Laid in the first days after Mr. Trump’s election win, the plan even enlists Brian Mulroney, a former Conservative prime minister and political nemesis of Mr. Trudeau’s father, who had also been prime minister. Mr. Mulroney knows Mr. Trump and his commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, from social circuits in southern Florida, where all three keep vacation homes.
.. Though emphasizing the benefits of harmony, the Canadians are not above flexing muscle, with a provincial government at one point quietly threatening trade restrictions against New York State.
.. His new foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, a former journalist with long experience in the United States and an unapologetic champion of the global liberal order, is seen as able to coax the Americans when possible and defy them when necessary.
Ms. Freeland’s team of America-whisperers includes Andrew Leslie, a former lieutenant general and Afghanistan veteran who knows many of the American generals filling out Mr. Trump’s administration.
Mr. Trudeau established a “war room” dedicated to the United States, headed by Brian Clow
.. Ministers’ schedules resemble those of rock bands on summer tours. They travel armed with data on the precise dollar amount and number of jobs supported by Canadian firms and trade in that area.
.. when Mr. Trump announced that the United States would leave the Paris climate agreement. Canadian officials said they would instead seek climate deals with American states, many of which were already in progress.
Trump surrogates go after Mueller
Many in the president’s circle praised the special counsel’s appointment last month but have publicly turned against him in recent days.
Robert Mueller’s glow is fading.
The special counsel who earned bipartisan praise last month as an unimpeachable investigator who would give President Donald Trump a fair shake in the Russia probe is now taking heat from Trump surrogates intent on trying to undercut his integrity.
The wave of freelance attacks, which gathered steam over the weekend following Comey’s dramatic testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, echoes tactics used by Democrats in the 1990s to undercut special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation into the Clinton White House.“I think the idea of having an enemy when you’re the object of a special prosecutor is a very important one,” said Dick Morris, who helped pioneer the anti-Starr strategy as a Clinton adviser but is now a Trump fan.
“Clinton only survived a special prosecutor because he made Ken Starr the enemy,” Morris added.
- Sidney Powell .. wrote an op-ed questioning one of Mueller’s staffers on the conservative site Newsmax, which is run by Trump friend Chris Ruddy.
- Writing in the Washington Examiner, columnist Byron York suggested Mueller may not be the right person for the job because he’s been friends with Comey for 15 years.
- Ann Coulter complained in a post that Attorney General Jeff Sessions “never should’ve recused himself” .. “Now that we know TRUMP IS NOT UNDER INVESTIGATION, Sessions should take it back & fire Mueller.”
- Newt Gingrich, who in a Sunday interview on Fox News echoed the president’s complaints that the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt,”
- It was a big reversal for the former House speaker, who wrote in a Twitter post on May 17, the day the Justice Department announced the special counsel appointment: “Robert Mueller is a superb choice. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity. Media should now calm down.”
- The shift from targeting Comey to targeting Mueller became apparent over the weekend, when one of the president’s personal attorneys, Jay Sekulow, in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” declined to rule out the possibility the president might fire the special counsel.
- During the Clinton era, Democrats called Starr a “federally paid sex policeman” who ran an unethical probe and had a conflict of interest.
.. said Trump surrogates don’t need to level attacks against Mueller, even if such an approach has often been favored in the past by the president’s New York-based personal attorney.
“Kasowitz loves this junkyard dog thing,” the attorney said. “My experience is that’s, more often than not, not a winning strategy.”
.. questioning Mueller over the staffers he’s appointed who donated to Democratic candidates “might be effective” for the Trump defense team. “It’s not an unreasonable narrative to start saying the team that has been put together is tainted,” he said.
But, he added, such a strategy could risk a backlash. “If you’re trying to affect the narrative, I think going after and attacking people of that stature who are not partisan people is really a mistake,” he said.
.. Mueller had interviewed with Trump to succeed Comey as FBI director.
.. For now, Morris said “Comey represents a better enemy than Mueller.” But he also suggested that Mueller will become a ripe target as the investigation unfolds, allowing Trump’s defenders to paint the investigation as an either-or proposition.
Who’s Conspiracy Mongering Now?
Whatever you like to believe about certain Trump companions and their conversations with Russian persons, nothing about it suggested an organization capable of participating in an arch conspiracy with a foreign intelligence agency. The campaign was a typically disorganized, free-form, low-budget Trump production. People came and went with head-spinning speed while having distressingly little effect on the candidate.
.. Russia relations were a specific case of the general Trumpian pitch. He is a strong leader who, with his amazing personality, would transform bad situations into good ones... If the Trump campaign directed or cooperated in illegal acts by Russia, that would be collusion in the sense of contributing to a crime... Mr. Trump is many things, but he’s not an idiot. He has a deep, instinctive understanding of New York political, real estate and media culture, and, like many presidents, now is struggling to apply his mostly irrelevant knowledge to a job he is poorly prepared for. He still strikes us as a good bet not to finish his term—his age, his temperament, the anti-synergy between his business interests and his White House life, the latter not helped by his classy in-laws... the seminal fact of Mr. Trump’s time was how quickly his critics sank to his conspiracy-mongering level and worse.
The woman who saved old New York
A massive freeway would have destroyed Greenwich Village and altered much of Lower Manhattan if not for one woman’s efforts. Jane Jacobs can teach us about what makes cities feel alive, writes Jonathan Glancey.
In 1939, Moses had been very much the muscle behind that year’s spectacular New York World’s Fair. A celebration of things to come, one of its many highlights was the Futurama pavilion. Designed by Norman Bel Geddes, a theatre and industrial designer with a flair for imagining convincing futures, and sponsored by General Motors, Futurama gave millions of visitors a ride, in moving chairs, around an enticing, post-Depression model of how New York might look in the near future. With streamlined cars racing along elevated freeways passing through science-fiction skyscrapers, it was an exciting, and highly polished vision of a city visitors to the exhibition knew to be grubby, crowded and chaotic, if charismatic, too.
.. For Jacobs, cities were more about people than buildings and grand designs. She celebrated the messy vitality of life on the street, of lively neighbourhoods where small businesses thrived, children played on sidewalks and people of different backgrounds rubbed shoulders.
.. “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
.. And when Jacobs gathered women to protest actively against Moses’s plans to drive an expressway through Washington Square Park and out to new suburbs, the grand planner dismissed the opposition as interfering “housewives”.
.. The Death and Life of Great American cities had sold more than 250,000 copies by 2005 when it was translated into Chinese for the first time, and as vast tracts of venerable Chinese cities were being demolished to make way for 1950s-style concrete blocks and freeways.