TAKE A JUMP ON TRUMP
Dutch photographers Thomas Mailaender and Erik Kessels are presenting their art installation, ‘Jump Trump’, this weekend at a photographic exhibition in Getxo, Spain. It allows visitors to jump from a trampoline onto a mat with US President Donald Trump’s face printed on it. The exhibitors describe the artwork as ‘interactive, irreverent and irresistible’.
● Former US president Barack Obama assailed President Donald Trump and Republicans on Friday, urging Democrats to deliver a check on the administration’s “abuses of power” and restore a sense of sanity to politics by voting in November’s election.
Obama said Americans were living in dangerous times and accused Republicans of threatening democracy, dividing the country, undermining global alliances and cosying up to Russia.
“In two months we have the chance, not the certainty, but the chance to restore some semblance of sanity to our politics,” he said in a speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “There is actually only one check on bad policy and abuses of power, and that’s you and your vote.”
Both parties are urging their core supporters to get to the polls for the November 6 midterm election, when Democrats need to pick up 23 seats in the House of Representatives and two seats in the Senate to gain majorities in Congress and slam the brakes on Trump’s agenda.
Obama accused Republicans of being unwilling to safeguard democracy or offer a check on Trump’s policies or worst instincts. He said voters would have to do it instead.
“In the end, the threat to our democracy doesn’t just come from Donald Trump or the current batch of Republicans in Congress,” he said. “The biggest threat to our democracy is indifference. The biggest threat to our democracy is cynicism.”
Trump was dismissive of Obama’s speech. “I’m sorry, I watched it but I fell asleep,” he said during a fundraiser in North Dakota.
The November election has been seen as a referendum on Trump, who has fulfilled campaign promises to cut taxes and regulations but who faces a special counsel probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and growing questions about his fitness for office.
Obama ridiculed Trump for taking credit for economic gains that began under Obama, and said Trump was exploiting cultural fears and economic anger.
“It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause,” Obama said.
Obama had been reluctant to criticise his successor although he appeared to chide Trump, without naming him, in a eulogy for the late Republican senator John McCain.
But he dropped that political reticence in Illinois, the state where he launched his own political career, saying a vote against Republicans could restore “honesty and decency and lawfulness” to government.
“If you thought that elections don’t matter, I hope these last two years have corrected that impression,” he said.
If Democrats win control of one or both chambers in Congress in November, they would be able not just to stymie Trump’s agenda but to launch investigations of the Trump administration.
Trump told supporters in Montana on Thursday that Republicans needed to maintain control of Congress to stave off possible impeachment proceedings against him.
“If it [impeachment] does happen, it’s your fault, because you didn’t go out to vote,” Trump told the rally.