Trump will lose in a landslide because of the economy, new election model predicts

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/20/business/economy-election-trump-biden-jobs/index.html

 The economy has gone from President Donald Trump's greatest political asset to perhaps his biggest weakness.

Unemployment is spiking at an unprecedented rate. Consumer spending is vanishing. And GDP is collapsing. History shows that dreadful economic trends like these spell doom for sitting presidents seeking reelection.

The coronavirus recession will cause Trump to suffer a "historic defeat" in November, a national election model released Wednesday by Oxford Economics predicted.

Oops: Elaine Chao Caught Pimping Her Family Business with China

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/elaine-chao-china-trip-foremost

The transportation secretary thought it’d be cool to bring family members to government meetings in which they had a financial interest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a normal presidential administration—hell, in a normal professional setting of any kind—it would be considered inappropriate to bring one‘s family members to official work meetings and/or on business trips. But of course, the Trump administration is not normal. Rather, it‘s a family affair, the primary goal of which is to enrich Donald Trump and the people who surround him—who, among others, include his not-very-bright son-in-law. That M.O. starts at the top with the grifter-in-chief, but it also extends to dozens of current and former cabinet members who’ve seen no issue with taking their wives on taxpayer-funded European vacations, using a government plane to get a better shot of the solar eclipse, plunking down $31,000 on dining-room sets, and allegedly planning work travel based on a “desire to visit particular cities or countries.” So it’s not entirely surprising that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao thought it would be no big deal to bring her relatives—who happen to have major business interests in Beijing—to meetings with government officials during a visit to China in the fall of 2017, but unfortunately for Chao, not everyone in government has adopted Team Trump’s way of thinking.The New York Times reports that in October 2017, an alarmed official at the American Embassy in Beijing wrote an urgent email seeking advice concerning “a series of unorthodox requests” made by Chao‘s office related to her first visit to China as a Trump cabinet member. According to the Times, Chao—who is married to Senate leader Mitch McConnell—wanted federal officials to “coordinate travel arrangements for at least one family member and include relatives in meetings with government officials.” Such requests would be wildly inappropriate for any secretary’s relatives, but were even more so given the Chao family’s business: her father, James Chao, founded Foremost Group, a shipping, trading, and finance company now run by Elaine’s sister Angela Chao. While the company is based in New York, its fleet is, per the Times, “overwhelmingly focused on China,” with roughly 72% of the raw materials it has shipped since early 2018 going to China, cargo that “helps feed” Beijing’s “industrial machine, which manufactures steel products that are a point of dispute in the deepening trade war between” China and the U.S. The company reportedly constructs almost all its vessels in state-owned shipyards in China, some with loans from the Chinese government.

 

China grants 18 trademarks in 2 months to Trump, daughter

https://apnews.com/0a3283036d2f4e699da4aa3c6dd01727

 The Chinese government granted 18 trademarks to companies linked to President Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump over the last two months, Chinese public records show, raising concerns about conflicts of interest in the White House.

In October, China’s Trademark Office granted provisional approval for 16 trademarks to Ivanka Trump Marks LLC, bringing to 34 the total number of marks China has greenlighted this year, according to the office’s online database. The new approvals cover Ivanka-branded fashion gear including sunglasses, handbags, shoes and jewelry, as well as beauty services and voting machines.

 

Jared Kushner Is China’s Trump Card

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/jared-kushner-is-chinas-trump-card

How the President’s son-in-law, despite his inexperience in diplomacy, became Beijing’s primary point of interest.

 

15 times Trump praised China as coronavirus was spreading across the globe

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/trump-china-coronavirus-188736

The president has lambasted the WHO for accepting Beijing’s assurances about the outbreak, but he repeated them, as well.

'We've been muzzled': CDC sources say White House putting politics ahead of science

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/20/politics/coronavirus-travel-alert-cdc-white-house-tensions-invs/index.html

In interviews with CNN, CDC officials say their agency's efforts to mount a coordinated response to the Covid-19 pandemic have been hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science.

Trump calls study his administration partly-funded phony

U.S.-China Relations Are In A Free Fall, Says Expert | Morning Joe | MSNBC

Mika Responds To Trump Tweet | Morning Joe | MSNBC

Donald Trump's WHO Letter About China Explained: An Annotated Timeline

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-who-letter-china-explained-annotated-timeline-1505379

President Donald Trump wrote this week a letter to the World Health Organization (WHO) chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus criticizing the U.N. agency and his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic, specifically its work with China, where the outbreak first emerged.

 

Here, Newsweek presents Trump's letter to the WHO in full, along with annotations to add context, facts, counterclaims, and other relevant information.

 Observers have warned that the loss of U.S. funding would degrade the WHO's ability to prepare for and fight future pandemics. Philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates, himself a major funder of the organization, said Trump's threat is "as dangerous as it sounds."

I was right, says prof who predicted pandemic would play itself out in 70 days

https://www.timesofisrael.com/i-was-right-says-prof-who-predicted-pandemic-would-play-itself-out-in-70-days/

Isaac Ben-Israel says virus disappears everywhere at same speed, rendering interventions irrelevant. Public health expert: He ‘has no clue about epidemiology and public health’

Many medical professionals have raised their eyebrows over Ben-Israel’s claims. The public health expert Nadav Davidovitch, asked to comment for this article, said he agrees with Ben-Israel’s sentiment that “hysteria” must be avoided but added: “He is an excellent scientist, yet he has no clue about epidemiology and public health.”

Ben-Israel doesn’t have a medical background, but claimed that simple mathematics can yield an understanding of the virus’s pattern. He argued that this pattern proves that lockdowns are “unnecessary no matter what,” and have been a needless disruption to life and a waste of money.

Ben-Israel has supported social distancing and hygiene measures but said that they only have a limited impact on infection rates. He argued that this is now shown to be true because he can’t draw a clear correlation between a country’s hygiene level and a significant change in the pattern of infection rates.

Trump Is Dangerously Predictable With China

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/01/trump-xi-china-coronavirus-trade-deal/

However erratic Trump’s positions on China appear at the surface, an honest examination of his engagement with Beijing reveals not unpredictability but a dangerous steadfastness. Trump has consistently placed his personal political interests over the national interest of the United States—even when the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Nor has Trump been shy about brandishing the trade deal as a pillar of his reelection campaign. Just before its signing, Trump crowed about the deal—describing it as a “big, beautiful monster”—at a campaign rally in the swing state of Ohio. During the signing ceremony itself, he declared: “It just doesn’t get any bigger than this.” Trump’s campaign, moreover, was planning a series of television ads touting the deal, whose signing and implementation spanned the exact period when America’s coronavirus trajectory was taking shape. It was precisely during this period when the dialogue between Washington and Beijing could have benefited from less fawning and more calls for transparency and international cooperation. But for Trump himself, the trade deal and its political implications didn’t “get any bigger,” and not even public health concerns could push him to jeopardize his rapport with Xi to secure it.

Other developments in Trump’s relations with Beijing that seem erratic on the surface display the same predictable, one-track mindset. This includes Trump’s protection of the Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE against his own officials in the Department of Commerce. In March 2017, ZTE pleaded guilty in the United States to illegally exporting American technology to Iran and North Korea. A year later, when the firm violated the settlement agreement with the U.S. court, the Department of Commerce banned American companies from providing ZTE with technology for seven years. The ruling underscored the national security implications of ZTE’s original offenses, its disregard for the settlement agreement, and the company’s efforts to cover up that disregard.

 Trump upended this course of action in May 2018, when he abruptly tweeted about how he was working with Xi to get ZTE “back into business,” citing “[t]oo many jobs in China lost” and directing the Commerce Department to “get it done.” The U.S. president’s focus on unemployed Chinese—after railing against Beijing’s unfair economic practices for years—raised eyebrows and sowed confusion even within his own administration.

Trump owed tens of millions to Bank of China

https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-owes-tens-of-millions-to-the-bank-of-china-and-the-loan-is-due-soon/

Donald Trump is warning “China will own the United States” if Joe Biden is elected president.

But Trump himself has taken on debt from China. In 2012, his real estate partner refinanced one of Trump’s most prized New York buildings for almost $1 billion. The debt included $211 million from the state-owned Bank of China, which matures in the middle of what could be Trump’s second term.

 

Donald Trump’s Debt to China

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/donald-trumps-debt-to-china

With criticisms of Trump’s handling of the pandemic growing and new opinion polls showing him trailing Biden in several key battleground states, we are sure to see more of these diversions. But adopting a China campaign strategy would also present a number of problems for Trump, beginning with the fact that Hunter Biden’s investment partnership isn’t the only American business that received funding from Chinese entities. In 2012, the Bank of China, a commercial bank owned by the Chinese state, provided more than two hundred million dollars in loans to a New York office building that Trump co-owns, Politico reported on Friday. The loans will come due in 2022, “in the middle of what could be Trump’s second term,” the timely article noted.