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      Donald Trump visits his golf club amid outrage over remarks about US war dead

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      Donald Trump visited one of his own golf courses on Saturday amid one of the worst recent scandals to his presidency in recent months and after expert warnings that up to 400,000 Americans could die of the coronavirus before the end of the year.Trump’s re-election bid is in turmoil after multiple reports of disparaging remarks he made about veterans and US soldiers that have caused widespread outrage, including calling them “suckers” and “losers”. The White House has strongly denied the allegations.Separately, a new report was published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, that forecast the US death toll from the pandemic could hit 400,000 by 1 January 2021.However, on Saturday Trump visited the Trump National Golf Club, in Virginia, passing by various roadside protesters, including one who waved a placard that read: “Elect A Clown Get A Circus”. Some supporters also held up Trump 2020 signs.CNN, which tallies Trump’s visits to golf courses, reported that this visit was the 295th trip to one of his own golf courses during his presidency.During his campaign for the White House in 2016, Trump was a harsh critic of the amount of golf Barack Obama played during his time in office. Yet once in the White House, Trump has played far more often than his predecessor. More

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      Trump orders crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it 'anti-American'

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      Donald Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ antiracism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda”.The OMB director, Russell Vought, in a letter Friday to executive branch agencies, directed them to identify spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other material that teaches or suggests that the United States or any race or ethnicity is “inherently racist or evil”.The memo comes as the nation has faced a reckoning this summer over racial injustice in policing and other spheres of American life. Trump has spent much of the summer defending the display of the Confederate battle flag and monuments of civil war rebels from protesters seeking their removal, in what he has called a “culture war” ahead of the 3 November election.Meanwhile, he has rejected comments from Democratic nominee Joe Biden and others that there is “systemic racism” in policing and American culture that must be addressed.Vought’s memo cites “press reports” as contributing to Trump’s decision, apparently referring to segments on Fox News and other outlets that have stoked conservative outrage about the federal training.Vought’s memo says additional federal guidance on training sessions is forthcoming, maintaining that “the President, and his Administration, are fully committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals in the United States”.“The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed,” he added. “The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the Federal government.” More

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      Trump says he will not cut funding to Stars and Stripes newspaper

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      Donald Trump tweeted on Friday that he “will not be cutting funding to Stars and Stripes”, a newspaper that has served US armed forces since 1861, despite a Pentagon memo obtained by USA Today saying the title would close by the end of the month.“The United States of America will NOT be cutting funding to Stars and Stripes magazine under my watch,” Trump wrote. “It will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military!”News that the venerable paper was in peril had landed as the White House reeled from a report in the Atlantic which said the president disparaged US marines killed in France in the first world war and made disrespectful remarks about both John McCain, a late political rival and Vietnam veteran, and wounded soldiers in general.Trump rubbished that report, insisting: “I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES”.In the case of McCain, observers pointed to a tweet from 2015 in which Trump called the senator and presidential nominee, who died in 2018, a “loser”.Trump also said the Atlantic, which was founded in 1857, was “dying, like most magazines”, and said its report had been refuted.Stars and Stripes traces its origins to Bloomfield, Missouri, in November 1861, when troops under the future president Ulysses S Grant took over the printing press of a Confederate sympathiser.It has traditionally provided news free of government censorship, often critical of military and civilian commanders, and is delivered daily to troops around the world, even on frontlines.According to USA Today, the Department of Defense ordered the publisher of Stars and Stripes to provide a plan to “dissolve” it by 15 September, including a “specific timeline for vacating government owned/leased space worldwide”.“The last newspaper publication (in all forms) will be 30 September 2020,” the author of the memo, Col Paul Haverstick Jr, was quoted as writing.Haverstick is director of Defense Media Activity (DMA), based at Fort Meade, Maryland. According to the Pentagon website, DMA is “a mass media and education organisation that creates and distributes Department of Defense content across a variety of platforms to audiences around the world”.Moves to close Stars and Stripes began in February, when the Pentagon announced plans to reallocate funding to projects including the Space Force, a much-maligned and satirised Trump pet project.On Wednesday, Military.com reported that a bipartisan group of senators led by the California Democrat Dianne Feinstein had written to the defense secretary, Mark Esper.“Stars and Stripes is an essential part of our nation’s freedom of the press that serves the very population charged with defending that freedom,” the 15 senators wrote. “Therefore, we respectfully request that you rescind your decision to discontinue support for Stars and Stripes and that you reinstate the funding necessary for it to continue operations.”Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq, signed the Feinstein letter. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally who was a lawyer in the US air force, wrote a letter of his own.Stars and Stripes did not immediately comment on Wednesday, but it did share a tweet from one of its writers, Steve Beynon.“I read Stars and Stripes on a mountain in Afghanistan when I was a 19-year-old aspiring journalist,” he wrote. “Now I work there. This doesn’t stop the journalism. I’m juggling three future news stories today.”Beynon shared recent stories including a report on women commanding combat units and employees alleging “ingrained racism” at the Department of Veterans Affairs.Kathy Kiely of the Missouri School of Journalism, who published news of the memo in USA Today, wrote: “Even for those of us who are all too wearily familiar with President Donald Trump’s disdain for journalists, his administration’s latest attack on the free press is a bit of a jaw-dropper.”Stars and Stripes later retweeted Trump’s promise not to close it.Before the presidential fiat by tweet, as news of the Pentagon memo echoed through the US media, one former cavalry officer who twice deployed to Iraq spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity.“Having an independent media outlet focused totally on the military and its communities,” he said, “should be a priority for the Department of Defense, to keep these communities informed and together – even while physically separated.”The same veteran expressed sadness about Trump’s reported remarks about soldiers killed in action, wounded or taken prisoner.“Anyone who is shocked or surprised at any of this simply hasn’t been paying attention,” he said. “Look at his comments about prisoners of war when talking about McCain.” More

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      'He is a coward': Trump condemned for reportedly calling US war dead ‘suckers’

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      Current and former members of the military, elected officials and the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, have reacted with outrage and sadness as former members of the Donald Trump administration confirmed key details of a bombshell report in which Trump referred to fallen soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”.The Atlantic magazine published a story on Thursday based on four sources close to the president who said Trump cancelled a visit to pay respects at an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 because he thought the dead soldiers were “losers” and “suckers” and he did not want the rain to mess up his hair.Both Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary of counter-terrorism in the Department of Homeland Security, and Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff in that department, said the account was true, asserting that Trump’s low opinion of soldiers killed and wounded in combat was well-known inside the administration.Trump defenders included the secretary of state and the president himself, who dismissed the report as a false attack meant to damage his shot at re-election. The Atlantic report was “totally false”, Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.Asked if he should apologize for his reported comments about fallen service members, Trump said: “No, it’s a fake story.”But a visibly angry Biden called the alleged comments “disgusting” and said Trump was “not fit to be commander-in-chief”.“When my son volunteered and joined the United States military – and went to Iraq for a year, won the Bronze Star and other commendations, he was not a sucker,” Biden said, his voice rising, in remarks in Wilmington, Delaware. His son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015, was deployed to Iraq in 2008.“If these statements are true, the president should humbly apologize to every Gold Star mother and father and every Blue Star family,” Biden said. “Who the heck does he think he is?“I’m always cautioned not to lose my temper,” Biden said. “This may be as close as I come in this campaign. It’s just a marker of how deeply the president and I disagree on the role of the president of the United States of America.”The Democratic senator Tammy Duckworth, a Purple Heart recipient who lost both her legs during a combat mission in Iraq, accused Trump of attempting to “politicize and pervert our military to stroke his own ego” on a press call hosted by Biden’s campaign.“This is a man who spends every day redefining the concept of narcissism; a man who’s led a life of privilege, with everything handed to him on a silver platter,” said Duckworth. “Of course, he thinks about war selfishly. He thinks of it as a transactional cost, instead of in human lives and American blood spilled, because that’s how he’s viewed his whole life. He doesn’t understand other people’s bravery and courage, because he’s never had any of his own.“I take my wheelchair, and my titanium legs over Donald Trump’s supposed bone spurs any day,” she added, referring to the reason Trump received draft deferments during the Vietnam war.The call also included the Democratic congressman Conor Lamb, a marine veteran, and Khizr Khan, a Gold Star father whose son was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004.Khan said Trump is “incapable – let me repeat it again – he is incapable of understanding service, valor and courage”.“His soul cannot conceive of integrity and honor,” Khan continued. “His soul is that of a coward.”The secretary of state defended the president’s support of members of the military in an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.“I’ve never heard that,” Mike Pompeo said of Trump calling the war dead “suckers”. “Indeed, just the opposite. I’ve been around him in lots of settings where there were both active-duty military, guardsmen, reservists, veterans. This is a man who had the deepest respect for their service, and he always, he always interacted with them in that way. He enjoys those times. He values those people.”On Friday, the Biden campaign released a video quoting the president based on the Atlantic story and later corroborating reports by the Washington Post and the Associated Press.With the tagline “If you don’t respect our troops, you cannot lead them,” the video overlays alleged Trump quotes on images of military cemeteries. More

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      Trump called American war dead ‘suckers’ and ‘losers', report alleges

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      A new report details multiple instances of Donald Trump allegedly making disparaging remarks about members of the US military who have been captured or killed, including referring to the American war dead at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 as “losers” and “suckers”.The allegations were first reported Thursday in the Atlantic. A senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events confirmed some of the remarks to the Associated Press, including the 2018 cemetery comments.The defense official said Trump made the comments as he declined to visit the cemetery outside Paris during a meeting following his presidential daily briefing on the morning of 10 November 2018.Staffers from the National Security Council and the Secret Service told Trump that rainy weather made helicopter travel to the cemetery risky, but they could drive there. Trump responded by saying he didn’t want to visit the cemetery because it was “filled with losers”, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss it publicly.The White House blamed the canceled visit on poor weather at the time.In another conversation on the trip, the Atlantic said, Trump referred to the 1,800 Marines who died in the first world war battle of Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.“This report is patently false,” said White House strategic communications director Alyssa Farah. “President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. These nameless anecdotes have no basis in fact and are offensive fiction.”Trump himself told reporters on Thursday the story was false. “To think that I would make statements negative to our military and fallen heroes when nobody has done what I’ve done,” for the US armed forces, Trump said. “It’s a total lie … It’s a disgrace.”Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, issued a statement on the allegations: “If the revelations in today’s Atlantic article are true, then they are yet another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the President of the United States.”The Defense official also confirmed to the AP reporting in The Atlantic that Trump on Memorial Day 2017 had gone with his chief of staff, John Kelly, to visit the Arlington Cemetery gravesite of Kelly’s son, Robert, who was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, and said to Kelly: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”The Atlantic, citing sources with firsthand knowledge, also reported that Trump said he didn’t want to support the August 2018 funeral of Republican senator John McCain, a decorated Navy veteran who spent years as a Vietnam prisoner of war, because he was a “loser”. It also reported that Trump was angered that flags were flown at half-staff for McCain, saying: “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser.”In 2015, shortly after launching his presidential candidacy, Trump publicly blasted McCain, saying “He’s not a war hero.” He added, “I like people who weren’t captured.”Trump only amplified his criticism of McCain as the Arizona lawmaker grew critical of his acerbic style of politics, culminating in a late-night “no” vote scuttling Trump’s plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Trump has continued to attack McCain for that vote, even posthumously.Trump tweeted on Thursday night: I was never a big fan of John McCain, disagreed with him on many things including ridiculous endless wars and the lack of success he had in dealing with the VA and our great Vets, but the lowering of our Nations American Flags, and the first class funeral he was given by our….— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2020
      ..Country, had to be approved by me, as President, & I did so without hesitation or complaint. Quite the contrary, I felt it was well deserved. I even sent Air Force One to bring his body, in casket, from Arizona to Washington. It was my honor to do so. Also, I never called..— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2020
      ….John a loser and swear on whatever, or whoever, I was asked to swear on, that I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES. This is more made up Fake News given by disgusting & jealous failures in a disgraceful attempt to influence the 2020 Election!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2020
      The magazine said Trump also referred to former President George HW Bush as a “loser” because he was shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II.Keith Kellogg, national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, tweeted Thursday: “The Atlantic story is completely false. Absolutely lacks merit. I’ve been by the President’s side. He has always shown the highest respect to our active duty troops and veterans with utmost respect paid to those who have given the ultimate sacrifice and those wounded in battle.” More

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      CDC's autumn vaccine hint fuels fears of pressure from Trump

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      Challenged last month on the government’s failure to contain the coronavirus in the United States, Mike Pence, the vice-president, said: “We think there is a miracle around the corner.”Pence might have been speaking from more than faith alone. On Wednesday, it emerged that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had instructed states to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to healthcare workers and vulnerable populations – just in time for the 3 November election.For months, critics of the Trump administration have worried that the White House would pressure the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), the CDC and other agencies to rush a hasty coronavirus vaccine to market before the election.Now it appears that Donald Trump could be in a position – as the confirmed US death toll from Covid-19 approaches 200,000, and just as undecided voters are looking for a sign on which way to swing – to announce that a vaccine is imminent.Efforts to find a safe and effective US Covid-19 vaccine began the gold standard phase-three trial stage in July.The potentially propitious autumn timing of a vaccine for Trump does not mean that the vaccine or vaccines would be illegitimate, although federal regulators would have to rush the approvals process to move a coronavirus vaccine to market so quickly.Scientifically respected voices in the administration, including Anthony Fauci, the top federal infectious diseases expert, have been saying for months that vaccine development was moving swiftly.At the end of July, Fauci told Congress he was “cautiously optimistic” that a “safe and effective” coronavirus vaccine would be available to the public by the end of 2020. On Thursday, he said that news of a successful vaccine by October was “unlikely, not impossible”.Any rollout in late October of an initial wave of vaccine doses, for those who need them most, could be in line with the most aggressive vaccine timelines mooted by experts last spring. However, such an event would also dovetail remarkably with Trump’s political needs as the pandemic continues to be out of control in the US.Critics have been warning for months that Trump could try to rush a vaccine – or exaggerate the magnitude of an initial vaccine rollout, just as he has exaggerated the national testing capacity – in order to win re-election.Those critics have pointed out that a key agency in the process, the FDA, which would have to grant emergency use approval for any vaccine candidate to be distributed before the full completion of trials, has shown itself vulnerable to political pressure.After Trump touted the drug hydroxychloroquine as an effective coronavirus treatment, the FDA granted emergency authorization for the drug to be used that way – only to revoke the authorization after two months.Concerns about the FDA grew at the weekend as its commissioner, Stephen Hahn, told the Financial Times that he was prepared to issue emergency use authorization for a vaccine before the end of phase-three human trials, in which efficacy is tested in tens of thousands of human subjects.Hahn said the agency’s decision would be based on whether “the benefit outweighs the risk in a public health emergency”.The CDC did not appear to be advising states that a general rollout of a new vaccine was imminent, instead advising them that a vaccine could be ready soon.The CDC notified public health officials in all 50 states and five major cities to begin making preparations to distribute vaccines, the New York Times first reported. The agency described guidelines for shipping, mixing, storing and administering two unnamed candidate vaccines, the report said.Days earlier, the CDC director, Robert Redfield, wrote a letter to state governors asking that they “consider waiving requirements” to allow a company with a federal contract to distribute vaccines to set up local facilities.Vaccine advocates worry that by potentially rushing an ineffective, or worse, dangerous, vaccine to market, the government could fuel vaccine skepticism and leave the population vulnerable to diseases once believed to have been eradicated if it prompts them to avoid other inoculations.“The president keeps telling us the virus is going to disappear,” Joe Biden said at the Democratic national convention last month.“He keeps waiting for a miracle. Well, I have news for him: no miracle is coming.”Officials have also voiced concerned that underfunded state health departments are not ready to be able to distribute and administer a vaccine to the waiting millions.The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, on Thursday afternoon dismissed concerns that Trump is pressuring the FDA.“No one is pressuring the FDA to do anything,” McEnany said. More