Trump’s America (continued)

April 10, 2018
By Jacob Rosenberg

On Fox and Friends, which US president Donald Trump has called “the most influential show in news,” the hosts discussed a thousand-person “caravan” of migrants traveling toward the United States to escape gang violence and poverty in Central America; and Trump said that women in the group were being “raped at levels nobody has seen before” and that he would deploy 2,000 to 4,000 National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border to stop the migrants from seeking asylum. Trump announced a tariff worth $50 billion on 1,300 Chinese goods, China proposed $50 billion worth of tariffs on American products, and Trump said he was considering raising the value of his tariffs by $100 billion. “We’ll see how this works out,” said Trump’s economic adviser. It was reported that Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt spent millions of taxpayer dollars to employ a 20-person security detail, reassigned or demoted EPA employees if they questioned the agency’s spending, attempted to use sirens to get through traffic, and rented a condo for $50 a night from the wife of a lobbyist for the only liquefied-natural-gas exporter in the United States. A fire broke out on the 50th floor of Trump Tower, killing one person.

In Syria, medical groups reported that at least 70 people suffocated in Douma from a chemical attack. During protests in Gaza, Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian photojournalist who was wearing a vest that bore the word “press.” A former president of Brazil, who was leading in the polls for the country’s upcoming presidential election, turned himself in to authorities to begin a 12-year sentence after being found guilty of helping a construction company acquire contracts from the state-run oil industry; a former president of South Korea was sentenced to 24 years in prison for using her position to fundraise for companies that paid for her shaman’s daughter’s equestrian lessons; and a South Carolina congressman pulled out a loaded .38-caliber Smith and Wesson handgun during a “coffee with constituents” meeting and said he was “not going to be a Gabby Giffords.”

Researchers found that one in three low-income American families struggles to afford diapers, and parts of California flooded when a plume of water vapor from the tropics caused snowmelt and heavy rain. A Tallahassee city commissioner said he had used almost all of the funds from his state senate campaign to pay an attorney to represent him in an FBI investigation of public corruption so that he could “clear his name” and “remain a viable candidate”; the FBI raided the office of one of Trump’s lawyers, who admitted to paying off an adult-film star with whom Trump allegedly had an affair; the ex-fiancée of a former Republican presidential campaign adviser accused her partner of forcing her to sign a five-page contract to be his “slave and property,” requiring her to wear a collar and always be naked; and the singer Cardi B released her first album, Invasion of Privacy.