I guess there’s something new in the air in recent weeks, for whatever reason. But it’s a bit hard not to notice a certain status anxiety or attempted snobbery in WaPo’s and Politico’s coverage of the Trump/Macri story. We will see how that develops.
You may have seen this account from The New York Post of Donald Trump’s meeting with major network media executives yesterday. Needless to say, coming from the Post, we should not necessarily assume any of it is true. The Post had Trump essentially reading the execs and top anchors the riot, yelling, getting red in the face, essentially telling them to fall in line or else. In the memorable words of one Post source, “It was like a f−−−ing firing squad.”
So what actually happened? CNN’s report on the meeting was quite different.
We’ve got yet another example. After his surprise election win, Donald Trump met with Nigel Farage, head of the UKIP along with at least one major financial backer of the Brexit campaign. Trump’s big ask was to help shut down some big off shore wind farms which Trump believes will mar the view of his Scottish golf course. Farage’s direct influence in current UK politics would seem limited. But it’s likely a different story for Brexit campaign’s major financial backers.The Times has the story.
As we noted earlier, Argentine President Macri says he didn’t speak to Trump about the building permits for his new office tower in Buenos Aires. But now we learn from this new report from The Guardian that he did talk to Ivanka during the call. But he didn’t talk with Ivanka about the development project either. “He spoke with Ivanka only briefly to say hello because he met her when she
was just a kid,” Macri’s spokesman told The Guardian. “They did not speak about it. The president doesn’t speak about city building permits.”
In an interview with Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, Macri addressed it himself: “In the call, I also talked with his daughter. I have known her since her infant days.”
Here’s a deep dive on the background of Trump’s Buenos Aires development. And here’s more on the two families’ history going back four decades.
As we noted earlier, there are likely half a dozen different stories out now showing the various ways that President-Elect Trump is combining the public’s business and his own private business ventures. As I noted a few days ago on Twitter, we’re about to learn with a little more context what the phrase “conflict of interest” actually means.
Don’t miss this story. The Koch Brothers political network had a lot more to do with securing Donald Trump’s election than most people realize. And they’re now directing pretty much the entire policy agenda of the new administration.
A short while ago we flagged that one of Argentina’s top journalists reported that Donald Trump asked Argentine President Macri to help work out some permitting issues holding up a building Trump is trying to build in Buenos Aires. This came during Macri’s call to Trump congratulating him on his election as President of the United States. Now President Macri is denying that they discussed the problems with Trump’s building project.
Over the weekend, there were a flurry of stories about how Donald Trump and his family are already using the presidency to leverage his overseas businesses as well as his new DC hotel. Well, now there’s more. This time in Argentina.
Over the weekend, the white supremacists (the self-labeled ‘alt-right’) who run the ‘National Policy Institute’ met in Washington to celebrate Trump’s victory and stake their claim to a role in Washington and the new government. Steve Bannon, the incoming White House counselor said earlier that he had made Breitbart “the platform for the alt-right.” He owns these folks. After a prettied up day when most journalists were there, leader Richard Spencer gave an explicitly Nazi speech. Here are some pictures from inside the event – after the jump.
Hillary Clinton’s national popular vote lead now stands at 1.677 million votes or a 1.3 percentage point margin.