Tag: Trump

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Trump fumes, GOP senators baffled by legal team’s debut

In this image from video, Bruce Castor, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, speaks during the second impeachment trial of Trump in the Senate at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2021. (Senate Television via AP)

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump fumed that his attorneys’ performance on the opening day of his second impeachment trial was a disaster, as allies and Republican senators questioned the strategy and some called for yet another shakeup to his legal team.

Trump, who was watching the proceedings in Washington from his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, was furious at what he saw, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Senators, too, criticized what they described as an unfocused and rambling performance as Trump’s team and Democratic House managers began to lay out their cases in front of the Senate jury.

While it remains unlikely that more than a handful of Republicans will join Democrats in convicting the former president at the end of the trial, the proceedings were a chance for Trump to try to repair some of the damage to his legacy incurred over the storming of the Capitol by a mob of his supporters. Trump has been charged with inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection, and last month he became the first president in history to be impeached by the House twice.

But Trump’s team — which was announced little more than a week ago — appeared unprepared as they attempted a good cop, bad cop routine that veered from flattery to legalese, and stood in dramatic contrast to Democrats’ focused emotional appeals.

Trump — ever the showman — was impressed with the Democrats, who opened Tuesday’s session with powerful video that compiled scenes of the deadly attack on Congress. And he complained that his team — especially lead lawyer Bruce Castor — came off badly on television and looked weak in comparison, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The anger was echoed by Trump allies, who blasted the lawyers both publicly and privately and with repeated profanities.

“There is no argument. I have no idea what he’s doing. I have no idea why he’s saying what he’s saying,” said Alan Dershowitz, an attorney who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial, as he weighed in on Castor during an appearance on Newsmax as the session was underway.

Peter Navarro, a former Trump trade adviser, had already been urging the former president to ditch his legal team and hire Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz before the trial began, warning: “You gotta get rid of those guys. These people don’t understand. This is a political trial.”

Republican members of the Senate appeared equally baffled, especially at Castor, who spent much of his time buttering up senators with compliments, praising the case made by Democrats and going on tangents.

GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said Castor “just rambled on and on and on and didn’t really address the constitutional argument. He said Trump attorney David Schoen, who spoke second, “got around to it” and “did an effective job. But I’ve seen a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments and that was not one of the finest I’ve seen.”

Before the criticism mounted, another Trump adviser described Castor’s presentation as part of a “very clear, deliberative strategy.” The adviser said that after the Democrats’ emotionally charged opening, Castor had set about “lowering the temperature” before “dropping the hammer on the unconstitutional nature of this impeachment witch hunt.”

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The hammer did not appear to hit its nail.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who voted with Democrats on Tuesday to move forward with the trial, said Trump’s team did a “terrible job” and was “disorganized,” “random” and “did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand.”

GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who also voted with Democrats, said she was “perplexed” by Castor, “who did not seem to make any arguments at all, which was an unusual approach to take.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of Trump’s staunchest allies, said he didn’t think the lawyers had done “the most effective job,” while South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, another close ally to Trump, said he didn’t know where Castor was going with his arguments.

Trump’s team did not respond to requests for comment on the day’s events or questions about whether they are planning any shakeups to the legal team.

Asked for a response to the GOP criticism as he was leaving the trial, Castor — who had said during the trial that the team had “changed what we were going to do” at the last minute because the House managers had done a good job — would say only that “we had a good day.” Schoen told reporters that he hadn’t spoken yet to the president, but would “have to do better next time.”

“I mean, I always hope to improve. I hope I can do that,” he said.

Trump parted ways with his original impeachment team just over a week before the Senate trial was set to begin, in part because Trump wanted them to use a defense that relied on unfounded allegations of election fraud, and the lawyers were not willing to do so.

___

Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington contributed to this report.

— Associated Press

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McConnell was done with Trump. His party said not so fast.

After four years, the minority leader had finally had enough. But with most Republicans rallying around Donald J. Trump, he sided with his colleagues trying to throw out the impeachment case.

 

— NYT: Top Stories

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Even as Trump cut immigration, immigrants transformed U.S.

The past four years have seen a steep reduction in immigration. But the country is becoming ever more diverse.

To grasp the impact of the latest great wave of immigration to the United States, consider the city of Grand Island, Neb.: More than 60 percent of public school students are nonwhite, and their families collectively speak 55 languages. During drop-off at Starr Elementary on a recent morning, parents bid their children goodbye in Spanish, Somali and Vietnamese.

“You wouldn’t expect to see so many languages spoken in a school district of 10,000,” said Tawana Grover, the school superintendent who arrived from Dallas four years ago. “When you hear Nebraska, you don’t think diversity. We’ve got the world right here in rural America.”

The students are the children of foreign-born workers who flocked to this town of 51,000 in the 1990s and 2000s to toil in the area’s meatpacking plants, where speaking English was less necessary than a willingness to do the grueling work.

They came to Nebraska from every corner of the globe: Mexicans, Guatemalans and Hondurans who floated across the Rio Grande on inner tubes, in search of a better life; refugees who fled famine in South Sudan and war in Iraq to find safe haven; Salvadorans and Cambodians who spent years scratching for work in California and heard that jobs in Nebraska were plentiful and the cost of living low.

The story of how millions of immigrants since the 1970s have put down lasting roots across the country is by now well-known. What is less understood about President Trump’s four-year-long push to shut the borders and put “America First” is that his quest may prove ultimately a futile one. Even with one of the most severe declines in immigration since the 1920s, the country is on an irreversible course to becoming ever more diverse, and more dependent on immigrants and their children.

The president since the moment he took office issued a torrent of orders that reduced refugee admissions; narrowed who is eligible for asylum; made it more difficult to qualify for permanent residency or citizenship; tightened scrutiny of applicants for high-skilled worker visas and sought to limit the length of stay for international students. His policies slashed the number of migrants arrested and then released into the country from nearly 500,000 in fiscal 2019 to 15,000 in fiscal 2020.

The measures worked: “We are going to end the decade with lower immigration than in any decade since the ’70s,” said William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who analyzed newly available census data.

The president-elect, Joseph R. Biden Jr. has pledged to reverse many of the measures. He has vowed to reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, an Obama-era program that allowed young adults mainly brought to the United States illegally as children to remain, and to resume accepting refugees and asylum seekers in larger numbers.

He has also said he would introduce legislation to offer a path to citizenship for people in the country illegally.

The foreign-born population grew by 5.6 million in the ’80s, 8.8 million in the ’90s and 11.3 million in the 2000s.

By the time Mr. Trump took office, this contemporary wave of immigration had lifted the foreign-born population to 44.5 million, representing 13.7 percent of the population, the biggest share since 1910. Among them were about 11 million undocumented immigrants.

During his first week in office, the president introduced a travel ban to halt the entry of people from many Muslim countries and paused refugee resettlement, citing terrorist threats.

As Central American migrants fleeing violence and poverty showed up at the border by the busload, his administration introduced policies to deter them, including the separation of migrant children from their parents.

He was able to do it by bypassing a Congress that has long been deadlocked on immigration reform, issuing a series of executive orders and proclamations that rapidly shut the door on immigration despite a flurry of legal challenges.

“Trump has demonstrably proven that you don’t need a grand deal to tackle immigration and border security,” said James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Average net migration shrank by 45 percent between 2017 and 2019 from an average of 953,000 during the previous seven years, as fewer immigrants arrived and more left, according to a Center for Immigration Studies analysis of census data.

There will be an even more precipitous decline recorded by the close of 2020 following visa restrictions imposed by the president amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“This year is truly unprecedented in how dramatic and fast this decline in immigration has been,” said David Bier, an immigration analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Outside of wars and the Great Depression, we have never seen a level of immigration like we are seeing right now.”

Mr. Trump put much of the focus on disparaging refugees and immigrants as drains on public coffers and championing a wall on the southwestern border.

Yet all the attention on the border ignored the much more significant growth in immigration that was happening elsewhere in the country.

The number of immigrants of Asian origin grew by 2.8 million in the nine years ending 2019, more than from any other region. The biggest gains were among Indians and Chinese; the number of Mexicans dropped by 779,000.

Many of the recent immigrants have settled in parts of the country where there is a low concentration of foreign-born people, including in states that voted for Mr. Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

Among them are Shikha Jaiswal, a nephrologist, and her husband, Nihit Gupta, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, who came to the United States from India to complete their residencies and are building their careers in a medically underserved area of West Virginia.

Small-town America has come to rely on a pipeline of foreign doctors. “People have been very kind and grateful at the same time, making it a very rewarding experience,” Dr. Jaiswal said.

The children of immigrants who are already here will continue to make the United States more diverse: The 2020 census is expected to show that more than half of people under 18 are people of color.

“The mainstream now increasingly includes people who are nonwhite, particularly from immigrant backgrounds,” said Richard Alba, a sociology professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

The movement of the baby boom generation out of the labor force amid a plummeting birthrate is accelerating the trend and intensifying the need for new immigrant labor to pay the Social Security and Medicare bills for retiring Americans.

“It’s not that native-born kids can’t take the boomers’ jobs; it’s that there are not enough of these kids to take them,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California who researches the subject.

That diversity is already being reflected in the higher rungs of the work force.

For much of the second half of the 20th century, white workers held a virtual monopoly on the best-paying positions. But by 2015, among top-earning workers under 50, about a third were nonwhite, mainly Latinos or Asians of immigrant origin, according to research by Mr. Alba, who predicts that their share will only grow.

A study released last month found that nearly 30 percent of all students enrolled in colleges and universities in 2018 hailed from immigrant families, up from 20 percent in 2000.

“When you start having cohorts of college graduates that are so diverse, it’s going to change the work force, which means more people from diverse backgrounds moving into positions of authority and high remuneration,” Mr. Alba said. “There’s no going back.”

 

— NYT: Top Stories

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What happens to the border wall under a President Biden?

President Trump made building a wall on the southern border to stop the flow of illegal immigration one of the his top priorities of his term in office. Now, with a considerable stretch built, what happens to the wall when President-elect Joe Biden takes office?

 

— FOX News

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What to expect from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on Election Day

The sites are key conduits for communication and information. Here’s how they plan to handle the challenges facing them before, on and after Tuesday.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were misused by Russians to inflame American voters with divisive messages before the 2016 presidential election. The companies have spent the past four years trying to ensure that this November isn’t a repeat.

They have spent billions of dollars improving their sites’ security, policies and processes. In recent months, with fears rising that violence may break out after the election, the companies have taken numerous steps to clamp down on falsehoods and highlight accurate and verified information.

We asked Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to walk us through what they were, are and will be doing before, on and after Tuesday.

Facebook

Since 2016, Facebook has poured billions of dollars into beefing up its security operations to fight misinformation and other harmful content. It now has more than 35,000 people working on this, the company said.

One team, led by a former National Security Council operative, has searched for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” by accounts that work in concert to spread false information. That team, which delivers regular reports, will be on high alert on Tuesday. Facebook has also worked with government agencies and other tech companies to spot foreign interference.

To demystify its political advertising, Facebook created an ad library so people can see what political ads are being bought and by whom, as well as how much those entities are spending. The company also introduced more steps for people who buy those ads, including a requirement that they live in the United States. To prevent candidates from spreading bad information, Facebook stopped accepting new political ads on Oct. 20.

At the same time, it has tried highlighting accurate information. In June, it rolled out a voter information hub with data on when, how and where to register to vote, and it is promoting the feature atop News Feeds through Tuesday. It also said it would act swiftly against posts that tried to dissuade people from voting, had limited forwarding of messages on its WhatsApp messaging service and had begun working with Reuters on how to handle verified election results.

Facebook has made changes up till the last minute. Last week, it said it had turned off political and social group recommendations and temporarily removed a feature in Instagram’s hashtag pages to slow the spread of misinformation.

On Tuesday, an operations center with dozens of employees — what Facebook calls a “war room” — will work to identify efforts to destabilize the election. The team, which will work virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, has already been in action and is operating smoothly, Facebook said.

Facebook’s app will also look different on Tuesday. To prevent candidates from prematurely and inaccurately declaring victory, the company plans to add a notification at the top of News Feeds letting people know that no winner has been chosen until election results are verified by news outlets like Reuters and The Associated Press.

Facebook also plans to deploy, if needed, special tools that it has used in “at-risk countries” like Myanmar, where election-related violence was a possibility. The tools, which Facebook has not described publicly, are designed to slow the spread of inflammatory posts.

After the polls close, Facebook plans to suspend all political ads from circulating on the social network and its photo-sharing site, Instagram, to reduce misinformation about the election’s outcome. Facebook has told advertisers that they can expect the ban to last for a week, though the timeline isn’t set in stone and the company has publicly been noncommittal about the duration.

“We’ve spent years working to make elections safer and more secure on our platform,” said Kevin McAlister, a Facebook spokesman. “We’ve applied lessons from previous elections, built new teams with experience across different areas and created new products and policies to prepare for various scenarios before, during and after Election Day.”

Twitter has also worked to combat misinformation since 2016, in some cases going far further than Facebook. Last year, for instance, it banned political advertising entirely, saying the reach of political messages “should be earned, not bought.”

At the same time, Twitter started labeling tweets by politicians if they spread inaccurate information or glorify violence. In May, it added several fact-checking labels to President Trump’s tweets about Black Lives Matter protests and mail-in voting, and restricted people’s ability to share those posts.

In October, Twitter began experimenting with additional techniques to slow the spread of misinformation. The company added context to trending topics and limited users’ ability to quickly retweet content. The changes are temporary, though Twitter has not said when they will end.

The company also used push notifications and banners in its app to warn people about common misinformation themes, including falsehoods about the reliability of mail-in ballots. And it expanded its partnerships with law enforcement agencies and secretaries of state so they can report misinformation directly to Twitter.

In September, Twitter added an Election Hub that users can use to look for curated information about polling, voting and candidates. The company has said it will remove tweets that call for interference with voters and polling places or intimidate people to dissuade them from voting.

“The whole company has really been mobilized to help us prepare for and respond to the types of threats that potentially come up in an election,” said Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity.

On Tuesday, Twitter’s strategy is twofold: Root out false claims and networks of bots that spread such information by using both algorithms and human analysts, while another team highlights reliable information in the Explore and Trends sections of its service.

Twitter plans to add labels to tweets from candidates who claim victory before the election is called by authoritative sources. At least two news outlets will need to independently project the results before a candidate can use Twitter to celebrate his or her win, the company said.

People looking for updates on Tuesday will be able find them in the Election Hub, Twitter said.

Twitter will eventually allow people to retweet again without prompting them to add their own context. But many of the changes for the election — like the ban on political ads and the fact-checking labels — are permanent.

For Google’s YouTube, it wasn’t the 2016 election that sounded a wake-up call about the toxic content spreading across its website. That moment came in 2017 when a group of men drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge after being inspired by YouTube videos of inflammatory sermons from an Islamic cleric.

Since then, YouTube has engaged in an often confusing journey to police its site. It has overhauled its policies to target misinformation, while tweaking its algorithms to slow the spread of what it deems borderline content — videos that do not blatantly violate its rules but butt up against them.

It has brought in thousands of human reviewers to examine videos to help improve the performance of its algorithms. It has also created a so-called intelligence desk of former analysts from government intelligence agencies to monitor the actions of foreign state actors and trends on the internet.

Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, said that he held several meetings a week with staff to discuss the election, but that there was no last-minute effort to rewrite policies or come up with new approaches.

“Of course, we’re taking the elections incredibly seriously,” he said in an interview. “The foundational work that will play a really major role for all of this began three years ago when we really began the work in earnest in terms of our responsibility as a global platform.”

Before Tuesday, YouTube’s home page will also feature links to information about how and where to vote.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mohan plans to check in regularly with his teams to keep an eye on anything unusual, he said. There will be no “war room,” and he expects that most decisions to keep or remove videos will be clear and that the usual processes for making those decisions will be sufficient.

If a more nuanced decision is required around the election, Mr. Mohan said, it will escalate to senior people at YouTube, and the call will be made as a group.

YouTube said it would be especially sensitive about videos that aimed to challenge the election’s integrity. YouTube does not allow videos that mislead voters about how to vote or the eligibility of a candidate, or that incite people to interfere with the voting process. The company said it would take down such videos quickly, even if one of the speakers was a presidential candidate.

As the polls close, YouTube will feature a playlist of live election results coverage from what it deems authoritative news sources. While YouTube would not provide a full list of the sources, the company said it expected the coverage to include news videos from the major broadcast networks, as well as CNN and Fox News.

Starting on Tuesday and continuing as needed, YouTube will display a fact-check information panel above election-related search results and below videos discussing the results, the company said. The information panel will feature a warning that results may not be final and provide a link to real-time results on Google with data from The A.P.

Google has said it will halt election advertising after the polls officially close. The policy, which extends to YouTube, will temporarily block any ads that refer to the 2020 election, its candidates or its outcome. It is not clear how long the ban will last.

 

— New York Times: Top Stories

— Mike Isaac, Kate Conger and Daisuke Wakabayashi

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Foreign observers note ‘chaos,’ ‘rancor’ in US debate

“Chaos, interruptions, personal attacks and insults,” one outspoken Chinese newspaper editor said of the U.S. presidential debate.

 

— ABC News: Top Stories

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GOP invests $10M in boosting Trump with Barrett confirmation

The Republican National Committee is putting Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation fight front and center with voters just weeks before Election Day.

 

— ABC News: Top Stories

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Voters believe winner of election should fill court vacancy, poll shows

A Times/Siena College poll showed that 56 percent said the next president should nominate a Supreme Court justice. And Joe Biden retained a clear lead over President Trump, 49 to 41 percent.

— NYT: Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns

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CNN blasted for claiming Biden falsehoods different than Trump’s: ‘This is propaganda’

CNN was labeled “propaganda” following Thursday night’s Joe Biden town hall event when a pair of reporters from the liberal network tried to explain why coverage of President Trump is more aggressive than coverage of the Democratic nominee.

 

— FOX News: Brian Flood

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Trump scorns his own scientists over virus data

A public scolding of the C.D.C. chief was only the latest but perhaps the starkest instance when the president has rejected not just the policy advice of his public health officials but the facts and information that they provided.

 

— NYT: Peter Baker