NEW YORK — Trump-West 2020?
In a moment that seemed to encapsulate 2018’s social media-driven blurring of celebrity and politics, President Donald Trump tweeted his thanks to rap superstar Kanye West on Wednesday for his recent and perhaps unexpected online support.
“Thank you Kanye, very cool!” the president posted in response to the tweets from West, who called the president “my brother.”
West, the enigmatic hip hop provocateur, posted a series of tweets in support of the president, whom he visited at Trump Tower in December 2016 during the presidential transition.
“You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy,” West wrote Wednesday. “He is my brother. I love everyone. I don’t agree with everything anyone does. That’s what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.”
WASHINGTON — French President Emmanuel Macron drew sharp contrasts with President Donald Trump’s worldview Wednesday, laying out a firm vision of global leadership that rejects “the illusion of nationalism” in a candid counterweight to Trump’s appeals to put “America first.”
In the spotlight of a speech to the U.S. Congress, Macron was courteous but firm, deferential but resolute as he traced the lines of profound division between himself and Trump on key world issues: climate change, trade and the Iran nuclear deal.
A day after the French leader had put on a show of warmth and brotherly affection for Trump at the White House, his blunt speech prizing engagement over isolationism reinforced the French leader’s emerging role as a top defender of the liberal world order.
“We can choose isolationism, withdrawal and nationalism. This is an option. It can be tempting to us as a temporary remedy to our fears,” Macron said. “But closing the door to the world will not stop the evolution of the world. It will not douse but inflame the fears of our citizens.”
Issuing a bleak warning, he urged against letting “the rampaging work of extreme nationalism shake a world full of hopes for greater prosperity.”
HOUSTON — Former President George H.W. Bush was moved out of intensive care and into a regular patient room at a Houston hospital on Wednesday as he recovers from an infection that required his hospitalization a day after his wife’s funeral, a family spokesman said.
The nation’s 41st president is expected to remain at Houston Methodist Hospital for “several more days,” spokesman Jim McGrath said. Bush, who is 93, is being treated for an infection that spread to his blood.
“He is alert and talking with hospital staff, family and friends, and his doctors are very pleased with his progress,” McGrath said in a statement.
He noted that Bush was more focused on the Houston Rockets playoff series against the Minnesota Timberwolves “than anything that landed him in the hospital.” Bush, frequently accompanied by his wife, has long been a fixture at Houston sporting events.
Bush was hospitalized on Sunday, a day after he attended the funeral and burial of his wife, Barbara. Married for 73 years, the Bushes were the longest-married presidential couple in U.S. history. Barbara Bush was 92 when she died on April 17 at their Houston home.
WASHINGTON — A first-of-its-kind intensive count of western Africa gorillas found far more of the apes than conservationists previously thought.
Maybe not for long: The same study found a 19 percent plunge in that gorilla population in just eight years.
Researchers spent a decade trudging through an area of forest that’s about the size of the state of Washington — or Ireland and Scotland combined — looking for lowland gorillas, chimpanzees and nests in what scientists said is the most accurate count for the apes in this primary region where they live, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances .
They put the 2013 population at 362,000 gorillas.
That’s considerably more than the 150,000-to-250,000 estimate from the organization that determines how endangered species are, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Republicans have known for months that their House majority is in genuine peril. But after another bruising showing in a special election, some in the party are reconsidering the once inconceivable notion of losing the Senate.
It’s a sobering possibility, particularly given Republican’ confidence not long ago that they probably would increase their Senate edge after the November vote. Far more Democratic senators are facing re-election in states favorable to Republicans than the other way around. Yet a Republican congressional victory Tuesday in the Phoenix suburbs has set off new alarm bells.
Republican Debbie Lesko won the special House election by 6 percentage points, though Trump captured the district by 21 percentage points in 2016. GOP turnout dropped off, and unlike Republicans’ shocking losses in a Pittsburgh-area House race and an Alabama Senate contest, there was no weak GOP nominee to blame in Arizona.
The only explanation was the most worrisome for the GOP: Trump’s presidency is activating Democrats and demoralizing some Republicans and if that trend continues, trouble is ahead.
From Associated Press