Month: February 2017

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Trump on Tuesday challenged divided lawmakers and a polarized nation to look past his turbulent early days in office and rally behind the “America First” vision of his history-making campaign. “A new national pride is sweeping across our nation,” Trump declared to a packed House of Representatives at the outset of the hourlong address. The entrepreneur stayed true to many of the core messages of his insurgent and profoundly nationalist candidacy — blaming immigration and global trade for a range of ills, expressing resentment at the burdens of America’s post-World War II global leadership, pushing for dismantling Obamacare — while dropping some of his most inflammatory rhetoric.

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As debate continues to swirl over the mission’s results, President Trump’s acknowledgment of a fallen soldier’s wife was the most emotional moment of his first congressional address. Carryn Owens, whose husband, Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens, was killed in a Yemen raid last month, was moved to tears as Trump praised her husband’s sacrifice. “Ryan died as he lived,” said Trump.

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House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said today that Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the national security adviser fired by President Trump, may have done the country a “big favor” if he signaled to the Russian ambassador that sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama after the Russian cyberattack on Democratic Party officials would be lifted once President Trump took office. The comments by Nunes, a vocal defender of the Trump White House, seemed to be the strongest indication to date that Flynn may have sought to undercut Obama’s actions, giving private assurances to Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, that punitive measures just imposed by the then-president would go away under Trump.

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WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday received a package of options for escalating or transforming the war on ISIS, setting in motion a process that could lead him to expand the presence of American forces fighting the terrorist army on the ground. Defense Secretary James Mattis briefed top national security officials at the White House on the Pentagon-led proposal, which includes military recommendations but also proposals for how to starve the so-called Islamic State of funds and combat the group online, where it has recruited and radicalized perpetrators of attacks in Europe and the United States. It’s not clear when Trump will put his stamp on the undeclared war he inherited from his predecessor, a campaign that has rolled back the rampaging death cult in Iraq but has posted less significant gains in neighboring Syria.

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Former President George W. Bush said that the power of the presidency can be addictive and that an independent media is necessary to keep things in check. “I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy,” Bush said in a “Today” show interview Monday morning. “We need an independent media to hold people like me to account.”

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