Trump news – live: Ridicule as president and Modi take it in turns to mispronounce names, as right-wing SCOTUS wife attempts to ‘purge’ White House

Trump White House bracing for HR McMaster’s new memoir

With John Bolton’s book forthcoming next month – if the White House ever finishes its review process – Trump is now facing the prospect of another former national security adviser turning out a potenitally damning memoir.

HR McMaster’s Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World is published on 28 April and HarperCollins says it will be a “groundbreaking reassessment of America’s place in the world, drawing from McMaster’s long engagement with these issues, including 34 years of service in the US army with multiple tours of duty in battlegrounds overseas”.

Both Bob Woodward in Fear and Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig in A Very Stable Genius document McMaster’s combative relationship with the president, with Trump said to have taken umbrage at the lieutenant general’s “lecturing style” during briefings.

(AP)

Trump admits Bernie Sanders would be toughtest Democrat to beat

Speaking en route to the Taj Mahal a little while ago, Trump told reporters he believes Bernie Sanders would be his toughest opponent should he win the Democratic nomination.

“I actually think he would be tougher than most of the other candidates because he is like me but I have a much bigger base,” the president said of Sanders while observing the race remains tight.

“It could go to the convention, it really could”, he commented, before reverting to one of favourite conspiracy theories about the opposition. 

“They are going to take it away from Crazy Bernie. They are not going to let him win,” Trump said.

Apparently not especially blown away by that Wonder of the World, Trump has since sloped off to his hotel and resumed ramming out retweets from the GOP, the White House and Stephanie Grisham.

This is what the president had to say about tjhe growing threat represented by Sanders after his Nevada win at the weekend.

 

Roger Stone calls for removal of judge who sentenced him to prison

Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?

 

Sanders is Jewish but has attacked both AIPAC and the Benjamin Netanyahu government in the past.

“I am not anti-Israel,” he told CNN at a town hall event last year. “But the fact of the matter is Netanyahu is a right-wing politician who I think is treating the Palestinian people extremely unfairly.

“What I believe is not radical. I just believe that the United States should deal with the Middle East on a level playing field basis.”

AIPAC has since responded angrily.

Here’s Clark Mindock on the candidate’s remarks on the president over the weekend.

 

Trump accuses Adam Schiff of leaking claim that Russia is helping Bernie Sanders

Donald Trump has accused House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff of leaking claims that Russia is trying to help Bernie Sanders win the Democratic nomination.

He used it to push his theory that the party will attempt to cheat the self-described democratic socialist out of victory: “What it could be is, you know, the Democrats are treating Bernie Sanders very unfairly and it sounds to me like a leak from Adam Schiff because they don’t want Bernie Sanders to represent them.

 

Nearly two-thirds of voters expect Trump to win re-election, poll finds

A new CBS News survey has found that two-thirds of voters expect the president to beat his Democratic challenger in November.

Some 31 per cent of voters expected Trump to definitely win a second term, while 34 per cent said he “probably” would, the two answers together beating the 35 per cent who were confident of his defeat.

Among Republicans, 90 per cent felt he would win while 35 per cent of Democrats had to concede it’s looking likely at present.

But the left’s broad pessimism was contradicted on a candidate-by-candiate basis, with the same poll forecasting the president losing to Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.

President and first lady tour Taj Mahal 

The Trumps are visiting the celebrated 17th century mausoleum at present and have brought their awful entourage along to bask in its marbled splendour.

National security adviser denies Russian election interference evidence

On the Sunday shows yesterday, Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien told George Stephanopoulos: I haven’t seen any intelligence that Russia is doing anything to attempt to get President Trump re-elected.”

Dave Maclean has this on the administration’s ongoing refusal to take seriously an issue that threatens to again warp the US election result and benefit the incumbent against his Democratic challenger.

 

Meanwhile, back in DC, the president has reportedly assembled a network of allies to help him remove anti-Trump “deep state” operatives he believes are working against him in the US government, with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Republican Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen understood to be involved in the effort.

Rory Sullivan has this report on the latest lurch towards Nixonian paranoia as the post-acquittal revenge spree cranks up a gear.

 

Trump fails to condemn Modi’s ‘anti-Muslim’ citizenship law

The president just praised India as “a democratic, peaceful country” in his address to the rally this morning, failing to condemn what critics say is New Delhi’s attempt to undermine the country’s secular constitution and marginalise its Muslim minority.

Adam Withnall has this assessment of a pandering speech.

 

How the Trumps are being shown a deeply sanitised version of India on their first visit

Trump has certainly embraced his flattering reception, tweeting a greeting in Hindi…

…and relishing the Bollywood memes being assembled in tribute:

President hails ‘very tough’ Narendra Modi

The president and first lady had already been treated to a warm welcome as India poured on the pageantry at the start of a whirlwind 36-hour visit meant to reaffirm US-India ties while providing enviable overseas imagery for a president in a re-election year.

After Air Force One touched down in Ahmedabad, Trump’s motorcade slowly drove down streets lined with hundreds of thousands of onlookers. Dancers in traditional attire and drummers lined the red carpet rolled out at the stairs of the presidential aircraft as Trump basked in the raucous reception that has eluded him on many foreign trips, some of which have featured massive protests and icy handshakes from world leaders.

The sun-baked city bustled as Trump arrived, as the streets teemed with people eager to catch a glimpse of the American president. Newly cleaned roads and planted flowers dotted the roads amid hundreds of billboards featuring the president and his wife Melania.

His first stop was Gandhi’s home, where Trump donned a prayer shawl and took off his shoes to create the incongruous image of a grandiose president quietly walking through the humble ashram. He inspected the loom used by the famed pacifist and looked at statues of monkeys representing Gandhi’s mantra of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” before departing for a far more boisterous setting: the mega-rally at the world’s largest cricket stadium.

The “Namaste Trump” event was packed with revelers, many of whom sported Trump and Modi masks, as they sat in 80-degree temperatures and listened to both traditional Indian music and pop songs including “Macho Man” by the Village People ahead of the leaders’ arrival .The gathering was in part a repayment for the “Howdy Modi” rally held in Houston last year that drew 50,000 people.

Taking to the podium, Trump dished out lavish praise for the country, hailing its economic progress and thriving Bollywood film industry and celebrating the authoritarian prime minister as “very tough”, winning a huge cheer from the crowd in pledging to snuff out the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism”.

Here’s John T Bennett on the context for the trip.