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An investigation into Donald Trump's pledges to charitable causes during the US presidential election campaign has won a Pulitzer prize.

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold's articles "created a model for transparent journalism" and cast doubt on Mr Trump's assertions of generosity, the Pulitzer board said.

He also revealed Mr Trump's obscene comments about women on a 2005 tape.

The Pulitzers are the most prestigious prizes in US journalism.

Mr Fahrenthold began asking questions after Mr Trump promised to donate $6m (£4.8m) to military veterans' organisations and found that, while that pledge did get fulfilled, many previous claims of philanthropic activities had been exaggerated, the Washington Post newspaper said.

Everyone knew Trump would be President when Gorsuch was in college...

An investigation into Donald Trump's pledges to charitable causes during the US presidential election campaign has won a Pulitzer prize.

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold's articles "created a model for transparent journalism" and cast doubt on Mr Trump's assertions of generosity, the Pulitzer board said.

In reply to Donald Trump’s election victory – and in lightning quick time – novelist Howard Jacobson has delivered a comic fairytale that the Man Booker prize winner hopes not only explains why Trump won, but provides the “consolation of savage satire”.

Pussy is set to be published in April by Jonathan Cape, and was written by The Finkler Question author in what he described as “a fury of disbelief” in the two months after the November result. A departure from his usual contemporary fiction, the 50,000 word novella tells the story of Prince Fracassus, heir to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality TV shows and fantasising about sex workers.

Idle, boastful and thin-skinned as well as ignorant and egotistical, Fracassus seems the last person capable of leading his country. But what seems impossible becomes reality all too readily.
“Fiction can’t match reality at the moment,” Jacobson said. “The book’s been brewing in me since the beginning of 2016. I was in the US early last year promoting [My Name Is] Shylock and watching this man [Trump] on TV in horror. It was unbelievable.”

After the election, what had been brewing exploded onto the page. “I had to get up at the crack of dawn every morning and write it,” he added, admitting that Pussy was the fastest book he had ever written. “I’m a slow writer normally,” he said. “I believe in slow writing.”

Writing had been “hugely cathartic”, Jacobson said, because he was making himself laugh. In 2010, he became one of only two comic novelists to win the Booker – the other being Kingsley Amis, with The Old Devils, in 1986.

Jacobson said he hoped the new book would offer the “consolation of savage satire” to readers depressed at the year’s events and hit the new inhabitant of the Oval Office where it hurts: the ego. “Satire is an important weapon in the fight against what is happening and Trump looks like a person who is particularly vulnerable to derision,” he explained.


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As well as Trump, the story takes pot shots at the president’s enablers and fans on both sides of the Atlantic. Walk-on parts are given to characters not too far removed from British political life. Asked whether leading Brexiters appear, Jacobson said: “Certainly you will be able to recognise some of them.” He added that Hillary Clinton makes a surprising appearance towards the end.

Though written with to make readers laugh, the book is more than a satire, Jacobson said: “I wanted to get over Trump’s moral bankruptcy but also the sheer bankruptcy of a culture that could produce him.” In particular, he wanted to convey the damage done to political discourse by the social networking site Twitter, which Trump has used to bypass traditional media.

Though the novelist regarded Trump as “dumb”, he said the former reality TV star had a sharp instinct for Twitter that had enabled him to address voters without the scrutiny of the press. “Social media thrives on the assertive single point of view, which is what he is able to do,” Jacobson said. Likening what has happened to a coup, he added: “If you have Twitter, you don’t need tanks.”

The Manchester-born writer and broadcaster said he had long hankered to write a fairytale, though he admitted changing his writing style to match the form had been difficult. “I had to write much shorter sentences,” he joked, saying that Jonathan Swift and Voltaire’s Candide had inspired him.

Pussy is not Jacobson’s first venture into fairytale fiction. “One of the first things that I did as a student at Cambridge in 1964 was write a fairytale called The Ogre of Downing Castle about my tutor,” he said. His tutor? The hugely influential literary critic FR Leavis, author of The Great Tradition.

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@McGentrix,
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Everyone knew Trump would be President when Gorsuch was in college...

It doesn't sound as if you've read the article. There's no "secret society".

Your response is somewhat defensive, which is odd because a conservative, swelling with pride, could have posted the same article as an example of the movement's focus, power, and success.

“I’m going to be working for you. I’m not going to have time to play golf.”
Mr. Trump at a Virginia campaign rally in 2016

Among the sweeping cuts in the Trump administration’s 53-page budget blueprint released last month, one paragraph stood out to climate researchers. It proposed eliminating four of NASA’s climate science missions, including instruments to study clouds, small airborne particles, the flow of carbon dioxide and other elements of the atmosphere and oceans.

The blueprint is as much a political document as a fiscal plan, in this case designed to send a message that the administration intends to pursue a long-sought goal of some conservatives: to clamp down on NASA’s study of Earth rather than space. But Congress may have other ideas, especially since the projects are not very costly. The savings from eliminating the earth science programs, which include the missions, would total $102 million out of a proposed agency budget of $19 billion.

The Virginia-based Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided to hear the government’s appeal of a lower court order blocking President Trump’s revised travel ban with its full panel of judges.

The court polled its 15 judges and a majority agreed Monday to hear the case en banc, streamlining the appeals process.

The government is appealing a Maryland district judge’s decision to block Trump’s executive order that temporarily banned nationals from six majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. hours before it was set to take effect.


A district judge in Hawaii also issued a temporary stay blocking the order, which the Trump administration is appealing. Those arguments in the Ninth Circuit are scheduled for May 15.

The Ninth Circuit refused to reinstate Trump’s first travel ban in February, after a district court judge in Washington blocked it.

The Fourth Circuit’s interest in hearing the case with its full panel of judges is likely the result of a federal judge in Virginia deciding to uphold the revised ban. The ruling created a split among the lower courts, increasing the likelihood that the Supreme Court will hear the case.

The Fourth Circuit will hear oral arguments on May 8.

in reality it is nothing but a bill designed for Trump to carry out his campaign promise of keeping Muslims out of the US.

... On foreign policy, Trump is ideologically rootless. He seems to have no considered views about the world, just confidence about his own abilities as a leader. And this places an unsettling randomness at the heart of America’s global role.

This inconsistency is the most consistent theme of Trump’s young presidency. During the campaign, he opposed entitlement reform, yet his health-care bill contained the most fundamental entitlement reform — moving federal Medicaid spending from an open-ended match for state spending to a capped amount per person — that Congress has recently considered. He campaigned as a tribune for the working class, yet his economic approach seems heavily tilted toward the interests of the wealthy.

This has been attacked as lying. It also indicates a complete unfamiliarity with the issues and debates at the heart of American politics. He never encountered these matters during previous government service (which he did none of). He was not forced to explain his views during primary or general election debates (a few lines from the stump speech more than sufficed). Trump was not hiding an inner sophistication. His ignorance was presented as part of an anti-establishment package — as contempt for the quibbles of smaller men.

This inbuilt discord has turned normal West Wing tension into a red-carpeted cage fight. A Republican with recent White House interaction told me: “Watching them work was frankly terrifying. They fear each other, they hate each other, they are paranoid beyond belief and it doesn’t work.”