The tumult in Puerto Rico continued Wednesday. The country's highest court ruled Pedro Pierluisi could not serve as the island's governor after his swearing in less than a week ago, CBS reports.
Justice Secretary Wanda Vázquez will ascend to the post.
President Donald Trump's administration has been mired in controversy after controversy, from his racist remarks to the Mueller report--which stopped short of clearing him of obstruction of justice. His policies, such as child separation at the border and his trade wars with China, are divisive.
Yet, new numbers seem to show that he's actually more popular today than he was in 2016, according to polling expert Nate Cohn.
"The share of Americans who say they have a favorable view of him has increased significantly since the 2016 election," Cohn writes. "And over the last few months, some of the highest-quality public opinion polls, though not all, showed the president’s job approval rating — a different measure from personal favorability — had inched up to essentially match the highest level of his term."
This doesn't guarantee Trump re-election.
"The increase in his support since 2016, and the possibility that it continues to move higher, does not necessarily make him a favorite to win re-election. His job approval ratings remain well beneath 50 percent, and have never eclipsed it."
It should be noted that Cohn is relying on two polls, Gallup and YouGov, which show that he is more popular today than in 2016.
And according to the website fivethirtyeight.com, which aggregates polling data, only 42.2 percent of Americans polled approve of Donald Trump, while 53.1 disapprove.
But, Trump's surge in popularity since 2016 is clearly something his democratic challengers need to keep in mind.
"Of course, Democrats might benefit from a more popular candidate than they had in 2016," Cohn writes. "Hillary Clinton was an unusually unpopular candidate, surpassed only by Mr. Trump in this regard in the modern era of polling. But an analysis that freezes the president’s standing in 2016 but assumes an improvement for the Democratic nominee would be misleading."
The corruption scandal at the National Rifle Association expanded on Tuesday night when The Washington Post published a bombshell report about the right-wing organization seeking to buy a "luxury mansion" for its chief executive officer.
"Documents indicate that National Rifle Association planned to purchase a luxury mansion in the Dallas area last year for the use of chief executive Wayne LaPierre, according to two people familiar with the records," the newspaper reported. "The discussions about the roughly $6 million purchase, which was not completed, are now under scrutiny by New York investigators."
The newspaper reported "The New York attorney general’s office is now examining the plan for a NRA-financed mansion as part of its ongoing investigation into the gun lobby’s tax-exempt status, in which it has subpoenaed the group’s financial records, the people said."
The newspaper revealed details about the mansion.
"One property that was considered, according to an individual familiar with the plans, was a 10,000 square foot French country estate with lakefront and golf course views," The Post reported. "The four-bedroom, nine-bath home in a gated golf course community, northwest of Dallas, resembles a French chateau, with a stately boxwood-lined drive, a formal courtyard, vaulted ceilings and an antique marble fireplace, according to its online real estate listing."
The timing couldn't be worse for the embattled organization.
"The revelations that the NRA was involved in discussions about the Texas mansion come as the nonprofit is contending with the fallout from allegations of lavish spending by top executives," the newspaper reported. "Leaked documents show that the NRA paid $542,000 for private jet trips for LaPierre, including a trip to the Bahamas with his wife after the Sandy Hook shooting and an array of Italian designer suits as well as the rent for a summer intern’s apartment."
LaPierre's salary in 2017 was $1.37 million.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump's lawyers launched a lawsuit against the state of California challenging a law that requires Presidential candidates to disclose five years of taxes to get a spot in the primary.
They claim that the law is unconstitutional on the grounds that the state doesn't have the authority to impose extra restrictions on campaign eligibility.
Gov. Gavin Newsome was quick to retort: "There’s an easy fix Mr. President -- release your tax returns as you promised during the campaign and follow the precedent of every president since 1973," he tweeted.
That's not the only way President Trump appears desperate to conceal his taxes. In a CNN segment, reporter Jessica Schneider presented a rundown of the lengths Trump is going through to avoid publicly sharing his taxes.
"So, they're battling this now in California, filing this lawsuit," said Schneider. "We expected it would be challenged on Constitutional grounds," she added.
"But of course the president's lawyers are also battling against releasing his tax returns on multiple other fronts. We have a lawsuit involving New York state and one of their recently enacted laws. And then of course just battling against any tax returns being released at all the that relate to the president or his accountants or his family," she continued. "So really this is a multifaceted effort to stop any release of these from the president."
Watch:
A man in Tooele, Utah, was arrested after he attacked a family with a bat and screamed racial slurs at them, reports ABC 4.
43-year-old Roland Hicks told police that he'd drank Four Loko, a highly alcoholic malt beverage. He allegedly approached the family, smashing his bat into different objects around them.
A young girl told police that he called them the N-word and threatened to “(expletive) them up.” His BAC was .161 at the time of his arrest.
According to ABC 4, Hicks' criminal history includes arrests for intoxication, disorderly conduct, drug possession, theft, assault, burglary and several DUIs.
A recent report found that racially motivated attacks are on the rise across the country.
On Tuesday, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley held a press conference in the aftermath of a deadly mass shooting -- the second one in one weekend.
Whaley once again criticized the president, saying that she was disappointed in Trump's remarks about the shooting. She said that he’d failed to offer any significant proposals to regulate guns. She also voiced her displeasure that the President had initially mistaken Dayton for Toledo.
"May God bless the memory of those who perished in Toledo, may God protect them. May God protect all of those from Texas to Ohio. May God bless the victims and their families," Trump said from the White House on Monday.
"Look, I'm disappointed with his remarks," Whaley said. "I think they fell really short. He mentioned gun issues one time," Whaley said.
"I think, you know, watching the president over the past few years on the issue of guns he's been -- I don't know if he knows what he believes, frankly," she said.
A reporter prodded her about the president confusing Dayton and Toledo.
"My immediate reaction is that people from the coast never understand Ohio and they think all Ohio cities are the same. It's an exhausting issue that we have all the time," she added.
"You know, if we had people from power centers really invest and pay attention to our communities, we'd all be better off."
Watch:
In the aftermath of two mass shootings in just one weekend, Fox News host Shep Smith issued an emotional plea, begging lawmakers to do their jobs and enact polices that will stop the slaughter.
"Yet again in America," he said. "Yet again in America, innocent families are slumped to their knees in grief, living the agonizing and unimaginable weight to retrieve the bullet-riddled bodies of their children and parents, slaughtered in senseless gun violence. Yet again in America we search our souls for answers, beg our leaders for solutions that thus far have not come" he continued.
Smith pointed out that there were 251 mass shootings in America in 2019, with Dayton marking that grim statistic. Although definitions differ, the FBI criteria
for what constitutes a mass murder is four fatalities by a fire arm, according to the Rand Organization.
The Fox News host pointed to the impact on those affected by mass slaughter.
"If you saw the killer up close, smelled the blood when it was over," he said. "Or buried your child. You can’t forget ever. Each time we hear kids cry, parents pray and politicians promise. Then it happens yet again in America," he said.
"Here a friend mourning the teacher in El Paso who was buying classroom supplies but didn’t survive. Here’s sisters holding each other in Dayton near the spot where their brother drew his last breath. They’ll remember. Now gun laws, regulations, background checks, soft targets, body armor, death penalty, mental health. Time for action. I promise. Thoughts and prayers. We hear you. We heard you last time. And the time before that."
Watch:
On Monday, the death toll from a gun massacre in El Paso, Texas, climbed to 22. Reporting from the city, CNN correspondents Chris Cuomo and Sara Sidner noted that the gun man, who posted anti-immigrant screeds online, is part of a growing right-wing threat.
"Christopher Wray, head of the FBI, says this is the main terror threat in terms of what is killing us at home," Cuomo observed. Sidner agreed. "They are responsible, the far right, for the vast majority of murders when it comes to extremist-based murders in this country so that needs to be looked at," she said.
According to the FBI, 40 percent of current terror investigations involve racially motivated violent extremism.
Watch:
On Monday, President Donald Trump addressed the nation following two mass shootings in less than 24 hours, declaring that hatred has no place in America. He also promised the swift application of the federal death penalty, even as more states are backing away from the practice.
At least one of the shooters appears to have been inspired by the president's rhetoric about Mexicans and the Wall.
Writing in the Washington Post Monday, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin decried the absurdity of Trump preaching against hate. Rubin counted off just a few of the instances in which the president has inspired hate.
"After stoking white nationalism, accusing a federal judge of being unfair because of his Mexican heritage, declaring there were some “very fine” people marching with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, demonizing refugees as an “invasion” and “infestation,” instigating a policy to rip migrant children from their parents’ arms, telling four nonwhite members of Congress to “go back” where they came from and cheering the burglary at the home of Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) — whose city he claimed was “rodent and rat-infested” — President Trump finally appeared before the public Monday morning to say, 'In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. ... Hate has no place in America.'” Rubin writes.
"It would be laughable if it were not so infuriating," Rubin says. He blamed a wide swath of issues, including social media, but refused to take responsibility for his own mistakes. "There was no sincere remorse for his own role in fanning racism. As a final insult and indication of abject insincerity, he ended with “and may God bless the people of Toledo.”
She outlines why Trump lacks the character to be a moral compass in hard times. "Trump is uniquely unsuited to the moment not only because he lacks empathy and decency," she writes. "If we as a country truly want to speak with one voice and condemn hate, we must collectively throw him out of office. He’s the largest, loudest megaphone for white nationalism and for anti-immigrant fervor. He’s an implacable opponent of serious gun safety legislation. He is not merely in the way. He is the problem."
On Monday, Americans reeled after not one, but two, deadly mass shootings over the weekend, in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. The Texas gun man's motives, posted to the website 8chan, seemed clearly inspired by the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Donald Trump.
Raw Story spoke with Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and an expert on violence at Yale School of Medicine, about the link between Trump's violent rhetoric and the wide array of violent that seem to occur with daily frequency in the U.S.
Lee has helped launch a public health approach to global violence prevention as a consultant to the World Health Organization and other United Nations bodies since 2002. She is author of the textbook, “Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures,” president of the World Mental Health Coalition, and editor of the New York Times bestseller, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” She and her coauthors prepared a mental health analysis of the Mueller report and presented it in a national online town hall (for more information, visit: dangerouscase.org; you can also follow Lee on Twitter: @BandyXLee1).
Raw Story: You said on Twitter: “My research on violence revealed that cultural or societal violence is greater than ten times the threat of individual violence. The president is currently committing cultural violence through his stoking of white supremacist terrorism.” What did you mean by that?
Bandy X. Lee: My textbook, Violence, has a one-line summary, and it is that all forms of violence are interconnected. A violent society will have violent structures, and violent structures will produce violent individuals. A U.S. president sits atop all of this, as a product of the culture, certainly, but in his position as the most influential instigator of structural, cultural, and, by consequence, individual violence. His attraction to and endorsement of violence will legitimize violence for all who are predisposed, creating a far-reaching cultural change.
This is the dangerous side of Donald Trump’s racism; his racism will be different from any other individual’s racism because of his office, and it will also be different in quality because it comes from a place of disorder. Pathology in a leader has been shown to be far more contagious than a sane person doing or saying the same things. This is why comparisons to Ronald Reagan or even Richard Nixon are understandable but flawed.
Fear is no doubt behind the reticence to call out the president even as a racist when he is inflicting more damage than any other white supremacist terrorist.
Raw Story: Given your extensive experience of studying violence, how should we understand the shootings in El Paso and Dayton that killed 29 in less than 24 hours?
Bandy X. Lee: First, we should not merely react, and we should not be surprised. The causes of violence are well known, and the violent act is merely an end product of a long process. Social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors are far greater in influence than individual factors when it comes to violence. It should be telling that we are seeing mass shootings all around the country, from California to Ohio. It should also be telling that all forms of violence have escalated especially since this presidency—and we should not be afraid to point that out.
We saw this coming, which is what drove us to write the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Yet what we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg. Far more widespread will be the violence and victimization that are hidden from view. Mass shootings are about one percent of overall gun deaths. And we should also remember there are other dangers, too: we are inching toward war in Asia and in the Middle East.
North Korea has resumed missile tests while standing us up in Bangkok, after we frivolously gave away international legitimacy. Iran has claimed seizure of a third oil tanker, after we recklessly pulled out of a nuclear deal and attacked with “maximum pressure.” We should not be surprised when war actually breaks out, but prevent in advance, knowing that the same incapacity that led to global instability and failure is what will instigate violence when reality catches up with it.
We have plenty of hard evidence on the president’s dangerousness: the more than doubling of white supremacist killings since Mr. Trump has been in office, the 226 percent jump in hate crimes in counties that host his rallies, and the escalation in gun murders and suicides to a 25-year high, not to mention numerous terrorism and violent crime cases that trace directly to the president, even as subtler manifestos try to deny that link.
Raw Story: You did a study of Republican and Democratic presidents and violent death rates over 110 years. Can you explain what you found?
Yes. My mentor and colleague James Gilligan insisted that I add political party to the other environmental factors I was analyzing, even as I saw power struggles among factions to be irrelevant to actual policy. The results were astonishing. We discovered that Republicans had been handing over not only double the violent death rates they inherited but weakened or wrecked economies, to Democrats, who would then fix them, consistently for 110 years. We only did not notice because the parties largely alternated. These were the years 1900 through 2010, and so they were even before the Obama administration.
Since my interest is in health, and violence rates are a great barometer for gauging societal health, this was very telling. When death rates go up and life expectancy diminishes, we need to recognize that the difference is not merely opinion or ideology. We may live in a sick society (our health parameters are far lower than our counterparts in the rest of the developed world), but one faction is making us sicker. This makes sense from its gun policies, economic policies that worsen inequality, a rejection of science that removes any check on power, and climate policies that edge us ever closer to collective suicidality.
Raw Story: Can you explain Donald Trump’s supporters? What causes them to follow him no matter what?
As long as we tolerate an impaired president and take his pathologies to be mere personal quirks, a malignant normality will prevail. We predicted that the longer he stays in office, the more his supporters will be drawn into sickness and be further detached from reality. Since this leads to choices that one would not make in a healthier state, allowing them to continue on this destructive course is not giving them respect. One of our authors, Harper West, explains how the abused “collude” psychologically with their abusers, at their own expense. Our job as mental health professionals is to extricate the abused from the dysfunctional relationship and to explain how this is different from normal relationships.
Trump, who is headed to a golf resort in New Jersey for the weekend, continues to destabilize the stock market with his unpredictable trade policy announcements, often made on social media.
And traders are telling Bloomberg that they wish the President would leave his phone behind, so they could have a less stressful weekend.
“I was easing into vacation mode,” Peter Tchir, head of macro strategy at Academy Securities, said in a message acquired by Bloomberg.
“Thinking about packing and hopefully not having to track markets that closely. That all changed” after Trump announced the new tariffs over Twitter Friday.
On Friday, Texas Republican Will Hurd said he wouldn't seek re-election, adding to the trickle of Republicans who've left office in the Trump era. Hurd is the GOP's only African-American representative in the House.
Writing in the Atlantic, Russell Berman notes that Hurd's departure is not good news for the GOP. The handful of Republicans who've left office is already bad enough.
"What’s even worse for the party’s diminished ranks, however, is that this modest wave of departures may only be a harbinger of a broader exodus to come," Berman writes.
"In 2018, Republicans lost their House majority in a Democratic wave that was exacerbated by more than two dozen retirements," he continues. "But the early indicators of 2019 suggest the GOP minority has not hit rock bottom: The surprising announcements thus far are a signal that Republican lawmakers see little benefit in trying to govern out of power and little hope that their party will regain the majority again in 2020."
Hurd released a statement in support of what he views as traditional Republican values.
"I’ve taken a conservative message to places that don’t often hear it. Folks in these communities believe in order to solve problems we should empower people not the government, help families move up the economic ladder through free markets not socialism and achieve and maintain peace by being nice with nice guys and tough with tough guys," he said. "These Republican ideals resonate with people who don’t think they identify with the Republican Party. Every American should feel they have a home in our party."
Berman wonders how many will follow.
"The big question now is: How many more Republicans will head out the door? After Democrats last recaptured the House majority in 2006, more than 20 GOP lawmakers retired outright rather than seek reelection in 2008, helping Democrats expand their majority in the presidential-election year."
Elected Republicans in the Trump era have consistently failed to rein in the president, even after he lobs racist attacks at fellow lawmakers.
Writing in the Washington Post, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin can't help but reach the conclusion that the GOP is beyond redemption after kowtowing to Trump's most extreme policies and statements.
First, she observes that any lawmakers with a shred of sanity are resigning rather than seek re-election during a Trump administration.
"Sane Senate Republicans and critics of President Trump, including Bob Corker (Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.) as well as a slew of House Republicans, retired in 2018 rather than face the challenge of reelection in the Trump era," she writes.
"Over the past two weeks, six Republican House members — including one of only 13 women (Susan Brooks of Indiana) and the only African American (Will Hurd of Texas) — have announced their retirement, bringing the total to eight."
And even as Democrats are electing more diverse officials than ever, Republicans are primarily male and white. And they refuse to push back on Trump.
"Since Trump’s election I’ve suggested that the current Republican Party is irredeemable," Rubin writes. "A party so thoroughly corrupted and devoid of intellectual and moral integrity cannot be rescued from itself."
"The only plausible path at this point is to crush the Republican Party so resoundingly at every level that it is forced to abandon Trumpism, recruit an entirely different generation of leadership and devise an agenda that is not based on right-wing nationalism," Rubin concludes. "Helping Democrats achieve that end should be the goal of all decent Americans — including Republicans who want one day to be able to vote in good faith for a Republican Party true to the tradition of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt."
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