The Donald Trump Score Card

In October 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal from four agreements. Two were related to fights he started with China and Iran.


Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights with Iran.

Optional Protocol to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR).

Universal Postal Union

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia




Trump Administration Announces Withdrawal from Four International Agreements

Trump Administration Announces Withdrawal from Four International Agreements

excerpt:

"In October of 2018, the Trump administration announced that the United States would withdraw from four international agreements. On October 3, 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would withdraw from the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights with Iran. Later that day, National Security Advisor John Bolton announced that the United States was also withdrawing from the Optional Protocol to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR). Both withdrawals were triggered by pending International Court of Justice (ICJ) cases grounded in these treaties that were recently brought against the United States. Two weeks later, in an escalation of the ongoing trade dispute with China, the United States gave notice of withdrawal from the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the international body charged with overseeing the international mailing system. Finally, on October 22, 2018, President Trump announced that the United States would be terminating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia. Unlike other withdrawals undertaken by the Trump administration, this latest round involved three Article II treaties to which the Senate had provided its advice and consent. In addition, the international commitments withdrawn from in this round were long-standing ones, with U.S. participation in the UPU going back as far as 1875."

 

U.S. Withdraws From 1955 Treaty Normalizing Relations With Iran
By Edward Wong and David E. Sanger
Oct. 3, 2018

U.S. Withdraws From 1955 Treaty Normalizing Relations With Iran

excerpt:

"At the White House, John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, separately announced that the United States would review all treaties that require it to participate in cases before the international court. Additionally, he said the Trump administration would no longer abide by an optional provision to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations that requires certain disputes to be settled by the court.

The United States remains in the Vienna Convention itself, but Mr. Bolton was aiming to undermine a lawsuit filed last week by Palestinian officials over the move of the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

“The United States will not sit idly by as baseless, politicized claims are brought against us,” Mr. Bolton said."

 

Trump claims that his campaign rallies are very safe from coronavirus.

 

lol

 

Trump's punishing treatment of Iran is contributing to the coronavirus problem. Countries that are the least able to financially address the situation are expected to be the ones with a high incidence and a hotbed for the spread of the disease to other countries.



Coronavirus Updates: U.S. Scrambles to Slow Spread, as Numbers Soar Outside China
The New York Times
Updated March 2, 2020

Coronavirus Updates: U.S. Scrambles to Slow Spread, as Numbers Soar Outside China

excerpt:

"Coronavirus kills an adviser to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei.

An adviser to Iran’s supreme leader died from coronavirus illness on Monday, state media reported — the first fatality of a top Iranian official from the scourge that has hit the country especially hard and made it a hub of contagion in the Middle East.

The adviser, Mohammad Mirmohammadi, 71, is a member of the Expediency Council, which provides advice to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 80. It was unclear from state media accounts whether Mr. Mirmohammadi, who died at a Tehran hospital, had been in direct contact with Ayatollah Khamenei when he was contagious.

The state media accounts also said Mr. Mirmohammadi’s mother had died in recent days from the coronavirus and an uncle — his mother’s brother — was being monitored in quarantine for possible infection."

 

Trump crouching behind the podium at a CPAC gathering to mock the height of Bloomberg.

This is the President of the United States.

Expect his followers to rave about how great he is for acting like a prechooler.

image:

 

Typical reaction when listening to Trump's remarks about foreign policy in front of a gathering of dignitaries.

facepalm image:

 

Such a classy guy

I'd mock Ben Shapiro the same way

 

Trump has exposed a huge weakness. Democrats should pounce.
By Greg Sargent
March 02, 2020

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...xposed-huge-weakness-democrats-should-pounce/

Outline - Read & annotate without distractions

excerpt:

"This cultish prioritization of protecting Trump above all else, of course, flows from the tone that Trump himself has set. But the case that Democrats can now make is that this very megalomania is itself corroding the government’s ability to handle this crisis.

The Post’s extraordinary weekend report on our evolving response to the crisis underscores the point. Trump badly wanted to minimize coronavirus’s seriousness — it was rattling the markets, which Trump views as a crucial gauge of his reelection chances.

And so, Trump fumed as he watched his own health officials inform the country about the seriousness of the threat, considering this to be alarmist. He raged against the media for treating him unfairly, confirming again that everything gets filtered through how it personally impacts him.

As The Post details, that’s the crucial backstory to what happened next: Trump contradicted his own officials by downplaying the dangers posed. And Trump put Pence in charge of the response after declining to bring in an outside coordinating “czar," in part because he worried that this person might be disloyal — that is, that he or she would tell the country the truth in a way that didn’t reflect well on him."

 

Trump and his fans raved that the U.S. was near air-tight and virus-free (USA! USA!) and belittled the coronavirus as being only in China.

Then they belittled it as being only in China and Iran.

Then China, Iran, Korea.

China, Iran, Korea, Italy.

China, Iran Korea, Iraly, U.S., Russia, Germany, Latvia, Tunisia, Senegal, Jordan, Portugal.



Virus spreads to more countries as new cases slow in China
ADAM GELLER and CARLA K. JOHNSON
Associated Press
March 2, 2020, 6:56 AM UTC

Virus spreads to more countries as new cases slow in China

excerpt:

"A shift in the crisis appeared to be taking shape: Hundreds of patients were released from hospitals at the epicenter of the outbreak in China, while the World Health Organization reported that nine times as many new infections were recorded outside the country as inside it over the past 24 hours.

Alarming clusters of disease continued to swell in South Korea, Italy and Iran, and the virus turned up for the first time in New York, Moscow and Berlin, as well as Latvia, Indonesia, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Jordan and Portugal. The worldwide death toll topped 3,000, and the number of those infected rose to about 89,000 in 70 countries on every continent but Antarctica."

 

Clinton strategist: Trump 'guaranteed' to throw Pence 'under the bus' and tap Nikki Haley for VP
by Zachary Halaschak
March 02, 2020 07:52 PM

Clinton strategist: Trump 'guaranteed' to throw Pence 'under the bus' and tap Nikki Haley for VP

excerpt:

“This is not a prediction. It’s a certainty,” Begala said. “On Thursday, July 16 — that’s the date the Democrat gives her or his acceptance address — on that day, to interrupt that narrative, Donald Trump will call a press conference at Mar-a-Lago."

“He’s going to dump Mike Pence and put Nikki Haley on the ticket to try to get those suburban moms,” he predicted.

Trump recently put Pence in charge of coordinating U.S. efforts to combat the new strain of coronavirus, COVID-19. Some have criticized Pence’s selection over his handling of an HIV outbreak in Indiana.

 

Trump meeting with Pharma executives to expedite the Coronavirus vaccines

I'm wondering just how much more those execs shit themselves and pump more money into it knowing and believing the retaliations Trump is likely to do compared to anyone else in that position

 

Well, that little theory lasted a whole three days


Dow roars back from coronavirus sell-off with biggest gain since 2009, surges 5.1%

 

Come on, that's some funny shit

 

Well, you basically have someone outside the US telling you where you can move your embassy

And, a 65 yr old treaty, I will say that again, 65 yr old! Treaty.....maybe re-evaluation is way past due

 

Trump’s Quiet Power Grab
The president’s administration is attempting to bring thousands of federal employees under his control, and the public is largely unaware.
Peter M. Shane
February 26, 2020

Trump’s Quiet Power Grab

excerpts:

"The Trump administration is now waging a two-pronged attack on the independence of all administrative adjudicators, including ALJs, and the agencies that employ them. The first prong involves telling agencies, via executive orders, how to exercise the discretion that Congress has given them to conduct adjudication. One such order, from October 2019, boasts the lofty title “Promoting the Rule of Law Through Transparency and Fairness in Civil Administrative Enforcement and Adjudication.” Among its provisions is a limit on when agencies may judge a private party’s past conduct to be unlawful based on a general legal standard. The executive order says that no such agency determination may be issued unless the agency has first warned the public—through a specific rule—that the general legal standard prohibits the conduct the agency would now challenge."


"The second and even more aggressive prong is the Trump administration’s campaign to undermine independent agencies, which conduct a lot of the highest-profile administrative adjudications. The aim is to put an end altogether to the idea of independent officers in the executive branch. An agency is considered an “independent agency” if its head or heads may be dismissed by the president only with good cause—typically, “inefficiency, malfeasance, or neglect of office.” Conventional understanding is that presidents may fire at will any administrator who lacks such statutory protection. The Department of Justice under Trump, however, has been working hard to nudge the Supreme Court into determining either that any statutory limits on presidential at-will removal authority are categorically unconstitutional or that “inefficiency, malfeasance, or neglect of office” must be interpreted broadly enough that failure to follow any presidential directive would become “good cause” for dismissal. This would effectively end, for example, the independence of the Federal Reserve System."

 

Trump’s new coronavirus risk: Dangerous spin and public distrust — inside Iran
If the coronavirus keeps spreading in Iran, the U.S. could face some tough choices after years of trying to isolate the country.
By ELI OKUN
02/29/2020 07:00 AM EST

Trump’s new coronavirus risk: Dangerous spin and public distrust — inside Iran

excerpt:

"But in Iran, which the Trump administration has successfully isolated from much of the world since pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, the president has very limited options to engage.

It’s been less than two months since the U.S. killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and the nations stood on the brink of outright war. The coronavirus has prompted the U.S. to restrict travel for the recent surge of troops it sent to the region.

“President Trump essentially has sanctioned America out of influence inside Iran,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

The impact of those sanctions also hovers over Iran. They have damaged Iran’s relatively strong health care infrastructure, causing some shortages and skyrocketing medical prices.

Though they include exemptions for humanitarian goods, many experts said European banks have been unwilling to finance even those transactions for fear of running afoul of sanctions.

“Companies and banks are very cautious about dealing with Iran even for humanitarian trade,” said Tara Sepehri Far, an Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch who authored a report last year on the impact of the U.S. maximum pressure campaign. “There are several cases of what should be legitimate trade that banks either refused to authorize or companies just ended their relationship with Iran.”"

 

U.S. Sanctions Hamper Iran's Battle to Contain Coronavirus
By Tom O'Connor
2/24/20 at 2:45 PM EST

U.S. sanctions hamper Iran's battle to contain coronavirus

excerpt:

"Iranian hard-liners were skeptical of the 2015 nuclear deal that lifted international sanctions and have increasingly felt vindicated since the Trump administration's 2018 decision to walk away from the agreement and impose unilateral economic restrictions on Tehran. While the State Department has said that these sanctions did not include humanitarian goods, some companies have proved unwilling to export even critical supplies for fear of triggering a U.S. government backlash.

Ahead of the recent elections, one Iranian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Newsweek that "currently Iran can produce about 95 to 97 percent of our needs. Even Iran is exporting medicines to other countries in the region." As for the remaining medicines, they "are important ones we need" and "there are problems in acquiring them because the United States has imposed those sanctions.""

 

All Trump appointed judges should recuse themselves from Trump related cases. That's only Republican thinking … after-all.

 

TRump's CDC released an infected woman into the general population in Texas.