Trump news - live: Top state department official resigns over president's 'actions surrounding racial injustice' as Facebook takes down his ads
Social media platform says campaign used 'banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol'
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Facebook has removed dozens of ads from Donald Trump's re-election campaign invoking Nazi imagery against political opponents while he has publicly sparred with the US Supreme Court and his ex-national security adviser John Bolton over allegations in a new book.
The social media platform said its decision to pull dozens of Trump campaign ads that invoked Nazi symbols to mark political opponents was based on the company's policy against "using a banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol."
Bolton say the “stunningly uninformed” president begged Chinese premier Xi Jinping for help with his re-election, said invading Venezuela would be “cool”, believed Finland was in Russia and did not realise the UK was a nuclear power.
Several newspapers published extracts from The Room Where it Happened, which hits shelves next week and paints a damning portrait of the Trump White House and a blustering president willing to do “personal favours for dictators he likes”, ignorant of foreign policy and motivated predominantly by “re-election calculations”.
Trump wasted no time in angrily hitting back at Bolton, disparaging him as “a washed up guy” on Fox News and taking to Twitter to label him: “A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war.”
A senior State Department official meanwhile has resigned over the president's poor handling of racial tensions in the wake of the police killings of black Americans, as the president lashed out over the Supreme Court's ruling that halts the administration's bid to end DACA, an Obama-era programme that provided a legal path for migrants who entered the US without legal permission to stay in the country.
The president, who has two of his own appointees on the high court, threatened the possibility of more nominees, underscoring the future of SCOTUS as a larger campaign issue in November.
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Trump begged Xi for re-election help, John Bolton book alleges
A new book by Donald Trump’s ex-national security adviser John Bolton alleges the “stunningly uninformed” president begged Chinese premier Xi Jinping for help with his re-election, said invading Venezuela would be “cool”, believed Finland was in Russia and did not realise the UK was a nuclear power.
The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times today carry extracts from The Room Where it Happened, which hits shelves next week and paints a damning portrait of the Trump White House and a blustering president willing to do “personal favours for dictators he likes”, ignorant of foreign policy and motivated predominantly by “re-election calculations”.
Bolton describes his former employer as a man who “saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government”.
“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn't driven by re-election calculations,” he adds, damningly.
Bolton says during his time at the White House, which stretched from April 2018 to September 2019, that the president only held two intelligence briefings a week “and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand.”
He also describes tensions with Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly and, more surprisingly, with his current secretary of state Mike Pompeo (usually thought of as a staunch ally), who allegedly once passed a note in a meeting while the president was speaking, saying: “He’s so full of s***”.
It’s the foreign policy revelations that are the most astonishing, however, with his account of the president flattering Xi at last June’s G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in pursuit of re-election support especially shocking.
The aforementioned Pompeo is currently meeting with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, in Hawaii, incidentally, which promises to be a spectacularly awkward affair thanks to the grenade just dropped - belatedly - by Bolton.
Here’s Griffin Connolly’s report on the Xi anecdote.
President reportedly said invading Venezuela would be 'cool'
Before we even get to on to juicy anecdotes like Trump’s dismissal of all journalists as “scumbags" who deserve to be executed or his determination to taunt North Korean despot Kim Jong-un by sending him a CD of Elton John singing “Rocket Man” to mock his nuclear ambitions, let’s start with Caracas.
Bolton writes in The Room Where it Happened that invading Venezuela would be "cool" and that he argued the South American nation was "really part of the United States".
The author says it was none other than Russian president Vladimir Putin who put Trump up to this, using a May 2019 phone call to pull off a "brilliant display of Soviet-style propaganda" by likening Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to Trump’s 2016 Democratic presidential opponent Hillary Clinton, which "largely persuaded Trump" against backing his claim to power, with Putin favouring corrupt incumbent Nicolas Maduro.
Trump had labelled Maduro a dictator and imposed sanctions a year earlier but he managed to cling on to power and the US never did intervene further.
Bolton has, incidentally, granted an exclusive interview to ABC News - which will be aired in full on Sunday - in which he is seen commenting in an advanced clip: "I think Putin thinks he can play [Trump] like a fiddle."
Also according to Bolton's memoir, one US invasion Trump was less keen on was that of Afghanistan at the commencement of the War on Terror. "This was done by a stupid person named George Bush," Trump is alleged to have remarked.
Trump 'believed Finland part of Russia' and was not respected by Putin, says Bolton
The president’s ignorance of geopolitical matters is also exposed by Bolton in his revelation that Trump allegedly once asked whether Finland was part of Russia (this has not been the case since the October Revolution of 1917, although the Finns did fight a border dispute with the Soviet Union in the Winter War of 1939 to reassert their independence).
Vladimir Putin makes another appearance in Bolton’s account of his Helsinki summit with Trump in July 2018, at which the president told the man from the Kremlin he believed him - and not his own intelligence agencies - when he insisted his country had not interfered in the 2016 US presidential election.
Given that Trump came out on top in that contest against Clinton, he has had a vested interest in not looking too closely at how its outcome was achieved ever since.
"This was hardly the way to do relations with Russia, and Putin had to be laughing uproariously at what he had gotten away with in Helsinki," Bolton comments.
Here’s John T Bennet with more.
President 'expressed surprise to learn UK a nuclear power'
Trump's sketchiness and indifference was also exposed by his not knowing that Britain had nuclear weapons, apparently failing to mask his surprise when he was informed of the fact by a British official during a meeting with then-prime minister Theresa May in 2018.
The country began testing nukes at the outset of the Cold War in 1952.
Here’s Graig Graziosi with the full story.
Angry Trump hits back at Bolton as 'disgruntled boring fool'
Although there’s plenty more where that came, let’s give the president his right to reply.
Trump gave a soft soap phone interview to his friend Sean Hannity of Fox News last night in which he angrily hit back at Bolton, saying: “He broke the law. This is highly classified information and he did not have approval... He was a washed up guy. I gave him a chance’
He went further on Twitter labelling the veteran hawk a “Wacko” and “a disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war.”
Andrew Naughtie has more fire and fury.
Trump obsessed with sending CD of Elton John's 'Rocket Man' to Kim Jong-un, says Bolton
Back to it - and here's Justin Vallejo on one of the most extraordinary and petty tales Bolton has to tell on the president's determination to humiliate the Pyongyang dictator over his defiance of the international community by persisting with nuclear missile testing.
Trump cared little about North Korea's nuclear weapons and treated summit as publicity exercise, alleges ex-national security adviser
John T Bennett has more on the president's dismissive attitude towards the rogue nuclear state, which he saw more as a legacy issue for himself than a cause to be addressed in the best interests of humanitarianism.
Allegation Trump endorsed mass detention of Chinese Uighurs emerges on same day he signs bill threatening sanctions over their repression
Back to China, where Bolton says Trump had no problem with Beijing's efforts to round up persecuted Uighur Muslim minority into concentration camps for "re-education", calling it "Exactly the right thing to do" during his Osaka meeting with Xi last summer.
Incredibly, Trump signed legislation YESTERDAY calling for sanctions against China over its repression and mass detention of the group.
The bill, which Congress passed with only one "no" vote, was intended to send a strong message on human rights to the Xi administration.
The United Nations estimates that more than a million Muslims have been detained in camps in the Xinjiang region. The US State Department has accused Chinese officials of subjecting Muslims to torture, abuse "and trying to basically erase their culture and their religion", although China denies mistreatment and says the camps provide vocational training.
Here's Phil Thomas and Justin Vallejo with more.
Joe Biden condemns Trump over John Bolton allegations and coronavirus
"If these accounts are true, it's not only morally repugnant, it's a violation of Donald Trump's sacred duty to the American people," said the president's Democratic challenger yesterday, responding to the extracts published from The Room Where it Happened so far.
Biden has also been taking the sword to the self-styled "wartime president" over his Covid-19 denialism.
Oliver O'Connell has more from the candidate.
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