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What the Hell Is Going on With Trump’s Delay on the All-Important Paris Decision?

Mother Jones

Will the president follow through on his campaign pledge to withdraw from, or “cancel,” the Paris climate change agreement?

Rumors have been swirling that the end to this reality show would come as early as Tuesday, when the White House had reportedly scheduled another meeting to examine its options. Ivanka Trump also was supposed to meet with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt earlier on Tuesday, but the White House did not confirm if that meeting ever took place. Discussions on the climate deal were canceled without much explanation, but when White House press secretary Sean Spicer was asked about the progress Tuesday, he replied that the president “wants to make sure he has an opportunity to meet with his team.” Trump has now decided he won’t decide on Paris until after G-7 meetings later this month in Italy, once more because he wants to “meet with his team.”

In the meantime, Trump is keeping 194 countries who signed the deal two years ago waiting and wondering. If he winds up withdrawing from the agreement, postponing the announcement might make meetings with world leaders slightly more pleasant, given their warnings that the United States shouldn’t defy the hard-fought 2015 deal.

We’ve heard for months that Trump’s Cabinet is split on what to do about both climate change policy and the Paris agreement. Ivanka Trump, now in her official role at the White House, represents those who want to stay. We’re told that she’s “passionate about climate change,” and she is joined by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and economic adviser Gary Cohn, who are also in favor of staying in the Paris agreement. Energy Secretary Rick Perry wants to “renegotiate.” Secretary of Defense James Mattis sees climate change as a national security threat and likely favors staying involved, as does Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

On the other side of the debate, Scott Pruitt is leading the “leave” team, echoing the president in calling the accord a “bad deal.” Team Pruitt also includes senior adviser Steve Bannon and White House Counsel Don McGahn. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has not publicly weighed in, but he opposed the deal as a senator. According to the New York Times, Pruitt’s side is convinced that staying in the Paris climate accord will be impossible if the administration wants to downgrade its ambitions. They point to a single clause in the agreement—that a nation “may at any time adjust its existing nationally determined contribution with a view to enhancing its level of ambition”—and argue that it would impose undesirable legal constraints on the administration and favor environmentalists in court.

Pruitt’s legal argument surprised the groups that usually sue him. “We’re not relying on the Paris agreement for any of the Clean Power Plan litigation,” Jake Schmidt, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international program director, says. “I’m not sure why anyone would use a city in France in a US court when there’s much stronger domestic law.” On top of that, negotiators say that nowhere in the largely nonbinding Paris deal does it legally force a country to meet or exceed its emissions targets. The only legally binding components of the accord commit countries to similar transparency and reporting standards to measure progress, or lack of progress, in meeting targets. Its biggest proponents argue that the agreement was built to be weak on legal enforcement, so as to keep as many countries involved as possible. International peer pressure, not legal pressure, is supposed to do the rest of the work.

The White House reportedly is leaning in Pruitt’s direction. And it’s unclear just how much of a fight Ivanka intends to defend her passions—E&E News‘ source notes she “wasn’t pushing for a strong position” and is more “in the direction of making sure her father gets the right advice.”

Yet given the public nature of this debate, no matter what happens, some members of the administration will end up embarrassed and, in most scenarios, we all lose. Here are some of the options for how this reality show might unfold:

Ivanka wins: She somehow convinces her father to wake up to the threat of climate change, and he decides to fulfill Obama’s promises to the world of at least a 26 percent cut to greenhouse gases by 2025 and providing the rest of the $3 billion in global climate finance.

This isn’t going to happen.

But not because others don’t support her alleged commitment to the agreement. In fact, she’s joined by nearly the rest of the world. According to the NRDC, an additional 1,106 US companies are on record supporting it, even including fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil, Arch Coal, and Peabody Energy. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found 69 percent of American voters support participating, and hundreds of thousands of marchers took to climate protests around the country in April to send a similar message. Senate Republicans who pilloried the deal as illegal and overbearing when Obama negotiated now have lost the will to demand an exit.

Ivanka loses: If Trump follows through on his campaign promises and kicks off the multiyear process to withdraw from the Paris accord, it will tell us a lot about who Trump is listening to (short answer: not Ivanka or his secretary of state), especially since there are so few businesses or interest groups arguing that it’s a good idea for the United States to defy the rest of the world. The few that are include 44 fossil fuel advocacy groups, as well as the far-right think tanks that promote climate change denial: the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. A “leave” decision would show that Bannon and Pruitt have considerable sway over Trump’s decision-making.

Add to the list Robert Murray, a coal magnate and head of the coal company Murray Energy. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Murray Energy donated its most yet to candidates last year, giving several hundred thousand dollars to Trump’s campaign. CEO Robert Murray hosted a private fundraiser for Trump last June and has returned to Trump’s side a few times since to push his favored policies, which include reversing regulations on the coal industry and pulling from the Paris accord.

No one wins: Renegotiating the deal, as Rick Perry has suggested, would all but certainly drag on the Paris drama for years to come. Perry claims that European nations haven’t done their share, although their commitment of 40 percent cuts over 1990 levels by 2030 is steeper than those agreed to by the United States. “Don’t sign an agreement and expect us to stay in if you’re not really going to participate and be a part of it,” Perry told a Bloomberg energy conference in April. But renegotiating is not as simple as Perry suggests. The time for that has passed, since the agreement has already been negotiated and entered into last fall. And how does Trump plan on convincing other countries to ramp up their ambitions voluntarily if he is moving backward on US commitments? One point of leverage other countries have over the United States is following through on imposing a carbon tax on US products. And a Chinese government climate official warned Tuesday that Trump’s decision “will impact other diplomatic arenas, already on G7 and G20, the Major Economies Forum as well,” and “will harm the mutual trust in multilateral mechanism.”

Ivanka claims to win, but it’s meaningless: This would be the case if we stay in the deal in name only and don’t bother to cut emissions through federal policy. Environmentalists prefer this option to pulling out entirely, if only because it would be easier to pick up the pieces in four years if Trump isn’t reelected. Yet it’s not much of a win, and certainly not for someone who is as passionate about climate change as Ivanka says she is.

“We should be of good intent,” former EPA administrator and League of Conservation Voters chair Carol Browner said on a recent press call. “If we stay at the table, it should be with the intent of achieving measurable reductions” of greenhouse gases. “Any idea that we stay at the table so we can disrupt what the rest of the world is attempting is really outrageous on our part. And the rest of the world will see it.”

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What the Hell Is Going on With Trump’s Delay on the All-Important Paris Decision?

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The Pay Gap Costs Women $840 Billion Every Year

Mother Jones

Each year, Equal Pay Day is a grim reminder that working women still don’t earn as much as their male counterparts. In fact, the persistent wage gap means that, on average, women lose a combined $840 billion every year, according to a new report from the National Partnership for Women & Families.

Using Census Bureau data from all 50 states and D.C., the report concluded that the average woman takes home 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man. And the gap is even worse for women of color: black women earn only 63 cents for each dollar picked up by a white male, while Latina women take home a mere 54 cents. Meanwhile, white women bring home 75 cents per dollar earned by a man, and Asian women earn 85 cents, though some Asian subgroups earn considerably less.

Wyoming, where women earn just 64.4 cents for every dollar brought home by a man, is the worst place in the country to earn a paycheck as a woman. New York and Delaware, where women earn 88.7 and 88.5 cents, respectively, are the two states leading the path to wage equity. The map below, created by the National Women’s Law Center, breaks down the gender wage disparities across the country.

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The annual losses amount to almost $10,500 for each working woman, according to the National Partnership report. And with over 15 million homes headed by women, the pay gap is hard on families. The money lost from the gap could pay for 1.5 years of food for every working woman and her family, 11 months of rent, or 15 months of child care.

“This analysis shows just how damaging that lost income can be for women and their families, as well as the economy and the businesses that depend on women’s purchasing power,” says National Partnership’s President Debra L. Ness. “Entire communities, states and our country suffer because lawmakers have not done nearly enough to end wage discrimination or advance the fair and family friendly workplace policies that would help erase the wage gap.”

During the 2016 Republican National Convention, Ivanka Trump famously championed President Trump’s support of women’s equal paychecks: “He will fight for equal pay for equal work, and I will fight for this, too, right alongside of him.” Despite Ivanka’s inclusion of women’s equality in the workplace as a key message of her platform, the Trump administration has not actually adopted any of her pledges. Instead, last month President Trump reduced paycheck transparency and rescinded other Obama-era workplace protections enshrined in the 2014 Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order, imperiling women’s overall ability to track the widening gap between men and women’s paychecks.

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The Pay Gap Costs Women $840 Billion Every Year

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What Are Trump’s White House Aides Worth? Read Their Financial Disclosures

Mother Jones

On Friday evening, the White House began releasing the financial disclosures of up to 180 top staffers. The forms provide a revealing though incomplete picture, showing an aide’s sources of income over the past year and his or her investments and debts, expressed in ranges not exact amounts. So far, these records show that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump could be worth as much as $740 million and are still benefiting from their vast business holdings, including Ivanka’s stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. And they indicate that chief White House strategist, whose assets are valued between $11.8 million and $53.8 million, earned a significant amount of his income last year from entities linked to Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the conservative megadonors. Below are the disclosures of more than 30 officials. We’ll post more as they become available.

Stephen Bannon, assistant to the president and chief strategist

Katie Walsh, deputy chief of staff for implementation. (Walsh recently departed the White House for a job with an outside group promoting Trump’s polices.)

Sean Spicer, press secretary

Reince Preibus, chief of staff

Donald McGahn II, White House counsel

Stephen Miller, senior adviser to the president for policy

Omarosa Manigault, director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison

Jared Kushner, assistant to the president and senior adviser to the president

Makan Delrahim, deputy White House counsel

Gerrit Lansing, chief digital officer

Joseph Lai, special assistant to the president

Jennifer Korn, deputy director, White House

Jeremy Katz, deputy director of the National Economic Council

Kenneth Juster, international economic affairs

Gregory Katsas, deputy counsel to the president

Boris Epshteyn, assistant director of communications. (Epshteyn is reportedly leaving his White House role.)

Hope Hicks, director of strategic communications

Andy Koenig, special assistant to the president

Shahira Knight, special assistant to the president

Timothy Pataki, special assistant to the president, Office of Legislative Affairs

David J. Gribbin, special assistant to the president

James Burnham, senior associate counsel

Bill McGinley, White House cabinet secretary

Joyce Meyer, deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of legislative affairs

Uttam Dhillon, special assistant to the president and senior associate counsel

Ann Donaldson, special counsel to the president and chief of staff to the White House counsel

Benjamin Howard, special assistant to the president and house special assistant

Ashley Marquis, chief of staff, National Economic Council

Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council

Michael Ellis, special assistant to the president and associate counsel

Julia Hahn, deputy policy strategist

John Eisenberg, deputy assistant to the president, National Security Council legal adviser, and deputy counsel to the president for national security

Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president

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What Are Trump’s White House Aides Worth? Read Their Financial Disclosures

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Ivanka Trump Will Become an Official Federal Employee

Mother Jones

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Amid mounting ethical concerns about Ivanka Trump’s already central role in her father’s administration, the first daughter made this announcement today: She will become an official federal government employee, specifically a “special assistant” to President Donald Trump.

The New York Times reports the the decision to take the unpaid position stems from questions over her original role as an informal adviser. Critics contended the position allowed her to bypass ethics rules typically required of federal employees.

“I have heard the concerns some have with my advising the president in my personal capacity while voluntarily complying with all ethics rules, and I will instead serve as an unpaid employee in the White House office, subject to all of the same rules as other federal employees,” Ivanka Trump said in a statement.

The announcement comes just hours after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) penned a letter asking Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub to address the issue.

“Ms. Trump’s increasing, albeit unspecified, White House role, her potential conflicts of interest, and her commitment to voluntarily comply with relevant ethics and conflicts of interest laws have resulted in substantial confusion,” the letter read.

Here’s a newly-relevant New Yorker story detailing Ivanka Trump’s role in assisting her father’s shady Iranian hotel deal.

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Ivanka Trump Will Become an Official Federal Employee

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Ivanka Trump Meets With Congress to Pretend That Her Father Cares About Children

Mother Jones

Bloomberg reports on Ivanka Trump’s first foray into policymaking:

Members of the House and Senate met with the president’s eldest daughter in the Roosevelt Room at the White House last week to discuss her proposed child care tax benefit, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting….It’s not clear whether Ivanka Trump is finding much appetite on Capitol Hill for her proposal. A deduction for child care expenses is both costly and regressive because it would favor wealthier families with two working parents. The deduction would cost the federal government $500 billion in revenue over a decade, according to an estimate by the Tax Foundation, a politically conservative, nonprofit research group.

Let’s see. It would cost $500 billion and fund a touchy-feely welfare program. On the bright side, it would benefit wealthy families more than the poor. Decisions, decisions….

As for the regressiveness, here’s a quick stylized example for a plan that allows, say, a deduction of up to $5,000 for child care expenses:

Income of $500,000, tax bracket = 39.6 percent, total value of deduction = $1,980
Income of $70,000, tax bracket = 15 percent, total value of deduction = $750
Income of $25,000, tax bracket doesn’t matter because you’re not paying any income taxes, total value of deduction = $0.

Everybody in the world with even a passing knowledge of tax policy is well aware of all this. Tax deductions are next to useless for the working and middle classes. That’s why anyone who actually wants to help the non-rich proposes tax credits with a fairly low income cap.

In other words, this is typical Trump. Launch Ivanka onto Capitol Hill with a high-profile proposal and get plenty of good PR for it. But the proposal itself does little for the working class, and Congress won’t pass it anyway. I think I should start keeping a list of Trump proposals that fit this model.

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Ivanka Trump Meets With Congress to Pretend That Her Father Cares About Children

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Government Ethics Watchdog Urges Trump to Investigate Conway and Consider Disciplining Her

Mother Jones

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The government’s top ethics watchdog sent a letter to the White House on Tuesday stating that Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, almost certainly broke ethics rules by promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line and that the administration should investigate her and consider disciplinary action.

Conway appeared on Fox & Friends last week to discuss the decision by the retail chain Nordstrom to drop Ivanka Trump’s clothing line from its stores. Standing in the White House briefing room in front of a presidential seal, Conway bragged that she owns Ivanka Trump clothing and urged viewers to purchase items from the president’s daughter’s line.

In the letter to Stefan Passantino, deputy counsel to the president and the White House’s designated ethics officer, Office of Government Ethics executive director Walter Shaub cited a rule forbidding executive branch employees from endorsing commercial products and pointed to a hypothetical example written into the regulation that’s nearly identical to Conway’s behavior.

“I note the OGE’s regulation on misuse of position offers as an example the hypothetical case of a Presidential appointee appearing in a television commercial to promote a product,” Shaub wrote. “Ms. Conway’s actions track that example almost exactly.”

While Democrats in Washington have criticized the Trump administration for a string of potential ethical lapses, Republicans have generally kept quiet. Conway’s comments, however, led to quick criticism from congressional Republicans, including House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, who together with the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings, sent a letter to Shaub recommending that he review the incident.

Last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that Conway had been “counseled” on the incident, but he did not elaborate on what that meant. Shaub, in his letter, said he has not been notified by the White House of any disciplinary action against Conway.

“Under the present circumstances, there is strong reason to believe that Ms. Conway has violated the Standards of Conduct and that disciplinary action is warranted,” Shaub wrote.

The decision on whether to discipline Conway rests with the White House. Shaub requested notification by February 28 of any disciplinary action. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Government Ethics Watchdog Urges Trump to Investigate Conway and Consider Disciplining Her

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Donald Trump Takes Time Off From Campaigning for an Infomercial

Mother Jones

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With less than two weeks to go before the presidential election, Donald Trump spent Wednesday morning not worrying about making America great again but about preserving his business empire.

As Trump took the stage for the grand opening of his new hotel in Washington, DC, it wasn’t clear whether he would be talking about the election or just praising this new venture. It was a throwback to the Republican primary, when campaign events and Trump product placement went hand in hand. (At a press conference at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago in March, Trump bragged about his business prowess by listing products that have borne his name over the years—Trump steaks, Trump vodka—as the cable networks aired the event live.)

The hotel opening was listed on his campaign website and staffed partly by campaign employees. But with election day around the corner, Trump seemed more interested in basking in the glow of the media cameras to hype this project—and his kids, Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric, who were there for the occasion. He had given up a morning of campaigning in a swing state for this. On the same day, Mike Pence, was holding a rally in Utah, a state Republicans should be able to take for granted but where Trump has been slipping in the polls.

“With a notable exception of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this is the most coveted piece of real estate in Washington, DC,” Trump said to a full room of VIPs in business suits and dresses. The well-attired attendees, who clapped when Trump entered the room, did not look like folks upset with NAFTA and who were eager to see the Washington swamp drained. One VIP was a woman who works for a major consulting firm in Washington who recently booked meeting rooms at the hotel for an event in April. The rates were low, she said, as many companies in the capital shy away from the Trump hotel because of Trump’s campaign. “There are a lot of people who will not want to have anything to do with this place,” she said. She noted that her firm is hoping that by the time of its event, Trump will have “calmed down.”

With more than two hundred journalists in the ballroom covering the odd event, Trump claimed that the hotel showed that he can get things done. He declared, “My theme today is five words: ‘under budget and ahead of schedule.'” (That is actually six words.) Trump then pivoted from hailing his hotel to assailing Obamacare. The health care program “is in free fall,” he said. The “military is depleted,” he added. Finally, he congratulated Newt Gingrich, one of his surrogates, for a combative interview with Fox News host Megyn Kelly on Tuesday night.

Though the ballroom was packed with camera crews and reporters, Trump’s days of getting uninterrupted air time on major cable networks are over. None of the cable networks paid much attention to his event Wednesday. It stood in stark contrast to the last big event he held at the hotel.

That was September 16, and Trump was riding high. The polls showed him neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton, and he tricked the media into giving him a free 45-minute infomercial for his new Washington hotel. He had invited the press to the hotel, with a soft opening underway, for what was billed as a major statement on birtherism. The word was that Trump would finally declare that he believed Obama was a US citizen, after years of championing the conspiracy theory that the president was born in Kenya. Instead, Trump used about half an hour of the free media coverage to promote the hotel and showcase military veterans supporting his campaign. Eventually, he made about 20 seconds of remarks regarding his supposed abandonment of birtherism (which hardly seemed genuine).

After that event, Trump was pleased with how he had bamboozled the media, and the press fumed. “We got played,” CNN’s John King admitted. Ultimately, this stunt may have backfired on Trump. It became a turning point in his media coverage. Major news outlets called his birther statement—in which he blamed Clinton for starting the birther charge—a lie. And when Trump gave a tour of the hotel that day to the photographers and videographers in his press pool, without any reporters, the pool decided to destroy the footage. Shortly after this episode, Trump’s campaign began tanking, following his poor performance at the first debate and the appearance of a video of him bragging about sexually assaulting women.

After the September birtherism event ended, the stage on which Trump had touted his new hotel literally collapsed as the cameras were still rolling—a perfect metaphor for what happened that day between Trump and the press. On Wednesday morning, the stage did not fall apart. But it seemed as if Trump might have realized that his electoral prospects had. He appeared more fixated on trying to save his brand, which has been harmed by the divisive and insult-driven campaign he has mounted. After the ribbon-cutting ceremony in the hotel lobby, Ivanka was hobnobbing with well-wishers and accepting congratulations. Mother Jones asked her if her father’s presidential bid had damaged the Trump brand. She just smiled and quickly walked away.

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Donald Trump Takes Time Off From Campaigning for an Infomercial

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"Looming Trump" Is a Metaphor for the Republican Party

Mother Jones

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Liveblogging a debate is an odd thing: You have to listen carefully to what the candidates are saying, but you’re also furiously typing away to deliver your brilliant commentary to a waiting world. For me, it’s exhausting. I have a one-track writing mind, and it doesn’t appreciate having background distractions. That’s why I can’t listen to music or have the TV going while I blog.

Obviously I have no choice during debates, but it means sometimes I miss things. Especially visual things. However, I know that my readers want to be au courant on all internet memes, so here’s one I missed last night: Looming Trump. Apparently Donald Trump is too hyperactive to simply sit in his chair when the other person is talking, so instead he wandered the stage. More often than not, he ended up about five feet behind Hillary Clinton, looming over her:

My guess is that this wasn’t deliberate on Trump’s part. It’s just an instinctive part of the stupid dominance games that control his life. On the other hand, some of his stupid dominance games were very, very deliberate:

Donald Trump’s campaign sought to intimidate Hillary Clinton and embarrass her husband by seating women who have accused former president Bill Clinton of sexual abuse in the Trump family’s box at the presidential debate here Sunday night, according to four people involved in the discussions.

The campaign’s plan, which was closely held and unknown to several of Trump’s top aides, was thwarted just minutes before it could be executed when officials with the Commission on Presidential Debates intervened….The gambit to give Bill Clinton’s accusers prime seats was devised by Trump campaign chief executive Stephen K. Bannon and Jared Kushner, the candidate’s son-in-law, and approved personally by Trump.

That’s Jared Kushner, as in “Ivanka Trump’s husband”:

As the candidates’ immediate family members shook hands it was also noticeable that Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton, friends of years’ standing, ignored each other. Ms Trump had spent the last few days absorbing the news that her father once called her a “voluptuous piece of a–“. She looked sad, almost tearful, throughout the ensuing 90 minutes as Mr Trump attempted to crush the life out of his opponent.

Um…I’m not sure that’s why Ivanka and Chelsea weren’t on speaking terms. I think my boss has the better take:

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"Looming Trump" Is a Metaphor for the Republican Party

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New Tapes Reveal Trump Lewdly Discussing his Daughter, Black Women, Threesomes, and More

Mother Jones

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On Saturday afternoon, CNN published several audio clips from the Howard Stern show, of conversations between Donald Trump and Howard Stern. In the freshly rediscovered clips, Trump makes lewd comments about his daughter, Ivanka, and discusses his thoughts on sex with women who are menstruating, sex with black women, threesomes, sex addiction, sex with Miss USA contestants… and more.

Several of the clips feature Trump discussing Ivanka’s physique. In a September 2004 interview, Stern asks Trump if he can refer to Ivanka as “a piece of ass.” Trump says yes. “My daughter is beautiful, Ivanka,” says Trump, and after a bit of back and forth, Stern asks: “Can I say this? A piece of ass,” to which Trump responds with “Yeah.” In an October 2006 interview, when Stern made a comment about Ivanka’s breasts and asked if she had gotten implants, Trump responded with, “She’s actually always been very voluptuous. She’s tall, she’s almost 6 feet tall and she’s been, she’s an amazing beauty.”

Mother Jones and other outlets have previously published clips of Trump making crude comments about women on Stern’s show, including one where he calls Jennifer Lopez’s butt “too fat.” In another, Trump responds to a question from Stern about whether he’d stay with Melania if she was disfigured in a car accident by asking, “How do the breasts look?”

In a 1997 interview clip unearthed by CNN, Stern asks Trump if he’s ever had sex with a menstruating woman. “Donald, seriously, you would not, right, am I correct?” Stern says.

“Well, I’ve been there. I have been there, Howard, as we all have,” Trump answers.

Later in the same interview, Stern asks Trump if he’s “ever had a black woman in bed.” Trump responds by asking Stern what his “definition of black” is. “Interesting, his bed is a rainbow. I like this discussion,” Stern says. “The rainbow coalition, as Rev. Jesse would say,” responds Trump.

In additional interviews published by CNN, Trump calls age 35 “check-out time” when it comes to leaving women, and responds to a question about whether he’s had a threesome: “Haven’t we all? Are we babies?” In another interview, he implies that he’s had sex with Miss Universe or Miss USA contestants, saying: “It could be a conflict of interest. But, you know, it’s the kind of thing you worry about later, you tend to think about the conflict a little bit later on.”

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New Tapes Reveal Trump Lewdly Discussing his Daughter, Black Women, Threesomes, and More

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Trump Says He Mocked Women’s Looks to Be Entertaining

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump defended his habit of publicly ridiculing women’s looks, arguing that it has entertainment value. Trump, who made the comment during an interview with an NBC affiliate in Las Vegas before giving a speech there Wednesday evening, seemed to claim that as long as mocking women is funny, it’s a fine way to grab headlines and ramp up ratings.

“You have two beautiful daughters past their teenage years,” the reporter said. “Can you understand the concern from parents of younger girls that some of your comments could be hurtful to girls struggling with body image and the pressure to be model-perfect?” Trump responded, “A lot of that was done for the purpose of entertainment. There’s nobody that has more respect for women than I do.”

Much of Trump’s public persona over the years has been shaped by his comments about women. He wanted to fire women from one of his golf courses because they weren’t hot enough. He made degrading comments about women in regular appearances on the shock jock Howard Stern’s show in the 1990s and 2000s and in public speeches where he boasted about hiring women for their looks. In last week’s presidential debate, his fat-shaming of Miss Universe Alicia Machado became a campaign issue.

But Trump’s claim that his comments about women over the years were just for entertainment is undermined by the fact that they weren’t limited to his public appearances. He didn’t just shame Machado in front of the cameras; he also allegedly called her “Miss Piggy” in private. He commented when female executives in the Trump organization gained weight. On the set of The Apprentice, he talked about the women contestants’ appearances when the cameras weren’t rolling. He once reportedly asked a Miss Universe whether she thought his then-16-year-old daughter, Ivanka, was hot. He passed the 1993 White House Correspondents Dinner talking to a model seated next to him about “the ‘tits’ and legs of the other female guests and asking how they measured up to those of other women, including his wife.”

Perhaps when Trump says “a lot of that was for entertainment,” he just means he personally found it entertaining.

Excerpt from:  

Trump Says He Mocked Women’s Looks to Be Entertaining

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