Tag: President-elect Donald Trump

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Ben Carson as the next secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and, former disgraced HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson supports and vouches for Ben Carson to take his old job, according to the Dallas Morning News. Having Jackson endorse Carson is troubling. In May 2004, as secretary of HUD, Alphonso Jackson made headlines across the nation when he stated “being poor is a state of mind, not a condition.”

If you care about everything from civil and human rights to economic justice and climate survival, Trump’s impending presidency is terrifying – but the amount of wreckage he can cause depends in part on how people respond. Already, a Dump Trump rebellion is rising up in the streets and online; it’s also worth remembering Trump lost the popular vote, the Senate is close to tied and not filibuster-proof, and things have a way of see-sawing in American politics.

In a Friday interview with The Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump repeated his campaign criticism of U.S. wars in the Middle East and said that he would focus on defeating the Islamic State in Syria and finding common ground with the Syrians and their Russian backers. Both the politics and the material interests of Trump’s top national security advisor, James Woolsey, however, seem counter to Trump’s anti-interventionist stance regarding Syria.