For Trump, the room functions as something like a royal court or meeting hall, with open doors that senior aides and . Some aides still call him “Mr. Trump,” and everyone turns to listen when he speaks. His presence always seems to consume the room. And the stream of visitors is constant. Just a few hours earlier, National Security Adviser H.
R. Mc. Master had stopped by with a foreign military delegation. Vice President Mike Pence brought by the Prime Minister of Georgia unscheduled for a photo. The New England . I use it a lot. I had the biggest people in the country here.”But right now, there is something else he wants to show. It’s down the hall, in his private dining room in the West Wing, a few steps away. Harley Slip On Muffler Installation Guide. As is often the case when reporters come through, he has a plan, a story he wants to tell. Tonight, at dusk on May 8, he invites three TIME correspondents for a tour of his home and office, followed by a four- course dinner in the Blue Room, the oval- shaped parlor on the first floor of the executive mansion.
The first three months of his presidency have been unsettling, a blur of confrontation, policy pivots and regulatory revolution. Financial markets have climbed, cruise missiles have fallen, and the world has watched with trepidation and confusion. In less than 2. 4 hours, Trump will roil the nation again by announcing the firing of his FBI Director, James Comey, who is leading an investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia. It will set off yet another firestorm. But for now, it’s showtime once again.“You’ll see something that is amazing.
It just happened,” he says as he stands up from the desk. The modern art favored by the Obama family is mostly gone, replaced with classic oils, including portraits of Trump’s favorite predecessors, like Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt. Gold curtains have replaced the maroon ones in the Oval Office, and military- service flag stands have been added around the room, topped by battle ribbons and held in place by heavy brass bases that Trump praises to visitors. But few rooms have changed so much so fast as his dining room, where he often eats his lunch amid stacks of newspapers and briefing sheets. A few weeks back, the President ordered a gutting of the room. Renovations are grand,” he says, boasting that contractors from the General Services Administration resurfaced the walls and redid the moldings in two days. They wanted to make me happy.”Trump says he used his own money to pay for the enormous crystal chandelier that now hangs from the ceiling.
But the thing he wants to show is on the opposite wall, above the fireplace, a new 6. Senate hearing on Russia. Since at least as far back as Richard Nixon, Presidents have kept televisions in this room, usually small ones, no larger than a bread box, tucked away on a sideboard shelf. That’s not the Trump way.
A clutch of aides follow him, including Mc. Master, Pence and press secretary Sean Spicer. The President raises a remote and flicks on the screen, sorting through old recordings of cable news shows, until he comes to what he is after: a clip from the Senate hearing earlier in the day, as broadcast on Fox News. The first clip he shows is of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham speaking to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Graham asks if Clapper stands by his statement that he knows of no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Trump waits quietly, until Clapper admits that nothing has changed. Trump pantomimes a sort of victory.“Yes. He was choking on that,” the President chortles.
He was the head of the whole thing. That’s a big statement.” Trump leaves unmentioned the fact that there is an ongoing FBI counter. Nor does he note that Clapper, out of government for nearly four months, could not possibly know everything the FBI has learned, and likely would have not known all even when he was in office. Trump also leaves unmentioned that he had a meeting that day with his new Deputy Attorney General about firing Comey, the director of that investigation. But for now, Trump is focused on his TV. He watches the screen like a coach going over game tape, studying the opposition, plotting next week’s plays. They are desperate for breath.”Clapper, on the screen, pauses several beats to search his memory.
Ah, look,” the President says. After a delay, Clapper finally answers, admitting that he had requested an unmasking, which would have been a routine occurrence in his former job.
The running Trump commentary continues. He also mentions the sound of photographers’ cameras clicking on the television. Moments later, the President watches as both Clapper and Yates testify that they had reviewed intercepts containing the unmasked identities of Trump, his associates and members of Congress. This, to Trump, is yet another victory, the lead- lined proof of his still unproven claim that Obama surveilled him before he was sworn in. They surveilled me.”President Trump walking to the residence. The powers of the presidency are vast, but Trump has discovered in these first months in office that they do not include.
Among the many frustrations, none seems to burn quite as much as the disrespect he feels he has received from the press, which has steadily failed to reflect his version of reality. The story he wants told is not the one the nation reads and sees. In his view, the past months have included a steady string of successes, broken only by occasional missteps, which are invariably overplayed and misinterpreted. After a rough start, an Obamacare replacement passed the House. A red line against the use of chemical weapons has been re- established in Syria.
Political prisoners have been released from Egypt. China has offered new cooperation to prevent the further development of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
American companies have been arm- twisted into staying in the country, while Trump has personally inserted himself into a handful of negotiations over weapons systems and trade agreements to try to get Americans a better deal. But the turmoil of his presidency has so far dominated the headlines, pushing out much of what he considers to be the good news he thinks he deserves. The press has focused on the disruption; his false statements in office; the fear and dislocation in immigrant communities; the many campaign promises, from eliminating the export- import bank to declaring China a currency manipulator, on which Trump has equivocated. Of the many firestorms he has had to fight, none has burned as brightly as the tweets he sent accusing Obama of wiretapping him at Trump Tower. The head of the FBI, Comey, whom he had discussed firing earlier that day, had testified that there is no evidence that this happened.
So he has been arguing that the wiretapping he alleged could include routine surveillance, which was not directed by the White House, of legal surveillance targets who spoke with people in his campaign. That’s why he cares so much about the “unmasking” testimony. He seeks vindication.
TIME Person of the Year 2. Runner- Up: Donald Trump. By Michael Scherer. Trump looked out from his golden Manhattan tower, divining as he does the unseized opportunity before him. Toughness was his brand, and in a tumultuous political season, transgression his method. He had already promised once again to water- board terrorist suspects and “more than that,” despite international treaties against torture. He had even vowed not only to “bomb the sh- t” out of the Islamic State fighters in Syria but also to “take out their families”—another likely war crime—and steal the oil from their land and sell it through American companies.
Then in early December he made his next move, an extraordinary call to bar all Muslims from entering the U. S., including tourists and business travelers, a direct challenge to the nation’s constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. James Madison warned his nascent nation of “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”To remedy this, America’s founders forged a union with safeguards: due process of law, inalienable individual rights and a byzantine electoral system that intentionally slowed popular fury and change. Yet still the country has been tested over the centuries by demagogues and bigots, leaders who broke social and political norms, targeted enemies within and rallied the nation against the governing class. President Obama carpeted the Oval Office with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Such sentiments have a demonstrated history of being cast aside in anxious times. Back in the 1. 93. Louisiana’s Huey Long, who ruled more like a dictator than a governor, disregarding the law as he denounced the billionaire robber barons and called for radical wealth redistribution.
He was followed in the 1. Wisconsin Senator Joseph Mc. Carthy, who channeled foreign policy fears into spurious attacks against ideas and the people who held them. Alabama governor George Wallace arrived in the 1. Each was denounced, like Trump, as a leader who appealed improperly to emotion and prejudice to gain power. Each was a master of the popular spectacle. Each terrified some and delighted others, testing the nation’s very identity.
Everything about Trump is a challenge, a test—even for the thousands of people who attend his rallies and cheer his outrages. If any other Republican candidate piped Luciano Pavarotti into his campaign events in the Deep South, people would talk. But for Trump, it was part of a piece. There is no one like that,” he says one day in late November of the late tenor, whom he considered a friend. Trump is standing backstage in Birmingham, Ala., before a rally that packs about 9,0.
I pick it all,” he continues. For two hours, Trump supporters have been shouting their praise over the soundtrack, hailing his tell- it- like- it- is toughness while confessing the frustrations and fears that grip them—rising health costs, flat wages, bankrupt political leadership, threats both foreign and domestic. Most also mention Trump’s defiance, that lack of concern for what others have said is acceptable.
The Republican nomination, by all rights, is within his grasp, which means the presidency as well, which will bring, he promises, a new national Valhalla, a chance to “Make America Great Again.” These are glory days for a man who has never tired of self–glorification. For five months he has been atop the Republican polls (“by a lot”), dominant in the press coverage (“big league”), taunting the political powers with attitude, singular authenticity and aggression. His father used to claim it had to do with real estate—“My boy has the greatest sense of location,” Fred said—but Trump now understands it’s something more profound.“I have a sense of people,” he says. I’ve made a lot of money because of people, because deals aren’t anything other than people, O. Bohemian Rhapsody Live Wembley Download Movies more. K.?” That sixth sense, he continues, is what led him to focus hard, right from the very start, on illegal immigration, proposing a 2,0. There is a mike offstage, as there is before a wrestling match.
Trump,” blares the announcer. There is din, bedlam, then Trump. If by chance you have not given over more than an hour this year to watch one of Trump’s raucous and rambling rallies, here is what you missed: High political theater. Subversive irony. Triumphant bravado. Stand- up improv. And a meanness this country has not seen from a politician for generations.
By that he means the crowd is with him tonight, in a world he will always define as binary: winners or losers, good or bad, strong or weak, smart or stupid. He throws schoolyard insults at his rivals—“low energy” Jeb Bush, “pathological” Ben Carson, “lightweight” Marco Rubio. He orders jeers for the journalists on the press risers.
There is no news report or video footage of thousands of Muslims cheering the attacks. But the controversy is his oxygen. As with his promise to have a religious test for entry into the nation, this libelous charge against an entire city, for which Trump will never apologize, allows him to dominate another two weeks of the presidential- campaign news cycle, pushing him up in the polls once again. That is how Trump has been doing it. He has a sense for people.
Something else happens while he stands onstage. Mercutio Southall, a well- known Birmingham civil rights activist, begins shouting in protest from the middle of the crowd. This happens a lot at Trump rallies, with troubling effects. At a September event on Capitol Hill, a young Latino protester gets spit on and has her hair pulled by an elderly man trying to shut her up. In Miami in November, the crowd kicks and punches at immigration activists, dragging them from the room.
This time Trump notices the disturbance and demands a response. Get him out of here,” he commands. Soon, regular Trump supporters are punching and kicking at him.
He falls to the floor, swings back and is choked. A video later shows a blond, middle- aged woman walk up, kick him in the stomach and back away, even as he is held by a local plainclothes police officer. While on the floor, Southall says he heard racial epithets directed at him. The next day, Trump is asked about the fight. He now claims the support of about 3.
Republican- leaning voters, who make up about 4. That number may grow or fade, but his success has already shifted the country, making possible ideas once seen as out of bounds by both the established press and elected officials. His proposal to ban Muslims from the country was condemned with near unanimity, by House Speaker Paul Ryan, former Vice President Dick Cheney and most of his 2. GOP rivals. Trump delighted in crossing such lines. Before cheering crowds, he praised the extrajudicial punishment of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who deserted his Afghan post and was captured by the Taliban. Trump even retweeted a racist image filled with statistics that falsely claimed that 8.
America were committed by blacks. Let them find out if it’s correct or not.” His poll numbers continued to climb. In a party once known for projecting strength, he cowed all comers and gave millions of Americans new hope that their lingering sense of decline and injustice might end. Sometimes it ain’t pretty, but the truth ain’t pretty sometimes.”Three days after the Birmingham rally, Trump invited TIME back to his Fifth Avenue office, high above Manhattan’s holiday- shopping celebrations. His outrage at the state of the world showed no sign of abating.
At a recent televised debate, he cited a 1. Operation Wetback, as proof that his own immigration plan would work. The program expelled about 1 million people by sending paramilitary federal agents to round up thousands in public squares and at restaurants and other locales, place them on buses, trains and boats with minimal due process and ship them south. Families got separated, U. S. What his exact plans are, however, remain a mystery.