Latest news with #RepublicanNomination
Irish Times
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Maureen Dowd: Trump is a pro at quid pro quo
When Donald Trump was headed for the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, I took Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, to Trump Tower to meet him. Trump didn't know anything about the inner workings of Washington. He proudly showed us his 'Wall of Shame' with pictures of Republican candidates he had bested. His campaign office had few staffers, but it overflowed with cheesy portraits of him sent by fans: one of him playing poker with Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt, and a cardboard cut-out of him giving a thumbs-up, flanked by Reagan and John Wayne. As we were leaving, Hulse warned Trump drily, 'If you ever get a call from our colleague Eric Lipton, you'll know you're in trouble.' 'Eric Lipton?' Trump murmured. READ MORE The president probably knows who Lipton is now, because the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter is tracking Trump on issues of corruption as closely as the relentless lawman in the white straw hat tracked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Lipton and the Times' David Yaffe-Bellany were on the scene at Trump's Virginia golf club on Thursday night as the president held his gala dinner to promote sales of $TRUMP, the meme coin he launched on the cusp of his inauguration. (Melania Trump debuted hers two days later.) Trump has been hawking himself in an absurdly grandiose way his whole life. But this time, he isn't grandstanding as a flamboyant New York business-person. He's selling himself as the president of the United States, staining his office with a blithe display of turpitude. Protesters at the golf club shouted, 'Shame, shame, shame!' but there is no shame in Trumpworld. Trump asked guests, who were whooping with joy at the president who allowed them to purchase such primo access by essentially lining the pockets of Trump and his family, if they had seen his helicopter. Protesters outside a private dinner with president Donald Trump and buyers of his cryptocurrency at his golf course in Virginia. Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/The New York Times 'Yeah, super cool!' gushed a guest. Buyers flew in from China and around the world, scarfing up a fortune in $TRUMP — some had millions of dollars worth — to procure the 220 seats at the dinner. 'It was a spectacle that could only have happened in the era of Donald J Trump,' Lipton and Yaffe-Bellany wrote. 'Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with the Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Trump and US financial regulations.' Pan-seared influence peddling with a citrus reduction. The prez is a pro at quid pro quo. Trump Inc.'s money grabs were taking place against the background of the president pushing through his 'big, beautiful bill' extending a tax cut for the rich while slicing billions from programmes that help poor people stay alive Trump's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, rebutted criticism on Thursday, saying, 'The president is attending it in his personal time. It is not a White House dinner.' But he flew to Virginia on Marine One. He gave his remarks from a lectern with the presidential seal. And some of the crypto crowd Friday got a tour of the White House (Lipton took his post outside the fence). With more than a dozen lucrative deals for his family and partners, the Times article said, 'Mr Trump is estimated to have added billions to his personal fortune, at least on paper, since the start of his new term, much of it through crypto.' The corruption is seeping across the Potomac. Donald Trump Jr and investors are opening a pricey private club in Georgetown called Executive Branch, where business and tech moguls can cozy up to administration big shots. [ Trump and the Irish tech bros: How the 'crypto president' is winning over Silicon Valley Opens in new window ] The notorious $400 million (€351 million) gift for the president from the Qataris, a luxury jumbo jet, has arrived in San Antonio. This alluring 'pre-bribe,' as Saturday Night Live dubbed it, instantly wiped out Trump's old concerns that 'the nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.' (Accepting the plane was sort of like a terrorist fist-bump, the same kind a Fox News host bizarrely accused the Obamas of making with each other.) Other foreign leaders got the message that emoluments were welcome. In an Oval Office meeting where Trump continued to relish his role as protector of the white patriarchy, the South African president jokingly told the American president, 'I'm sorry I don't have a plane to give you.' (This might be the line that best sums up the Trump presidency in the history books.) Trump replied breezily, 'I wish you did. I'd take it.' Trump Inc.'s money grabs were taking place against the background of the president pushing through his 'big, beautiful bill' extending his obscene tax cut for the rich while slicing billions from programmes that help poor people stay alive. 'The guy promised to make American families more prosperous,' Barack Obama's former chief strategist David Axelrod said. 'He just decided to start with his own.' In a galaxy long ago and far away, there was shame attached to selling your office. Sherman Adams, president Dwight Eisenhower's chief of staff, lost his job and ruined his reputation after he accepted a vicuña coat from a Boston textile manufacturer doing business with the federal government. Trump has no reputable reputation to ruin. He's a snatch-and-grab artist. 'I think social media and Donald Trump's persona have numbed people to the idea that certain forms of behaviour are off-limits,' said Tim O'Brien, a Trump biographer. 'No institution has been able to rein in Donald Trump. He got impeached twice. Didn't matter, so Congress couldn't rein him in. He had all sorts of federal and state prosecutions that ended up going nowhere, so law enforcement couldn't rein him in. The media has been covering him as close as anyone could ever be covered, and the media couldn't rein him in. I think it makes people just sort of turn away and accept it as inevitable.' Before he did his YMCA dance and scrammed early, the scamming Trump told the crypto enthusiasts at his golf club that he wasn't pushing crypto and bitcoin for himself. 'I really do it because I think it's the right thing to do,' he said. In Trump's moral universe, the right thing to do is always the thing that makes him richer. This article originally appeared in The New York Times
New York Times
24-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Dance$ With Emolument$
When Donald Trump was headed for the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, I took Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, to Trump Tower to meet him. Trump didn't know anything about the inner workings of Washington. He proudly showed us his 'Wall of Shame' with pictures of Republican candidates he had bested. His campaign office had few staffers, but it overflowed with cheesy portraits of him sent by fans: one of him playing poker with Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt, and a cardboard cutout of him giving a thumbs up, flanked by Reagan and John Wayne. As we were leaving, Hulse warned Trump dryly: 'If you ever get a call from our colleague Eric Lipton, you'll know you're in trouble.' 'Eric Lipton?' Trump murmured. The president probably knows who Lipton is now, because the Pulitzer Prize-winning Times investigative reporter is tracking Trump on issues of corruption as closely as the relentless lawman in the white straw hat tracked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Lipton and The Times's David Yaffe-Bellany were on the scene at Trump's Virginia golf club Thursday night as the president held his gala dinner to promote sales of $TRUMP, the memecoin he launched on the cusp of his inauguration. (Melania debuted hers two days later.) Trump has been hawking himself in an absurdly grandiose way his whole life. But this time he isn't grandstanding as a flamboyant New York businessman. He's selling himself as the president of the United States, staining his office with a blithe display of turpitude. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Independent
15-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Trump tells US troops in Qatar that he will ‘have to think' about running in 2028
President Donald Trump has told U.S. service members stationed in Qatar that he will 'have to think' about running in a fourth election, despite the possibility being prohibited by the terms of the Constitution. Trump, 78, issued his latest hint about seeking the Republican presidential nomination once again in 2028 while delivering remarks to troops stationed at the Al Udeid Air Base in Doha. 'Some people want us to do a fourth, I don't know,' he said of the prospect of his running another campaign, following wins in 2016 and 2024 and defeat in 2020. 'Have to think about that.' Trump is currently on his first major overseas trip of his second administration, spending the week in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Just prior to the trip, Trump invited controversy by accepting a $400 Boeing jet as a gift from the Qatari royal family. The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution limits American presidents to two terms. This restriction, intended to guard against despotism, states that commanders-in-chief can serve only two stints or eight years in total. 'No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice, and no person who has held the office of president, or acted as president, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected president shall be elected to the office of the president more than once,' the Amendment states. 'But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of president when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of president, or acting as president, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of president or acting as president during the remainder of such term.' Congressional Democrats have proposed a measure to clarify that the Amendment explicitly forbids a third term in office. Trump has at times admitted that the current guardrails block his path to a third term. Notably, during his recent interview with Kristen Welker on NBC's Meet the Press, the president has hinted that he could find a means of running again anyway, telling the journalist he was 'not joking' about the idea. 'A lot of people want me to do it,' Trump said, referring to his allies. 'But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it's very early in the administration. I'm focused on the current [one].' Asked how he might go about seeking an unprecedented third mandate to govern and whether he has been presented with plans to allow him to do so, the president replied: 'There are methods [by] which you could do it.' His preoccupation with the possibility, often dismissed as mere trolling by pundits, can be traced back to the days after his election triumph last November, when he told House Republicans: 'I suspect I won't be running again unless you say 'He's so good, we got to figure something else out.'' Trump went on to mention it again at a prayer breakfast at the Washington Hilton on February 6, before basking in cries of 'Four more years!' at a White House event to commemorate Black History Month later that month. Also in February, his former chief strategist Steve Bannon led the Conservative Political Action Conference in chanting: 'We want Trump in '28... We want Trump! We Want Trump!' Then, speaking to reporters on board Air Force One as he flew back to Washington on March 30 after a weekend in Florida, the president said of a hypothetical future third term: 'I'm not looking at that but, I'll tell you, I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term because the other election, the 2020 election was totally rigged, so it's actually sort of a fourth term.' Asked about the constitutional limits in his way, he said: 'I don't even want to talk about it. I'm just telling you I have had more people saying, 'Please run again.' We have a long way to go before we even think about that.'
