Vox: Trump says Obama Banned Refugees Too. He’s Wrong.

By Zack Beauchamp:

“My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months,” he said, echoing the arguments in conservative publications almost word for word. “The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror.”

This is wrong in every particular. Obama’s Iraqi visa policy in 2011 did not ban Iraqis from entering the country. Obama’s immigration policy did not treat people with passports from the seven countries as unusually dangerous terrorism threats. And Obama’s policies never approached anything like the breadth, cynicism, and incompetence of Trump’s executive order.

* * *

“While the flow of Iraqi refugees slowed significantly during the Obama administration’s review, refugees continued to be admitted to the United States during that time, and there was not a single month in which no Iraqis arrived here,” Jon Finer, an Obama administration official who worked on national security, writes at Foreign Policy.

Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s top foreign policy aides, took a similar line.

“There was no ban on Iraqis in 2011,” Rhodes tweeted. “Anyone pushing that line is hiding behind a lie because they can't defend the EO.”

Finer and Rhodes’s account is backed up by two fact-checkers who looked into the issue, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and FactCheck.org’s Eugene Kiely. Both concluded, in lengthy investigations that I encourage you to read, that Obama’s policy was not a six-month ban on Iraqi refugees.

The Full Story (January 31, 2017)

Vox: Trump Further Undermines Fake Blind Trust by Seeking Top Secret Clearance for His Kids

By Matthew Yglesias:

Julianna Goldman reported Monday evening for CBS that the Trump-Pence transition team “has asked the White House to explore the possibility of getting his children the top secret security clearances” in light of their role as advisers to their father.

The request is somewhat unusual since “nepotism rules prevent the president-elect from hiring his kids to work in the White House.” But you don’t need to be a government employee to have a top secret clearance, and the kids would presumably be willing to offer dad their thoughts on trade negotiations with China and the course of the war in Syria on a pro bono basis.

The only problem is this greatly exacerbates the massive conflict of interest problem surrounding the Trump Organization.

Trump’s proposed fake solution to the problem is to say that the management of his businesses will be handled by his kids, who will operate them through a fake blind trust. As dodgy as that arrangement would be under any circumstances, having his kids serve as senior advisers completely undermines any possible benefit. Imagine a normal president with a normal asset portfolio that he really does put in a blind trust, but then he taps the guy running the trust to be Treasury secretary — it doesn’t make any sense.

The Full Story (November 15, 2016)

Vox: President Trump and the Trump Organization are the Biggest Conflict of Interest in US History

By Matthew Yglesias:

Trump’s plan, by contrast, is simply to hand over management of the Trump Organization network of businesses to a council composed of his children and some other executives. He has chosen to call this council a “blind trust,” and some media outlets have unaccountably agreed to go along with it. But even in the age of Trump, words have meaning, and asking your kids to manage your affairs for you is not what a blind trust is.

But beyond that, a blind trust arrangement is fundamentally inappropriate for the nature of Trump’s assets. Recent wealthy presidents — the Bushes, John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt — have been essentially rich kids who inherited dynastic fortunes that they invested passively. Trump is also a rich kid who inherited a dynastic fortune. And had he invested it passively, he would be even richer today than he is now. But he chose instead to take his money and build a series of companies — mostly companies bearing his name — with it.

The way to deconflict this would be to set up a mechanism to sell the Trump Organization (perhaps to a wealthy Trump supporter to whom the president-elect is already indebted, like Peter Thiel) and then plow the cash proceeds into a new blind trust.

As long as the company is intact and under the control of Trump’s children and direct heirs, the conflict of interest has not been even slightly mitigated. Further exacerbating the problem is the well-known fact that Trump’s three oldest children — and Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner — are some of his closest political advisers. The council of kids running the Trump Organization, for example, have also been appointed to the council running the Trump transition project. There will be perfect and intimate coordination between Trump’s policymaking and Trump’s business life.

The Full Story (November 14, 2016)

[Special] Editorial: Donald Trump, A Pinnacle of Health

Donald Trump has spent a fair chunk of his campaign attacking people as being weak, lacking stamina, having low energy, and other such assertions. Trump is the master of projecting all of his insecurities, failures and weaknesses on to others, but this particular instance may be subconscious.

Julia Belluz(1) recently shared a story from one of Trump's books, wherein he shared a ridiculous diet. This was before his days of fast food indulgence like KFC.

As he wrote in the 2004 book Think Like A Billionaire, "You can’t just think like a billionaire; you have to eat like one, too." At that time, in the early 2000s, Trump’s chef at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, was Gary Gregson. Gregson kept Trump on a strict regimen. "We call it the Mar-a-Lago Diet, and if I didn’t adhere to it from time to time, my waistline would be an absolute disaster," Trump wrote.

Here’s a summary of that amazing diet:

1. It has to be served in a fantastic setting.
2. It has to look fantastic.
3. It has to taste incredible.
4. It cannot make you gain weight.
Wow, I'm surprised no one else thought of that. Trump truly is a genius. 

Belluz theorizes that Trump switched from fine dining to fast food as a way to relate to the average American, who apparently spend all of their time wolfing down french fries. This would not be an uncommon tactic in politics, as all of us have seen politicians awkwardly eating local favorite dishes, always with a knife and fork even when one isn't necessary or approved (such as with pizza). However, Politico's Michael Kruse and Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna(2) have another theory.

But Trump’s germophobia goes beyond an unwillingness to shake hands—an aversion he has had to forgo during his run for the presidency. Trump is also reported to have a preference for drinking with straws and eating pizza with a fork, a distaste for pressing elevator buttons and a revulsion to fans and the public getting too close to him, such as for autographs. In an op-ed for the U.K. newspaper The Independent, Gurnek Bains, author of Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization and founder of a corporate psychology consultancy, suggests that Trump’s fear of communicable diseases is the root of his anti-immigrant political stances.

His obsession with cleanliness is why he prefers mass-produced or processed food. His preferences are not complicated: KFC. McDonald’s. The occasional taco bowl.

“I like See’s Candies.” “I like hamburgers.” “I’m an ice cream fan from way back.”

“I don’t like rich sauces or fine wines,” Trump wrote in his book Surviving at the Top. “I like to eat steak rather than pheasant under glass.” So long as the steak is well-done—so well-done, according to his longtime butler, “it would rock on the plate.”

His simplistic palate is a function of his desire for cleanliness. “One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s,” he explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier this year. “I’m a very clean person. I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food’s coming from. It’s a certain standard.”

Regardless of the reasons why, and ignoring the fact that Trump thinks fast food is served in clean, well maintained areas, Trump likes processed food. We have seen it, and we have heard it straight from the man's mouth. Someone with a diet as poor as his must at least exercise to counter-balance the effects of same, but Trump is a man who refuses to conform to logic. From that same Politico piece: 

Trump believes the human body is like a battery. Energy used is energy lost. For this reason, he doesn’t like exercising too much, and he doesn’t like his employees exercising too much, either, according to former Atlantic City casino executive Jack O’Donnell who worked for Trump from 1987 to 1990.

“All my friends who work out all the time, they’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements—they’re a disaster,” he explained last year. 

Good to know that a flabby 70 year old man with a poor diet does not believe in exercise. Hey, maybe Republicans will vote for Trump after all, in the hope that he has a heart attack and Vice President Mike Pence takes over completely. 

(1) Vox: Donald Trump's Curious Shift From Gourmet to Fast-Food Aficionado (October 12, 2016)

(2) Politico: The 7 Oddest Things Donald Trump Thinks (October 13, 2016)

Vox: Donald Trump’s Experts Are Basing His Trade Policy on a Remarkably Silly Mistake

by Matthew Yglesias:

There’s a lot going on in the document, much of it more or less standard conservative fare touting the miraculous growth effects of tax cuts for high-income households and drilling for oil. But what’s really telling is the paper’s discussion of trade, which George Mason University’s Scott Sumner describes as “a complete mess,” which, if anything, is too kind.

Trade is a major point of emphasis for Trump personally; it’s an area where he’s broken with most GOP experts and elected officials, and it’s also the main focus of Navarro’s research.

President Trump, in other words, would be a trade policy innovator. And he would be guided on his innovative path by Navarro. Except Navarro is basing his analysis on a mistake that would get you flunked out of an AP economics class.

The Full Story (September 29, 2016)