January 20, 2019

Trump Rants About Pelosi, Crime, and Climate Change in Sunday Morning Twitter Blast

Happy two-year anniversary of your inauguration, Mr. President.

President Donald Trump makes remarks to the media as he prepares to depart the South Lawn of the White House on Saturday, January 19.Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA Wire

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Two years ago today, before a crowd of debatable size, President Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol to take the oath of office that would make him the 45th President of the United States. And while the federal government marked the anniversary by entering the 29th day of a partial government shutdown, Trump celebrated with a mixtape of his greatest hits on Twitter.

The president opened by taking credit for job growth, which has been steadily improving. He left out, of course, the fact that the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts have ballooned the federal deficit and that an estimated 800,000 federal workers haven’t seen a paycheck in a month.

Next, the president tried to add a little levity to Winter Storm Harper, the massive snow system that’s already responsible for five deaths, by taking a dunk on climate change. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he tweeted. The Washington Post‘s weather team quickly clapped back with a reminder that the last four years on the planet have been it’s warmest, something the president “might have heard direct from NOAA and NASA if the government was open and you listened to their excellent scientists.”

He followed up with a series of tweets about the offer he made to Democrats yesterday in an effort to reopen the government, which would reinstate protections to some undocumented immigrants, including Dreamers who came to the United States as children, in exchange for $5.7 billion in border wall funding. (Reminder: Trump was the one who scrapped the protections in the first place.) Pelosi and fellow Democrats, who view the deal as non-starter, prompted both hostility from the president—“They don’t see crime & drugs, they only see 2020”—and that trademark humility—“which they are not going to win.”

Trump, of course, lingered on Pelosi, calling the Speaker a “Radical Democrat,” and claiming she is “petrified” of the ‘lefties’ in her party.” Trump also attacked the “disgusting” streets of San Francisco. (Pelosi represents a district that includes the city.)

Trump then claimed that his poll numbers among Hispanics had gone up from 19 to 50 percent, apparently deploying the number as proof that his border wall deal was popular among Latino voters. (Mother Jones is still scouring the internet for the poll the president is citing.)

To close, he thanked conservative commentator David Wohl (the father of Jacob, a prankster also famous for his Twitter-based fealty to Trump) for criticizing the news media. Wohl’s tweet likened the Buzzfeed journalists, who reported Friday that the president had directed his attorney Michael Cohen to lie Congress, to “circus clowns” and “hatchet men for the DNC.” (The Office of the Special Counsel has disputed the claims made in Buzzfeed’s story.)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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