‘Whatever it takes, we need a wall’: Why the final Donald Trump crisis of 2018 isn't going away in 2019
Nikhila Natrajan • 6 years agoWhat’s Donald Trump playing at with his $5 billion demand for a wall and shutting down the government - the third in the last 12 months - in Christmas season? For one, this has echoes of what his chief strategist and inscrutable mastermind of the 2016 campaign Steve Bannon told a reporter after Trump pulled off the greatest political upset in American history: "Brother, Hollywood doesn't make movies where the bad guys win" - a riff on Gregory Peck's lines from Twelve O'Clock High.
8-year-old Guatemala boy dies in US immigration custody as Donald Trump continues railing about border wall
• 6 years agoAn 8-year-old boy from Guatemala died in government custody in New Mexico early Tuesday, U.S. immigration authorities said, marking the second death of an immigrant child in detention this month.
Scared and isolated, Donald Trump drags US Govt to shutdown, gambles with jobs of 800,000 employees over demand of $5 bn for border wall
Nikhila Natrajan • 6 years agoMore than 400,000 US government employees will go without pay, 380,000 will be put on leave without pay as America hurtles towards a partial government shutdown days before the Christmas holidays and all this is happening over another Donald Trump tantrum. That's the short story of a wild and endless day in Washington DC when many stunned lawmakers who had just gone home for the holidays had to scramble back on flights and trains to the capital city to cast their votes for a downright ridiculous Trump negotiation drama.
US envoy to anti-Islamic State coalition Brett McGurk resigns in protest over Donald Trump's Syria withdrawal
• 6 years agoMcGurk, appointed to the post by President Barack Obama in 2015 and retained by Trump, said in his resignation letter that the militants were on the run, but not yet defeated, and that the premature pullout of American forces from Syria would create the conditions that gave rise to Islamic State
James Mattis quits, shutdown looms, stocks dive; are the wheels coming off Donald Trump presidency?
Nikhila Natrajan • 6 years agoThe wheels are coming off the Donald Trump presidency. In one of the wildest days yet in the Trump era, Defence Secretary Jim Mattis quit exactly 24 hours after Trump's shock withdrawal of US troops from Syria - the final straw for Mattis after a string of run-ins with the US president over many months.
'Cannot protect interests without maintaining alliances': Read James Mattis' full resignation letter to President Donald Trump
Fp Staff • 6 years agoJames Mattis, perhaps the most respected foreign policy official in Trump's administration, will leave by the end of February after two tumultuous years struggling to soften and moderate the US president's abruptly shifting policies.