Ivanka bagged a string of Chinese trademarks for her luxury brand the same day she dinned with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
GOP town halls this week and last … well, not going all that well.
Here’s an interesting article in The Outline about how Google basically destroyed a small web publisher by stealing the information it created and using it for Google.
Folks following the Trump/Russia story have been talking about this article in the British Prospect, an interview with Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 (1999-2004), the UK’s analogue to the CIA. The attention has been on this passage of the interview in which Dearlove talks about or speculates about whether Donald Trump may have been bailed out by loans from Russia or other parts of the former Soviet Union during the 2008 financial crisis. Read More
The last we heard of Trump campaign tough guy Boris Epshteyn he was being booted from the White House communications office and being found a job elsewhere in the Trump administration. Apparently that didn’t pan out. He’ll now be joining Sinclair Broadcasting as “chief political analyst.”
Word out of South Korea and Northeast Asia generally is that people in the region are seeing all the Trump winning and are getting sick of all the winning. The AP reports that Trump is finding Asian allies cool to a preemptive strike and The Washington Post Tokyo bureau chief last night suggested on Twitter that people in the region are more worried about rash action from President Trump than North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, which is really quite an achievement if you think about it. Read More
It is what we might call ‘the consensus judgment’ that President Trump is a deeply ignorant man and perhaps a profoundly ignorant President. But it is worth stepping back and considering just what this means, the different kinds of ignorance that exist and how they differ. Read More
Betsy DeVos finds lawyer who decried discrimination against white people and puts her in charge of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
We’ve had a flurry of articles this week about the Trump/Russia story. I want to flag some details which are now apparent as we look at each of the articles together.
Let’s start with the news that Carter Page was surveilled by the FBI using a FBI warrant obtained in the summer of 2016. The Washington Post and New York Times stories on this tell a slightly different story on the precise timing of the first warrant. The Times says August. The Post at least seems to say July. I wouldn’t make too much of this disagreement. It’s possible the Post story is speaking loosely in one case or I over-interpreted a key sentence. Read More
President Trump flipped on maybe half of his major campaign promises yesterday. That’s an issue in itself. But I want to zoom in on the specific issue of Trump’s out of nowhere about-face on designating China as a “currency manipulator” – a technical executive branch finding which brings lots of penalties in its wake.