Before Inauguration, Trump Says He Did Not Divide the Nation
■ President-elect Donald J. Trump says he didn’t divide the country. It was divided already. His source: Franklin Graham.
■ Vice President-elect Mike Pence defended Mr. Trump’s tweeting.
■ When pressed, the nominee for Treasury secretary, Steven T. Mnuchin, told the Senate Finance Committee that he was an officer at an investment fund based in a tax haven, and much more.
The president-elect’s choice to vouch for his unifying message: Franklin Graham
A day before Mr. Trump is to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, he took to Twitter to assert that he is not responsible for the nation’s divisions. His champion? Rev. Franklin Graham.
To some, Mr. Graham’s good wishes may not hold much weight. Last month on Facebook, he decried House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s failure to join him and the president-elect in ending all Muslim immigration “until we can properly vet them or until the war with Islam is over.”
He castigated Representative William Lacy Clay, Democrat of Missouri, for defending a high school student’s artwork depicting a confrontation between citizens and police, depicted as pigs.
And last year, Mr. Graham said of homosexuals, “you cannot stay gay and continue to call yourself a Christian.”
The journey begins
Ready or not, Mr. Trump begins his journey from Manhattan to Washington on Thursday, by military jet, not Trump Force One, to assume the presidency. He let the country know by Twitter.
And that’s O.K. by the man who will be his vice president, Mike Pence, who told Charlie Rose on CBS, “I think one of the really refreshing things about the president-elect is that he speaks his mind and sometimes he does that from a podium, sometimes he does that in an interview and sometime he does that on Twitter.”
Questioning his Twitter habits is just not fair, Mr. Pence added.
“I will tell you that some of the treatment he has gotten and that we frankly continue to get from some in the media is frustrating. His ability to literally reach tens of millions of people with his view of a particular issue or of particular news I think is of value to the administration. I expect him to continue to use that. You are going to see a President Donald Trump who uses the bully pulpit in new and 21st century ways to communicate our agenda to the American people and marshal the kind of support to bring real change to Washington, D.C., and restore our economy and our place in the world.”
By the way, it isn’t just the media. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll published Wednesday found that 69 percent of Americans did not like Mr. Trump’s tweeting, agreeing that “in an instant, messages can have unintended major implications without careful review.”
‘The rich are different’ — Steve Mnuchin edition
At first blush, Mr. Mnuchin was a busy enough man, with his investment business and his Hollywood endeavors listed on a Dec. 19 questionnaire for the Senate Finance Committee that he swore was “true, accurate and complete.”
But when pushed by committee aides, Mr. Mnuchin conceded there was more. In a revised questionnaire submitted to the committee this month, he disclosed that he was also the director of Dune Capital International Ltd., an investment fund incorporated in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven. He also revealed his management posts in seven other investment funds, which he said he “inadvertently missed,” according to Finance Committee documents obtained by The New York Times.
According to those documents:
In his revised questionnaire, Mr. Mnuchin disclosed several additional financial assets, including $95 million worth of real estate — a co-op in New York City; a residence in Southampton, New York; a residence in Los Angeles, California; and $15 million in real estate holdings in Mexico. Mr. Mnuchin has claimed these omissions were due to a misunderstanding of the questionnaire — he does not consider these assets to be “investment assets” and thus did not disclose them, even though the Committee directs the nominee to list all real estate assets.
Oh, he also forgot to disclose the $906,556 worth of artwork held by his children.
Chelsea Manning: Thanks, Obama
The anger or disappointment at President Obama’s decision to commute Ms. Manning’s sentence after seven years in military prison has been bipartisan. Ms. Manning, then Prvt. Bradley Manning, leaked thousands of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, becoming a hero to some on the left but a villain to many, especially in the military.
Ms. Manning did appreciate it though.
Thank you @BarackObama for giving me a chance. =,)
New president will visit C.I.A. headquarters
Mr. Trump plans to appear at the swearing-in ceremony for Mike Pompeo, his choice for director of the C.I.A., after an interfaith prayer service on his first full day in office, a person briefed on the plans said.
Mr. Trump’s visit to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., will be one of his earliest official acts as president and could be seen as a gesture to an agency whose work he has criticized repeatedly since his victory in November.
The visit would come much earlier in his administration than in those of his three immediate predecessors. President Bill Clinton, who defended the agency amid proposed cuts, first went to Langley a year after taking office; President Obama visited in April 2009, a few months after his inauguration; and President George W. Bush went even sooner, in March 2001.
The visit is an opportunity for Mr. Trump to display the seriousness of the job.
Back at the Trump
His days outside the White House waning, the president-elect dashed from New York to Washington on Wednesday night for a bit of a folderol:a stop at the National Portrait Gallery to honor his vice president-elect, Mike Pence, then a cabinet secretaries’ dinner at the Library of Congress.
Mr. Trump did take the time to snap a photograph with a celebrity on hand to celebrate with Mr. Pence: the country singer Lee Greenwood of “God Bless the U.S.A.” fame.
With A-list celebrities hard to come by for the inaugural festivities, country music has proved to be something of a lifeline.
Great seeing @TheLeeGreenwood and Kimberly at this evenings VP dinner! #GodBlessTheUSA
On such nights, presidents (and presidents-elect) often make unscheduled stops — sometimes at a soup kitchen, sometimes at a diner or burger joint — to fraternize with ordinary folks. Mr. Trump also made an unexpected stop at the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, where he had dinner.
Video shows Pres.-elect Trump greeted with cheers Wednesday night inside the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. abcn.ws/2jzU6Y4
One assumes that for the small pool of journalists tagging along, the hotel made an exception to the no-reporter rule handed down by management for the inaugural festivities.
Party at Pence’s house
Of course the real fun in Washington on Wednesday night was on Mr. Pence’s street, where gay rights activists gathered to dance and twerk — a protest of sorts of the incoming vice president’s views of homosexuals. From the Portrait Gallery to this:
P.C: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/donald-trump-inauguration.htmlDemonstrators twerked their way past VP-elect Pence's home in protest of what they view as his anti-LGBTQ agenda. abcn.ws/2k2sh7q
Post a Comment