Trump retweets doctored GIF of his golf ball hitting Hillary Clinton
From wire services
It’s a big week for President Donald Trump. He will appear before the U.N. General Assembly, the first such visit of his presidency. The session comes at a time when the United States is on the cusp of crucial foreign policy decisions: North Korea continues to provoke by firing missiles over Japan, and Mr. Trump plans to refine his overall strategy on Iran.
Serious work beckons, but so does Twitter, and on Sunday morning the temptation to share a fan’s GIF that showed Mr. Trump golfing and the ball striking Hillary Clinton proved too much to resist.
The retweet stoked outrage online, generating more than 11,000 replies, many of which condemned the president’s promotion of violent imagery toward Ms. Clinton, who — as a former first lady — has lifetime Secret Service protection.
“Trump chipping away at the dignity of the office, one tweet at a time. He knows this stuff is going into history books for all time, right?” one Twitter user posted.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., appearing on ABC’s “This Week, said: “It’s distressing to have a president that frankly will tweet and retweet things asjuvenile as that.”
But it was also celebrated by Trump supporters, who admonished “crooked Hillary” and accused Mr. Trump’s critics of lacking a sense of humor.
“Get a sense of freaking humor. Everyone on the LEFTdefended stupid Kathy Griffin when she held a “severed” head & said it was comedy!” one wrote.
A former Trump campaign strategist, David Urban, brushed off the controversy. “Retweets do not equal endorsements,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The GIF, which was created by splicing two videos, shows Mr. Trump swinging a golf club and the ball striking Ms. Clinton in the back as she boards a plane, knocking her forward. The imagery of Ms. Clinton tripping in the aircraft’s doorway was from 2011, shot when she boarded a flight in Yemen.
It is not the first time one of the president’s tweets has made light of violence. Last month he retweeted an image of a train running over a cartoon person with a CNN logo over their head, which was later described by a White House official as a mistake and deleted. In July, Mr. Trump posted a video of him body slamming a man with a CNN logo superimposed over his head.
The post with the golfing GIF on Sunday was just one of several eclectic tweets that Mr. Trump sent. In one, he referred to Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, as “Rocket Man.”
‘Chain migration’ targeted
Just over a day after agreeing with Democratic leaders to make an immigration deal, Mr. Trump on Friday took a hard line against allowing close family members to follow new immigrants, a position that could stymie bipartisanlegislation.
Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that any immigration bill cannot include “chain migration,” a term used by advocates of limiting immigrants to criticize how new U.S. citizens can sponsor family membersfor legal status.
Downsized monuments?
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has recommended that Mr.Trump modify 10 national monumentscreated by his immediate predecessors, including shrinking the boundaries of at least four western sites — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante in Utah, along with Nevada's Gold Butte and Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou — according to a copy of the report obtained by The WashingtonPost.
Environmentalists win
Handing a major victory to environmentalists, a court cast doubt Friday on a longstanding U.S. government argument that blocking federal coal leasing won’t affect climate change because the coal could simply be mined elsewhere.
Obamacare repeal effort
The Congressional Budget Office is in the process of estimating the cost and coverage impact of the GrahamCassidy bill that would devolve federal health care spending to the states, according to a senior Senate Republican aide.