Trump’s failed defense secretary pick defended his son after he brutally beat his own mother with a baseball bat
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan abruptly resigned on Tuesday — and a new report from the Washington Post sheds some light on why.
Shanahan, who had been tapped by President Donald Trump as a permanent replacement for former Defense Secretary James Mattis, admitted to the Post this week that he had written a defense of his then-17-year-old son Will Shanahan after he brutally beat his own mother with a baseball bat in 2011 and left her “unconscious in a pool of blood, her skull fractured and with internal injuries that required surgery,” the paper reports.
Despite the gruesome nature of the attack, Shanahan sent a letter to his former brother-in-law claiming that his son had acted in self-defense.
“Use of a baseball bat in self-defense will likely be viewed as an imbalance of force,” Shanahan wrote. “However, Will’s mother harassed him for nearly three hours before the incident.”
Shanahan tells the Post that he deeply regrets writing those words and claims that he did not know the extent of his ex-wife’s injuries at the time.
“Quite frankly it’s difficult to relive that moment and the passage was difficult for me to read. I was wrong to write those three sentences,” he said. “I have never believed Will’s attack on his mother was an act of self-defense or justified. I don’t believe violence is appropriate ever, and certainly never any justification for attacking someone with a baseball bat.”
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Trump defenders argued his latest tweets weren’t really racist — but he just completely undercut their arguments
If you try to defend President Donald Trump, you will always end up having the rug pulled out from underneath you. It's a law of nature.
And yet, so many of the president's allies have failed to learn this simple lesson. So when Trump launched a new attack at progressive Democratic lawmakers that was one of his most obviously racist smears, inevitably, some of his defenders tried to deny the obvious truth.
His screed attacked a group of women who have come to define the left wing of the Democratic caucus, which includes Reps. Ilhan Omar (MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Rashida Talib (MI), and Ayanna Pressley (MA). Though only Omar is an immigrant (she was a refugee from Somalia as a child), Trump seemed to assume all four women of color weren't born in the United States, and most egregiously, he suggested they should "go back" to other countries:
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Trump is facing massive criticism for his attacks on young women of color in Congress
US President Donald Trump came under fire from Democrats and even some members of his own Republican Party on Monday after launching an extraordinary xenophobic attack on four progressive Democratic congresswomen.
"All they do is complain," Trump told reporters at a White House event featuring products "Made in America."
"These are people that hate our country," he said of the four lawmakers. "If you're not happy here, you can leave."
Trump also accused the four first-term congresswomen -- who are of Hispanic, Arab, Somali and African American origin -- of having "love" for US "enemies like Al-Qaeda."
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Trump’s campaign is spending massively at his own businesses — and even more on lawyers
President Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign filed their latest campaign finance reports on Monday.
Anna Massoglia, a researcher at the money in politics watchdog group Open Secrets, dissected the numbers and made two startling discoveries.
In the three months covered, from April through June, Trump's campaign and affiliated joint fundraising committees spent $326,094.24 at Trump businesses, including six figures at both Mar-a-Lago and Trump Hotel DC.
Trump's campaign also spent over $1.3 million on legal bills. He spent approximately $7 million on legal bills in 2018, Massoglia noted.
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MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow shows what Trump was trying to distract from with his latest racist attacks
