As Hurricane Harvey bore down on Texas last Friday, the White House rushed out a number of controversial decisions, pardoning the former sheriff Joe Arpaio, the hardline Arizona lawman who was convicted of contempt of court in July for defying a judge’s order to stop racially profiling Latinos, firing the nationalist adviser Sebastian Gorka, and signing a directive banning transgender people from joining the military.
The rest of Donald Trump’s week was dominated by the storm, the most powerful to hit the US in more than a decade. But in the background, the Russia inquiries continued to chug away, with several new nuggets of information coming gradually into view.
Last weekend
Over the weekend, two of the president’s most senior cabinet figures seemed to speak up obliquely against him, with the defence secretary, James Mattis, telling troops they had to “hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it”, and the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, refusing to say whether Trump’s values represented “the American people’s values” in the wake of his controversial comments about far-right violence in Charlottesville. Meanwhile, Republicans John Kasich, John McCain, Jeff Flake and Paul Ryan all criticised the president for his pardoning of Arpaio, an icon of the anti-immigrant right.
Trump spent much of the weekend tweeting from Camp David about rescue efforts in Texas as the Houston area was hit hard by flooding caused by the hurricane, but he also found time to fire off a tweet about Canada and Mexico being “very difficult” regarding the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), and threatening to terminate the deal. He also repeated his demand that Mexico pay for his border wall “through reimbursement/other”, although in a phone call with Mexico’s president Enrique Peña Nieto leaked last month he had suggested his demand for payment for a border wall from Mexico was merely a political ploy.
In an echo of his alleged request to FBI chief James Comey before he fired him to drop his investigation into national security adviser Michael Flynn, it emerged that Trump had asked the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, whether the charges against Arpaio could be dropped. Told they couldn’t, the Washington Post reported, “Trump decided to let the case go to trial, and if Arpaio was convicted, he could grant clemency.” Which he duly did.
Monday
At a press conference with the president of Finland, Trump defended his decision to pardon the former sheriff, saying: “I thought he was treated unbelievably unfairly.” And he claimed that far from trying to bury bad news by announcing the pardon as Hurricane Harvey hit the previous Friday, he had actually timed it that way in order to increase the chances of publicity. “In the middle of a hurricane, even though it was Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally,” Trump explained.
He also criticised his Finnish counterpart for calling on the same female journalist twice to ask a question. But as Sauli Niinistö revealed, the woman was in fact two women. “She is not the same lady, they are sitting side by side,” said the Finnish president. One of the two journalists, Maria Annala, told Trump: “We have a lot of blonde women in Finland.”
Returning to Russia news, it emerged on Monday that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen emailed Vladimir Putin’s spokesman during the US presidential campaign asking for help with a Trump Tower real estate project in Moscow. Trump claimed during the campaign that he knew “nothing about Russia”, and had “no loans” and “no deals” there. Other emails showed that the Trump Tower project was being promoted by a Russian-born business associate of Trump, Felix Sater, who was claiming he could persuade Putin to back the real estate scheme and help get Trump elected president.
Tuesday
Overnight North Korea made it clear that despite Trump’s claim that Kim Jong-un “is starting to respect us”, it did not consider his threats an effective deterrent, firing a missile over Japan for the first time since 2009. In response, the US president warned that “all options are on the table”.
Closer to home, Trump and his wife, Melania, flew to Texas to view the damage caused by the storm, which by that point had killed at least 18 people and displaced tens of thousands. It was clear that his swift visit and constant Twitter updates were an attempt to head off any comparisons with George W Bush, whose reputation never recovered from his slow and ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina a decade ago. “What a crowd, what a turnout,” said Trump from a ladder between two fire trucks in Annaville. He later mused to the housing secretary, Ben Carson, about the name of the storm: “It sounds like such an innocent name, Ben, right, but it’s not innocent.”
Wednesday
Trump started the day with a plaintive cri de coeur, tweeting: “After reading the false reporting and even ferocious anger in some dying magazines, it makes me wonder, WHY? All I want to do is #MAGA!”
He and Mattis seemed at odds again after the president declared of the North Korea crisis, “Talking is not the answer”, and his defence secretary, by contrast, told reporters: “We’re never out of diplomatic solutions.” For his part, Kim made it clear there would be more ballistic missile launches, describing this week’s test as a “meaningful prelude” to his plan to send a salvo of similar missiles into the seas around the US territory of Guam.
Looking ahead to the difficult battles over tax reform to come when Congress returns on Tuesday, Trump travelled to Springfield, Missouri, to deliver a speech vowing to cut the business tax rate to 15% from 35%. Perhaps learning from the failure of his semi-detached attempts to push repeal of Barack Obama’s healthcare law, he seemed to be using the speech to kick off a concerted campaign to get the tax legislation through. “I don’t want to be disappointed by Congress,” he told the crowd, which included several legislators. “Do you understand me?”
Trump’s advisers may have hoped the crowd in Springfield met his liking. It emerged that Trump dismissed a loyal aide after spotting on TV that the rally he was about to hold in Phoenix, Arizona, last week was less than full.
Meanwhile, reports claimed special counsel Robert Mueller’s team was working with the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, on its investigation into Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his financial transactions. The involvement of Schneiderman would be significant since Trump’s presidential pardon powers only extend to federal crimes, not state ones. There was speculation Mueller could be using Schneiderman’s involvement to put pressure on Manafort to flip and cooperate in the case against Trump.
Thursday
In a slew of Russia news, Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, which is investigating Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr and his meeting with Russians in Trump Tower in 2016, revealed that Trump had called him to promise critical federal support for the biofuel ethanol. The Associated Press reported that a grand jury used by Mueller had heard secret testimony from Rinat Akhmetsin, a Russian American lobbyist who attended that meeting. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s lawyers had met with Mueller several times to argue that the president did not obstruct justice by firing Comey in May. And the Daily Beast reported that Mueller had “teamed up” with the IRS’s Criminal Investigations unit, a revelation that would suggest Mueller had access to Trump’s tax returns, as well as Manafort’s, and could add to the pressure on the former Trump campaign chairman to cooperate.
Friday
Sticking with Russia, the New York Times reported that Mueller had got hold of a letter Trump and the controversial nationalist political aide Stephen Miller had drafted explaining the president’s rationale for firing Comey. It was not clear exactly what was in the original letter but the Times reported that Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, had found its contents “problematic”. The eventual letter that emerged pinned the blame on Comey’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server – and was soon blown out of the water by Trump’s own remark that “this Russia thing” had been on his mind when he made the decision.
Meanwhile, Trump’s spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the president would announce his decision on whether to kill off special legal provisions offered to “Dreamers”, brought to the US illegally as children, on Tuesday. Republicans including Ryan and tech chiefs led by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg called on Trump to keep the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program in place and not threaten the status of the 800,000 Dreamers. “These are kids who know no other country, who were brought here by their parents and don’t know another home,” said Ryan, arguing that there needed to be a “legislative solution” to their status.
Until recently, Trump had suggested he was sympathetic to the Dreamers, telling a press conference in February: “We are gonna deal with Daca with heart. The Daca situation is a very difficult thing for me, as I love these kids, I love kids. I have kids and grandkids, and I find it very, very hard doing what the law says exactly to do and, you know, the law is rough.”
On Friday he continued in this vein, saying: “We love the Dreamers. We love everybody … We think the Dreamers are terrific.”
But the Dreamers themselves entered the Labor Day weekend in a state of insecurity, with their immigration statuses suddenly up in the air.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion