Trump administration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump's public lands chief refuses to leave his post despite judge's order

      by

      A controversial environment chief in the Trump administration has said he has no intention of leaving his post after a US district court judge deemed his tenure and ongoing occupation of the position illegal.William Perry Pendley, head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), said this week that the judge’s ruling “has no impact, no impact whatsoever”.“I have the support of the president,” he told the Wyoming Powell Tribune. “I have the support of the secretary of the interior and my job is to get out and get things done to accomplish what the president wants to do.”Perry has served as director of the BLM since July 2019, when the interior secretary, David Bernhardt, temporarily authorized him to the post. The BLM manages 248m acres – or 10.5% of all land in the US, the most of any agency, mostly in 11 western states and Alaska. It manages public lands for conservation as well as livestock gazing and resource extraction, and critics say the Trump administration has prioritized the latter.President Trump formally proposed Pendley for the post in July 2020, but withdrew the nomination after congressional Democrats indicated unanimous opposition to his appointment, and some Republicans seemed unlikely to support him owing to his fringe views. Pendley has never been confirmed by the Senate to serve as BLM director.After Montana’s Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, brought a case claiming that Pendley’s service was unconstitutional, US district judge Brian Morris ruled two weeks ago that Pendley had “served unlawfully” for the last 424 days, prohibited him from acting as director and suggested that his decisions during his tenure be thrown out or reversed.The interior department said it would appeal against Judge Morris’s ruling.In response to Pendley refusing to vacate his post, the Montana senator Jon Tester accused him of a power grab “in service of his long-held goal of selling off our lands and enriching his corporate allies”.As a former industry attorney and longtime president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), a litigation organization funded by conservative and industry groups including the Charles Koch Foundation and Exxon Mobil, Pendley boasts a deep background of legal advocacy for extractive resource industries on public lands.He has made light of killing endangered species. The Guardian obtained a 2017 recording in which he told a group of North Carolina rightwing activists, “This is why out west we say ‘shoot, shovel and shut up’ when it comes to the discovery of endangered species on your property.”Congressional Democrats also expressed concern with his views on social justice and racial inequality. Pendley has mocked Native American land management practices and dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as based on a “lie”. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump's Afghanistan withdrawal announcement takes US officials by surprise

      by

      Donald Trump has announced on Twitter that he wants to bring all US troops home from Afghanistan by Christmas – a plan that came as a surprise to administration officials and which puts complicated peace negotiations in jeopardy.Multiple officials told the Associated Press they had not been informed of any such deadline and military experts said it would be impossible to withdraw all 5,000 US troops in Afghanistan and dismantle the US military headquarters by the end of the year.They suggested the president’s claim was aimed at shifting the news cycle away from coronavirus coverage and that the Pentagon would not act on the order before the 3 November US election.The announcement was, however, greeted enthusiastically by the Taliban on Thursday. If Trump follows through, the militant group would almost certainly claim it as a victory, after decades of couching their fight as a war against foreign aggression.“It’s no surprise that the Taliban have welcomed Trump’s announcement that he’d have the troops home by Christmas. They spent 19 years fighting for this,” said Ashley Jackson, the director of the ODI’s Centre for the Study of Armed Groups.“This is the last leverage the US had left in talks with the Taliban, and Trump is proposing to give it away for free.”Without the prospect of US military pressure, the Taliban would have little incentive to stay at the negotiating table with representatives of the Kabul government.From a practical point of view, disentangling a 19-year military presence would take considerably longer than two months.“It’s October, so no – it’s ridiculous. It’s simply can’t happen,” said Jason Dempsey, a former infantry officer who served in Afghanistan. “We could make some superficial show of pulling out uniformed troops, but obviously we still have a very massive contractor presence, and we would need a uniformed headquarters to oversee the shutdown and withdrawal of everything we have in country.”Trump has made impulsive policy announcements about Afghanistan on Twitter before, including calling off a US-Taliban summit last year, shortly before a withdrawal agreement was first expected to be signed.He also has a record of ordering abrupt and total troop withdrawals from foreign deployments. In most cases the Pentagon has sought to mitigate and slow the speed of the pullout but in some case the president has prevailed in bringing soldiers back home.The Afghan government and Taliban negotiators are currently attempting to hammer out a new political settlement for the country in the Qatari capital. The peace talks were set up under a withdrawal agreement signed earlier this year between the Taliban and Trump’s administration.The US-Taliban deal laid out a full departure of American forces by May 2021 but only if conditions on counter-terrorism were met, including severing ties with al-Qaida. Some critics of the Doha talks argue that the militants are merely marking time until the departure of US troops.Trump’s plans were announced in a tweet late on Wednesday night. The White House doubled down on the message on Thursday morning: “our troops in Afghanistan are coming home by the end of the year”, the official Twitter account for the administration said.It was the latest in a long line of ad hoc policy announcements from Trump that have caught his own advisers and military by surprise. His national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, had said shortly before Trump tweeted that troop numbers would be brought down to 2,500 early next year.About 4,500 troops are currently on the ground in Afghanistan, reduced from over 12,000 when the deal was signed in February.The Pentagon referred all requests for comment on Afghanistan drawdown plans to the White House.The Taliban welcomed Trump’s remarks as “a positive step towards the implementation of [the] Doha agreement”, a spokesman for the Islamist group, Mohammad Naeem, said in a statement, referring to the US withdrawal deal.Peace talks have been progressing slowly, with negotiators still trying to lay out the ground rules for their discussion. They are currently stalled on which school of Islam should be used when settling disputes.Trump has made a promise to “end” America’s wars overseas part of his bid for re-election this year, promising to bring troops home from a constellation of conflict zones including Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.But past pledges to bring back troops have often been abandoned, reversed or only partially completed.After ordering a total withdrawal of US troops from Syria in October 2019, Trump was persuaded to let some stay on the grounds that they would protect oil installations there. A US military presence has remained, but it is about half the size of the thousand-strong force that was supporting Kurdish forces in northern Syria.In July, the Pentagon announced it was pulling nearly 12,000 troops out of Germany, after Trump called for a total withdrawal to punish the Berlin government over policy disagreements.Senior military officials made clear it would take years to redeploy that number of troops, and Congress is scrutinising the order. The drawdown of foreign deployed forces was dwarfed by the dispatch of 10,000 US troops to the Gulf following the killing of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in January. Dempsey, now adjunct senior fellow of the military, veterans and society program at the Center for a New American Security, said the Pentagon would wait to see the outcome of the presidential election before carrying out major troop movements. “I think the lesson we all should have learned after four years is the president’s conception of his powers doesn’t go anywhere beyond his enjoyment of having an expanded Twitter presence,” he said. “We’ve become so inured to these kind of kneejerk attempts to win the news cycle that nobody will be talking about this 48 hours from now.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      At least 27 in Trump’s circle have tested positive for coronavirus

      by

      Covid-19 has created a dramatic situation in the Trump administration best summed up as “all the president’s men and women”.At least 27 people across Donald Trump’s White House, election campaign and military leaders have now tested positive for coronavirus.On Tuesday, Stephen Miller, the controversial policy adviser to the US president, became the latest to confirm that he has Covid-19 and will enter quarantine. Miller has become the latest in a lengthy list of people connected to the White House to contract the virus in recent days.This group is headed by Trump himself, who left the Walter Reed hospital on Monday after receiving state-of-the-art medical treatment for the virus.Trump, who has routinely downplayed the virus and disparaged the wearing of masks, posed for cameras without a mask after returning to the White House and tweeted: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”Public health experts have criticized Trump’s comments, noting that people with the virus can still spread it to others for around 10 days after becoming infected.More than 210,000 people in the US have died from the coronavirus pandemic, by far the worst death toll in the world.After seemingly months of largely avoiding becoming infected, Covid-19 reached into the heart of the Trump administration last week.A swathe of Trump’s inner circle of family and allies has recently tested positive for the virus, including Melania Trump, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, assistant press staffers Chad Gilmartin, Karoline Leavitt and Jalen Drummond, aide Nick Luna, adviser Hope Hicks and former White House counsel Kellyanne Conway, as well as Miller. A military valet and another assistant press staffer, both unnamed so far, have also been infected.Meanwhile, a number of prominent Republicans have also contracted the virus, including Republican National Committee chief Ronna McDaniel, former New Jersey governor and unofficial Trump adviser Chris Christie, Utah senator Mike Lee, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson and Bill Stepien, head of Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.At least nine of these people, including Trump, attended a White House event on 26 September for Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s nominee for the US supreme court. Assembled guests, most of them not wearing masks, were seated close together for the event, with some then mingling inside the White House, again without masks, afterwards.An outbreak of Covid-19 has also swept through senior US military leaders, including Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Gen John Hyten, vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.Gen Gary Thomas, a senior marine corps leader; Gen Daniel Hokanson, the chief of the national guard; Gen James McConville, the army chief of staff; Adm Michael Gilday, naval operations chief; Gen Charles Brown, air force chief of staff; Gen Paul Nakasone, the cyber command chief; and Gen Jay Raymond, the space force chief, have also been infected.White House staff have reportedly expressed fears that their workplace has been allowed to become an unsafe environment, with mask wearing discouraged and even mocked.The day after the event for Barrett, the White House held a gathering for Gold Star military mothers, the name given to families who have lost military members to combat, with pictures again showing the president and other officials not socially distancing or wearing masks while indoors. Those working in the White House are regularly tested for the virus, but officials have been opaque on when the president had his last negative test, before testing positive late last Thursday.The senior military leaders are believed to have been infected during a Friday meeting in the “tank”, a secure Pentagon room for top military brass. Contact tracing and further precautions are being taken to “to protect the force and the mission”, according to a Pentagon spokesman.The infections have occurred within a broader context where the pandemic is still barely under control across much of the US. Half of all states are reporting an increasing trend in recent Covid-19 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University. In total, more than 7.5 million people in the US have tested positive for the virus. More