Unnerved by Trump
Son dropped in fallout
presidents for years to come. Shortly before the tweet the Chicago Tribune posted an interview with the company’s CEO, Dennis Muilenberg.
“Anyone who paid attention to the recent campaigns and the election results realises that one of the overarching themes was apprehension about free and fair trade,” Muilenberg told the Tribune’s Robert Reed. Fair trade has helped Boeing, which prides itself on being America’s largest manufacturing exporter.
“Last year, we delivered 495 737s from our factory in Renton, Washington, to customers around the world,” Muilenberg continued, noting that a third of the planes were sent to China. “This phenomenon would have been unimaginable when I started at the company in 1985.” Those are pointed comments. It was Trump, of course, who robustly criticised free trade during the general election. And it is Trump who, this week, seemed to threaten a trade war with China.
It is not known if Trump was responding to the Tribune story. But Trump’s tweet tanked Boeing’s stock price, albeit only briefly. In 2013, Trump tweeted about having just bought stock in Boeing (“great company!”), but his spokesman said that the President-elect no longer holds stock in Boeing, or anything else, having sold it all in June. The son of the top national security adviser to President-elect Donald Trump was removed from the new administration’s transition team after backing a bogus conspiracy theory that inspired a shooting incident in Washington.
Michael Flynn and his father, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn — Trump’s designated national security adviser — have both used their social media accounts to promote fabricated claims, including allegations that aides to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton were involved in a child prostitution ring.
But the younger Flynn had renewed his support for the baseless allegation even after a North Carolina man armed with an assault rifle arrived at a pizzeria to investigate the fictitious crime. “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story,” Flynn posted on Twitter.
Flynn, 33, has been his father’s chief of staff.