Debra Messing directly addressed first daughter Ivanka Trump on Saturday night while being honored at the 2017 GLAAD Media Awards in New York City. The “Will & Grace” star spoke as “one Jewish mother to another” while delivering her acceptance speech, which was at turns hilarious and biting. After thanking the LGBTQ advocacy organization for her Excellence in Media Award, Messing noted that unless you’re an “unenlightened straight, cisgender, white man, you are a target.” She then slammed President Donald Trump, calling him the “very bad and very orange man in our White House.”

Debra Messing directly addressed first daughter Ivanka Trump on Saturday night while being honored at the 2017 GLAAD Media Awards in New York City.

The “Will & Grace” star spoke as “one Jewish mother to another” while delivering her acceptance speech, which was at turns hilarious and biting.

After thanking the LGBTQ advocacy organization for her Excellence in Media Award, Messing noted that unless you’re an “unenlightened straight, cisgender, white man, you are a target.” She then slammed President Donald Trump, calling him the “very bad and very orange man in our White House.”

But the actress and activist reserved the brunt of her scorn for Ivanka Trump, who operates in an official capacity as an unpaid assistant to the president. Messing told the audience full of advocates, journalists and celebrities that she wanted to make a “direct appeal” to the first daughter, whom she referred to as “the secretary of state.”

“It’s not enough to simply say that women’s issues are important to you,” she said. “It’s time to do something. You can change the lives of millions of women and children just by telling your dad stories about real people who are suffering.”

Messing challenged Ivanka to not let the president “separate immigrant mothers from their American-born children” or “take health care away from women who need it.” She also asked her to convince her father not to make trans kids like Gavin Grimm “fight in court for their basic human dignity.” Grimm, who was in attendance at the awards gala, is currently challenging his school for the right to use the restroom that corresponds with his gender identity.

Messing said she wanted Ivanka to “stop blindly defending” her father and start “defending what you say you believe in.”

“You can’t just write ‘#womenwhowork’ and think you’re advancing feminism,” Messing added. “You need to be a woman who does good work #saywhatyoumeanandmeanwhatyousay.”

“Imagine how you’ll feel, sitting at Passover seder, if you can tell your children that you fought for justice and freedom,” said the actress, who is set to reprise her role as Grace Adler this fall in a 10-episode run of the beloved and groundbreaking show “Will & Grace.” 

Messing has long been an advocate for the LGBTQ community and has been especially vocal in challenging Donald Trump since he began running for president, often using her Twitter account as a platform to speak out against him and his administration.

Ivanka Trump PoorLittle Rich Girl: Documents reveal Ivanka, Jared have fortune worth over $740M

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Still Benefiting From Business Empire, Filings Show



President Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, leaving the Oval Office in February.CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, will remain the beneficiaries of a sprawling real estate and investment business still worth as much as $740 million, despite their new government responsibilities, according to ethics filings released by the White House Friday night.

Ms. Trump will also maintain a stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The hotel, just down the street from the White House, has drawn protests from ethics experts who worry that foreign governments or special interests could stay there in order to curry favor with the administration.

It is unclear how Ms. Trump would earn income from that stake. Mr. Kushner’s financial disclosures said that Ms. Trump earned between $1 million and $5 million from the hotel between January 2016 and March 2017, and put the value of her stake at between $5 million and $25 million.

The disclosures were part of a broad, Friday-night document release by the White House that exposed the assets of as many as 180 senior officials to public scrutiny. The reports showed the assets and wealth of senior staff members at the time they entered government service.

This is just more testament to the stupidity and ignorance of at least half of the US electorate.

It is important, for the future edification and need for closure of the American tax payer/voter, that Trump's solitary confinement in a...

The word "earned" with regard to the second-generation beneficiaries of Fred Trump's lucre may be taken with a grain of salt. 

Those disclosures included the assets of Gary D. Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs who now leads the National Economic Council, Kellyanne Conway, the pollster and counsel to Mr. Trump and Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist to the president.

Mr. Bannon disclosed $191,000 in consulting fees he earned from Breitbart News Network, the conservative media organization, $125,333 from Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked for the Trump campaign, and $61,539 in salary from the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative nonprofit organization. All three are backed by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, financiers and major Republican donors.

Mr. Bannon’s most valuable asset was Bannon Strategic Advisors Inc., a privately held consulting firm into which income from his other investments appeared to flow. It was valued at between $5 million and $25 million. He also held bank accounts valued at up to $2.25 million, and rental real estate worth as much as $10.5 million.

Ms. Conway earned at least $842,614 last year, and perhaps slightly more, the filings show. Her assets are valued at between $11 million and at least $44.2 million.

Mr. Cohn is far wealthier, with assets valued between $253 million and $611 million, and income last year as high as $77 million. Another White House official, Reed Cordish, who heads up technology initiatives, accumulated assets as a Maryland developer valued as high as $424 million.

Mr. Trump’s administration is considered the most wealthy in American history, with members of his senior staff and cabinet worth an estimated $12 billion, according to a tally by Bloomberg. The Friday filings will add voluminous detail to that top-line figure. The White house chief of staff, Reince Priebus, for example, earned at least $1.18 million — nearly half of which came from the Republican National Committee, which he formerly led. His assets totaled between $604,008 and at least $1.26 million.

“I think one of the really interesting things that people are going to see today — and I think it’s something that should be celebrated — is that the president has brought a lot of people into this administration, and this White House in particular, who have been very blessed and very successful,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. The officials “have given up a lot to come into government by setting aside a lot of assets,” he said.

Until January, Mr. Kushner was the chief executive of Kushner Companies, a family-run real estate investment firm with holdings across the country. It is a growing business that has taken part in at least $7 billion of acquisitions over the past decade.

Late Friday, the White House released details of the plan devised by his advisers to avoid conflicts of interest between Mr. Kushner’s government role and the wide-ranging business empire he ran with his father. That business depends on foreign investment from undisclosed sources, as well as billions of dollars in loans from the world’s biggest financial services firms.

Although Mr. Kushner has stepped down from his management positions at the more than 200 entities that operated aspects of the family real estate business, he will remain a beneficiary of a vast majority of the business he ran for the past decade, through a series of trusts that already owned the various real estate companies.

The plan laid out on Friday “is not sufficient,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel and chief ethics officer for the Federal Election Commission. “While removing himself from the management of the businesses is an important step, he is still financially benefiting from how the businesses do. This presents potential for a conflict of interest. Given his level in the White House and broad portfolio, it’s hard to see how he will recuse himself from everything that may impact his financial interest.”

While the filing discloses Mr. Kushner’s personal lenders, it does not provide information on his business partners or lenders to his projects.

His real estate firm has borrowed money from the likes of Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group, Deutsche Bank and the French bank Natixis. It also received loans from Israel’s largest bank, Bank Hapoalim, which is the subject of a United States Justice Department investigation into allegations that it helped wealthy Americans evade taxes using undeclared accounts.

Most recently, his firm’s flagship property at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was the subject of controversy: Around the time his father-in-law received the Republican nomination last spring, Mr. Kushner’s firm began conversations with a Chinese company with ties to some of the Communist Party’s leading families about a plan to invest billions of dollars in the troubled office tower.

Mr. Kushner’s company and the firm, Anbang Insurance Group, agreed to end the talks on Wednesday after weeks of negative publicity about the deal, criticized as a bailout of the Kushners. The building had already been rescued by a number of prominent firms, including the private equity giant Carlyle Group, and Zara, the Spanish fashion retailer founded and owned by Amancio Ortega, one of the world’s wealthiest men.

Mr. Kushner has divested his stakes in any businesses connected to that property.

The disclosures do not reveal the names of investors and lenders to ventures that Mr. Kushner is retaining a stake in. For example, the form shows Mr. Kushner is retaining a stake in a limited liability corporation that owns a Trump-branded luxury rental high-rise building in Jersey City worth as much as $5 million. That project was financed with tens of millions of dollars from wealthy Chinese investors through a controversial visa-for-sale program called EB-5.

However, the filing does not disclose the names of any of those investors — or partners in any of his other projects.

“We don’t know who the business partners are in many of these investments,” Mr. Noble said, “and those business partners may also have interests that will be affected by how he advises the government. And that’s a concern.”

“He could have foreign business partners who have a real interest in policy, and he may be advising the president on those policies,” Mr. Noble added. “This is a dark area where we just don’t know what’s going on.”

In all, the Kushner company owns more than 20,000 apartments and approximately 14 million square feet of office space.

Previous disclosures by the United States Office of Government Ethics showed that Mr. Kushner had divested his interests in several entities, mostly partnerships connected to a venture capital firm run by his brother, Joshua, called Thrive Capital, that invests in technology firms like Instagram.

He also shed his interests in funds run by the private equity giant Blackstone Group — whose chief executive, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is an economic adviser to Mr. Trump — as well as BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.

Over all, he has shed his stakes in 58 businesses.

He is still the sole primary beneficiary of a majority of the trusts that will retain assets, with his children as the secondary beneficiaries.

Mr. Kushner was required to submit some limited financial information for his wife, Ms. Trump, who will continue to receive payments from the Trump Organization as well as her fashion brand.

Ms. Trump, who now serves as an assistant to the president, resigned from her leadership roles at both companies. Instead of performance-based payments, Ms. Trump will receive fixed payments from T International Realty, the family’s luxury brokerage agency, as well as fixed fees from two entities related to real estate projects, the documents show.

Ms. Trump had previously rolled her fashion brand into the Ivanka M. Trump Business Trust, which is overseen by her brother-in-law, Josh Kushner, and sister-in-law, Nicole Meyer. The documents released on Friday valued the trust at more than $50 million.

The brand is largely a licensing operation, meaning that it sells the use of Ms. Trump’s name to partners who manufacture her clothes, shoes and other accessories. Since it is privately held, little is known about the company’s financials, but The New York Times has previously reported that revenues were roughly between $4 million and $6 million in 2013, before the debut of a major partnership.

The disclosure forms released Friday for less senior White House staff members were not reviewed by the federal Office of Government Ethics. Only the White House Counsel’s Office examines their assets to determine if there are potential conflicts, and to decide what steps employees must take to sell assets, resign positions or recuse themselves from decisions.

Already, a complaint has been filed against at least one White House staff member for taking actions that might benefit his own financial interests. Christopher P. Liddell, an assistant to the president and the director of strategic initiatives, had been the chief financial officer of companies including Microsoft, International Paper and General Motors before taking his White House job. Until recently, he also owned stock in General Motors, according to disclosure forms, among more than 750 other companies.

But in late January and early February, according to a complaint filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Mr. Liddell participated in meetings that involved several of the companies in which he still owned a total of about $2 million in stock, including International Paper and General Motors. Mr. Liddell, according to disclosures, sold these stock holdings by mid-February.273COMMENTS

“It is Ethics 101 — the most basic thing you are not supposed to do: using your official capacity to benefit your financial interest,” said Norman Eisen, who served as a White House ethics lawyer during the Obama administration and now is a co-chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The White House did not respond Friday when asked about the complaint.

Ivanka Trump.... hardly a good Ambassador for Working Women

Ivanka Trump at a meeting at the White House in February. CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

Ivanka Trump will now have an official job at the White House. It’s an unpaid role as an adviser to her father, the president, but it comes with an office, a title and, presumably, an even higher perch from which to fashion herself as a crusader for working women.

“Policies that allow women with children to thrive should not be novelties — they should be the norm,” she said at the Republican National Convention last summer. She has written a book, to be published in May, called “Women Who Work.” In her very own West Wing office she will shepherd policy related to “women in the workplace,” according to her lawyer. In April she’s headed to a summit meeting in Berlin on women in the work force.

While Ms. Trump may want to be the new face of working motherhood, the reality of the policies she has devised for her father diverge starkly from her rhetoric. They offer very little to most parents, especially the ones who really need the support.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump unveiled his daughter’s plan for six weeks of paid leave for women who give birth. When pressed, Ms. Trump made it clear that her policy was tailored specifically for coping with childbirth and was not meant for new fathers or parents who adopt.

It’s a plan that is likely to hurt all working women more than help them.

Employers are already more hesitant to hire mothers than other candidates, male or female. Part of what they fear, fair or not, is investing in an employee who will then leave to care for her children for some unknown period, taking all her training and knowledge with her and requiring the company to spend resources hiring a replacement.

Their anxiety will be amplified if women are afforded time off from work for a new child and men aren’t. If only mothers get a paid leave benefit when their family welcomes a new child, the stigma falls squarely on one gender.

That stigma then spreads from mothers to all women, even if they don’t have or plan to have kids. Any female employee within a certain age range becomes a risk if she could decide to take six weeks off at some point. Women are transformed into potential mothers and therefore potential costs.

Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

Experience elsewhere offers some evidence that this is what will happen. On the whole, other developed countries — all of which ensure new mothers get paid leave — are attracting and keeping more women in their work forces than the United States. But there can be negative consequences depending on how they do it. Research has found that giving mothers long leaves that don’t apply to men depresses their earnings and makes them less likely to move up to higher positions. Other policies aimed just at women, such as a law in Chile that required employers with a large share of female employees to provide child care assistance, have had similar effects. Employers turn women away if they become more expensive than men.

The solution here isn’t complicated: Extend paid leave to all new parents. When California established gender-neutral paid family leave, the number of fathers taking time to be with their infants doubled. Women’s earnings and employment go up when men take more leave.

Ms. Trump and administration officials are reportedly now considering a plan that also covers fathers and adoptive parents and changes the funding structure, though a more expansive benefit program is going to be a very tough sell to Republicans in Congress.

The child care plan that Ms. Trump put forward isn’t much better than her paid-leave idea. Her proposal to allow parents to fully deduct the cost of care up to a certain limit would apply to all parents, unlike maternity leave. But it would give the biggest benefit to those who need it least. Even though it includes a tax credit for families with the lowest incomes, the bulk of the policy is a tax deduction, which is worth much more to those who owe the most taxes.

According to analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, families that make more than $100,000 a year would gobble up 70 percent of the total benefits. Those making less than $40,000, on the other hand, would get about a $20 boost to their incomes — not much compared with the thousands of dollars it can cost to put a child in day care. Yet poorer families spend a much larger share of their incomes on child care than those with more means.

These proposed child care tax credits, shortcomings and all, would cost the government $115 billion over the next decade.

Rather than offer a step toward something better later, Ms. Trump’s plan

could stymie progress. If she were somehow able to persuade members of Congress to pass a pricey child care plan that does nothing to address the real concerns for most families, it would allow them to claim they already did something about the issue and ignore other, superior solutions. Worse, she risks giving them sticker shock without actually doing anything for families that aren’t wealthy. Conservatives are already calling her plan “mammoth.” If a real, comprehensive solution were to come down the road, would they have any appetite for it after this?

The climbing cost of child care has led to a 5 percent reduction in women’s employment in the United States in the past two decades. The lack of investment in child care is another reason other developed countries surpass this country on the percentage of women in the work force. No wonder, when far more women than men say they’ve had to take long chunks of time off from work to care for their families. Meanwhile, mothers with steady child care are twice as likely to stay in their jobs. If they were all able to get their kids into early childhood education programs, mothers’ employment would increase by 10 percent. A tax benefit for rich families won’t do it.

The politics of paid leave and child care have certainly shifted: They’re now bipartisan issues, at least among some lawmakers. But it is important not just that the country adopt these policies, but what kinds of policies it adopts. If Ms. Trump wants to champion working women, she needs to offer more than photo ops and empty promises.

Why It’s Just Fine to ‘Frum Shame’ Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump

As we all know by now, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump got special rabbinic dispensation to ride in a car on Shabbat for daddy Donald’s inauguration. This led to a collective Jewish (and general!) eye-roll, but also to demands that we respect the young couple’s religiosity and let them be. Jessica Levine Kupferberg and Andrew Silow-Carroll both made versions of the case that the self-appointed guardians of Shabbat observance should mind their own beeswax Shabbat candles, as it were.

The ‘don’t frum-shame Jared and Ivanka’ take is… well, it’s like ‘don’t kink-shame Donald Trump’ (re: pee-gate) or the ongoing take that it’s mean-spirited and unfair to looks-shame the now-president. Yes, under normal circumstances, you should be respectful of private bedroom activities, and, heck, of the choice to sport orange foundation and an elaborate combover. But just as religious restrictions (such as those about driving on Shabbat) can be broken under special circumstances, so too can etiquette rules along these lines.

Why? Because it’s clear that the Trump looks-shame isn’t about, say, making everyone with small hands feel bad about this, but to get at what would annoy him. So, too, in a way, with the frum-shaming of Jared and Ivanka. It’s not that I’d expect them to be touchy about it, like Donald about his hands. Rather, it’s that the Trumps have invested a lot politically in the image of the couple as a good Jewish family. This fact is used to rebuff the rather heavily substantiated claim that Trump’s rise brought with it a new, right-wing American anti-Semitism. It’s also used, more generically, to suggest that the Trump brand stands for good family values, and not, say, trading a string of wives in for younger models.

So consider this your dispensation: You are totally allowed to frum-shame Jared and Ivanka. You get to do so even if you yourself aren’t pious (am I? is TMZ?), and you can rest easy that you are not, in frum-shaming that particular couple, in some way invading the religious privacy of all observant Jews, or of all converts to Judaism.

Shabbat at Home with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Every Friday night.

Inthe cold, dark days of winter, the sun sets early on a Friday night. Depending on the week, the sun might set as early as approximately 5:15 p.m. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have spent the whole day preparing for this: The eve of the Sabbath. Their phones are off. Their computers are locked in a safe and the safe’s combination is written down and kept in yet another safe, only accessible by Jared, Ivanka, and their housekeeper, who does not even know of the safe’s actual contents. Their windows are closed and blocked by a second set of walls that come down before sunset and stay there until sunset the following evening, once the Sabbath is over. There are only four people on this planet that have access to them for these 24 hours: Their three children, Arabella, Joseph, and Theodore, and their housekeeper.

The Sabbath is a time for mindfulness and reflection on the week gone by. To shut yourself off from the outside world and spend time with your loved ones. It’s also the only reprieve Ivanka and Jared have from the POTUS’s alarming policies, divisive cabinet picks, and his tweets. It is important that the world knows that when Trump makes his worst, most hateful decisions, the Kushners had nothing to do with it. Certainly this is not a coincidence. Six days a week it’s, “Nordstrom is dropping your line this, you played a role in bringing about the apocalypse that.” But not today. Not on Shabbat.

Ivanka and Jared begin Shabbat the way any other family would: By saying the prayers over the traditional Shabbat candles, wine, and challah. “Baruch, atah, Oh God, what have I done?” Ivanka starts the blessing, thanking God for what he’s provided and then apologizing profusely for her role in destroying his creation. The family eats the festive Shabbat dinner. It is always an impeccably prepared, delicious meal, for they know that without Jared’s small influence over his father-in-law for the evening, it could be their last. “Do we have enough rations in the event of a nuclear war?” Ivanka asks her husband. He nods solemnly. When they say the blessing over the children, Ivanka whispers, “May God make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah,” and “may you outlive the nuclear holocaust your family will have helped to create.”

Jared and Ivanka do not make love on the Sabbath. In fact, they rarely make love at all anymore. They lie awake at night, eyes towards the ceiling. The next day, they’ll play with their children, and for a brief, shining moment, they’ll feel like a normal family again. But all Shabbats must come to an end, and with their end, comes the onslaught of the real world. And for Jared and Ivanka, that means reentering the inner circle of Donald Trump.

Ivanka Trump ... our Lord , Our Saviour from Trumpism on the Environment

Top Trump Advisers Are Split on Paris Agreement on Climate Change



A bulldozer moving coal at a processing facility in Price, Utah. President Trump campaigned with a promise to “cancel” the Paris agreement, which binds countries to combat global warming. CreditGeorge Frey/Bloomberg

WASHINGTON — The White House is fiercely divided over President Trump’s campaign promise to “cancel” the Paris agreement, the 2015 accord that binds nearly every country to curb global warming, with more moderate voices maintaining that he should stick with the agreement despite his campaign pledge.

Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser, is pressing the president to officially pull the United States from the landmark accord, according to energy and government officials with knowledge of the debate. But, they say, he is clashing with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who fear the move could have broad and damaging diplomatic ramifications.

Mr. Trump vowed on the campaign trail to tear up President Barack Obama’s global warming policies, and on the home front he is moving aggressively to meet those pledges with deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and a new E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, who is a skeptic of climate science.

Next week, Mr. Trump plans to sign an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to start the lengthy legal process of unwinding Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations for cutting greenhouse pollution from coal-fired power plants. Those regulations are the linchpin of the last administration’s program to meet the nation’s obligations to reduce climate emissions under the Paris agreement.Continue reading the main story

While the president cannot, as Mr. Trump suggested, unilaterally undo a 194-nation accord that has already been legally ratified, he could initiate the four-year process to withdraw the world’s largest economy and second-largest climate polluter from the first worldwide deal to tackle global warming. Such a move would rend a global deal that has been hailed as historic, throwing into question the fate of global climate policy and, diplomats say, the credibility of the United States.

But it would also demonstrate to his supporters that Mr. Trump is a man of his word, putting American coal interests ahead of a global deal forged by Mr. Obama.

On one side of that debate is Mr. Bannon, who as a former chief executive of Breitbart News published countless articles denouncing climate change as a hoax, and who has vowed to push Mr. Trump to transform all his major campaign promises into policy actions.Photo

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, center, is worried about the fallout if the United States withdraws from the accord. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

On the other side are Ms. Trump, Mr. Tillerson, and a slew of foreign policy advisers and career diplomats who argue that the fallout of withdrawing from the accord could be severe, undercutting the United States’ credibility on other foreign policy issues and damaging relations with key allies.

Although Ms. Trump has not spoken out publicly for action to combat climate change, proponents and opponents of such action see her as an ally. Former Vice President Al Gore met with her during the Trump transition, and was ushered in by the “first daughter” to see the president-elect. The actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio even slipped her a DVD copy of his climate-change documentary.

“President Trump Must Not Wobble on Climate Change — No Matter What Ivanka Says …,” blared a Breitbart post on Monday written by James Delingpole, who is close to Mr. Bannon and who leads the website’s coverage of climate-change policy.

Mr. Trump wants to make a decision by next week, say people familiar with the White House’s debate on the climate pact, in order to announce his executive order to undo Mr. Obama’s climate regulations in conjunction with his plans for the Paris deal.

According to leaked budget documents, the president will also propose killing off nearly two dozen E.P.A. programs, including the Obama-era Clean Power Program, climate partnership programs with local governments, Energy Star grants to encourage efficiency research in consumer products and climate-change research. Those would be part of a broader budget submission that would cut the E.P.A.’s funding by 25 percent, to around $6.1 billion from $8.2 billion, and its staff by 20 percent.

“If the goal is to fulfill the president’s campaign promises and implement his agenda, there is no value in staying in Paris,” said Thomas J. Pyle, an adviser to the Trump transition and the president of the Institute for Energy Research, an organization partly funded by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, who have worked for years to undermine climate-change policies.

Mr. Trump has cited Mr. Pyle’s group as being influential in shaping his energy and climate proposals, including his campaign pledge to withdraw from the Paris deal.

Get the Morning Briefing by Email

What you need to know to start your day, delivered to your inbox Monday through Friday.

Sign Up

Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.


SEE SAMPLE
PRIVACY POLICY

“The two greatest obstacles to a Clexit (climate exit from U.N. Paris agreement) are probably Ivanka and Tillerson,” wrote Marc Morano, a former Republican Senate staff member who now runs Climate Depot, a fossil-fuel-industry-funded website that promotes the denial of climate science, in an email. “Tillerson with his ‘seat at the table’ views could be biggest proponent of not withdrawing the U.S. from the agreement.”

Mr. Tillerson is a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, which, like many major global corporations, endorsed the Paris agreement. While his former company once denied human-caused climate change, it has more recently publicly acknowledged the threat posed by burning oil and supported proposals to tax carbon dioxide pollution.

Asked during his Senate confirmation hearing about the Paris accord, Mr. Tillerson said, “It’s important that the U.S. maintains its seat at the table about how to address the threat of climate change, which does require a global response.”

Under the Paris agreement, every nation has formally submitted plans detailing how it expects to lower its planet-warming pollution. The Obama administration pledged that the United States would reduce its carbon pollution about 26 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. However, that pledge depends on enactment of Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations on coal-fired power plants, which Mr. Trump and Mr. Pruitt intend to substantially weaken or eliminate.

But under the Paris deal, those numerical targets are not legally binding, and there are no sanctions for failing to meet them. The only legal requirements of the deal are that countries publicly put forth their emissions reductions targets, and later put forth reports verifying how they are meeting the targets. It would be possible for the Trump administration to stay in the deal and submit a less ambitious target.

Even senior Republican voices in the foreign policy debate have said it may be wiser to stay in but keep a low profile.

“There’s really no obligation,” Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview. “It doesn’t require us to do anything. I think they may take a little time to assess whether pulling out makes sense now.”Photo

Scott Pruitt, the new E.P.A. administrator, made a career on suing the agency he now leads to eliminate regulations. CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

Foreign policy experts say withdrawing from Paris would have far greater diplomatic consequences than President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the world’s first global climate-change accord, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

“I think it would be a major mistake, even a historic mistake, to disavow the Paris deal,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a retired career diplomat and under secretary of state under Mr. Bush.

“In international politics, trust, reliability and keeping your commitments — that’s a big part of how other countries view our country,” Mr. Burns said. “I can’t think of an issue, except perhaps NATO, where if the U.S. simply walks away, it would have such a major negative impact on how we are seen.”

The Paris deal is more consequential than Kyoto. Unlike that pact, which required action only from developed economies, the Paris agreement includes commitments from every nation, rich and poor, to cut emissions, including China and India, the world’s largest and third-largest polluters. Also, the science of climate change has become far more certain and the impact more visible in the 20 years since Kyoto. Each of the last three years has surpassed the previous one as the hottest on record.

Some of the United States’ closest allies are urging the Trump administration not to pull out. In a letter to Mr. Trump after he won the election, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany wrote, “Partnership with the United States is and will remain a keystone of German foreign policy, especially so that we can tackle the great challenges of our time.” They include, she wrote, “working to develop farsighted climate policy.”

As Mr. Trump and his advisers weigh their Paris options, one proposal is gaining traction, according to participants in the debate: Mr. Trump could declare that the Paris agreement is a treaty that requires ratification by the Senate. The pact was designed not to have the legal force of a treaty specifically so that it would not have to go before the United States Senate, which would have assuredly failed to ratify it.

“If there are camps forming in the White House, then let the people decide, the elected representatives,” Mr. Pyle said. “Let’s put the question to them.”

Proponents of that idea say it could shift some of the weight of the decision from Mr. Trump to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, at least in the eyes of some foreign diplomats, and of the president’s daughter.

#StopTrumpKleptocracy, Ivanka Trumps slap in the face Nordstrom's continued #OyVeyDonaldTrumps open kleptomatic promotion of his Trump brand

So far, Trump has behaved as if he believes that millions of voters chose him because they wanted to enrich his family and not theirs.PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN WALSH / THE AP

Kleptocracy (from Ancient Greek κλέπτης (kléptēs, “thief”), κλέπτω (kléptō, “steal”), from Proto-Indo-European *klep- (“to steal”); and from the Ancient Greek suffix -κρατία (-kratía), from κράτος (krátos, “power, rule”; klépto- thieves + -kratos rule, literally "rule by thieves") is a government with corrupt rulers (kleptocrats) that use their power to exploit the people and natural resources of their own territory in order to extend their personal wealth and political power. Typically this system involves the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service.

If there had been any ambiguity about how far Donald Trump was prepared to press his role as President in service of the business interests of himself and his family, it was laid to rest on February 9th by his most visible surrogate, Kellyanne Conway. “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff is what I would say,” Conway now famously said on Fox News. “I’m going to give a free commercial here: Go buy it today, everybody. You can find it online.”

This stunning promotional message (for which Conway was reportedly “counselled”) came after Trump publicly scolded the retailer Nordstrom, which made what appears to be a routine business decision to drop Ivanka Trump’s fashion line due to underperforming sales. Other retailers had already taken steps to reduce the Ivanka brand’s prominence in their stores; the discount chains T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s sent notes to their employees last week, according to the Times, instructing them to stop promoting the merchandise separately and to mix it in with other labels. Neiman Marcus, a more upscale chain, said that is was phasing out Ivanka’s jewelry from its Web site. (The jewelry is still available at Lord & Taylor, along with the label’s clothing, shoes, and handbags, which are also sold at Macy’s.) According to Nordstrom, sales of the brand had been declining “steadily” during the last year—and especially since September, 2016—while other estimates showed sales plummeting at several retailers. That is hardly surprising given that its target customers are young professional women, many of whom have recoiled from Trump’s overt misogyny. Judging from his public messaging, Ivanka’s father, the President of the United States, feels that corporations should set aside their own economic interests if their business decisions might hurt his family. So far, Trump has behaved as if he believes he has a mandate to act this way, as if millions of voters chose him because they wanted to enrich his family and not theirs.

It’s difficult to keep track of the ways in which the norms and ethical standards that have long governed the personal financial interests of the President have been breached in only a short time. Trump amassed enough Electoral College votes to become President without releasing his tax returns, leaving Americans in the dark about the sources of his earnings and his debts, and the urgent question of to whom, exactly, he is beholden. Shortly after Election Day, he declared that he was exempt from ethics and conflict-of-interest rules (which in some areas is technically true). On January 11th, Trump’s attorney stood behind a podium at Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and pointed to a table stacked with manila folders: Trump would be resolving his enormous, unprecedented business conflicts, she assured the American people, by placing his ownership of the Trump Organization into a trust and leaving the operational management in the hands of his two sons. Ethics experts said at the time that the measures fell laughably short, because Trump already knew what businesses the company was involved in and would still be collecting its profits. Since then, it has become clear that even those thin measures were largely cosmetic. The trust itself, theTimes reported, will be overseen by Trump’s oldest son, Donald, and his longtime company C.F.O. As its name—Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust—suggests, it can also be undone at any time.

The Trump Organization has not gone out of its way to assuage concerns about overt profiteering: Trump’s Palm Beach golf club is moving ahead with plans to double its membership prices; the President is using his Mar-a-Lago golf club as a venue for hosting foreign leaders; the head of Trump Hotels has discussed plans for a massive domestic expansion; and the company continues to own the Trump hotel in Washington, which is located in the Old Post Office, in violation of a lease prohibiting federally elected officials from benefitting from it financially. More recently, it emerged that the Defense Department and the Secret Service were considering leasing space inside Trump Tower in New York, in order to provide security services to Trump and his family, effectively paying the President rent.

Although the new President has taken some steps to distance himself from his finances, including selling his public stock holdings and resigning from several of the family enterprises he was involved with, he has largely shown himself to be indifferent to critics of his conflicts, including the legal scholars and former White House ethics lawyers who filed a lawsuit on January 22nd alleging that taking payments from foreign government entities at his hotels and other properties violates the Constitution. As part of his plan to address these ethics problems, which threaten to create endless distractions for his Administration, Trump volunteered (in his words) to hire an ethics monitor to insure that nothing inappropriate happens.

For companies, the hiring of an ethics or compliance monitor often happens under different circumstances. Typically, after a company has been charged with fraud, or money laundering, or, possibly, with having been infiltrated by organized crime, the government will impose such conditions as a prerequisite to settling the case. The arrangement allows the Department of Justice to make certain that a company continues to uphold its side of the deal.

It appears that Trump, by calling for an independent ethics monitor to watch over his company, was trying to evoke those sorts of agreements—but what he has done, voluntarily, is far less than what a compliance-monitor agreement with the government would require.

Normally, the selection of a monitor is a rigorous process, and includes rules to insure that the monitor has an arm’s-length relationship with the entity being monitored. In addition, the government usually has the right to approve the person who is hired for the job. “There’s a certain amount of transparency—you can’t just pick and choose whomever you want,” Stephen Fishbein, a partner with Shearman and Sterling, who has served as a corporate compliance monitor himself, said. “If Trump wanted to do something similar, it would be a fairly elaborate setup. He wouldn’t have complete discretion on who it was, and there would be a written public document that would explain what the rules of the road are.”

Because Trump is undertaking the measures at will, he can pick whomever he wants. And the people the Trump Organization has chosen reflect, to some extent, Trump’s apparent attitude toward conflicts of interest. Bobby Burchfield, a litigator with the law firm King & Spalding, in Washington, D.C., was named as an independent ethics adviser to the Trump Organization; part of his job will be to review the company’s business transactions and make sure they don’t pose any conflicts. Burchfield is an experienced lawyer, but hardly a neutral one: he’s a longtime ally of the Republican Party, having represented George W. Bush during the vote recount in Florida, in 2000, and serving as chairman of Crossroads G.P.S., the Karl Rove-backed dark-money fund-raising machine. In 2015, he was named the Republican Lawyer of the Year by the National Republican Lawyers Association.

Perhaps even more troubling, Trump’s company also appointed its own attorney, a longtime Trump Organization executive named George Sorial, as its chief compliance counsel. The job, according to Sorial’s public statements about his plans, will be to insure that the company does not take any actions that could be perceived as exploiting Trump’s position as President. Sorial is deeply enmeshed in the company: he has been employed by Trump since 2007, and worked on the Trump University fraud litigation, which the company settled for twenty-five million dollars. Unlike official Justice Department oversight, which would require the monitor to report on the company’s behavior to the government, there is no indication that the Trump Organization’s internal or external ethics officers will be sharing their activities with the government or the public. In other words, Americans will continue to be uninformed as to Trump’s business conflicts, except when he decides to broadcast them on Twitter.

#OyVeyDonaldTrump Politics and Business Don't Mix Nordstrom Drops Ivanka and joins 7 others

The resistance: 1, Ivanka Trump: 0


Nordstrom’s decision to drop Ivanka’s brand hit the Trumps where it hurt – and shows how boycotts have a rightful place in the resistance

‘Why should Ivanka get a pass just because she has shiny hair and avoids all but a narrow range of topics’ Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Ivanka Trump spent the election trying to pull off a delicate balancing act: campaigning for an authoritarian demagogue while simultaneously hawking sensible office clothes to women. Now, those contradictions have caught up with her: Nordstrom and others have dropped her toxic brand. Her father’s reaction, predictably, was: so unfair!

But it’s not.

Back in October, Fast Company reported that traffic to her site was up 275% from the previous year and online searches for her products were up 335% from April. Ivanka’s frequent appearances on the campaign trail might have been “controversial” in the fake America, but they were paying off at the bank, as clear a sign as any that the people were with her.


Is Ivanka Trump's fashion line any good?

When Ivanka used her appearance at the Republican national convention to advertise a basic pink shift dress (first by wearing it, then by tweeting a link to “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech”), it sold out in a matter of hours. Were Americans really so celebrity-obsessed they’d buy anything with a famous person’s name on it, regardless of what that person was famous for?

At the time, this seemed like cognitive dissonance, as Ivanka’s primary demographic of professional women favored Hillary Clinton over her father, albeit by slimmer margins in the end than some strategists expected, given his brazen misogyny. (White women with college degrees went for Clinton 51% to 44%, while non-white women with college degrees favored her 76% to 19%. )



Follow
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump


My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person -- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!
5:51 PM - 8 Feb 2017

25,36825,368 Retweets
127,971127,971 likes



Was the increased exposure afforded by Ivanka’s involvement in her dad’s campaign really worth alienating more than half of her potential customers? Why should Ivanka get a pass just because she has shiny hair and avoids all but a narrow range of topics? And was it really a good idea for someone who’d built her brand around an image of monied classiness to use her political screen time to shill her wares like some sort of blond, fascist Kardashian?


The other nude pump began to drop when a group of women disgusted by Trump Senior’s “grab ’em by the pussy” comments – a scandal in which Ivanka reprised her by-then stale role of character witness – started a grassroots boycott campaign called Grab Your Wallet targeted at the Ivanka Trump brand – the wares themselves, as well as the stores selling them. Would it work?



Donald Trump's first 100 days as president – daily updates

Read more

Some predicted that the dust would settle down after the election, and that the net effect of the campaign on Ivanka’s brand would be neutral to positive. To hear them tell it, the boycott was a brief tantrum by a small group of people that would die down when the country went back to (lol) normal. I will even admit some personal skepticism as to whether the types of liberals who favor consumer politics would have the follow-through to remember whose clothes they weren’t buying, come the next end-of-season sale.

Advertisement


And then a funny thing happened: the boycott grew and persisted, until stores began dropping Ivanka’s wares from their shelves. As of this writing, at least seven retailers have dropped Ivanka’s goods, including Neiman Marcus, Gilt, Shoes.com and, most recently, Nordstrom, which insists they did not drop the brand due to negative press surrounding the boycott, but simply to poor sales, which makes me wonder if they know what a boycott is.


In any case, Nordstrom’s stock has already recovered and then some from the brief dip caused by President Trump’s outburst about the unfairness of it all, to the tune of +4%. “Yeah that was some next-level #grabyourwallet today, everyone,” tweeted boycott co-founder Shannon Coulter. “Good job!” A constantly updated list of boycott targets remains pinned to the top of her profile.

The Nordstrom victory is but one example of liberals staying angry and engaged on a level we have not seen in the recent past. Following the huge groundswell of people who protested for the first time at the Women’s March, folks are keeping the momentum going by weaving activism into the fabric of their everyday lives, showing up in waves for immigrants, women and LGBT people.

The Women’s March website itself is posting a new action every 10 days, and adherents are doing them by the millions. At least some of these people are sympathetic to more radical elements within the anti-Trump movement, and will hopefully pick up some good habits that can be deployed under Democrats and Republicans alike. Assuming these activities can be sustained and grown, we could finally see a resurgence of grassroots movements in the progressive mainstream, leading to a healthier political culture overall.


Of course, boycotts alone will not stop Trumpism. Effective resistance to authoritarianism requires more disruptive actions than not buying certain products, and it’s easy for more seasoned activists to scoff at those who think they can shop their way to a better world.


But if there’s anything the past few weeks have taught us, it’s that resistance must take as many forms as possible, and it’s possible to call attention to the ravages of neoliberalism while simultaneously allying with any and all takers against the immediate dangers posed by our impetuous orange president.

Since you’re here …

… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but far fewer are paying for it. And advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.

If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to pay for it, our future would be much more secure.

Quo Vadis #OyVeyDonald Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump Kushner ..... her father's daughter , her father's ear..... a voice of moderation on Woman's Rights and the Right to Choose???

Ivanka Trump has her father's ear and trust, family says

Ivanka Trump said she is "incredibly candid with my opinions" when she speaks with her father

She and her husband are poised to have big influence in the White House

Those closest to her describe her as smart, independent-minded and relentless.
Now, Ivanka Trump is poised to become one of the most influential -- and powerful -- first daughters in US history.

Like few others in the incoming president's orbit, Trump has her father's ear and his trust.
"She . . . has a great way of being able to, you know, talk to him," Ivanka's brother Don Jr. said in an interview with CNN's Gloria Borger. "He trusts her."

Don Jr. and Eric Trump are among those speaking to Borger for a CNN Special Report, "First Daughter: Ivanka Trump," on Monday at 9 p.m. ET. Also appearing to talk all things Ivanka Trump are others close to her and the Trump family: incoming counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway; her close, longtime friend Maggie Cordish; and family friend and inauguration committee chairman Tom Barrack.

A key voice
Conway, who served as Donald Trump's campaign manager in the final months of the presidential campaign, described the father-daughter relationship as "impenetrable" and called Ivanka Trump a crucial voice during key campaign deliberations -- from urging him to act more presidential during the rough-and-tumble months of the campaign to helping him pick his running mate.
"Ivanka Trump was in a very unique position to give her father voice in choosing a vice presidential running mate. Because she knows what Donald Trump expects," Conway said.



That influence will now be put to work on behalf of the issues Trump advocated for during her father's presidential campaign: helping working mothers by implementing new federal child care and maternity leave policies. She has already begun forming a coalition of women in Congress to implement that agenda, with her father's blessing.
Tom Barrack, a decadeslong friend of the billionaire real estate developer and next president, said Trump's influence comes down to her lack of ulterior motives.Trump has always had a "special voice" in her father's business and political life, Barrack said.

"She has no skin in the game other than, 'I'm giving you my point of view because I love you Dad and I want you to be successful, and you need to listen to me,'" Barrack explained.

Ivanka Trump said in a July interview with CNN that she is "incredibly candid with my opinions"when she speaks with her father.

Trump has yet to settle on a formal White House role, but her husband, Jared Kushner, will be one of the three most powerful aides in the West Wing. Trump officially announced Kushner would become a senior adviser at the White House, steering the ship in a triumvirate with incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Kushner is poised to wield heavy-handed influence in the White House, just as he did during the campaign, where he was integral to crafting much of the campaign's strategy and to key hiring and firing decisions.

Like his wife, Kushner knows "how to speak to my father," Don Jr. said.

Opinion: Ivanka and Jared will rule Trump's America

Life in Washington

Beyond their marriage, much of Kushner's influence is tied to the working synergy he enjoys with his wife.

Ivanka Trump goes further than her father in divestment

"They really create a force to be reckoned with," Eric Trump said in an interview at Trump Tower last week with Borger. "They're very pragmatic thinkers. They spend a lot of time thinking, strategizing -- you know, planning. They really spend a lot of time in high level thought. And you know, they really feed off each other. Their personalities truly, truly feed off of each other."

Kushner and Ivanka Trump first cut their teeth in their fathers' separate real estate empires in the New York area for years before the 2016 presidential run that pulled the whole family into politics.

Trump is resigning her positions at the Trump Organization and management of her own eponymous brands to move to Washington -- moves aimed at quelling concerns about conflicts of interest tied to her husband and father's role, but that could also lay the foundation for her to join the White House in a more official capacity.

For now, the mother of three said she plans to help her children settle into their new lives in the nation's capital.

Cordish, a close friend of more than 20 years, called Trump a "fierce and devoted" mother who has worked hard to balance her ambitious career with her role as a mother.

"She is up with them early every single morning, giving them breakfast and being with them. And then, you know, putting them to bed," Cordish said.

But Trump does not need a formal White House position to keep hold of her influence once her father is inaugurated. What Trump values most in his daughter, Eric Trump said, comes down to one word: "Loyalty."

"For years we'd always heard, you know, real estate's one of the most cutthroat industries in the world, right? It's very tough. It's very brash," the younger brother said. "Nothing compared to politics."

#OyVeyDonaldTrump In addition to everything else .... hello Nepotism ....Jared Kushner, Trump’s Son-in-Law, Is Cleared to Serve as Adviser

Jared Kushner arriving for the National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral on Saturday.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

Hours after President Trump took his oath on Friday, the Justice Department issued an opinion saying that his appointment of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser would be lawful despite a federal antinepotism law.

In a 14-page opinion signed on Friday, a longtime career lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said that the president’s special hiring authority exempted White House positions from a 1967 law barring the president from employing relatives at a federal agency.

Some legal experts had raised concerns that Mr. Kushner’s appointment violated that law, which Congress enacted several years after President John F. Kennedy had appointed his brother Robert as attorney general.

But the new Justice Department opinion, signed by Daniel L. Koffsky, a deputy assistant attorney general in the legal counsel office, said Mr. Trump had the power to appoint Mr. Kushner anyway because of a subsequent 1978 law that gives the president the authority to appoint White House staff members without regard to other laws restricting employment and compensation of federal employees.

Mr. Koffsky’s opinion acknowledged that in several cases since 1978, the Office of Legal Counsel had determined that the antinepotism statute prevented presidents from appointing relatives to positions.

The revised position came after an effort by Jamie S. Gorelick, Mr. Kushner’s lawyer and a deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration who is now a lawyer at the firm WilmerHale, to clear away obstacles to Mr. Kushner’s appointment.

The opinion paves the way for Mr. Kushner, 35, to join Mr. Trump in the West Wing. Among the new president’s closest advisers during the campaign, Mr. Kushner married Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka in 2009. He has run his family’s vast real estate company and has owned a newspaper, The New York Observer.

Mr. Trump announced on Jan. 9 that he would appoint Mr. Kushner, who will not accept a salary. His purview is expected to include the Middle East and Israel, government partnerships with the private sector and matters involving free trade.

“If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Kushner at an event on Thursday.

The appointment of Mr. Kushner will be a dramatic change. In 1977, for example, the Justice Department barred President Jimmy Carter from appointing his son to an unpaid White House role, citing the antinepotism law.

Even after Congress enacted the 1978 law, the Justice Department continued to block proposed appointments of presidential relatives. Mr. Koffsky’s opinion, which he worked on in the final days of the Obama administration, acknowledged a 1983 case in which the office barred President Ronald Reagan from appointing a relative to an advisory committee, and a 2009 case in which it blocked President Barack Obama from appointing his brother-in-law and a half sister to advisory committees.

But, Mr. Koffsky maintained, those opinions failed to adequately address the impact of the special hiring authority that Congress gave the president for his personal staff as part of the 1978 law.

He also wrote that it was unlikely that Congress could bar a president from obtaining informal, ad hoc policy advice from a relative, and a major consequence of allowing Mr. Kushner’s appointment to a formal role is that he will be subject to the usual ethics rules for White House employees, like conflict-of-interest laws.

Mr. Kushner intends to sell some assets to his brother and to put others into a trust overseen by his mother, said Ms. Gorelick, who has worked on the plan. Ms. Gorelick said she had been consulting with federal ethics officials to try to address any conflict-of-interest issues associated with Mr. Kushner’s appointment.

He will also be required to file a financial disclosure report that details his assets and income, and to divest some holdings that could create a conflict of interest.

When Mr. Trump announced Mr. Kushner’s appointment, Ms. Gorelick told reporters that while there were arguments on both sides of the legal question, she believed the “better argument” was that it would be lawful. She also disclosed then that the Trump transition team would seek an Office of Legal Counsel opinion.

In an email on Saturday, Ms. Gorelick said that “we believed that we had the better argument on this,” adding that “the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department — in an opinion by a highly regarded career deputy assistant attorney general — adopted a position consistent with our own.”

Richard W. Painter, who served as a White House lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said that while he had some doubts about the new opinion, “it is a reasonable interpretation” of the law. “But what is important now,” he added, “is that Mr. Kushner complies with the conflict-of-interest and disclosure provisions, and I wish his father-in-law, the president, would do the same.”

El Douche-bag Donald Trump is a wreck! by The Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

El Douche-bag Donald Trump is a wreck!
Talk about politically incorrect,Trump is ethical broke!
Your proverbial bad joke!
Can his Twittering get any dumber?
Has he thought reality of his numbers?
Thinks he is our knight in shining armor,
Can't even handle personal indiscretion war.
Ask Ivana and Melania about his demeanor,
Has no right to call anyone a loser
If he should happen to win,
Call me Canadian!
Talk about Arrogant
When he passes a mirror he stops and pouts
Donald Trump 45th President, a hellish dilemma
#RIPUSA God Save America

#RIPUSA ??? Donald Trump's AIPAC commitments.s Son-Law Jared Kushner earmarked to broker a Middle East Peace Deal..Good for Zion or will be backtrack out of these commitments as well..

At 22.30 Trump commits to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to "israel's eternal Capital Jerusalem. Yet Donald Trump's key appointments are not on the same page . 

Defense Secretary-designate James Mattis testified on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 12, 2017, at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

President-elect Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary nominee, James Mattis, was asked on Thursday what the capital of Israel is. And he didn’t say Jerusalem.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked about Israel during the hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, but Mattis refused to give him the answer he wanted.

“The capital of Israel that I go to, sir, is Tel Aviv, because that’s where all their government people are,” Mattis replied.

“Do you agree with me that the capital of Israel is Jerusalem?” asked Graham.

“Sir, right now, I stick with the U.S. policy,” said Mattis.

“Okay, do you support moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem?”

“I would defer to the nominee for Secretary of State on that, sir.”

You can watch the full exchange here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heSCwC7_qHQ

Mattis’ refusal to say what Graham wanted him to — that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel—distinguishes him from both the president-elect and many other members of the incoming administration.

The U.S. embassy is currently located in Tel Aviv, as it has long been U.S. policy that the status of Jersualem should be decided in negotiations with Palestinians. Congress did order that the U.S. embassy in Israel be moved to Jerusalem in 1995, but the past three presidents have not done so due to concerns about security. The United Nations originally intended Eastern Jerusalem to be the capital of a Palestinian state, and it still does not view Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Trump, however, disagrees. During the campaign, he said that if he became president, he would move the embassy to Jerusalem, which he called the “eternal capital of the Jewish people” in a speech before the American Israeli Public Affairs Comittee (AIPAC).

Since being elected, Trump has reaffirmed that view. His pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has also called Jerusalem “Israel’s eternal capital,” said he opposes the two-state solution, and doesn’t believe Israeli settlements on Palestinian land are illegal. On Tuesday, CNN reportedthat the Trump team was considering having the U.S. ambassador to Israel live and work in Jerusalem, even while the embassy itself remains in Tel Aviv.

Trump’s Secretary of State nominee, Rex Tillerson, also recently criticized a speech by Secretary of State John Kerry condemning Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem.

It’s not just Trump and his cabinet nominees who hold such views on Israel, as evidenced by Graham’s questioning. Last week, Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (TX), Marco Rubio (FL), and Dean Heller (NV) introduced a bill that would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s official capital. The bill also requires the U.S. embassy in Israel to move there from Tel Aviv, or receive only 50 percent of its allotted funding until it does so.

Mattis told Graham on Thursday that he supports maintaining Israel’s military qualitative edge over all potential adversaries, views Hamas as a terrorist organization that would negotiate “only if forced to,” and is a proponent of the two-state solution. “If there’s another solution, I’d be happy to hear what it is,” he added.

Jared Kushner, who is married to US President-elect Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, will be the next American peace envoy to the Middle East.

Trump confirmed the appointment in an weekend interview with London’s Sunday Times.

“You know what? Jared is such a good lad, he will secure an Israel deal which no one else has managed to get. You know, he’s a natural talent, he is the top, he is a natural talent. You know what I’m talking about – a natural talent. He has an innate ability to make deals, everyone likes him,” Trump told the newspaper.

Kushner was said to have been one of Trump’s chief advisers on foreign policy during the election campaign.

In the past, Kushner’s family donated large sums of money to Jewish settlement projects in Judea and Samaria.

Jared Kushner
Senior Advisor to the President Designate
Taking office January 20, 2017
President	Donald Trump (elect)
Succeeding	Brian Deese Valerie Jarrett Shailagh Murray
Personal details
Born	Jared Corey Kushner January 10, 1981 (age 36) Livingston, New Jersey, U.S.
Political party	Republican Democratic (Formerly)
Spouse(s)	Ivanka Trump (m. 2009)
Relations	Joshua Kushner (brother) Murray Kushner (uncle)
Children	3
Parents	Charles Kushner Seryl Stadtmauer
Education	Harvard University (BA) New York University (MBA), (JD)
Religion	Modern Orthodox Judaism

Jared Corey Kushner (born January 10, 1981) is an American real estate investor and developer, publisher, and senior advisor to President-elect Donald Trump. Together with Chief of Staff Reince Preibus and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, he forms Trump's leadership team. Kushner is said to be Donald Trump's most trusted advisor, showing unwavering loyalty to his father-in-law

He is principal owner of the real estate holding and development company Kushner Companies and of Observer Media, publisher of the weekly, on-line New York Observer. On January 9, 2017, Kushner was named to be a Senior White House Adviser to his father-in-law, President-elect Donald Trump. As a result, Kushner will resign as CEO of his family's real estate company and as publisher of the New York Observer. He will also divest "substantial assets."

Kushner is the son of American real estate developer Charles Kushner and is married to Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President-elect of the United States Donald Trump. He was among the senior advisors of Trump's presidential campaign, and developed Trump's digital media strategy.

In 2007, his father's company, Kushner Companies, made the most expensive single-building property purchase in US history, acquiring 666 Fifth Avenue. In 2011, Kushner brought in Vornado Realty Trust as a 50% equity partner in the ownership of the building.

Early life and education

Kushner is the elder son of Seryl Kushner (née Stadtmauer) and real estate developer Charles Kushner, whose parents were Holocaust survivors who came to America from Poland in 1949.^] He has a brother, Joshua (also a businessman), and two sisters, Nicole and Dara. He is also a nephew of Murray Kushner, the owner of Kushner Real Estate Group. Kushner Real Estate Group is separate from Kushner Companies, which Murray Kushner started in 2000.

Kushner was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in New Jersey. He graduated from the Frisch School, a private, coed yeshiva high school in 1999. According to Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies, he was an honors student and a member of the debate, hockey, and basketball teams while at Frisch.

In 2003, Kushner graduated cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. in sociology. According to journalist Daniel Golden, Kushner and his brother Joshua were admitted to Harvard after their father had made a $2.5 million donation to the university.

While a student at Harvard, Kushner was a member of the Fly Club and bought and sold buildings in Somerville, Massachusetts, earning a $20 million profit.

In 2007, Kushner graduated from New York University where he earned a J.D. and M.B.A.; his father had previously made a $3 million donation to NYU in 2001.^[ He interned at Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.

Business career

Real estate

Kushner Companies purchased 666 Fifth Avenue in 2007 for $1.8 billion, the most expensive single property purchase in US history at the time.^[24]

In May 2015, Kushner purchased a majority stake of One Times Square for $295 million.

Kushner is a real estate investor and has increased the Kushner Companies presence in the New York City real estate market as a principal in his family's real estate company. His father, Charles Kushner, was arrested on charges of tax evasion, illegal campaign donations, and witness tampering in 2004 and was eventually convicted on all charges (by the then U.S. Attorney Chris Christie) and sentenced to two years in federal prison.

Kushner Companies purchased the office building at 666 Fifth Avenue in 2007, for a then-record price of $1.8 billion, most of it borrowed. However, following the property crash in 2008, the cash flow generated by the property was insufficient to cover its debt service, and the Kushners were forced to sell the retail portion in the building to Stanley Chera for more than $1 billion and bring in Vornado Realty Trust as a 50% equity partner in the ownership of the building.

He assumed the role of CEO of Kushner Companies in 2008. On August 18, 2014, Kushner acquired a three-building apartment portfolio in Middle River, Maryland, for $37.9 million with Aion Partners. In 2013–14, he and his company acquired more than 11,000 units throughout New York, New Jersey, and the Baltimore area.In May 2015, he purchased 50.1% of the Times Square Building from Africa Israel Investments Ltd. for $295 million.

In 2015, Kushner scored spot No. 25 on Fortune Magazine’s 40 under 40 list ranking the most influential young people in business.

Newspaper publishing

At age 25, Kushner purchased the New York Observer, a weekly New York City newspaper, for $10 million,^[32] using money he says he earned during his college years by closing deals on residential buildings in Somerville, Massachusetts, with family members providing the backing for his investments

After purchasing the Observer, Kushner published it in tabloid format. Since then, he has been credited with increasing the Observer's online presence and expanding the Observer Media Group. Very young and with no substantial experience in journalism, Kushner could not establish a good relationship with the newspaper's veteran editor-in-chief, Peter W. Kaplan. “This guy doesn’t know what he doesn’t know,” Kaplan remarked about Kushner, to colleagues, at the time. As a result of his differences with Kushner, Kaplan quit his position. Kaplan was followed by a series of short-lived successors until Kushner hired Elizabeth Spiers in 2011. In December 2011, the New York Post reported that the Observer expected to become profitable for the first time..Spiers left the newspaper in 2012. In January 2013, Kushner hired a new editor-in-chief, Ken Kurson. Kurson had been a consultant to Republican political candidates in New Jersey^[ and one-time member of Rudy Giuliani's unsuccessful 2008 presidential primary campaign.

According to Vanity Fair, under Kushner, the "Observer has lost virtually all of its cultural currency among New York’s elite, but the paper is now profitable and reporting traffic growth ... [it] boasts 6 million unique visitors per month, up from 1.3 million in January 2013". In April 2016, the New York Observer became one of only a handful of newspapers to officially endorse United States presidential candidate Donald Trump in the Republican primary, but the paper ended the campaign period by choosing not to back any presidential candidate at all.

Los Angeles Dodgers bid

In February 2012, Kushner put in a bid to acquire the MLB team the Los Angeles Dodgers. He withdrew his bid in March 2012.

Political activity

Donald Trump presidential campaign

From the outset of the presidential campaign of his father-in-law Donald Trump, Kushner was the architect of Trump's digital, online and social media campaigns, enlisting talent from Silicon Valley to run a 100-person social-media team dubbed "Project Alamo".^[4] Kushner has also helped as a speechwriter and was tasked with working to establish a plan for Trump's White House transition team should he be elected. He was for a time seen as Trump's de facto campaign manager, succeeding Corey Lewandowski, who was fired in part on Kushner's recommendation in June 2016. He has been intimately involved with campaign strategy, coordinating Trump's visit in late August to Mexico and he was believed to be responsible for the choice of Mike Pence as Trump's running mate. Kushner's "sprawling digital fundraising database and social media campaign" has been described as "the locus of his father-in-law’s presidential bid".

According to Eric Schmidt, "Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election, Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources."Eric Schmidt said, "Jared understood the online world in a way the traditional media folks didn't. He managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring using new technology and won. That's a big deal. Remember all those articles about how they had no money, no people, organizational structure? Well, they won, and Jared ran it."Peter Thiel said "If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.”

On July 5, 2016 Kushner wrote an open letter in the New York Observer addressing the controversy around a tweet from the Trump campaign containing allegedly antisemitic imagery. He was responding to his own paper's editorial by Dana Schwartz criticizing Kushner's involvement with the Trump campaign.^[50] In the letter, Kushner wrote, "In my opinion, accusations like “racist” and “anti-Semite” are being thrown around with a carelessness that risks rendering these words meaningless."

Donald Trump presidential transition

President-elect Trump and Japanese PM Shinzō Abe, November 17, 2016

During the presidential transition, Kushner was said to be his father-in-law's "confidant" and one of Donald Trump's closest advisors, even more so than Trump's four adult children Trump was reported to have requested the top-secret security clearance for him to attend the Presidential daily intelligence briefings as his staff-level companion, along with General Mike Flynn who already has the clearance.

The Washington Post, New York Times and numerous other national news authorities explain Kushner was an influential factor behind the firing of New Jersey governor Chris Christie as head of the transition team, as well as the dismissal from the Donald Trump transition team of anyone connected to Christie. A source familiar with the Trump campaign explained that “Jared doesn’t like Christie. He’s always held [the prosecution of his father, Charles Kushner] against Christie.”

The New York Times reports that Kushner is an admirer of the story The Count of Monte Cristo, which tells of an innocent man who seeks vengeance against people he thinks have wronged him.^] Kushner's and Chris Christie's lives became intertwined in 2005 when Jared Kushner was 24 years old, the New York Times reports. In 2005, Mr. Christie, then the United States attorney for New Jersey, sent Mr. Kushner’s father, Charles, to federal prison for tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign donations.As the Times, CNN^] ad The Washington Post reported, the case involved a tawdry family feud: At one point, Charles Kushner sought to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with the federal authorities, by hiring a woman to seduce him and videotape the encounter. Charles Kushner was sentenced to two years in prison, but he was released in 2006 after just 14 months in the federal penitentiary in Alabama and spent the remainder of his sentence in a New Jersey halfway house.

Kushner told Forbes that the reports that he was involved in Christie's dismissal were false: “Six months ago Governor Christie and I decided this election was much bigger than any differences we may have had in the past, and we worked very well together. The media has speculated on a lot of different things, and since I don't talk to the press, they go as they go, but I was not behind pushing out him or his people.”

Donald Trump presidential administration

In January 2017, Kushner was named a Senior White House Advisor to President-elect Trump. Kushner's appointment has been questioned on the basis of a 1967 anti-nepotism law, but Kushner's attorney has asserted that the appointment is legal. Kushner plans to step down from his newspaper role in favor of his brother-in-law, Joseph Meyer.^[62]

Personal life

Kushner married Ivanka Trump, daughter of businessman and U.S. president-elect Donald Trump, in a Jewish ceremony on October 25, 2009. Ivanka converted to Judaism under the auspices of a modern Orthodox rabbi before marrying Kushner. Kushner and Trump have three children.