Within 24 hours, a pair of wildly different Trump speeches ADVERTISING Within 24 hours, a pair of wildly different Trump speeches RENO, Nev. (AP) — It was a tale of two Trumps in the desert southwest. Within a 24-hour span,
Within 24 hours, a pair of wildly different Trump speeches
RENO, Nev. (AP) — It was a tale of two Trumps in the desert southwest.
Within a 24-hour span, President Donald Trump delivered one speech in which he tore into the media and members of his own party, and a second in which he called for national unity and love. The about-face seemed to reflect the president’s real-time internal debate between calls for moderation and his inclination to let loose.
On Wednesday, the president spoke in measured tones and stuck to his prepared remarks as he praised veterans at an American Legion conference in Nevada as examples for a nation yearning to set aside its differences.
“We are here to hold you up as an example of strength, courage and resolve that our country will need to overcome the many challenges that we face,” he said.
The night before, the president cut loose in Arizona, defying instructions from his aides to stick to the script and angrily renewing his fight with the press over its coverage of his comments about the race-fueled violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Wrapped: Charlottesville covers Confederate statues in black
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Workers in Charlottesville draped giant black covers over two statues of Confederate generals on Wednesday to symbolize the city’s mourning for a woman killed while protesting a white nationalist rally.
The work began around 1 p.m. in Emancipation Park, where a towering monument of Gen. Robert E. Lee on horseback stands. Workers gathered around the monument with a large black drape. Some stood in cherry-pickers and others used ropes and poles to cover the statue as onlookers took photos and video. Some of the crowd cheered as the cover was put in place.
“It’s great. It’s a good start,” said Jamie Dyer, who spoke a short time later from nearby Justice Park, where workers covered a statue of Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. “They do have to go, but it is a start, and I’m glad the city has finally recognized it has to happen on some level.”
Later Wednesday, local media reported that a man with a gun strapped to his leg approached the Lee statue and began cutting the tarp with a knife.
Police asked him to stop, and he complied. He addressed reporters and bystanders, saying he thought it was illegal under state law to cover a war memorial and that doing so amounted to erasing history.
Egypt’s leader, US envoy meet after cut in American aid
CAIRO (AP) — Egypt’s president and foreign minister met with White House adviser Jared Kushner on Wednesday, just hours after the Trump administration cut or delayed hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Cairo over human rights concerns.
Kushner, who is also President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, was in Cairo as part of a Middle East tour aimed at exploring ways to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which last collapsed in 2014.
A modified version of Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry’s schedule had earlier showed the meeting with Kushner cancelled, which was widely seen as a snub in protest at the aid cuts. But Shoukry later sat in on Kushner’s meeting with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and met with the American delegation separately at the Foreign Ministry.
Kushner’s delegation includes Jason Greenblatt, the U.S. envoy for international negotiations, and Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser.
The Trump administration on Tuesday cut nearly $100 million in military and economic aid to Egypt and delayed almost $200 million more in military financing, citing Egypt’s poor human rights record and its crackdown on civic and other non-governmental groups.
Violence in Charlottesville leads to soul-searching at ACLU
NEW YORK (AP) — Faced with an angry backlash for defending white supremacists’ right to march in Charlottesville, the American Civil Liberties Union is confronting a feeling among some of its members that was once considered heresy: Maybe some speech isn’t worth defending.
Cracks in the ACLU’s strict defense of the First Amendment no matter how offensive the speech opened from the moment a counter-protester was killed during the rally in Virginia. Some critics said the ACLU has blood on its hands for persuading a judge to let the Aug. 12 march go forward. An ACLU leader in Virginia resigned, tweeting, “What’s legal and what’s right are sometimes different.”
“This was a real tragedy and we’re all reeling,” said Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s headquarters in New York City. “Charlottesville should be a wake-up call to all of us.”
The backlash, reminiscent of one that followed the ACLU’s 1978 defense of a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb with a large number of Holocaust survivors, set off a tumultuous week of soul-searching and led to a three-hour national staff meeting in which the conflict within the group was aired.
What resulted was an announcement that the ACLU will no longer stand with hate groups seeking to march with weapons, as some of those in Charlottesville did.
AP FACT CHECK: Trump does what he accuses media of doing
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump accused the media of selectively quoting from his remarks about the race-fueled violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, to create a misimpression that he had not unequivocally denounced racist conduct. Then the president turned around and did the same thing himself: At a Tuesday night rally in Phoenix, the president re-read portions of his comments about the violence — but left out the specific phrase that generated all the controversy.
In that statement, which Trump uttered in the hours after the Aug. 12 violence, the president said he condemned “in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides.”
But when Trump read the statement again in Arizona, he left out “many sides.”
