monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The Republican Party has had a slow but steady growth since 1968. The elections of Clinton and Obama were flukes. Under normal circumstances they would not have been elected President.

When President Donald Trump tweeted on Monday that the legacy media would be “forced” to cover America’s improving economy, reporters in the establishment press freaked out, implying that Trump would strong-arm them into doing so while ushering in an authoritarian regime.

Trump tweeted: “At some point the Fake News will be forced to discuss our great jobs numbers, strong economy, success with ISIS, the border & so much else!”

NBC’s Katy Tur ominously asked on-air what Trump meant by “forced."

Talking Points Memo asked, “Trump declares the press will be “forced” to cover his achievements. What First Amendment?”

A contributor to the New York Times and New Republic wrote, “Interesting choice by Trump to use the word ‘forced’ the day after sharing his fantasy of assaulting a news network.”

CNN has come under fire for suggesting it will publish the identity of a private citizen if he behaves in a way that displeases the network.

Andrew Kaczynski, senior editor of CNN’s KFile, discovered the identity of the Reddit user who made a short video of President Trump tackling a man with CNN’s logo superimposed on his face to the ground.

CNN said it unsuccessfully attempted to contact the man on Monday. He called CNN back on Tuesday, and “sounded nervous about his identity being revealed and asked not to be named out of fear for his personal safety and for the public embarrassment it would bring to him and his family,” CNN reported.

CNN is withholding the man’s identity “because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again,” Mr. Kaczynski wrote in an article published Tuesday night.


“CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change,” he continued.

A swift backlash on social media ensued, with users accusing CNN of engaging in “extremely unethical” behavior and using the hashtag “#CNNBlackmail.”

Saudi Arabia is the chief foreign promoter of Islamist extremism in the UK, a new report has claimed.
The Henry Jackson Society said there was a "clear and growing link" between Islamist organisations in receipt of overseas funds, hate preachers and Jihadist groups promoting violence.
The foreign affairs think tank called for a public inquiry into the role of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations.
The UK's Saudi Arabian embassy says the claims are "categorically false".
Ministers are under pressure to publish a report on UK-based Islamist groups.
The Home Office report into the existence and influence of Jihadist organisations, commissioned by former Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015, has reportedly yet to be completed amid questions as to whether it will ever be published.
Critics have suggested it could make uncomfortable reading for the government, which has close and longstanding diplomatic, security and economic links with the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia.
Wednesday's report says a number of Gulf nations, as well as Iran, are providing financial support to mosques and Islamic educational institutions which have played host to extremist preachers and been linked to the spread of extremist material.
At the top of the list, the report claims, is Saudi Arabia. It alleges individuals and foundations have been heavily involved in exporting what it calls "an illiberal, bigoted Wahhabi ideology", quoting a number of examples.
In a minority of cases, the report alleges institutions in the UK that receive Saudi funding are run directly from Saudi Arabia, although in most instances the money appears to "simply buy foreign donors' influence".
In a statement, the Saudi embassy in London said any accusations that the kingdom had radicalised "a small number of individuals are baseless and lack credible evidence".
And it pointed out that the country has itself been subject to numerous attacks by al-Qaeda and so-called Islamic State.
It added: "We do not and will not condone the actions or ideology of violent extremism and we will not rest until these deviants and their organizations are destroyed."
The BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner, said the report's release comes at a sensitive time with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt all accusing Qatar of supporting extremism - a charge the report says is hypocritical.
Arab foreign ministers are meeting in Cairo on Wednesday to discuss possible further sanctions on Qatar, while the Qatari foreign minister will be making his own country's case at a press conference in London.
'Worrying' links
Endorsing the report, Labour MP Dan Jarvis said it shed light on "very worrying" links between Saudi Arabia and the funding of extremism and he called for the government to release its report on foreign funding.
"In the wake of the terrible and tragic terrorist attacks we have seen this year, it is vital that we use every tool at our disposal to protect our communities," he said.
"This includes identifying the networks that promote and support extremism and shutting down the financial networks that fund it."
Is Saudi Arabia to blame for IS?
Saudi Arabia profile
He said the proposed Commission for Countering Extremism, a new body intended to expose examples of extremism in civil society, should make the foreign funding of UK institutions a priority.
Prime Minister Theresa May, who visited Saudi Arabia in April, has insisted the UK's historic relationship with the desert kingdom is important for British security and trade.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has called for the immediate suspension of UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia because of its human rights record and involvement in military action in Yemen.

North Korea's confident announcement that it has successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of striking the US is another iteration in the high stakes game of international poker that Pyongyang appears to excel at.
Carefully timed to coincide with the 4 July holidays in the US, Kim Jong-un's triumphal blast has simultaneously allowed the North Korean authoritarian leader to make good on his promises of military modernisation to his own people while exposing the hollow overconfident tweets of President Donald Trump that an ICBM launch "won't happen".
The launch of the North's Hwasong-14 rocket is in practical terms merely an incremental step forward from an earlier launch in May, when a similar rocket flew for 30 minutes, to a height of some 1,312 miles (2,111km) over a distance of some 489 miles.
The most recent missile added seven to nine minutes of flight time, an extra 400 miles or so in height and a further 88 miles in overall distance.
Superficially this is simply more of the same pattern of provocation and tactical sabre-rattling that the North has been pursuing for decades, whether through its longstanding quest to acquire nuclear weapons (dating from the 1960s) or its missile testing programme, sharply accelerated in the course of last year.
Yet, by bringing Alaska within range, the new test is an unambiguous game-changer in both symbolical and practical terms.
US territory (albeit separate from the contiguous continental US) is now finally within Pyongyang's cross-hairs and for the first time a US president has to accept that the North poses a "real and present" danger not merely to north-east Asia and America's key allies - but to the US proper.
President Trump's weakness lies in having overplayed his hand too publicly and too loudly.
His initial gambit of deploying a US "armada" to the region in the form of the USS Carl Vinson battle group, not only involved a poor use of historical analogies (the ill-fated 16th Century Spanish fleet was probably the least auspicious of reference points), but also signally failed to intimidate the North Koreans.
Similarly, openly pressuring the Chinese to impose punitive sanctions on North Korea in return for economic restraint from the US through a Trumpian concession not to list Beijing as a currency manipulator also appears to have failed.
President Xi, notwithstanding the positive mood music of the April Mar-a-Lago summit, appears to have avoided being boxed in by Trump, and China's reaction to the North's latest provocation is likely to be limited to a familiar pattern of rhetorical condemnation and a call for calm from all parties.
Washington's immediate options are limited.
Military action - notwithstanding the hawkish recommendations of Republican senators such as John McCain and Lindsay Graham - is next to impossible given the risks involved to Seoul and the poor prospects of success, either in terms of removing the North's strategic assets or its political leadership.
Sanctions are likely to be revisited, through a reconvening of the UN Security Council, but the political process is slow and enforcement is at best a partial and therefore ineffectual approach.
Talks are one way forward and the convergence of views between Washington and Seoul on the back of President Moon's recent visit to the US suggest that some sort of partial re-engagement with the North might be on the cards, albeit within a framework of reinforced deterrence.
Yet, for now the momentum is all with Pyongyang, which has little incentive to sit down with the US and can afford to play for time in accelerating its military modernisation efforts while capitalising on divisions within the international community.
While the US, South Korean and Japanese leaders will be united in pushing for tough measures at this week's G20 summit in Germany, they will be hard pressed to secure the support of either China or Russia for anything beyond a bland, condemnatory declaration.
The dangers of the present crisis are two-fold.
A more confident Kim Jong-un, emboldened by his latest success may become less risk-averse, engaging in conventional military brinkmanship which, while not going as far as pre-emptive attacks on his neighbours, might spill over into conflict through miscalculation rather than through design.
Alternatively, the US confronted by the unpalatable reality of seeing the North cross yet another supposedly non-negotiable "red line" may simply choose to avert its eyes.
For a president wedded to his own version of "fake news", the easiest way to cope with an inconvenient truth may be to redefine or simply ignore the original "red line".
This would be a major mistake since it will do nothing to deter the North while encouraging other states in the region to pursue their own military modernisation plans, storing up even greater problems for the future.
Ultimately, Mr Trump, if he wishes to demonstrate that he is indeed master of the "art of the deal", will need to give up the bully pulpit of megaphone diplomacy via twitter and pivot towards a more enlightened approach.
This could involve the imaginative despatch of a high-profile US senior statesman to negotiate with and appeal to the ego and amour propre of the young North Korean leader.
It could also involve closer co-ordination with America's allies, most notably South Korea, in offering some high-profile political concessions to the North - whether the establishment of a US liaison mission in Pyongyang or a sequenced pattern of asymmetric conventional force reductions on the peninsula.
Right now, Washington (for the sake of the region and the wider world) urgently needs a long-term, sustained and calibrated strategy for dealing with the North that is more than a reactive game of eye-ball to eye-ball posturing.
An impulsive, attention deficient and hyper-active President Trump would be better advised to switch from playing poker to chess.