White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow says that President Donald Trump will call for a 5 percent “across the board” cut in domestic government spending in 2020 when he proposes his new budget on Monday.

“It will be a tough budget,” Kudlow told the Fox News Sunday show. “We’re going to do our own caps this year and I think it’s long overdue.”

Kudlow said that “some of these recent budget deals have not been favorable towards spending. So, I think it’s exactly the right prescription.”

Trump’s third budget proposal during his presidency, for the year starting in October, is expected to draw wide opposition from Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans, setting off months of debate just weeks after a record 35-day government shutdown over government spending in the current year was ended.

The recent dispute centered on Trump’s demand for more than $5 billion for construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border to thwart illegal immigration. When Congress rejected Trump’s request, he declared a national emergency to bypass congressional authorization to tap money allocated for other projects to build the wall. Congress is now considering whether to revoke the emergency declaration and 16 states have sued to overturn it.

U.S. news outlets reported Trump will seek at least another $8.6 billion in new wall funding in the 2020 budget. The reports said the budget cuts will not affect popular programs providing health care funding and pensions for older Americans, but will pare other funding for domestic programs while boosting defense outlays.

Kudlow said he expects a new fight over border wall funding.

But he contended that Trump has justified his call for the wall’s construction even though surveys in the U.S. show that a majority of voters oppose it.

“I would just say that the whole issue of the wall and border security is a paramount of importance,” Kudlow said. “We have a crisis down there. I think the president has made that case effectively. It’s a crisis of economics, it’s a crisis of crime and drugs, it’s a crisis of just of humanity.”

For years, U.S. presidents and Congress have squabbled over the budgets, what to spend taxpayer dollars on and the size of the annual deficits, often hundreds of billions of dollars that add to the country’s long-term debt of more than $22 trillion. The current budget is more than $4.4 trillion, with a deficit of about $1 trillion expected, largely because of tax cuts Congress approved a year ago at Trump’s behest.

There are signs the U.S. economy, which grew at a 2.9 percent pace last year, is slowing, but Kudlow said he was not worried by some predictions that say the American economy, the world’s largest, will only advance between 1 and 2 percent in the first three months of the year and that the overall advance for 2019 will be just above 2 percent.

“I’m not going to score it just yet,” Kudlow said. “I’ll take the over on that forecast. As long as we keep our policies intact, low tax rates for individuals and businesses, across the board deregulation, lighten the paperwork, let small businesses breathe and get a good rate of return. The president has ended the war on business. The president has provided incentives for economic growth. we’ve opened up the energy sector. Our policies are strong and I think the growth rate this coming year will exceed these estimates just as they have last year.”

He added, “If the markets were overwhelmingly worried about our budgets and our spending and our deficits, you would see that interest rate rise and be a greater penalty. I don’t see it right now. Long run, we do want to reduce the burden of spending and borrowing, absolutely.”

The U.S. added just 20,000 new jobs in February, but Kudlow described the figure as “a very fluky number,” attributing the weak hiring to the partial government shutdown that ended in late January.

Kudlow said the U.S. is “making good progress” in ongoing trade talks with China although an agreement has not yet been reached.

“As the president said,  across the board, the deal has to be good for the United States, for our workers and our farmers and our manufacturers, got to be good,” Kudlow said. “It’s got be fair and reciprocal. It has to be enforceable. That’s an important point.”
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Clashes and fierce fighting are being reported in northeastern Syria, where U.S.-backed forces say their final assault on the Islamic State terror group enclave of Baghuz is underway.

A spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces made the announcement on social media Sunday, writing the offensive to wipe out the last remnant of the terror group’s self-declared caliphate resumed at 6 p.m. local time.

Earlier, he tweeted the last chance for any fighters or civilians still holding out in the small path of land on the banks of the Euphrates River to leave had come and gone.

“The timeline that we give it for ISIS to surrender themselves is over,” the SDF’s Mustafa Bali wrote, using an acronym for the terror group.

The SDF is “ready now to start and finish what is left in ISIS hands,” he added.

Officials with both the SDF and the United States are expecting a difficult battle over the collection of tents and wrecked buildings spanning no more than 1.6 square kilometers on the outskirts of the northeastern Syrian town of Baghuz.

They say IS has been using a network of tunnels, caves and trenches to hide and launch counter attacks. They describe the tunnel system as complex, extending possibly for more than two kilometers, and rigged with explosives and booby traps.

There are also questions about how many IS fighters are left to defend the last shred of the terror group’s self-declared caliphate.

In late February, SDF officials estimated that no more than 1,000 people remained the bombed-out farming community on the banks of the Euphrates River, including perhaps 300 of the terror group’s most hardened and devoted fighters.

But as more than 20,000 civilians and fighters have emerged from the area to surrender over the past week, taking advantage of a brief cease-fire, they have been forced to reassess their estimates. Officials now say it is possible thousands of IS fighters are still there, prepared to fight to the death.

“We have been consistently wrong as have our SDF [Syrian Democratic Force] partners on how big this is,” a senior U.S. defense official said Friday.

“The number of civilians coming out of Baghuz has exceeded any prediction of humanitarian actors,” Hedinn Halldorsson, with the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Damascus, told VOA late last week.

Yet as surprising as the numbers have been, U.S. defense officials do not believe it is an accident or a happenstance of the campaign to liberate this part of Syria from IS rule.

“What we are seeing now is not the surrender of ISIS as an organization but a calculated decision,” the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Gen. Joseph Votel, told U.S. lawmakers Thursday.

He, and other officials, warn IS’ goal is to preserve as much of the group’s capabilities as possible as it completes a transition from an almost traditional army to a clandestine insurgency, counting on every man, woman and child to do their part.

“The vast majority of these are assessed not to be innocent civilians,” the senior defense official said of the thousands of stragglers who evacuated Baghuz in recent days.

The prolonged battle to wrest Baghuz from the control of IS has played out as U.S. President Donald trump has repeatedly declared victory over IS and its caliphate.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” he tweeted Dec. 19, 2018, adding in a video released by the White House that “we have beaten them and we have beaten them badly.”

Most recently, on February 28, he told troops at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska of the self-declared caliphate’s demise, “You kept hearing it was 90 percent, 92 percent, the caliphate in Syria. Now it’s 100 percent.”

“We have the whole thing,” he added.

Trump’s national security adviser defended the president’s comments Sunday.

“The president has been, I think, as clear as clear can be when he talks about the defeat of the ISIS territorial caliphate,” Bolton said told ABC News’ “This Week.” “He has never said that the elimination of the territorial caliphate means the end of ISIS in total. We know that’s not the case.”

“We know right now that there are ISIS fighters scattered still around Syria and Iraq and that ISIS itself is growing in other parts of the world,” Bolton added. “The ISIS threat will remain”

Despite losing administrative control over almost all the land it once held in Syria and Iraq, U.S. defense officials warns IS still has “tens of thousands” of fighters working either as part of sleeper cells or as part of an active, clandestine insurgency.

A series of reports issued starting last year warned IS could have as many as 30,000 followers and fighters in Syria and Iraq, with officials cautioning they remain “well-positioned” to rebuild a physical caliphate.
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The White House said Sunday it does not “have any illusions” about whether North Korea is preparing to resume missile testing, but refused to assess commercial satellite imagery suggesting Pyongyang is assembling a new rocket.

National security adviser John Bolton told ABC News the U.S. watches North Korea “constantly,” but added, “I’m not going to speculate on what that commercial satellite imagery shows.”

The Feb. 22 imagery seems to show new North Korean missile activity at an assembly operation, but Bolton said the U.S.”relies on its own” satellite surveillance and draws its conclusions from those images.

“We see exactly what they’re doing,” he said. “We look every day at the intelligence. I don’t want to get into speculation as to what they’re doing.”

After last month’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, U.S. President Donald Trump said he trusted Kim’s pledge to him that he would not resume nuclear or missile testing.

Bolton said that Trump “is confident in his relations with Kim Jong Un.”

Asked about the commercial satellite images on Friday, Trump said he would be “very disappointed” if North Korea resumed nuclear testing. He said he has greatly improved U.S. relations with North Korea during his time in office.

“Look, when I came in,” he said, “under the Obama administration, North Korea was a disaster. You were going to war, folks, whether you know it or not. . . . I inherited a mess.”

He continued, “Right now you have no testing, you have no nothing. Let’s see what happens, but I would be very disappointed if I saw testing.”

North Korean state media said for the first time on Friday that the summit late last month made no advances and its people were blaming the U.S. for the lack of an agreement.

Trump and Kim met in Vietnam in a summit meant to reach an agreement on North Korean denuclearization. But the meeting collapsed over an impasse over how many weapons sites North Korea would shut down and the extent of economic sanctions relief the U.S. would offer in return.

Following the summit, South Korean newspapers reported there was evidence of new activity at the Sohae long-range rocket site, a site Kim agreed last year to shut down as part of confidence-building measures with the United States.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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President Donald Trump was just doing what he could to raise spirits when he signed Bibles at an Alabama church for survivors of a deadly tornado outbreak, many religious leaders say, though some were offended and others said he could have handled it differently.  

Hershael York, dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary School of Theology in Louisville, Ky., said he didn’t have a problem with Trump signing Bibles, like former presidents have, because he was asked and because it was important to the people who were asking.   

Though we don't have a national faith, there is faith in our nation, and so it's not at all surprising that people would have politicians sign their Bibles,'' he said.Those Bibles are meaningful to them and apparently these politicians are, too.”   

But the Rev. Donnie Anderson, executive minister of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches, said she was offended by the way Trump scrawled his signature Friday as he autographed Bibles and other things, including hats, and posed for photos. She viewed it, she said, as a “calculated political move” by the Republican president to court his evangelical voting base. 

Not unprecedented  

Presidents have a long history of signing Bibles, though earlier presidents typically signed them as gifts to send with a spiritual message. President Ronald Reagan signed a Bible that was sent secretly to Iranian officials in 1986. President Franklin Roosevelt signed the family Bible his attorney general used to take the oath of office in 1939.  

It would have been different, Anderson said, if Trump had signed a Bible out of the limelight for someone with whom he had a close connection.  

For me, the Bible is a very important part of my faith, and I don't think it should be used as a political ploy,'' she said.I saw it being used just as something out there to symbolize his support for the evangelical community, and it shouldn’t be used in that way. People should have more respect for Scripture.”  

York said that he, personally, would not ask a politician to sign a Bible, but that he had been asked to sign Bibles after he preached. It feels awkward, he said, but he doesn’t refuse.   

“If it’s meaningful to them to have signatures in their Bible, I’m willing to do that,” he said.    

A request for comment was left with the White House on Saturday, a day after Trump visited Alabama to survey the devastation and pay respects to tornado victims. The tornado carved a path of destruction nearly a mile wide, killing 23 people, including four children and a couple in their 80s, with 10 victims belonging to a single extended family.  

At the Providence Baptist Church in Smiths Station, Ala., the Rev. Rusty Sowell said, the president’s visit was uplifting and will help bring attention to a community that will need a long time to recover.  

Before leaving the church, Trump posed for a photograph with a fifth-grade volunteer and signed the child’s Bible, said Ada Ingram, a local volunteer. The president also signed her sister’s Bible, Ingram said. In photos from the visit, Trump is shown signing the cover of a Bible.  

Trump should have at least signed inside in a less ostentatious way, said the Rev. Dr. Kevin Cassiday-Maloney.  

Almost a ‘desecration’ 

It just felt like hubris,'' said Cassiday-Maloney, pastor at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Fargo, N.D.It almost felt like a desecration of the holy book to put his signature on the front writ large, literally.”   

He doesn’t think politicians should sign Bibles, he said, because it could be seen as a blurring of church and state and an endorsement of Christianity over other religions.   

It would have been out of line if Trump had brought Bibles and given them out, but that wasn’t the case, said James Coffin, executive director of the Interfaith Council of Central Florida. 

“Too much is being made out of something that doesn’t deserve that kind of attention,” he said.   

Bill Leonard, the founding dean and professor of divinity emeritus at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C., woke up to Facebook posts Saturday morning by former students who were upset about Trump signing the Bibles because they don’t view him as an appropriate example of spiritual guidance.  

But, Leonard said, it’s important to remember that signing Bibles is an old tradition, particularly in Southern churches.  

Leonard said he would have viewed it as more problematic if the signings were done at a political rally. He doesn’t see how Trump could have refused at the church.  

It would've been worse if he had said no because it would've seemed unkind, and this was at least one way he could show his concern along with his visit,'' he said.In this setting, where tragedy has occurred and where he comes for this brief visit, we need to have some grace about that for these folks.” 
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