“My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning.
Nordstrom announced Feb. 5 that they would stop carrying Ivanka Trump’s label due to its performance.
Blaming America First
This weekend, Mr. Trump dismissed a question about why he respected “a killer” like Mr. Putin by drawing a moral equivalency between the United States and Russia.
“You got a lot of killers,” Mr. Trump told Bill O’Reilly of the slavishly pro-Trump Fox News. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” Mr. Trump also said he respected Mr. Putin, noting: “He’s a leader of his country. I say it’s better to get along with Russia than not.”
.. Since taking office, Mr. Trump has shown little support for America’s traditional roles as a champion of universal values like freedom of the press and tolerance.
.. But on Saturday, Mr. Trump spoke by phone to the Ukrainian president and later issued a statement that did not condemn Russia, played down the conflict as a border dispute and made no reference to sanctions.
‘If something happens’: Trump points his finger in case of a terrorist attack
President Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to preemptively shift blame for any future terrorist attack on U.S. soil from his administration to the federal judiciary, as well as to the media.
.. “If something happens blame him and the court system. People pouring in. Bad!” Trump wrote in a tweet Sunday.
.. Then on Monday, Trump seemed to spread that blame to include news organizations. In a speech to the U.S. Central Command, the president accused the media of failing to report on some terrorist attacks for what he implied were nefarious reasons.
“ISIS is on a campaign of genocide, committing atrocities across the world,”
.. Trump did not offer a single example of an attack that had gone unreported to support his accusation.
.. Trump’s terrorism blame-game is in keeping with how he ran his campaign, looking for scapegoats at nearly every turn. He often blamed his own failings — a poor debate performance or a gaffe or a primary loss — on the media or other perceived enemies, and he fed his own conspiracies that his adversaries were out to undermine him.
.. “Trump acts instinctively rather than strategically,” said David Frum, a senior editor at the Atlantic and a White House speechwriter under President George W. Bush who is sharply critical of Trump. “His instinct to pass blame is very strong. . . . I don’t know whether people will succumb to this.”
Trump’s approach is not without risk. He could come across to many Americans as thin-skinned if he skirts the responsibilities of being commander in chief and looks to assign blame to outside forces.
.. In his commentary, Trump has ignored the screening measures and other counterterrorism precautions that have long been in place by U.S. customs and border officials.
..Asked whether the White House had evidence of Islamic militants “pouring in” to the country, a phrase Trump used in at least two tweets, Spicer said only: “I’m not going to get into specific information that the president has.”
Former CIA chief: Trump’s travel ban hurts American spies — and America
President Trump’s executive order on immigration was ill-conceived, poorly implemented and ill-explained. To be fair, it would have been hard to explain since it was not the product of intelligence and security professionals demanding change, but rather policy, political and ideological personalities close to the president fulfilling a campaign promise to deal with a threat they had overhyped.
.. Paradoxically, they pointed out how the executive order breached faith with those very sources, many of whom they had promised to always protect with the full might of our government and our people. Sources who had risked much, if not all, to keep Americans safe.
..But as a former station chief told me, in the places where intelligence officers operate, rumor, whisper and conspiratorial chatter rule people’s lives. It doesn’t take paranoia to connect the action of the executive order with the hateful, anti-Islamic language of the campaign. In the Middle East, with its honor-based cultures, it’s easier to recruit someone we have been shooting at than it is to recruit someone whose society has been insulted.