the Midwest where homeowners were hit hardest by the housing crash sparked by the financial crisis.
Mr. Trump blamed the political establishment and Wall Street banks for leaving behind many Americans and vowed to break up both. Those promises have already been called into question as he has filled his administration with members of Congress and Wall Street executives, including Mr. Cohn, who retired as president of Goldman Sachs GroupInc. to join the Trump administration.
Adding to the potentially difficult optics for Mr. Trump, he will sign the actions on the same day he meets with a group of business executives, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive James Dimon and BlackRock Inc. CEO Laurence Fink.
Asked about the potential political pushback because of his Wall Street past, Mr. Cohn said the administration’s goal of deregulating financial markets “has nothing to do with Goldman Sachs.”
“It has nothing to do with J.P. Morgan,” he said. “It has nothing to do with Citigroup. It has nothing to do with Bank of America. It has to do with being a player in a global market where we should, could and will have a dominant position as long as we don’t regulate ourselves out of that.”
Mr. Cohn said existing regulations put in place by Dodd-Frank are so sweeping that it is too hard for banks to lend, and consumers’ choice of financial products is too limited.
Democrats and consumer groups have pushed for tighter controls on banks and other lenders, particularly after the subprime mortgage crisis that helped fuel the global financial crisis.
But Mr. Cohn said that many of the postcrisis rules haven’t solved the problems they were supposed to be addressing. He said, for example, that there still isn’t a solid process to safely wind down the collapse of a giant faltering financial company or to ensure that those firms have access to short-term liquidity.
“I’m not sitting here saying we want to go back to the good old days,” Mr. Cohn said.
“We have the best, most highly capitalized banks in the world, and we should use that to our competitive advantage,” he added. “But on the flip side, we also have the most highly regulated, overburdened banks in the world.”
Mr. Cohn laid out a road map for how the Trump administration plans to target new financial rules. He said the Treasury Department would lead an effort to overhaul mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were put into government conservatorship after the crisis.
He also said that the White House wouldn’t need a change in the law to redirect the mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the 2010 law and which governs things like mortgage and credit-card rules.
He suggested the White House could influence the mission of the bureau, set up as an independent agency, by putting a new person at its helm to replace Richard Cordray, the agency’s director.
Asked about potential changes at the agency, he said, “Personnel is policy.”
Mr. Cordray has declined to say what he might do if Mr. Trump attempts to remove him. He told The Wall Street Journal in January the arrival of the Trump administration “shouldn’t change the job at all.”
Mr. Cohn has emerged as one of the top economic and strategic thinkers within the White House, as the Senate hasn’t yet confirmed Mr. Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the Trump administration also hasn’t named any members of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Mr. Cohn did say, though, that a Federal Reserve post, the vice chairman of supervision, is “a very important job to be filled.” This slot was created by the Dodd-Frank law but has been left vacant.
On the fiduciary rule change, the Friday memorandum will ask the Labor Department to revise or rescind the rule.
Mr. Trump has nominated Andrew Puzder to run the department, but he hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate.
Asked if the rule would be eliminated, Mr. Cohn nodded his head. “It’s a bad rule for consumers,” he said.
The fiduciary rule, unveiled last spring and set to go into effect in April, would restrict how brokers can provide retirement advice by forcing them to work in the best interest of their clients and generally avoid conflicts, which can come about with commission-based compensation. It stands to affect about $3 trillion of retirement assets in the U.S., according to research firm Morningstar Inc.
Mr. Cohn said to comply with the rule, companies would be forced to offer retirement products with the lowest fees even if it isn’t best for their client.
Mr. Trump said repeatedly during the presidential campaign that the Dodd-Frank overhaul law was preventing banks from lending, which he said made it harder for consumers to access credit and get the economy to grow. Financial analysts have had mixed views on this assessment.
Some believe that low demand from consumers has hurt the ability of banks to lend, and low interest rates have hurt the returns banks make on these loans. But smaller banks have said they are dealing with a crush of new regulations spurred by Dodd-Frank, something regulators have struggled to address.
Mr. Cohn didn’t specify how all of these regulations should be rewritten, but he said that financial markets have made their own corrections and that the environment that fueled the financial crisis no longer existed. He said, for example, that even if mortgage restrictions are rolled back, it doesn’t mean that there would be another boom in the subprime lending market. That is because, he said, those loans can’t be securitized and sold like they were before the financial crisis because the market for those products isn’t the same.
“We don’t want to do it an unregulated way,” he said. “We want to do it in a smart, regulated way.”
—Ryan Tracy 
and Lisa Beilfuss 
contributed to this article
Write to Michael C. Bender at Mike.Bender@wsj.com and Damian Paletta at damian.paletta@wsj.com

Wall Street Journal

The Phrase Putin Never Uses About Terrorism (and Trump Does) - New York Times

The Phrase Putin Never Uses About Terrorism (and Trump Does)
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
FEBRUARY 1, 2017
MOSCOW — Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president, hardly misses a chance to talk tough on terrorism, once famously saying he would find Chechen terrorists sitting in the “outhouse” and “rub them out.”
He and President Trump, notably dismissive of political correctness, would seem to have found common language on fighting terrorism — except on one point of, well, language.
During his campaign, Mr. Trump associated Islam with terrorism and criticized President Obama for declining to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”
However, Mr. Putin, whom Mr. Trump so openly admires for his toughness, has, for more than a decade, done exactly what President Obama did. He has never described terrorists as “Islamic” and has repeatedly gone out of his way to denounce such language.
“I would prefer Islam not be mentioned in vain alongside terrorism,” he said at a news conference in December, answering a question about the Islamic State, a group he often refers to as “the so-called Islamic State,” to emphasize a distinction with the Islamic religion.
At the opening of a mosque in Moscow in 2015, Mr. Putin spoke of terrorists who “cynically exploit religious feelings for political aims.”
In the Middle East, Mr. Putin said at the mosque opening, “terrorists from the so-called Islamic State are compromising a great world religion, compromising Islam, sowing hatred, killing people, including clergy,” and added that “their ideology is built on lies and blatant distortions of Islam.”
He was careful to add, “Muslim leaders are bravely and fearlessly using their own influence to resist this extremist propaganda.”
And, this being Russia, the failure to adhere to this Kremlin-determined interpretation is a prosecutable offense: The Russian news media are required by law to note in any mention of the Islamic State that the reference is to a banned terrorist organization of that name, lest it be misconstrued as denigrating religion.
Mr. Putin does not take this stance to soothe the feelings of Western liberals, a group he dismisses as hypocritical in any case.
“Putin prides himself on Russia’s intelligence capabilities,” the Brookings Institution wrote in a study of the early formation of his counterterrorism policies. “Russian leaders think they know their enemy,” and it is not the governments of majority Muslim countries such as Iraq and Iran, or the majority of Muslims living in Russia.
Instead, Russian counterterrorism strategy focused on financing and militarily backing moderate Muslim leaders, with the breakthrough in the Chechen war coming when the region’s imam, Akhmad Kadyrov, allied with the Russian military. His son, Ramzan Kadyrov, leads the region today.
While embracing Islamic leaders as a centerpiece of its counterterrorism strategy, however, the Kremlin did not avoid drawing distinctions along religious lines.
The Russian government backed the Kadyrov family’s campaign to revive traditional Sufi Islam in Chechnya as a counterweight to the more austere Wahhabi denomination professed by many separatists. The Wahhabi strain was outlawed in another restive, predominantly Muslim province, Dagestan, and its adherents are persecuted in Russia, rights groups say.
Still, the alliance with moderate Islamic religious leaders became important in pacifying Chechnya and other North Caucasus regions, which have ceased to pose a serious security threat to Russia.
“Putin rules a multiconfessional country,” Orkhan Dzhemal, a commentator on Islamic affairs, said in a telephone interview, noting that in the United States, in contrast, Muslims are not a powerful political force. “He cannot say ‘Islamic terrorism’ for a simple reason. He doesn’t want to alienate millions of Russians.”
The term preferred in Russian political parlance is “international terrorism.”
In a phone call on Friday, President Trump and Mr. Putin discussed “real cooperation” in fighting terrorist groups in Syria. They could agree on an enemy. But the Kremlin statement described a “priority placed on uniting forces in the fight against the main threat — international terrorism.”
Follow Andrew E. Kramer on Twitter @AndrewKramerNYT.

How Trump benefited from the White House - New York Times

PETE GAMLEN
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
FEBRUARY 1, 2017
As a candidate, President Trump spent contributors’ money for office space that he owned, stays at his resorts and food at his restaurants. He spent contributors’ money on Trump-branded wine and water. He displayed Trump merchandise at campaign events. Now he seems determined to milk the presidency, apparently synonymous with his brand in his eyes, for a fortune.
“The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before,” Mr. Trump observed, with satisfaction, shortly after the election.
Last week, an executive of the Trump Organization, Eric Danziger, said it would open Trump-branded hotels in the 26 largest metropolitan areas in the country, up from five. The business, he said, would focus its expansion domestically for “the next four or eight years.” The fee to join the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., which Mr. Trump calls the “Winter White House,” just doubled to $200,000.
This news came less than a week after Mr. Trump and his inauguration committee hosted parties and other events at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, in the government-owned Old Post Office. Even his press secretary, Sean Spicer, has become a pitchman: “It’s an absolutely stunning hotel,” he said recently. “I encourage you to go there if you haven’t been by.”

Self-dealing is such standard procedure for this White House that a cynic (or satirist) might say it’s time to give in and try to put Mr. Trump’s conflicts of interest to work for the public. Maybe if he had hotels in every nation, he’d have a financial interest in being less bellicose, and more supportive of the free flow of trade and of people, even if they happen to be Mexican or Muslim.
But we really prefer the old-fashioned approach in which presidents put the public interest ahead of their own finances. Federal ethics officials have told Mr. Trump that he should divest his business interests to avoid allegations of bribery and to assure Americans that their needs are his only concern. Mr. Trump argues that he can put a “firewall” between his businesses and himself by having his eldest sons manage them. The president and the Trump Organization last week hired lawyers to keep an eye on the Trumps, a laughable ploy that doesn’t meet ethical or anti-corruption standards and constitutional requirements.
Mr. Trump has argued that the law permits the president to keep his business — even though no modern president has done so, and far poorer ones than he have sold off business interests to serve. He and his lawyers have played down the importance of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits government officials from accepting gifts or income from foreign governments without the approval of Congress. And he refuses to release his tax returns and divest his assets and put the proceeds in a blind trust, as his cabinet nominees are doing right now.
Consider the Trump Hotel. Mr. Trump has a 60-year lease on the property with the General Services Administration. That contract states that no elected federal official “shall be admitted to any share or part of this lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.” That unambiguous clause exists to prevent corruption and self-dealing by government officials.
Since Mr. Trump officially violated the lease when he assumed office, the agency is clearly obligated to cancel the lease or require that it be sold to another hotel operator. Ranking Democrats on the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over the agency have for weeks been asking it to address the lease violation. So far, the agency, which reports to the president, appears to have done nothing. Mr. Trump’s lawyers preposterously contend that because he was not an elected official when the lease was signed, he hasn’t broken it.
Aside from violating the lease terms, Mr. Trump is very likely violating the emoluments clause by holding on to the hotel. His lawyers have said that he will donate profits from rooms rented to foreign governments to the Treasury, but that’s no cure. Experts say it would be next to impossible to account for foreign “profits” — which, of course, would be based on the hotel’s own calculations. Is the hotel prepared to open its books so the public can judge those numbers for itself?
Congress ought to demand that the G.S.A. uphold the terms of the hotel lease and shame Mr. Trump into selling his other businesses, the fortunes of which are now hitched to the presidency. Democrats have been trying to do this, but the Republicans who run the House and Senate have not joined them. So far, they lack the spine to challenge the president. Just imagine how they would have reacted if Hillary Clinton had been elected and the Clinton Foundation were merely leasing a government building, let alone using it to generate revenue.
If the agency doesn’t act, a competing hotel could sue to demand that it cancel the lease because the president’s control of the hotel represents unfair competition. The Trump Hotel has been drawing business away from other hotels, precisely because its proprietor occupies the White House. Indeed, the hotel has promoted itself on Twitter with an image of a man relaxing in one of its rooms, gazing out upon a building that looks very like the White House (it’s actually the Environmental Protection Agency, which Mr. Trump campaigned to abolish). Since the election, embassies from countries that include Bahrain, Kuwait and Azerbaijan have held receptions at the hotel, and diplomats say it’s important that they be seen patronizing it.

A tweet from Trump Hotels makes it clear that proximity to power is part of the sales pitch.
Mr. Trump has boasted that the presidency boosts his brand. He should focus instead on how his commercial ambition is tarnishing the image of public service. If he continues to reduce the most powerful office in the world to a marketing scheme, ethical public servants, in Congress and across the government, can’t stand by and watch.
New York Times

A White House devoid of integrity - TIME

A White House Devoid of Integrity
At the dedication of his Library, President Ronald Reagan, then 80 years old, reflected on the pendulum swings he had seen in his lifetime, such as the rise of big government and totalitarianism. “I also remember a time when America was advised to keep a low profile in the world as if by hunkering down and muzzling her deepest beliefs she might avoid foreign criticism and placate her enemies,” Reagan said.
Just a week into his infant presidency, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that affirmed his deepest beliefs loudly to the world: He will rule an incompetent, huge government dependent on fear-mongering, which (for starters) means banning lawfully admitted immigrants based on their birth nationality. It could mean a wall on our border with Mexico, whether it’s a new tax on Americans or diplomatic fallout over who picks up the $40 billion tab. It may mean reversing protections for LGBT government employees.
As we witness daily public panic caused by a White House possessing not enough professionalism and a toxic abundance of narcissism, a crisis of character is quickly becoming a crisis of the American experiment.
TIME

Why liberals should back Neil Gorsych to US Supreme Court - New York Times

Why Liberals Should Back Neil Gorsuch
By NEAL K. KATYAL
JANUARY 31, 2017
I am hard-pressed to think of one thing President Trump has done right in the last 11 days since his inauguration. Until Tuesday, when he nominated an extraordinary judge and man, Neil Gorsuch, to be a justice on the Supreme Court.
The nomination comes at a fraught moment. The new administration’s executive actions on immigration have led to chaos everywhere from the nation’s airports to the Department of Justice. They have raised justified concern about whether the new administration will follow the law. More than ever, public confidence in our system of government depends on the impartiality and independence of the courts.
There is a very difficult question about whether there should be a vote on President Trump’s nominee at all, given the Republican Senate’s history-breaking record of obstruction on Judge Merrick B. Garland — perhaps the most qualified nominee ever for the high court. But if the Senate is to confirm anyone, Judge Gorsuch, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver, should be at the top of the list.
I believe this, even though we come from different sides of the political spectrum. I was an acting solicitor general for President Barack Obama; Judge Gorsuch has strong conservative bona fides and was appointed to the 10th Circuit by President George W. Bush. But I have seen him up close and in action, both in court and on the Federal Appellate Rules Committee (where both of us serve); he brings a sense of fairness and decency to the job, and a temperament that suits the nation’s highest court.
Considerable doubts about the direction of the Supreme Court have emerged among Democrats in recent weeks, particularly given some of the names that have been floated by the administration for possible nomination. With environmental protection, reproductive rights, privacy, executive power and the rights of criminal defendants (including the death penalty) on the court’s docket, the stakes are tremendous. I, for one, wish it were a Democrat choosing the next justice. But since that is not to be, one basic criterion should be paramount: Is the nominee someone who will stand up for the rule of law and say no to a president or Congress that strays beyond the Constitution and laws?
I have no doubt that if confirmed, Judge Gorsuch would help to restore confidence in the rule of law. His years on the bench reveal a commitment to judicial independence — a record that should give the American people confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the president who appointed him. Judge Gorsuch’s record suggests that he would follow in the tradition of Justice Elena Kagan, who voted against President Obama when she felt a part of the Affordable Care Act went too far. In particular, he has written opinions vigorously defending the paramount duty of the courts to say what the law is, without deferring to the executive branch’s interpretations of federal statutes, including our immigration laws.
In a pair of immigration cases, De Niz Robles v. Lynch and Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, Judge Gorsuch ruled against attempts by the government to retroactively interpret the law to disfavor immigrants. In a separate opinion in Gutierrez-Brizuela, he criticized the legal doctrine that federal courts must often defer to the executive branch’s interpretations of federal law, warning that such deference threatens the separation of powers designed by the framers. When judges defer to the executive about the law’s meaning, he wrote, they “are not fulfilling their duty to interpret the law.” In strong terms, Judge Gorsuch called that a “problem for the judiciary” and “a problem for the people whose liberties may now be impaired” by “an avowedly politicized administrative agent seeking to pursue whatever policy whim may rule the day.” That reflects a deep conviction about the role of the judiciary in preserving the rule of law.
That conviction will serve the court and the country well. Last week, The Denver Post encouraged the president to nominate Judge Gorsuch in part because “a justice who does his best to interpret the Constitution or statute and apply the law of the land without prejudice could go far to restore faith in the highest court of the land.”
I couldn’t agree more. Right about now, the public could use some reassurance that no matter how chaotic our politics become, the members of the Supreme Court will uphold the oath they must take: to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.” I am confident Neil Gorsuch will live up to that promise.
Neal K. Katyal, an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, is a law professor at Georgetown and a partner at Hogan Lovells.
New York Times

Why is Trump bad for Brexit ? - Financial Times

Why is Trump bad for Brexit ?
by: Gideon Rachman
For the most ardent supporters of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump was a mixture of vindication and salvation. The president of the US, no less, thinks it is a great idea for Britain to leave the EU. Even better, he seems to offer an exciting escape route. The UK can leap off the rotting raft of the EU and on to the gleaming battleship HMS Anglosphere.
It is an alluring vision. Unfortunately, it is precisely wrong. The election of Mr Trump has transformed Brexit from a risky decision into a straightforward disaster. For the past 40 years, Britain has had two central pillars to its foreign policy: membership of the EU and a “special relationship” with the US.
The decision to exit the EU leaves Britain much more dependent on the US, just at a time when America has elected an unstable president opposed to most of the central propositions on which UK foreign policy is based.
During the brief trip to Washingtonby Theresa May, the UK prime minister, this unpleasant truth was partly obscured by trivia and trade. Mr Trump’s decision to return the bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office was greeted with slavish delight by Brexiters. More substantively, the Trump administration made it clear that it is minded to do a trade deal with the UK just as soon as Britain’s EU divorce comes through.
But no sooner had Mrs May left Washington than Mr Trump caused uproar with his “Muslim ban”, affecting immigrants and refugees from seven countries. After equivocating briefly, the prime minister was forced to distance herself from her new best friend in the White House.
Donald Trump is a disaster for Brexit
Britain cannot look to the US for support after its divorce from the EU
Gideon Rachman


©by: Gideon Rachman
For the most ardent supporters of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump was a mixture of vindication and salvation. The president of the US, no less, thinks it is a great idea for Britain to leave the EU. Even better, he seems to offer an exciting escape route. The UK can leap off the rotting raft of the EU and on to the gleaming battleship HMS Anglosphere.

It is an alluring vision. Unfortunately, it is precisely wrong. The election of Mr Trump has transformed Brexit from a risky decision into a straightforward disaster. For the past 40 years, Britain has had two central pillars to its foreign policy: membership of the EU and a “special relationship” with the US.
The decision to exit the EU leaves Britain much more dependent on the US, just at a time when America has elected an unstable president opposed to most of the central propositions on which UK foreign policy is based.
During the brief trip to Washington by Theresa May, the UK prime minister, this unpleasant truth was partly obscured by trivia and trade. Mr Trump’s decision to return the bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office was greeted with slavish delight by Brexiters. More substantively, the Trump administration made it clear that it is minded to do a trade deal with the UK just as soon as Britain’s EU divorce comes through.
But no sooner had Mrs May left Washington than Mr Trump caused uproar with his “Muslim ban”, affecting immigrants and refugees from seven countries. After equivocating briefly, the prime minister was forced to distance herself from her new best friend in the White House.
Related article

May finds goodwill from Trump visit draining away
White House wrongfooted Britain’s PM within hours of first meeting’s success

The refugee row underlined the extent to which Mrs May and Mr Trump have clashing visions of the world. Even when it comes to trade, the supposed basis for their new special relationship, the two leaders have very different views.
Mrs May says that she wants the UK to be the champion of global free trade. But Mr Trump is the most protectionist US president since the 1930s. This is a stark clash of visions that will be much harder to gloss over — if and when Mr Trump begins slapping tariffs on foreign goods and ignoring the World Trade Organisation.
In addition, any trade deal with the Trump administration is likely to be hard to swallow for Britain and would involve controversial concessions on the National Health Service and agriculture.
The British and American leaders also have profoundly different attitudes to international organisations. Mrs May is a firm believer in the importance of Nato and the United Nations. (Britain’s permanent membership of the UN Security Council is one of its few remaining totems of great power status). But Mr Trump has twice called Nato obsolete and is threatening to slash US funding of the UN.
The May and Trump administrations are also at odds on the crucial questions of the future of the EU and of Russia. Mr Trump is openly contemptuous of the EU and his aides have speculated that it might break up. This reflects the views of Nigel Farage and the UK Independence party — but not of the current British government.
Mrs May knows that her difficult negotiations with the EU will become all-but-impossible if member states believe that the UK is actively working to destroy their organisation in alliance with Mr Trump.
Her official position is that Britain wants to work with a strong EU. She probably even means it, given the economic and political dangers that would flow from its break-up.
Not the least of these dangers would be an increased threat from a resurgent Russia. The British government worked closely with the Obama administration to impose economic sanctions on the country after its annexation of Crimea. But Mr Trump is already flirting with lifting sanctions.
The reality is that the UK is now faced with a US president who is fundamentally at odds with the British view of the world. For all the forced smiles in the Oval Office last week, the May government certainly knows this. For political reasons, Boris Johnson, the British foreign minister, is having to talk up the prospects of a trade deal with Mr Trump.
Yet only a few months ago, Mr Johnson was saying that Mr Trump was “clearly out of his mind” and betrayed a “stupefying ignorance” of the world.
Were it not for Brexit — a cause that Mr Johnson enthusiastically championed — the UK government would be able to take an appropriately wary approach to Mr Trump. If Britain had voted to stay inside the EU, the obvious response to the arrival of a pro-Russia protectionist in the Oval Office would be to draw closer to its European allies.
Britain could defend free-trade far more effectively with the EU’s bulk behind it — and could also start to explore the possibilities for more EU defence co-operation. As it is, Britain has been thrown into the arms of an American president that the UK’s foreign secretary has called a madman.
In the declining years of the British empire, some of its politicians flattered themselves that they could be “Greeks to their Romans” — providing wise and experienced counsel to the new American imperium.
But the Emperor Nero has now taken power in Washington — and the British are having to smile and clap as he sets fires and reaches for his fiddle.
gideon.rachman@ft.com
Financial Times

Trump's whirlwind first week in office - Financial Times

Trump's whirlwind first week in office - Financial Times

JANUARY 28, 2017 by: Demetri Sevastopulo and Sam Fleming
In The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump described hyperbole as an “innocent form of exaggeration” that was a “very effective form of promotion”. In an interview with ABC News on Wednesday, the US president stretched this definition to the limit with his claim that he would make relations with Mexico “better than ever”, despite his demand that the country pays billions of dollars for a border wall.
Less than 24 hours later, Mr Trump watched his first foreign policy controversy unfold after Enrique Peña Nieto, the Mexican president, angrily cancelled a visit to Washington. To Mr Trump’s supporters, the escalating spat was another example of his negotiating genius but to critics it was further proof that he was acting like a rogue on the global stage.
“Americans are as baffled by the first days of the Trump presidency as the rest of the world,” said David Gergen, a political adviser to former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. “The good news for his supporters is he has not changed. But that is the bad news for his detractors, who hoped he would become more presidential and more rational.”
It has become clear that Mr Trump has no intention of changing his behaviour or the populist agenda he laid out on the campaign trail. “I can be the most presidential person ever . . . but I may not be able to do the job nearly as well if I do that,” he told ABC.
Despite unveiling a flurry of policies ìn his first week in office, most of the attention focused on Mr Trump’s behaviour. The man who was preoccupied with his TV ratings as host of The Apprentice spent much of the week obsessing over different metrics, from the size of his inauguration crowd to his loss in the popular vote. This quest for affirmation has pushed Mr Trump and his staff beyond the bounds of fact, sparking criticism that the new president was debasing his office and harming US credibility.
On his first full day in office, Mr Trump used a speech at the CIA to lambast journalists for reporting — accurately — that Barack Obama had a far bigger attendance for his 2009 inauguration than Mr Trump did on January 20. In a pique, he ordered Sean Spicer, his spokesman, to berate them. In an angry performance Mr Spicer repeated Mr Trump’s false claims about the size of the crowd.
Escalating the issue further, Mr Trump pressured the head of the National Park Service to find photographs to prove that the media were lying, according to the Washington Post. He also ordered an investigation into voter fraud, which he blamed for his losing the popular vote despite any evidence.
Kellyanne Conway, a presidential adviser, entered the fray on Sunday and denied that Mr Spicer had lied in his defence of Mr Trump. He had used “alternative facts”, she said, a phrase that went viral and sparked images of her as a doll named “Propaganda Barbie”. Her comment helped catapult Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s novel about a dystopian world where the regime engages in “doublespeak”, to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.
As the sideshows played on, Mr Trump was busy notching up “wins” for his voters. Using his executive powers, he withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, began moves to repeal Obamacare, resurrected the Keystone XL oil pipeline and started the process to build the border wall.
He summoned US chief executives, including Elon Musk of Tesla and Mark Fields of Ford, to the White House for meetings where he stressed his administration would punish companies that moved production overseas and imported their goods back to the US.
Investors applauded, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average past the 20,000 mark for the first time on Wednesday. But his policies have also courted concern.
“There are very significant geopolitical implications from a retreat from international engagement and an embrace of protectionism,” said Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank.
Despite the fanfare, some of his actions were more symbolic than substantive. Many of these policies will face a challenge in Congress.
While the TPP move seemed dramatic, it was a deal that had effectively collapsed. His order to back the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines — and to demand that the pipes are made in the US — has been pitched as a way of generating jobs. But the demand for the pipelines has diminished because of the US shale revolution, and the effect on employment is disputed.
Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics said forcing Keystone XL to use US steel would probably violate World Trade Organisation rules. In that sense, he said, it sent a clear signal about Mr Trump’s disregard for many of the international norms that have governed America as the pillar of the liberal economic order.
Amid the flurry of activity, some campaign promises did not materialise. His vow to brand China a currency manipulator has yet to be enacted, for example, perhaps because Beijing has been trying to prop up its currency. He has still to explain how he will fund his much-heralded $1tn infrastructure blitz.
Critically, Mr Trump’s views on questions such as corporate tax reform remain unclear. On Thursday, Mr Spicer appeared to endorse plans from congressional Republicans for a major overhaul of corporation tax that would penalise imports and exempt exports. The move was pitched as a way to force Mexico to pay for the border wall, but the White House later backtracked.
Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina senator and one of few Republican Trump critics, tweeted that “any policy proposal which drives up costs of Corona, tequila or margaritas is a big-time bad idea. Mucho Sad”.
While some critics hope Congress will act as a brake on Mr Trump, others worry that most of the Republican party has become so intoxicated with power that pro-trade politicians such as Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, are willing to ignore the fact that Mr Trump is tearing up decades of party orthodoxy.
“Most of the Republicans have sold out their values for political power,” said Edward Alden, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The last time the US rejected a negotiated treaty on trade was 1950. The last time you had a president running on an openly protectionist platform was Herbert Hoover.”
Beyond the realm of economics, Mr Trump shocked US allies — including UK Prime Minister Theresa May who visited Mr Trump on Friday — by suggesting that he might allow torture, including waterboarding, for interrogations. The White House obfuscated when pressed about a leaked memo that talked about the use of “black sites” — the secret CIA prisons used during the George W Bush administration.
James Stavridis, Nato’s former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, described the first week as a “bumpy start” because of the spat with Mexico and “fairly confrontational” White House comments which suggested that the US try to block China from accessing islands in the South China Sea.
Fans and critics of Mr Trump are arriving at the same conclusion. “What you have seen in the first week is that he intends to pursue what he talked about doing. He is creating turbulence and secondary effects, but it is early days,” said Mr Stavridis.
Mr Gergen, however, says Mr Trump is damaging the US’s reputation. “It is causing a deeper sense of distress that this could become dangerous. You misjudge the Chinese on Taiwan or those islands and guns could be blazing.”
Laura Schisler, a Trump voter from Pittsburgh, said she was “very pleased and not surprised” that Mr Trump was issuing so many executive orders. “He stated these promises over and over again, and his supporters believed him and voted for him. Now he is delivering,” said Mrs Schisler.
Stephen Bannon, former head of Breitbart News turned White House aide, pointed to the disconnect between elites and many voters to explain why the media — which he said should “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while” — was shocked at Mr Trump’s actions. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country,” he told the New York Times.
Some experts say Mr Trump will boost the economy, particularly if he pushes through infrastructure spending. Others worry that the bullying treatment he gave Mexico would backfire with powers such as China. His penchant to sow confusion — such as saying in a single interview that Nato was “very important” and “obsolete” — has left diplomats scratching their heads, while domestic critics worry about the damage he could do to the country’s image.
“Ronald Reagan certainly brought a new spirit of government, but Reagan was willing to respect certain norms of behaviour,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University.
“The current president seems unwilling and uninterested to respect the bipartisan norms of presidential action. If this week is a harbinger of the future the entire globe is going to get a case of ADD [attention deficit disorder].”