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Donald Trump’s State of the Union bipartisan dreams were divorced from his own reality
In a nearly 90-minute address, the president outlined the need to “break decades of political stalemate” and “bridge old divisions.”
You could be forgiven for noticing a jarring distance between Trump’s ode to bipartisanship and the real world, where in the lead-up to his speech, he called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi clueless and reportedly called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer a “nasty son of a bitch.”
Trump went from funding for the border wall — focusing on a topic that has jeopardized the rest of his agenda — to more bipartisan issues like infrastructure and prescription drug pricing.
“Victory is not winning for our party,” he said, at a time when the US faces the prospect of the second government shutdown this winter. “Victory is winning for our country.”
Read Tarini Parti’s analysis of President Trump’s State of the Union address.
These secret files show how the Trump Tower Moscow talks unfolded while Trump heaped praise on Putin
Yesterday, we published a huge bundle of internal Trump Organization documents that show how secret negotiations for Trump Tower Moscow unfolded while Donald Trump was publicly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin on the campaign trail.
The documents show that Trump’s representatives — Michael Cohen and Felix Sater — planned to use Trump’s comments about Putin to help secure the lucrative deal.
At the same time, they plotted to persuade the Russian president to declare his support for Trump’s candidacy.
SNAPSHOTS
The Oscars officially won’t have a host this year after the Kevin Hart controversy. Instead, the ceremony will simply see a cavalcade of celebrities appear as presenters throughout. The last time this happened, in 1989, the show was a disaster. I’m sure this will go fine.
A judge called a 13-year-old victim the “aggressor” in a sex solicitation case with a 67-year-old man. After Raymond Soden was convicted of exchanging messages with the girl about him paying for nude photos, a Kansas judge reduced Soden’s sentence because, he said, “a 13-year-old who offers what she offered for money is certainly an aggressor.”
A jogger killed a mountain lion with his bare hands after it attacked him on a trail. The Colorado man was trail running when the animal lunged at him and bit him on the face and wrist. He fought back and suffocated the 80-pound big cat.
Beto O’Rourke told Oprah he’s thinking about running for president. After the former Democratic member of Congress from Texas narrowly lost to Ted Cruz in November, speculation about a run reached fever pitch. O’Rourke said he’ll decide by the end of the month.
The next season of Modern Family will be its last. The hit sitcom, which has been running since the late Paleozoic Era, was renewed for its 11th and final season. No word yet on whether Phil Dunphy is going to fix that step.
How a young woman followed two hackers’ lies to her death
In December, the body of Tomi Masters, a 23-year-old from India, was found in a box dumped in a river in the Philippines. The story of how she got there is a tangled web of drugs, lies, and cryptocurrency.
Masters’ relationship with her boyfriend at the time of her death, a 21-year-old American hacker named Troy Woody, began with a lie — Woody sent her Snapchat messages pretending to be rapper Mac Miller. From there, the deception grew more dangerous.
Masters’ brother is convinced that Woody, along with a fellow hacker named Mir Islam, plotted to kill his sister because she was demanding to return to the US from the Philippines, and knew too much about the men’s “drug and money laundering.”
The story that unfolds raises the question: How can you ever know that anything you see on a screen is true?
I read Joe Bernstein and Davey Alba’s shocking report in one sitting.
Tyra Banks is opening a theme park in California dedicated to…modeling?
The former supermodel said she’s opening a 21,000-square-foot theme park, set to open in late 2019.
Banks said it’s her calling to bring modeling to the masses. No one is sure what that means, but she added that the establishment will allow visitors to “be the dream version of themselves.” Presumably, this means I will turn into Idris Elba.
The theme park will be called Modelland, because of course it will.