Franklin Graham: ‘I Am Grateful to God’ for ‘the Last Four Years’
Evangelist Rev. Franklin Graham said Monday that he is grateful for the last four years, and all that President Donald Trump has done for Americans who stand for life and freedom.
“People have asked if I am disappointed about the election,” he posted to Facebook, and reflected he is “grateful to God that for the last four years He gave us a president” who protected religious freedom and the lives of the unborn, as he also appointed Supreme Court justices and judges who will uphold the Constitution, and gave the nation a strong economy.
Graham, the president of international aid charity Samaritan’s Purse, continued that he is “grateful for a president who strengthened and supported our military; grateful for a president who stood against ‘the swamp’ and the corruption in Washington; grateful for a president who supported law and order and defended our police.”
“I’m grateful for a president and a vice president who recognized the importance of prayer and were not ashamed of the name of Jesus Christ,” he added.
“I’m thankful that the president stood against the secularists who wanted to take Christ out of Christmas and that he brought back the greeting “Merry Christmas!” the Christian leader continued.
“So as we come to the end of this election season, I look back with a grateful heart and thank God for all of these things,” he said. “President Trump will go down in history as one of the great presidents of our nation, bringing peace and prosperity to millions here in the U.S. and around the world.”
THIS FAMILY HAS NEVER EARNED AN HONEST DOLLAR IN THEIR PATHETIC LIVES!
Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-fall-of-donald-trump-final-days.html
“The legal ring surrounding him is collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic corruption and criminality.” JONATHAN CHAIT
Eric Trump claims family 'lost a fortune' in pushback of pay-for-play report
ADAM KELSEY
Responding to a story that reported that hundreds of corporations, special interest groups and foreign governments seeking benefits patronized Trump Organization properties in recent years, the president's son argued Sunday that the groups represent a small proportion of their business and that his father has not benefited monetarily from his office.
"We've lost a fortune. My father lost a fortune running for president. He doesn't care," Eric Trump, an executive vice president with the Trump Organization, said on ABC's "This Week." "He wanted to do what was right. The last thing I can tell you Donald Trump needs in the world is this job."
The comments come a day after a New York Times story reported that President Trump "transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his family's hotels and resorts -- and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration." The article, citing the president's tax records, reports that of the hundreds of individuals and entities seeking favor, "60 customers with interests at stake before the Trump administration brought his family business nearly $12 million during the first two years of his presidency."
"Almost all saw their interests advanced, in some fashion, by Mr. Trump or his government," the news story continued.
ABC News has not viewed the president's taxes and cannot confirm the Times' reporting.
On "This Week," Eric Trump echoed his father's rhetoric calling the story "fake news." He also implied without evidence that the report -- one of several in the past two weeks concerning the president's finances -- was timed to hurt his reelection campaign.
NEW: "My father has lost a fortune," Eric Trump tells @jonkarl when pressed on a NYT report that Pres. Trump turned "his own hotels and resorts into the Beltway's new back rooms, where public and private business mix and special interests reign." https://t.co/fsCP2um0H5 pic.twitter.com/MtZLiszs2K
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) October 11, 2020
Pressed by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl about the president's debt, which the Times reported as more than $400 million, Eric Trump characterized it as commonplace for someone with his level of wealth in the real estate industry. He also misleadingly claimed that all of the president's lenders are publicly known.
"It's in his financial disclosures," Eric Trump said, referring to the annual reports the president is required to issue under federal ethics regulations that do not list all of his creditors. President Trump has not voluntarily released his tax returns, as other past commanders-in-chief and candidates for the office have done. "You know exactly who the money's owed to … my father is worth billions of dollars, and on a proportion of his net worth, my father has very, very low leverage."
"If you own buildings, if you own real estate, you carry some debt. That's what developers do, that's what business owners do, they carry some debt," he continued. "We have a phenomenal company, but there's nothing new about that, and by the way, it's the same debt that he got elected on."
.@jonkarl: "Don't the American people have a right to know who (the president) is indebted to?"
"That's what developers do, that's what business owners do, they carry some debt, "Eric Trump says but President Trump still won't release his tax returns. https://t.co/fsCP2um0H5 pic.twitter.com/x3u8GcDpKy
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) October 11, 2020
In the interview, Eric Trump also responded to the president's refusal to participate in a virtual debate this coming week, as planned by the Commission on Presidential Debates following the president's COVID-19 diagnosis and subsequent hospitalization. The debate was canceled as a result and it is not immediately clear what format the next, and potentially final, scheduled debate will take in two weeks.
"My father wants to stand on stage with his opponent. That's how debates have been handled in America for the last 200 years, you've stood there and you've debated somebody," Eric Trump said, despite the fact that John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debated on-camera from opposite coasts, appearing on television in a split-screen in 1960.
"My father doesn't want to do it over a glorified conference call," he continued.
Karl noted that several members of the Trump family, including Eric and his siblings, defied protocol by watching the first debate maskless. Second lady Karen Pence also appeared at this past week's vice presidential debate without a mask.
"Given the concerns now, will you commit that the Trump team will abide by those safety precautions that the commission put in place at the next debate?" Karl asked.
"I'm happy to wear a mask," Eric Trump said, going on to accuse Democratic nominee Joe Biden of backing out the debate -- another mischaracterization. It was the commission that announced the plan to hold the second event virtually, and the president who chose not to participate. The Trump campaign said the president would also be willing to attend two more debates if they were each postponed a week to allow for an in-person format, but the Biden campaign rejected the idea.
"My father wants to stand on the stage with his opponent," and "doesn't want to do it over a glorified conference call," Eric Trump tells @jonkarl when asked if the Trump campaign will decline to participate in Oct. 22 presidential debate if it's virtual. https://t.co/R7EgB0oaON pic.twitter.com/s7Vl6T9MY6
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) October 11, 2020
On Saturday, the president's physician, Dr. Sean Conley, issued a memo stating that the president "is no longer a transmission risk to others" and "the assortment of advanced diagnostic tests obtained reveal there is no longer evidence of actively replicating virus." It remains unclear whether Trump has tested negative.
The memo came hours after the president delivered an address resembling a campaign speech from the White House South Lawn. The administration called the event a "peaceful protest for law and order," which Eric Trump echoed on "This Week." The president heads to Florida Monday to restart official in-person campaign events with a rally in Sanford.
Eric Trump also noted on Sunday morning that attendees at Saturday's outdoor White House event were temperature-checked and wore masks -- the latter measure, Karl noted, a less common sight at Trump campaign rallies prior to the president's diagnosis.
As the president prepares to return to the campaign trail, Karl challenged Eric Trump about his father's rhetoric following the vice presidential debate in reference to Biden's running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.
"Vice President Pence, when he debated Kamala Harris, said it was a privilege to be on the stage with her, recognized her history-making pick as Biden's running mate. And then the next day your father said that she was a monster," Karl said, referencing comments the president made on Fox Business Thursday. "Why? How is Kamala Harris a monster? Why did he say that?"
"Well, you know, there are a lot of stances that she takes are just -- they're mind-boggling to me," Eric Trump responded.
"But political differences are one thing. A monster? You're calling the Democratic vice presidential nominee a monster. Your father did," Karl pressed.
"You know, you're also dealing with a person who is willing to lie every single day," Eric Trump claimed, going on to misrepresent Biden and Harris' position on law enforcement funding.
Eric Trump claims family 'lost a fortune' in pushback of
THE ORANGE BABOON HAS SURROUNDED HIMSELF WITH ENABLER SOCIOPATH LAWYERS FROM ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR ALL THE WAY DOWN!
ALL LAWYERS ARE CONTEMPTUOUS OF THE LAW. FOR THEM, LAWS AND ETHICS ARE GAMED. THEY'RE TRAINED IN LAW SCHOOL TO GAME IT!
How Has Donald Trump Survived?
Donald F. McGahn II looks over at President Trump
By Gabriel Debenedetti
DONALD TRUMP V. THE UNITED STATES
Inside the Struggle to Stop a President
By Michael S. Schmidt
When a Republican-led Senate committee issued a nearly 1,000-page report in mid-August that detailed the prodigious extent of the contacts between Russian officials and members of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign team, it felt a bit like a dispatch from a vaguely familiar reality — a prepandemic realm when we could mostly agree to focus on foreign interference in American democracy, and when the Trump presidency felt as if it were hanging in the balance while it awaited word from Robert S. Mueller III. This is the world that forged Michael S. Schmidt’s “Donald Trump v. the United States.” It vividly resurrects that actually-not-so-distant era by unspooling the occasionally staggering stories of two administration figures who were central to the investigative sagas that dominated the early Trump years, largely thanks to their attempts to constrain him.
The subjects are both all too familiar and, Schmidt implies, underappreciated in their significance in shaping Trump’s presidency. Schmidt recounts with unsparing intimacy James Comey’s arc from the 2016 election to his 2017 firing from the F.B.I. directorship, and he documents the relentlessly uncomfortable White House tenure of the former general counsel Donald F. McGahn II, who, he points out, “was in charge of Trump’s greatest political accomplishment, and he found himself caught up as the chief witness against Trump.” The result is a revelatory portrait of the events that led to the investigation of Trump for obstruction of justice, and his repeated attempts to control the Department of Justice. It is not about the alleged collusion with Moscow, and in fact Schmidt reports that Mueller’s investigators “never undertook a significant examination of Trump’s personal and business ties to Russia,” largely thanks to the deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein’s intervention.
Schmidt, a New York Times correspondent in Washington who was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018, including one for coverage of Trump’s Russian-inflected scandals, portrays an administration in which all aides may as well always have a resignation letter ready as a safeguard against an angry, flailing president detached from commonly accepted reality. This is a meticulously reported volume that clearly benefits from the author’s extraordinary access to many of the relevant characters, but also from his subjects’ tendency to record, in detail, their time around Trump.
Whereas recent years have been packed with high-impact reported books about Trump’s erratic behavior and his administration’s backbiting — Bob Woodward’s “Fear,” Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s “A Very Stable Genius” and Jonathan Karl’s “Front Row at the Trump Show” come to mind — “Donald Trump v. the United States” is more closely tailored to the efforts to rein Trump in. As such, it may be unlikely to become a go-to for general conclusions about Trump’s character. But it adds significantly to the public understanding of the Mueller investigation and Trump’s war against it.
The narrative is sometimes cinematic. It opens with Schmidt chasing down McGahn outside the White House’s front gates and eventually getting him to concede, “I damaged the office of the president; I damaged the office.” It’s a breathtakingly revealing admission from the White House’s chief lawyer and the architect of Trump’s effort to appoint as many conservative judges as possible. (Schmidt says, “I thought he was still understating the gravity of what he had done.”)
McGahn, a staunch libertarian, was frequently in over his head with the lawless president he nicknamed “King Kong,” and he struggled with his highly unusual extended contact with Mueller’s team. Still, despite getting close to resigning, McGahn stuck around far longer than his apparent misery and frequent attempts at principled stands would suggest, largely because of his judicial project’s success. It was only after Trump granted a woman clemency at Kim Kardashian’s request that McGahn knew he truly had to leave the White House. He could no longer abide the accumulation of Trump’s actions.
Then, in the annals of unsustainable relationships with Trump, there’s James Comey. His early interactions with the president, like the one-on-one dinner at which Trump requested Comey’s loyalty, have been described repeatedly. But in Schmidt’s granular telling, the relationship was especially agonizing because of a fundamental disconnect between the two men.
Comey was always deeply interested in maintaining his and his agency’s public credibility — especially after his wildly controversial intrusions into the 2016 campaign over Hillary Clinton’s emails. After he was fired by Trump, he text-messaged a friend: “I’m with my peeps (former peeps). They are broken up and I’m sitting with them like a wake. Trying to figure out how to get back home. May hitchhike.” It’s just one example of the clearly extensive access Schmidt had to Comey and his wife.
“Donald Trump v. the United States” is full of gritty details about what it’s like for a plugged-in journalist to report on Trump’s intrigue, ranging from the time Schmidt shepherded a valued source to and from the airport, to his learning, secondhand, about a Justice Department official soliciting dirt on Comey at a Cinco de Mayo party. At one point, Schmidt writes, he shattered his cellphone and didn’t fix it for a week because there was too much news; he ended up with pieces of glass in his hands.
More interesting, however, is the constant flow of shocking anecdotes: Schmidt writes that Mitch McConnell fell asleep during a classified briefing on Russia, for example, and he details the F.B.I.’s shambolic reaction to evidence of the hacking in 2016, including an unresolved disagreement over how to handle the material. Describing Trump’s unexpected November 2019 visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, he reports the White House wanted Mike Pence “on standby to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized.” (The vice president never had to take this step.)
For all its revelations, this is not an inside look at Mueller’s investigation itself, and over half of Schmidt’s story goes by before Mueller is even appointed. At times, too, it wanders from the obstruction fights at its heart. Still, if the furor around the investigations into Trump’s last campaign feels like ancient history as the nation faces a pandemic, a civil rights reckoning and another election, “Donald Trump v. the United States” nevertheless offers one more startling dissection of the Trump presidency. Ultimately this book about “the struggle to stop a president” is, in many ways, a tale of how he survived.
Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York magazine.
DONALD TRUMP V. THE UNITED STATES
Inside the Struggle to Stop a President
By Michael S. Schmidt
448 pp. Random House. $30.
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