President Donald Trump can draw money from his business empire as its trustees see fit without disclosing it publicly, according to a revised version of his trust, a change that ethics experts say blurs the lines between the Trump Organization and his administration.
.. But the president’s son Eric, who serves as an adviser to the trust though not a trustee, told Forbes in an interview last month that he would provide periodic updates to his father on “the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that.”
When the president announced his plan to place his assets in a trust in January, he said his sons would run his business and that “they’re not going to discuss it with me.”
.. Mar-a-Lago in recent months doubled its initiation fee to $200,000, and Mr. Trump plans to bring Chinese leader Xi Jinping there for meetings this weekend.
.. Mr. Trump said during the campaign he was worth $10 billion; A financial disclosure he released during the presidential campaign showed he held assets valued between $1.5 billion and $2.1 billion
.. A Wall Street Journal analysis of the president’s finances last year showed Mr. Trump assets were relatively illiquid.
.. Mr. Spicer said the president had donated his first-quarter salary—$78,333—to the National Park Service, fulfilling thus far a campaign pledge not to accept a paycheck as president. Mr. Trump has proposed slashing 1,500 times that amount from the agency’s funding for offices including the National Park Service.
Donald Trump Racks Up Few Wins So Far
.. Other presidents have seen approval ratings significantly worse, but they have all come at later points in their presidencies, Gallup found.
President Bill Clinton hit a low in his first summer in office of 37%, but it marked a bottoming out from which he climbed back to win re-election.
Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush each reached the 20s in the latter years in their first, and only, terms of office, and didn’t recover.
- .. The selection of Judge Gorsuch, who now serves on the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, is a rare case in which the president has managed to clearly fulfill a campaign pledge,
- as was his promise to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and
- expedite approval of long-stalled pipeline projects.
.. His description of the revised ban as a “watered-down version of the first one” already has complicated the government’s arguments in support of it.
.. Mr. Trump lashed out at lawmakers in the House Freedom Caucus who withheld support for the White House-backed health-care bill after deeming it insufficiently conservative. He said he would “fight them” in the 2018 elections, if he had to. The rift, some conservatives have said, is mutual.
.. Ms. Walsh, in charge of assigning West Wing office space, gave Mr. Dearborn an office he found inferior to the space allotted to his assistant. Mr. Dearborn and the assistant switched offices, which angered Ms. Walsh. Aides loyal to Mr. Dearborn cheered Ms. Walsh’s White House departure, while other insiders—including top Trump adviser Steve Bannon—heaped praise on her.
Nafta After All
The Trump administration is signaling to Congress that in coming negotiations with Mexico and Canada it will seek mostly modest changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement, a deal President Donald Trump called a “disaster” during the campaign. An administration draft proposal being circulated in Congress by the U.S. trade representative’s office would keep some of the most controversial provisions, including one establishing an arbitration panel that investors in the three nations can use to resolve civil claims, bypassing local courts.
.. NUMBER OF THE DAY $528.2 billion The amount investors borrowed against their brokerage accounts in February, a record high for margin debt and a fresh sign of bullishness among flummoxed investors trying to navigate the political and economic crosscurrents driving markets.
Donald Trump and the Myth of the COal Revival
To put the miners “back to work,” the President announced, he was lifting the moratorium on coal leases on federal lands. He was also ordering a review of his predecessor’s Clean Power Plan, that “crushing attack on American industry.”
.. his order seems designed to cleanse the E.P.A. of what Senator James Inhofe, Republican, of Oklahoma, recently described as “all the stuff” on the agency’s Web site “that is brainwashing our kids.”
.. The irony of the executive order, as many analysts have already pointed out, is that it denies economic realities, too. The C.P.P., Reilly said, largely locked in “what was going to happen anyway”—namely, a steady decline in the demand for coal caused by Trump’s beloved free market.
.. Repealing the C.P.P., Reilly predicted, “will do little or nothing to help out-of-work coal miners.” Even Robert Murray, the C.E.O. of Murray Energy, the country’s largest private coal company, recently said that coal jobs weren’t going to come back in the multitudes that Trump has promised.
.. Indeed, economists have projected that the cost of implementing the C.P.P. would be recovered in public-health benefits alone, since it would reduce soot-and-smog-forming emissions. This is especially true for communities downwind of coal plants, which have been suffering for decades.
According to the E.P.A.’s own estimates, the C.P.P. would help prevent as many as thirty-six hundred premature deaths, seventeen hundred heart attacks, ninety thousand asthma attacks among children, and three hundred thousand missed workdays and school days every year.
.. Trump’s proposed cuts to the E.P.A. budget would result in the elimination of approximately thirty-two hundred jobs.