1. Bess Levin: Trump Throws A Fit, Blames “Clueless Jay Powell,” “Crazy Inverted Yield Curve” For Market Sell-Off

On Wednesday, the Dow Jones plunged 800 points after the U.S. bond market flashed a signal that a recession may be on the horizon. Rational people understand that this is largely happening because of persistent fears about Donald Trump’s never-ending trade war with China, in addition to concerns about a global economic slowdown. And then you have the president, who has never once been accused of being rational, smart, or even sane, and who believes that this is all the Federal Reserve’s fault.

“‘The Fed has got to do something!’” he raged on Twitter, quoting the leading lights at Fox. “‘The Fed is the Central Bank of the United States, not the Central Bank of the World’…. The Federal Reserve acted far too quickly, and now is very, very late. Too bad, so much to gain on the upside!

After cutting rates for the first time in more than a decade last month, citing weak manufacturing and business-investment data due to trade-war fears, Wall Street has predicted that the Fed will slash rates at least twice more before the end of the year. If that happens, it’ll largely be because Trump drags his good and easy to win trade war out until at least 2020. Unfortunately, in that case, economists believe it may be impossible to avoid a global downturn, regardless of what the Fed does or how much the president verbally abuses Jerome Powell. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/donald-trump-clueless-jay-powell

2. Eliana Johnson: Trump’s vision meets growing global chaos

Donald Trump had hoped to head into the 2020 campaign season as the world’s consummate deal-maker.

He may instead enter his reelection campaign not just empty-handed, but vulnerable to the charge that his policies have helped sow chaos across the globe.

His trade war with China keeps escalating, with mounting costs to the U.S. economy. Diplomatic overtures to Iran and North Korea have so far failed to yield the president’s desired outcome. Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan, two years in the making, is nowhere to be seen. And America’s retreat from Syria, where the president once boasted he had defeated ISIS, has allowed the terrorist group to regenerate, according to a new Pentagon inspector general’s report.

Trump’s critics see these data points as alarming signs that the president is out of his depth on international affairs, if not complicit in the breakdown of global order. And while his allies enthusiastically support his efforts to squeeze Iran, some are quietly nervous — if not openly scornful — of his policies elsewhere.

“He’s trying to pivot from being sort of a militarist to being a deal-maker and delivering on diplomacy. That’s his sort of political goal going into 2020,” said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “He’s made all of these decisions and choices that are sort of getting him into trouble and he’s having to cope with the decisions and consequences.” https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/08/trump-foreign-policy-peacemaker-1452726

3. Dana Milbank: A worried nation wonders: How can we keep Wayne LaPierre safe?

After two horrific mass shootings, we come together as a nation to confront an urgent question: How are we going to keep Wayne LaPierre safe?

The longtime head of the National Rifle Association, it turns out, is worried sick about his personal safety in this gun culture.

After the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, he and his wife bravely waited out the uproar on the pink-sand beaches of the Bahamas, part of $542,000 in private jet trips and personal items the NRA bought for him. And now, thanks to some delightful reporting by my Post colleagues Carol D. Leonnig and Beth Reinhard, we know that last year’s Parkland massacre left LaPierre so fearful for his personal safety that he tried to have the NRA buy him a $6 million French-chateau-style mansion with nine bathrooms in a gated Dallas-area golf course community.

He told associates he was worried about his safety and thought his Virginia home was too easy for potential attackers to find.

Ultimately, the financially stressed NRA didn’t buy LaPierre the mansion. That’s too bad, because, as the saying goes: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a French chateau.” — Dana Milbank https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-worried-nation-wonders-how-can-we-keep-wayne-lapierre-safe/2019/08/09/3ea6e598-bab5-11e9-bad6-609f75bfd97f_story.html

4. Bridget Read: Well, This Really, Really Doesn’t Sound Good

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released another report on the state of things in the Anthropocene, and this one also falls in the category of Really Not Good, subset: We’re Fucked. It’s about the world’s food supply, which, in short, is very much in peril.

Last year, the IPCC delivered stark predictions about what will happen if industrialized countries fail to rapidly curb greenhouse-gas emissions and global temperatures rise over 1.5 degrees. Now the United Nations body has described how our continued wasteful land- and water-use practices are depleting these resources at potentially crisis-inducing rates. Soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming; places are literally turning into deserts as they dry up.

Agriculture is getting more difficult under climate change, and it’s also making climate change worse. The experts on the panel cited the draining of wetlands, deforestation, and the raising of cattle as practices that contribute untenable amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. What’s more, even some of the innovations devised to combat those gases — planting trees and growing corn to produce ethanol, called bioenergy — will also adversely affect land use, pushing livestock and crops off viable soil.

The bottom line is that drastic changes are needed to mitigate the worst-case scenario, including protecting indigenous populations, aiding farmers in developing countries, and strengthening property rights. The report emphasizes that the world’s most vulnerable populations are already suffering from famine and drought and that migration will only increase as desperate people try to flee their circumstances. The example the authors used is the record numbers of Hondurans, Guatemalans, and El Salvadorans who sought to cross the border between the United States and Mexico between 2010 and 2015, which coincided with an unusual dry period in those countries. There will be climate refugees within our borders too, of course, as rising seas and extreme weather cause mass migration from affected population areas. As one author of the report ominously put it, “People don’t stay and die where they are.” https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/un-releases-scary-new-report-on-climate-change-and-food.html

5. Maggie Haberman: A Divisive Voice Once Again Has Trump’s Ear

As President Trump doubles down on a re-election approach of stoking fear of immigrants, he is once again elevating a voice of validation — and many say racism — that he discovered during his last presidential campaign.

That voice is Katie Hopkins, a far-right British commentator who has made denunciations of migrants and Muslims — and defenses of Mr. Trump — a staple of her public discourse. British headlines have routinely labeled Ms. Hopkins a “racist” and a “bigot” for her views about immigrants.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Trump invoked Ms. Hopkins shortly before a mass shooting that killed 22 in El Paso, where the suspect wrote an anti-immigrant manifesto that echoed Mr. Trump’s inflammatory language about migrants.

Ms. Hopkins, a former Sun and Daily Mail columnist who appeared on the British version of “The Apprentice,” has become well known in Britain for her provocative views.

In a 2015 column, she compared migrants to cockroaches. And after a suicide bombing killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017, Ms. Hopkins tweeted that “we need a final solution” to the terrorism problem. She later deleted the post.

Sowing fear of Muslims — and calling out other politicians for not using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” — was a bedrock of Mr. Trump’s run to the presidency in 2016. In an interview that March, he told the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper that “Islam hates us.” The previous year, he would not rule out a mandatory registry of Muslims in the United States in an interview with Yahoo News and, after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., called for a ban on Muslims entering the country.

Ms. Hopkins’s tweets and commentary were first a source of affirmation for Mr. Trump in his campaign.

“Thank you to respected columnist Katie Hopkins,” Mr. Trump tweeted in 2015, “for her powerful writing on the U.K.’s Muslim problems.” In another tweet, he said, “The politicians of the U.K. should watch Katie Hopkins,” adding, “Many people in the U.K. agree with me!” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/us/politics/trump-katie-hopkins-tweets.html

6. Andy Kroll: DHS Was Asked What They’re Doing About White Nationalist Terror. They Sent a Report About Environmentalists

In the past three years, despite the rise in recorded hate crimes, the Trump administration has reportedly deemphasized its focus on domestic terrorism and white-nationalist violence: DHS disbanded a domestic terrorism intelligence unit, according to the Daily Beast, and reassigned those analysts to different departments. The move raised questions about how serious the Trump administration was about combating homegrown extremist violence. (CNN reported on Thursday that the White House had “rebuffed” efforts by DHS to put a greater emphasis on domestic terrorism in the most recent National Counterterrorism Strategy, which lays out the administration’s priorities in fighting terrorism at home and overseas.)

As if its letter wasn’t confusing enough, DHS attached to its denial an official report — about “suspected environmental rights extremists.” The May 2017 “Field Analysis Report,” jointly produced by DHS and several state-level intelligence centers, accuses pipeline protesters of exploiting “Native American causes” to benefit their “own violent agenda” to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It documents a series of incidents in which protesters allegedly briefly shut down pipelines along the U.S.-Canada border; fired a gun several times into a portable toilet and a backhoe; and sabotaged heavy construction equipment on several pipeline construction sites. (American Oversight provided the response letter and the report to Rolling Stone.) https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/white-nationalist-extremist-trump-dhs-environmentalist-869090/

7.  Vera Bergengruen and W.J. Hennigan: ’We Are Being Eaten From Within.’ Why America Is Losing the Battle Against White Nationalist Terrorism

When you think of a terrorist, what do you see? For more than a generation, the image lurking in Americans’ nightmares has resembled the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: an Islamic jihadist. Not a 21-year-old white supremacist from a prosperous Dallas suburb.

But long before that young man drove to El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 3 and allegedly murdered at least 22 people at a Walmart crammed with back-to-school shoppers, it was clear that white nationalists have become the face of terrorism in America. Since 9/11, white supremacists and other far-right extremists have been responsible for almost three times as many attacks on U.S. soil as Islamic terrorists, the government reported. From 2009 through 2018, the far right has been responsible for 73% of domestic extremist-related fatalities, according to a 2019 study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). And the toll is growing. More people–49–were murdered by far-right extremists in the U.S. last year than in any other year since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in July that a majority of the bureau’s domestic-terrorism investigations since October were linked to white supremacy.

Yet the nation’s leaders have failed to meet this menace. In more than a dozen interviews with TIME, current and former federal law-enforcement and national-security officials described a sense of bewilderment and frustration as they watched warnings go ignored and the white-supremacist terror threat grow. Over the past decade, multiple attempts to refocus federal resources on the issue have been thwarted. Entire offices meant to coordinate an interagency response to right-wing extremism were funded, staffed and then defunded in the face of legal, constitutional and political concerns. https://time.com/5647304/white-nationalist-terrorism-united-states/

8. Dahlia Lithwick: Trump’s Photo-Op With the Orphaned El Paso Baby Was the Smallest Moment of His Presidency

It took a tiny baby to reveal how small Donald Trump really is.

The president’s trip to Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, this week, ostensibly undertaken to comfort the mourners and the injured in the wake of two horrifying mass murder sprees that left at least 31 people dead and many more injured, went terribly, terribly wrong. The Washington Post observed on Thursday that inside the White House, the trip was generally seen as “not ideal,” in the words of one senior administration official.

Having pledged to spend the trip unifying the nation, President Donald Trump opted to comfort the grieving by attacking Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley for misrepresenting his reception at a hospital in Dayton, something neither of them actually did. He also spent Wednesday morning tweeting conspiracy theories about the Dayton shooter. Trump was evidently fuming on the return trip to Washington that video of his consolation and empathy tour had not been released fast enough; that he wasn’t getting “credit” for his compassion, prompting Dan Scavino to tweet that he was greeted as a “ROCK STAR.” Then, independent video surfaced Thursday of Trump comforting medical staff in an El Paso hospital by bragging about his crowd size at a February rally. “That was some crowd,” Trump said. “We had twice the number outside. And then you had this crazy Beto. Beto had like 400 people in a parking lot, and they said his crowd was wonderful.”

The cherry bomb on top was a photo from first lady Melania Trump’s Twitter account that appeared to feature a grinning president with a 2-month-old infant who was orphaned during the El Paso shooting. The baby’s parents were both killed trying to protect him.

Five of the eight El Paso victims who were still in the hospital reportedly declined to meet with the president, and three were physically unable to. It appears baby Paul was brought back to the hospital by White House staff for the photo-op.

That’s the president, grinning and giving a thumbs-up, as the orphaned child is held out like a trophy. If words weren’t inclined to fail, ghoulish and surreal might serve. This child has no parents because a shooter spouting Trumpist talking points about foreign “invaders” went to El Paso to kill them. And while the president refused to speak to reporters, who were scolded by the White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, in a statement saying that the visits were all “about the victims” and not a “photo op,” hours later, Trump released a campaign-style video of his triumphal comforting tour.

It is clearly a horrifying spectacle of degradation when even consummate soulless showman Anthony Scaramucci is forced to say that the trip proved to be a “catastrophe” for the president, who was incapable of demonstrating the requisite quantum of “compassion” and “empathy” to win the reality show seal of approval. But for all its failures as a television event, Trump’s failure served to remind us how truly small he really is. And maybe that is enough.

Trump is really only good at one thing: being on television. Any event that can be engineered to look like a scene from The Apprentice can be fudged to his advantage. Stadium rallies, press availability from inside the Oval Office, even canned speeches read from a teleprompter can be salvaged; so long as he is essentially only producing a simulacrum of presidenting, he can shift along. But reality confounds him. Take him out from behind the oceans of fawning MAGA hats and put him next to a real survivor of sexual violence, and all the grinning and preening tricks fail him. Put him next to actual heads of state discussing actual international policy, and he sulks and mopes. Oh, he can pull off the photo-op; this is a man made of photo-ops. But time and time again, when he is called on to deal with real people—not glassy superfans but genuine human beings whom he allegedly serves as president—he fails to meet the occasion. The consummate reality-TV president is unerringly confounded by reality.

Americans will soon have to choose whether or not they want to live forever in Donald Trump’s reality—the one in which words don’t matter, and everything is a ratings game, and proximity to the famous and the beautiful is the epitome of a life well lived. If that is the only value left, Donald Trump’s is indeed the presidency perfected. For those of us who still live in reality, the photo-op with the orphaned baby is proof positive that Trump’s is not a big life, or a real life. It’s just smallness, refracted a million times over, which is nevertheless impossibly small. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/trump-photo-melania-el-paso-orphan-baby-photo.html

9. Ed Kilgore: Graham Reminds Us 2020 GOP Victory Means Another Assault on Obamacare

If you were not already convinced of the high-stakes nature of next year’s national election, one of Congress’s most prominent Republican leaders, Senator Lindsey Graham, offered a reminder that his party is coming after your health coverage if it gets in position to try it again, as the Hill reports:

“If we can get the House back and keep our majority in the Senate, and President Trump wins reelection, I can promise you not only are we going to repeal ObamaCare, we’re going to do it in a smart way where South Carolina will be the biggest winner,” Graham said in an interview with a South Carolina radio station.

“We’ve got to remind people that we’re not for ObamaCare.”

The pledge to move some money from godless liberal states to South Carolina is an allusion to a key feature of the bill Graham co-sponsored with Bill Cassidy in 2017, which, among other things, would reward states (in base funding for the new health-care “block grants” it would create) that refused to exercise their option under the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid. More centrally, of course, the Graham-Cassidy bill would make it easy for states to get rid of protections for those with preexisting health conditions and other inconvenient (if immensely popular) provisions of Obamacare.

Reminded that Republicans had failed earlier to abolish Obamacare despite trifecta control of the federal government, Graham hints that today’s 53-47 Republican Senate majority would get ’er done if his party can flip the House: GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Rand Paul (Ky.) and the late Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) all opposed the bill. But Graham insists it would be different next time.

“We were one vote short in the Senate,” Graham said.

Anyone who is focused on the presidential race but not the battle for the Senate and House should be forewarned. Most Republicans will bob and weave and take other evasive actions before addressing their future plans for our health-care system; Graham is bragging about going back to the poisoned well of conservative health-care policy again. If you hear other Republicans begin to talk about it as well, it’s a clear sign they really are planning to make base mobilization their only strategy for 2020. For all we know, Obama birtherism could make a comeback. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/graham-reminds-us-2020-gop-victory-means-obamacare-repeal.html

10. Bess Levin: Trump Hurt, Confused Over Insufficient Praise For El Paso Trip

Despite no one wanting him to come, Donald Trump traveled on Wednesday to El Paso, Texas, where a gunman killed 22 people over the weekend after posting an anti-immigrant manifesto that could’ve been cribbed from one of the president’s rallies. The purpose of the trip was to gin up some good press for Trump after he was largely blamed for inspiring the massacre, but, of course, the poster child for narcissistic personality disorder couldn’t keep it together and act like a human for more than a few minutes. Instead, he used a trip to the hospital where victims were being treated to lash out at Beto O’Rourke, calling the 2020 hopeful “crazy” and lying about one of his favorite subjects: crowd sizes. We know this thanks to a short video of the episode, uploaded by someone at the University Medical Center at El Paso. But apparently, if the president had had his way, there would have been way more footage of him mugging for the cameras and trashing political rivals as people lay dying.

The Washington Post reports that Trump threw a giant hissy fit on Air Force One because news cameras had not accompanied him in the hospital, causing coverage of the visit to be dominated by his foes. According to reporters John Wagner and Josh Dawsey, the president had wanted “pictures and video released immediately” and “asked aides to go defend him,” complaining that he had not gotten sufficient credit for his response to the shooting. (That may have had something to do with the fact that his response was to take zero responsibility for riling people up about an immigrant “invasion,” and to insist his mouth-foaming hate speech “brings people together.”) Yet what Baby Huey hadn’t realized was that the lack of cameras was by design, a plan hatched by nervous aides understandably worried that he wouldn’t be able to go two seconds without, well, acting like himself. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/donald-trump-el-paso-hospital-visit

12. Washington Post Editorial: Misinformation about the 2020 election has already been spread — by Republicans

Domestic actors on both sides of the aisle have been experimenting with social media manipulation ever since Russia taught them how well those tactics can work — from misleading “news” stories to fake Facebook events to trolls stomping around Twitter. These misrepresentations would be troubling in any environment. In an age of warfare over what is real, they are downright dangerous. But, while the government can act against foreign incursions, the First Amendment prevents most attempts to clamp down on information operations carried out by citizens. Political candidates, by and large, have a right to lie, and they have a right to buy up a bunch of bots to pollute platforms with propaganda without voters knowing the difference (except perhaps in California, which as of July 1 has a “bot law” of its own). They just have to choose not to.

Not surprisingly, the president has been a leader in this realm — in the wrong direction. Routine retweeting of fraudulent accounts, along with promotion of distorted video, conspiracy theories and other manufactured narratives, is the least of it. Last month, the Associated Press reported on a series of social media ads for President Trump’s reelection featuring personalities such as “AJ from Texas,” a Hispanic man on a city street. But it turns out AJ is not from Texas, and his name is not AJ. All the president’s supposed supporters were models in stock footage produced overseas. Weeks earlier, the New York Times discovered that a consultant for Mr. Trump’s reelection campaign was publishing smear websites disguised as official pages for Democratic candidates. The most prominent displays GIFs of former vice president Joe Biden touching women and girls alongside blurbs about his opposition to court-ordered busing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/misinformation-about-the-2020-election-has-already-been-spread--by-republicans/2019/08/09/1a9fdd78-b243-11e9-951e-de024209545d_story.html

13. Paul Waldman: The Trump administration ramps up its war on legal immigration

For many years, whenever someone accused Republicans of being anti-immigrant, they would insist that they are actually pro-immigrant and that they opposed only illegal immigration. As long as people come legally, they would say, we welcome them.

So how many Republicans have raised their voices in opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts not only to slash legal immigration but also to push out legal immigrants who are already here?

The administration has all but shut America’s doors to refugees fleeing war, disaster and oppression. They’ve tried to make it impossible to seek asylum if you’re coming from the south. They’ve allowed officials to reject green card applications for trivial paperwork reasons such as a missing blank page, without allowing applicants to fix the errors. They’ve proposed raising immigration filing fees, just to make things more difficult.

And now, they’re following through on a proposal they first suggested not long after President Trump took office and officially unveiled last year, to use a 19th-century “public charge” principle to deny green cards and citizenship to legal immigrants who have ever used a public benefit such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program or food stamps.

We might note that President Trump’s grandfather Friedrich, who immigrated to America at the age of 16 with little education, money or ability to speak English, would almost certainly have been rejected under these standards. That’s true of my ancestors who first came to America, and probably yours, too.

We should also note that the idea that if someone has ever used a public benefit then they won’t ever become a contributing member of society is absurd. As a point of reference, in the wake of the Great Recession, food stamp use peaked at 47.6 million Americans, or almost 1 in 6. There are 60 million Americans on Medicare and 72 million on Medicaid and CHIP. That’s not to mention the more than 150 million people who have employer coverage and therefore get a tax break that amounts to the government paying part of their premiums. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/12/trump-administration-ramps-up-its-war-legal-immigration/

14. Kevin Fitzpatrick: Trump’s Epstein Response: The Clintons Are Definitely Pedophile Murderers

Accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide was shocking enough without factoring in how President Trump might react to it. The commander-in-chief and former Epstein confidant was perhaps uncharacteristically quiet in the weeks following the disgraced financier’s arrest this summer, especially as rumors swirled that Epstein held dirt on some of the world’s most powerful people. How then, would he respond to news of Epstein’s shocking demise?

Why, by accusing a former president and ex-political opponent of subverting his own justice department to arrange Epstein’s murder, of course. That’s just where we are now.

Hours after word of Epstein’s death by suicide arrived, Trump broke any semblance of restraint, indirectly addressing his former Mar-A-Lago buddy-turned-political liability. Rather than issuing a prepared statement, the president opted to retweet self-proclaimed comedian and commentator Terrence K. Williams’s assertion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were behind Epstein’s death.

Trump’s tweets served as yet more evidence of the president’s tendency to embrace unfounded conspiracy theories targeting his political enemies; previously, he winked at intimations that Texas senator Ted Cruz’s father killed JFK, and spent years embracing the racist allegation that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. While the Friday release of court documents related to Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking did place Bill Clinton—and Trump himself—as a passenger on several of Epstein’s flights, there have been precisely zero corroborated links between Epstein’s alleged crimes and Clinton, and nothing suggesting that the Clintons, who for decades have been accused of all manner of criminal conspiracies, could have a hand in Epstein’s death. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/trump-epstein-clinton-conspiracy-theory-retweet

15. Bess Levin: Trump Declares Open Season On Endangered Species

Back in May, a United Nations report revealed that as many as 1 million species—from mammals, to birds, to amphibians, to plants, to marine life—are disappearing at a rate “tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the last 10 million years” due to human activity, and that as many as 1 million are at risk of extinction. That was obviously a call to action for countries to step up their efforts to protect the wildlife that remains, but apparently the Trump administration read it as a different sort of challenge—one to kill off as many species as possible.

On Monday the people who brought you “another Deepwater Horizon spill would be great” announced that it will be gutting the Endangered Species Act, the landmark conservation legislation signed into law by Richard “This Trump Guy‘s Been Great for My Image” Nixon. The new rules, expected to be published in the Federal Register this week and to go into effect 30 days after that, will weaken protections for species classified as “threatened,” make it easier to remove a species from the endangered list, and make it significantly more difficult to consider the impact of climate change on wildlife when determining if a certain species warrants protection, by changing how far into the future the department will look to determine the possibility of a species becoming threatened or extinct. They will “allow economic assessments to be conducted when making determinations,” so that industries like mining and oil and gas can claim that protecting a certain species or its habitat would hurt their operations. (Presumably it would also allow two hunting aficionados to be able to argue that they’d suffer monetary harm should federal protections prevent them from killing off an entire ecosystem to make way for another golf course.)

The administration, of course, is arguing that the changes will help protect more species, its typical M.O. when announcing the gutting of a long-standing regulation. “The act’s effectiveness rests on clear, consistent and efficient implementation,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas lobbyist, said Monday. Others, however, had a slightly different take. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/donald-trump-endangered-species