In bluntly vulgar language, President Donald Trump questioned Thursday why the U.S. would accept more immigrants from Haiti and “shithole countries” in Africa rather than places like Norway, as he rejected a bipartisan immigration deal, according to people briefed on the extraordinary Oval Office conversation.

Trump’s contemptuous description of an entire continent startled lawmakers in the meeting and immediately revived charges that the president is racist. The White House did not deny his remark but issued a statement saying Trump supports immigration policies that welcome “those who can contribute to our society.”

Trump’s comments came as two senators presented details of a bipartisan compromise that would extend protections against deportation for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants — and also strengthen border protections, as Trump has insisted. (Read more from “Trump: Why Allow Immigrants From ‘Sh**Hole’ Countries” HERE)

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It’s become fashionable among journalists and various politicos to discuss whether Democrats should attempt to remove President Donald Trump from office via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, supposedly because he has become too mentally incapacitated to fulfill his duties.

After his televised meeting with top House and Senate leaders from both parties, the liberal fantasy that they can simply nullify the results from the last presidential election — bolstered by the discredited accounts from Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” that made the president appear psychologically unstable — should no longer be entertained by the media any more than it already was.

No individual who is mentally unstable or dangerously unfit could have possibly ran an hour-long negotiation and discussion over complex policy solutions as the president did Tuesday.

Throughout the meeting, Trump not only seemed engaged and alert, but also served as a leader managing both parties’ desires.

Even an article in USA Today, whose editors wrote an editorial late last year titled “Will Trump’s Lows Ever Hit Rock Bottom?” called the meeting “extraordinary.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham called the negotiations “the most fascinating meeting I’ve been involved with in 20-plus years in politics.”

The president’s performance Tuesday afternoon raised further questions about how a Yale psychiatrist deemed it appropriate to deliver a warning to a group of Democratic lawmakers that they should consider removing Trump from office.

Nor does the president’s clear sanity and mental fitness — regardless of whether or not one agrees with him on policy issues — jive with Wolff’s assertion that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a subject of regular conversation within the White House.

In an interview on “Meet The Press,” Wolff told Chuck Todd that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment — which allows the vice president to take power in cases where the president dies or becomes incapacitated — is “alive every day” in the West Wing.

On top of being grossly inappropriate, any effort by Democrats or anti-Trump Republicans to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment going forward will have to reconcile with the fact that millions of Americans have now seen Trump publicly performing the duties of the office more than competently.

Of course, there are those who won’t ever be happy. A Vox article ran last weekend arguing that Trump needed a psychological evaluation “by force if necessary.”

Trump defended his mental state in a series of tweets earlier this week.

….Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

….to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

The idea of essentially kidnapping a president because some tweets made a liberal writer uncomfortable was comically ridiculous before, but after today’s public meeting, it just seems like a pathetic attempt to kick a Republican out of office. (For more from the author of “While Everyone Is Freaking out Over Trump DACA Promise, He Just Did the Most Trump Thing Ever” please click HERE)

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President Trump has long promised he will secure the U.S.-Mexico border with a “big beautiful wall,” but a major bargaining chip in his negotiations possibly could flip four or even five traditionally Republican-leaning states to Democrats in future elections.

Those states are: Texas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

Of the five, Texas, with 34 electoral votes, has the most impact on presidential election outcomes. Florida has 29; North Carolina, 15; Georgia, 16; and Arizona, 11. In 2016, Trump won Texas 52.2 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 43.2 percent. His winning margin in Florida was much tighter at 48.6 percent to 47.4 percent. Trump took North Carolina with 49.8 percent to 46.2 percent; Arizona, 48.1 percent to 44.6 percent; and Georgia, 50.4 percent to Clinton’s 45.3 percent.

But political trends in those traditionally Republican-leaning states could see a shift if illegal immigrants known as DREAMers, or illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as minors, are offered amnesty and particularly if they’re eventually given voting rights. Those fives states host large numbers DREAMers, as Fortune magazine reported last January.

The issue began in 2012, when then-President Obama signed an executive order giving work permits and temporary residence to more than 800,000 noncitizens under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. In making his announcement, Obama stated: “Effective immediately, the Department of Homeland Security is taking steps to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people. Over the next few months, eligible individuals who do not present a risk to national security or public safety will be able to request temporary relief from deportation proceedings and apply for work authorization.” (Read more from “Trump’s DACA Deal Could Flip 4 States to Dems” HERE)

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By Mike Allen. Battered by the backlash from Michael Wolff’s book, Steve Bannon is trying to make amends with the Trump family, providing a statement to Axios that expresses “regret” to President Trump and praises his son, Donald Trump Jr.

“Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around.”

“My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda — as I have shown daily in my national radio broadcasts, on the pages of Breitbart News and in speeches and appearances from Tokyo and Hong Kong to Arizona and Alabama.”

“President Trump was the only candidate that could have taken on and defeated the Clinton apparatus. I am the only person to date to conduct a global effort to preach the message of Trump and Trumpism; and remain ready to stand in the breech for this president’s efforts to make America great again.”

“My comments about the meeting with Russian nationals came from my life experiences as a Naval officer stationed aboard a destroyer whose main mission was to hunt Soviet submarines to my time at the Pentagon during the Reagan years when our focus was the defeat of ‘the evil empire’ and to making films about Reagan’s war against the Soviets and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in selling uranium to them.”

(Read more from “Bannon Regrets Trashing Trump in Family Book” HERE)

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How Bannonism Got Trumped

By Paul Waldman. The story of Bannon and Trump’s relationship isn’t just about a couple of colorful characters; it also tells us something important about this presidency and the Republican Party. Even if Wolff’s book had never come out, Bannonism was already dead. In the era of Trump, it never had a chance . . .

The first policy shifts that grew out of Bannon’s ideas, like efforts to clamp down on both legal and illegal immigration, were certainly amenable to President Trump. But as Trump now understands, he never had Bannon’s loyalty. Bannon saw Trump only as a vehicle for his own agenda, one Trump was never going to fully appreciate in all its ambitious majesty, even if the candidate might share pieces of it. What Trump certainly shared was its destructive force, the idea that smashing existing norms and institutions was essential to doing what Bannon wanted.

And Bannon certainly had something to offer Trump. His dark genius, such as it was, lay in identifying groups of angry people who could be mobilized for a political end, whether they really understood what that end was or not. As Joshua Green, author of the book Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, explains, even before Bannon took over Breitbart News and later became CEO of the Trump campaign, a brief experience in the video game industry “awakened him to the power of what he called ‘rootless white males’ who spend all their time online. And five years later when Bannon wound up at Breitbart, he resolved to try and attract those people over to Breitbart because he thought they could be radicalized in a kind of populist, nationalist way.”

They were, but even after Bannon helped guide Trump to victory, he may have overestimated the degree to which Trump voters were actually in the market for a clash of civilizations. (Read more from “How Bannonism Got Trumped” HERE)

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