Monday, April 11, 2022

Trump Is Basking In Surreal, Adoring Mar-a-Lago Bubble, Says Reporter

Mary Papenfuss
Mon, April 11, 2022

Former President Donald Trump is spending his days in a surreal Mar-a-Lago fairy tale of worshipful fans who applaud him every time he enters a room, a reporter said Sunday.

“He is the center of the universe there,” said Washington Post journalist Josh Dawsey, who interviewed Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week.

“What’s striking there is he has hordes of people who surround him every night ... either working for him or paying to be there, or wanting his endorsements or having fundraisers there,” Dawsey told MSNBC host Yasmin Vossoughian.

“He really basks in adulation there every single night. Every time he walks in the room everyone stands up and cheers. When he leaves, everyone stands up and cheers,” recounted Dawsey



The rarified atmosphere is not, however, reality, Dawsey pointed out.

“His presidency was a quite polarizing presidency. He had his deep and loyal supporters, but struggled to convert independents and moderates and others. That’s why he was a one-term president,” Dawsey said.

“But down there, everyone around him loves him. It’s kind of a surreal place to be where [with] everybody in every room, he is the center of the universe there.”

Trump — and his children — have in the past confused the adulation of those around the former president to his popularity in the entire nation. It doesn’t help his return to reality that Trump often grossly exaggerates crowd sizes at his rallies.

Early this year he pointed to the size of a rally in Arizona as proof that he couldn’t possibly have lost the presidential election there — even though such crowds are self-selected Trump supporters, and represent a minuscule fraction of American, even Arizona, voters.

He claimed at that rally that cars stretched out for “25 miles” to see him. “That’s not somebody that lost an election,” he declared.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Trump accused of being ‘really stupid or really corrupt’ over missing gift records


Nathan Place
Sun, April 10, 2022

Government ethics experts say they are stunned after the US State Department said records are missing of the gifts Donald Trump received while he was president.

“It’s flagrant and it looks terrible,” Richard Painter, who served as former president George W Bush’s top ethics lawyer, told The New York Times. “Either it was really stupid or really corrupt.”

Federal officials are required by law to inform the State Department of any gifts from foreign governments worth more than $415. But as the Trump administration made its chaotic exit from the White House in January 2021, it allegedly neglected to send the list.

As a result, the State Department said in its report, much of the required data is missing – specifically, all gifts to all White House officials for the entire year of 2020.

In a footnote, the department explained that the Chief of Protocol – who in 2020 was a Trump appointee – did not gather the information.

“The State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol did not submit the request for data to all reporting agencies prior to January 20, 2021 (at which time there was a change in administrations),” the report says. “In addition, the Executive Office of the President did not, prior to that date, transmit to the Secretary of State a listing of all statements filed during the preceding year, 2020. As a result, the data required to fully compile a complete listing for 2020 is unavailable.”

An alternative explanation might be that White House officials received no gifts at all in 2020 – but as Times reporter Michael Schmidt pointed out, this is not the case.



“Despite the pandemic in 2020 at least a dozen foreign leaders visited the White House and Trump traveled abroad to India and Switzerland,” Mr Schmidt tweeted. “In India he received a bust of Gandhi, a sculpture of Gandhi’s famous ‘three monkeys’ metaphor and a spinning wheel. None were listed.”

Gifts to Trump officials outside the White House – such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former secretary of defense Mark Esper, and former CIA director Gina Haspel – are accounted for in the report.

But gifts to Mr Trump himself, his family, former vice president Mike Pence, and other White House staff members are all missing.

The Independent has reached out to Mr Trump’s spokesperson for comment.

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