Trump takes flak from all sides
President’s tweets about retailer come as he criticises judges
President Donald Trump was widely criticised yesterday for using his presidential Twitter account to hit out over family business matters, while his attack on judges ruling on his immigration ban reportedly drew words of frustration from the man he has nominated to join the Supreme Court.
All that came on a day when Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions, was confirmed despite fierce Democratic opposition to the Alabama Republican over his record on civil rights and immigration.
Trump drew fire from ethics lawyers with a Twitter attack on Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom after it pulled his daughter Ivanka Trump’s line of clothing.
“My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom,” the President tweeted. “She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!” Posted first on his personal account, it was retweeted more than 6000 times in less than an hour. It was also retweeted by the official @POTUS account.
Though Trump has tweeted about companies such as Boeing, Carrier and General Motors, ethics experts say this time was different: It involved a business run by his daughter, which raises conflict-of-interest concerns.
Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert, said the Nordstrom tweet was problematic because other retailers may think twice now about dropping the Ivanka Trump brand for fear of getting criticised publicly by the President. She said it was especially disturbing that Trump retweeted his message on the official White House account.
“The implicit threat was that he will use whatever authority he has to retaliate against Nordstrom, or anyone who crosses his interest,” said Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Trump yesterday also accused the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals which is considering his immigration and refugee executive order of being “so political”. During the weekend, the President labelled a judge who ruled on his executive order a “so-called judge” and referred to the ruling as “ridiculous”.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, who yesterday met Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, said Gorsuch described the President’s comments as “demoralising and disheartening”.
Democrats had opposed the appointment of Sessions, casting him as too cosy with Trump and too harsh on immigrants. They asserted he wouldn’t do enough to protect voting rights of minorities, protections for gays and the legal right of women to obtain an abortion. They fear immigrants in the country illegally won’t receive due process with Sessions as the top law enforcement officer.
Senator Elizabeth Warren was given a rare rebuke on Wednesday for quoting Coretta Scott King, widow of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King jnr, in her 1986 criticism of Sessions.
King wrote that as an acting federal prosecutor in Alabama, Sessions used his power to “chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens”. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held that the Massachusetts Democrat had run afoul of rules about impugning a fellow senator.
Sessions’ nomination to a federal judgeship was rejected three decades ago by the Senate Judiciary Committee after it was alleged that as a federal prosecutor he had called a black attorney “boy” and had said organisations like the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union were un-American.
At his hearing last month, Sessions said he had never harboured racial animus.