A collection of some of my favorite quotes and ideas that apply to the current situation we find ourselves in and offer hope to me.
On Trump and his fear of Muslims (well poor ones) and his attempts to ban them
On Trump and his ties to Fascism and the Alt- Right Movement
On Trump’s budget and all the people it hurts in order to make the rich richer
On Climate science and leaving the Paris Accord
On Congress’ conflicts of interest
On the Economy
On all the lies (alternative facts)
On Russia
On Faux (FOX ) news
On Health Care
On Women’s Rights
On Trump himself (his character or lack there of)
On the GOP
On Christian GOP Hypocrisy
How the world sees us with Trump in charge
Things I wish Democrats would point out.
There is a lot out there regarding Trump’s firing of FBI Director Comey.
My quick takeaways from everything.
My favorite part of this all, Jeff Sessions pushed Trump to fire Comey because he kept talking about the investigation, and yet when it was helping Trump, he felt they had to share what he knew about Hillary.
But in the end, his Ego will be his undoing- because as Nixon learned, you cannot fire the person who is investigating you.
Trump’s Watergate Moment?
More Resources
Trumps Firing of Comey Explained
NYT editorial about the impasse our democracy is at
Comey’s firing is a moment of truth for the GOP, are they going to stand behind Trump and risk their own careers?
Today the GOP in the House showed their hands to everyone. They are for the Rich and only care about the Rich.
They have shown time and time again to show the belief that healthy people are blessed by God and that the sick are somehow less than them and it’s their fault they are suffering. They do it all in the name of reducing costs for them and their friends.
“My understanding is that it will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool,” he said, “thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives.”
Of these people who live “good lives,” he then added, “They’re healthy, they have done the things to keep their bodies healthy, and right now those are the people who have done things the right way and are seeing their costs skyrocket.”
When the GOP is more worried about their rich benefactors over their constituents.
When the GOP basically says being a Woman is a pre-existing condition
When the costs of our insurance skyrocket due to illness or even just having a baby, while the Billionaires continue to get tax break after tax break
Because their agenda has not changed. Their tactics and leaders might have, but in the end, selfishness and greed has been around from the beginning and we need to STOP FORGETTING
Follow-Up the next morning
If you earn a good salary, are young and healthy, and want to buy a cheaper, skimpier insurance plan, the American Health Care Act could be pretty good for you. It would give Americans who earn upward of $100,000 tax credits to help purchase insurance. Right now, Obamacare’s tax credits are only available to individuals who earn less than $64,000.
the Republican bill makes it easier for insurers to charge lower prices to young people, too. Right now, insurance plans are required to only charge the oldest enrollees three times as much as the youngest enrollees. AHCA would change that rule to allow insurers to charge the oldest enrollees five times as much. This would raise premiums on the elderly but lower them for young Americans. Christine Eibner, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, estimates that this particular policy would lower annual premiums for a 24-year-old from $2,800 to $2,100
AHCA would let states apply for waivers so that insurers in those states could charge people with preexisting conditions higher premiums. For healthy people without pre-existing conditions, this would be a benefit: They would no longer have to pay more so that the insurance company could cover the high medical bills of other enrollees. Instead, the Republican bill would move the individual market closer to the one that we had before Obamacare, where health insurance premiums were meant to reflect how much an individual’s own coverage is expected to cost.
If you’re someone who uses little health care, that could be a good deal. If you’re someone who is expected to have high bills, however…
For low-income people who get their coverage through either Medicaid or the individual marketplace, though, the AHCA will likely change things for the worse.
The bill would end the Medicaid expansion in 2020, a program that millions of Americans who earn less than 138 percent of the poverty line (about $15,000 for an individual) currently rely on. The end result would be that people eventually get moved into the individual market, where they would have to pay for private insurance coverage. They would get some help from AHCA’s tax credits, but likely not enough to afford to purchase a plan — keep in mind, these are people who are only earning $15,000 or less per year.
People already in the marketplace would see significant change, too. Right now, Obamacare’s tax credits are based on income, with those who earn less getting more help. Under Obamacare, people who earn less than 200 percent of the poverty line (about $24,120 for an individual or $49,200 for a family of four) get the most generous help, enough money so that a midlevel plan would cost no more than 6.4 percent of their income.
Under AHCA, which doesn’t base tax credits on income alone, those people would get substantially less help. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the average 40-year-old who earns $26,500 would see her tax credit fall from $4,800 to $3,650 under AHCA.
For an older Obamacare enrollee, the problem would be even more acute, because insurers would be allowed to charge the oldest enrollees five times as much as the youngest enrollees. This would have the result of raising premiums for Obamacare enrollees in their 60s.
CBO estimates that a 64-year-old earning $26,500 would see their annual tax credit decline from $13,600 to $4,900. The amount they pay out of pocket for their premiums, meanwhile, would go up from $1,700 in annual premiums under current law to $14,600 under AHCA. Right now, with the tax credit, that person spends very little of her own money on a premium. Under the new bill, she’d spend nearly half her annual income on health insurance.
The Freedom Caucus went into the Obamacare repeal fight with two non-negotiable demands. First, they wanted a bill that got rid of Obamacare’s requirement that sick and healthy people be charged the same premiums. Second, they wanted to end Obamacare’s essential health benefit mandate, which requires insurers to cover 10 types of medical care including hospital trips, maternity care, and mental health services.
This was a huge ask. These are two of the most popular parts of the Affordable Care Act. American voters really like Obamacare’s ban on preexisting conditions; a recent Washington Post poll found that 70 percent want that part of the law to stay.
But the Freedom Caucus ultimately got its way, as the Republicans added an amendment that would allow states to waive out of these two provisions. This group of legislators moved the Republican replacement plan sharply to the right, and showed that they could sway the caucus toward a more conservative health care plan.
The Tuesday Group, a loose affiliation of moderate Republicans, had the exact opposite experience in the health care debate. These moderates opposed the first version of AHCA because they felt it didn’t do enough to protect the Americans who rely on the health care law’s programs.
The Freedom Caucus then added a series of changes that made the bill more conservative, the ones described earlier. They let states waive out of the preexisting condition ban and cover fewer benefits.
Moderates, somewhat amazingly, signed onto these changes while getting incredibly little in return. Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan secured an additional $8 billion in funding to help cover people with preexisting conditions. He admitted that he didn’t know whether this would be enough to actually make sure those people receive quality health care.
The moderates went from opposing the more moderate version of AHCA to supporting the more conservative one — which doesn’t speak especially well to their leverage and muscle on Capitol Hill.
The AHCA would amount to a huge tax cut for the wealthiest Americans by rolling back key taxes included in Obamacare. One analysis of an earlier version of the bill estimated that it contains $600 billion in tax cuts that would save the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans, on average, $200,000 each.
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The single biggest tax cut included in the bill is the repeal of the 3.8 percent tax the Affordable Care Act applied to capital gains, dividend, and interest income for families with $250,000 or more in income ($125,000 for singles).
Repealing that tax is a change that, by definition, only helps affluent Americans. If you’re part of a married couple and, like the vast majority of Americans, make less than $250,000 a year, or earn more than that but have little investment income, it doesn’t affect you at all.
The Senate has had the luxury so far of sitting on the sidelines of the health care debate and waiting to see what bill the House passes. Now, the ball is in their court — and they don’t sound entirely excited to receive it.
AHCA is an unpopular bill. Different polls find that somewhere between 17 percent and 37 percent of Americans approve of the Republican plan, and now it’s being dropped squarely in the laps of senators.
Senators presumably don’t want to be the roadblock to Obamacare repeal — a goal of the Republican party for years now — but also have major concerns about AHCA. Many of them worry about the bill’s deep cuts to Medicaid and changes to private insurance. Now they’ll have to hash out the issues on their own.
A few senators have suggested they will even draft their own competing bill — which will be just as challenging of an effort in the Senate as it has been in the House this year.
Trump has spent months now campaigning on his promise to “repeal and replace Obamacare. He has promised, repeatedly, that a plan would be coming soon and Republicans would get it done.
In getting the American Health Care Act through the House, he finally gets to claim progress on that goal. He has a clear political victory he can point at, in a presidency where very little policy has been made.
Trump has repeatedly promised a health care bill that will “cover everyone” and take care of people with preexisting conditions.
The bill that just passed the House is decidedly not that bill. The things Trump says are currently in the bill — protections for everyone with preexisting conditions, for example — are not in the American Health Care Act. The most recent CBO estimate says that 24 million fewer Americans would have coverage under AHCA. Clearly, not everyone is covered.
Trump has repeated these claims this week and he may well keep repeating these claims about AHCA in the future too. But eventually, if he signs this bill into law, the way AHCA actually works will become clear to the Americans who lose insurance and the Americans with preexisting conditions who suddenly have to pay more for coverage. That will be a rude awakening for the voters who have, for years now, been promised the exact opposite.
Right after Trump praised his party for passing the AHCA, he then praised Australia, which has universal care, for having better healthcare than the US.
“I shouldn’t say this to our great gentleman and my friend from Australia, because you have better health care than we do.”
Trump is right on that point. Australia’s universal health care system, known as Medicare, provides high-quality healthcare with far more efficiency than the US’s.
A list of pre-existing conditions that will no longer be covered under #Trumpcare:
AIDS/HIV, acid reflux, acne, ADD, addiction, Alzheimer’s/dementia, anemia, aneurysm, angioplasty, anorexia, anxiety, arrhythmia, arthritis, asthma, atrial fibrillation, autism, bariatric surgery, basal cell carcinoma, bipolar disorder, blood clot, breast cancer, bulimia, bypass surgery, celiac disease, cerebral aneurysm, cerebral embolism, cerebral palsy, cerebral thrombosis, cervical cancer, colon cancer, colon polyps, congestive heart failure, COPD, Crohn’s disease, cystic fibrosis, DMD, depression, diabetes, disabilities, Down syndrome, eating disorder, enlarged prostate, epilepsy, glaucoma, gout, heart disease, heart murmur, heartburn, hemophilia, hepatitis C, herpes, high cholesterol, hypertension, hysterectomy, kidney disease, kidney stones, kidney transplant, leukemia, lung cancer, lupus, lymphoma, mental health issues, migraines, MS, muscular dystrophy, narcolepsy, nasal polyps, obesity, OCD, organ transplant, osteoporosis, pacemaker, panic disorder, paralysis, paraplegia, Parkinson’s disease, pregnancy, restless leg syndrome, schizophrenia, seasonal affective disorder, seizures, sickle cell disease, skin cancer, sleep apnea, sleep disorders, stent, stroke, thyroid issues, tooth disease, tuberculosis, ulcers
Last August, non-profit organization Media Matters for America released a video that rounded up 70 times Fox News was really freaking sexist.
Here’s just a handful of charming quotes directed at women in the video:
“Didn’t men give you the kitchen?”
“Know your role and shut your mouth.”
“You would be much happier at home with a husband and children.”
So when Trump took office- he made a lot of promises.
Here is the contract he made with the American public as to what he plans to do in his first 100 days in office. This contract is from his personal campaign website.
You should check out this website- It takes all the promises that Trump said he would accomplish in the above contract and lets us know what he has actually accomplished. It is a non-partisan, 100% fact only approach that I really appreciate.
Have you seen the movie Idiocracy?
A quick synopsis (from Wikipedia)
In 2005, average in every way private Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) is selected to take part in a secret military experiment to put him in hibernation for a year along with a woman named Rita (Maya Rudolph). The slumbering duo is forgotten when the base they are stored on is closed down and are left in stasis until 2505. When they finally wake up, they discover the average intelligence of humans has decreased so much that Joe is now the smartest man in the world.
So here is this man, who in 2005 is just an average slacker, but in 2505, is now the smartest man due to a poor trend in evolution. Basically, all the smart people end up having fewer and fewer kids and the unintelligent populate the earth to the point that it is not longer valued to be intelligent and the dumb inherit the earth.
Which brings me to this photo from the White House last week
How has a man with 5 kids with 3 different wives somehow become more ideal than a black man with a solid core of his family?
How does Trump seem prouder to meet with people like Ted Nugent, Sarah Palin, and Kid Rock then leaders from the free world?
Where does this path lead?
The man behind the 2006 cult sci-fi film “Idiocracy” is lamenting that his fictional movie appears to have become reality.
“I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary,” tweeted screenwriter Etan Cohen in an apparent jab at the 2016 presidential race
Day after day, at the gym, I see on TV stuck on CNN and the other on FOX News and see people watch over and over again and gobble up all the noise and hate. The problem is it’s not real news. Please stay informed of true news stories, from places like NPR, PBS, and Reuters.
The news outlets that are considered trustworthy by every ideological group don’t equate to the most popular outlets, however. Americans say they get most of their political news from local TV, Facebook, and major networks like CNN and Fox News. Because of this, we are in an age of “alternative facts” and we feel we can still debate things like climate change, even when they are scientific fact.
Last Week- Trump did an interview with the AP
The only thing I can continue to ask, is this man a pathological liar, insane, or have dementia?
Here is just one example
AP: You did put out though, as a candidate, you put out a 100-day plan. Do you feel like you should be held accountable to that plan?
TRUMP: Somebody, yeah, somebody put out the concept of a hundred-day plan. But yeah. Well, I’m mostly there on most items. Go over the items, and I’ll talk to you …
(Crosstalk.)
TRUMP: But things change. There has to be flexibility. Let me give you an example. President Xi, we have a, like, a really great relationship. For me to call him a currency manipulator and then say, “By the way, I’d like you to solve the North Korean problem,” doesn’t work. So you have to have a certain flexibility, Number One. Number Two, from the time I took office till now, you know, it’s a very exact thing. It’s not like generalities. Do you want a Coke or anything?
AP: I’m OK, thank you. No. …
TRUMP: But President Xi, from the time I took office, he has not, they have not been currency manipulators. Because there’s a certain respect because he knew I would do something or whatever. But more importantly than him not being a currency manipulator the bigger picture, bigger than even currency manipulation, if he’s helping us with North Korea, with nuclear and all of the things that go along with it, who would call, what am I going to do, say, “By the way, would you help us with North Korea? And also, you’re a currency manipulator.” It doesn’t work that way.
AP: Right.
TRUMP: And the media, some of them get it, in all fairness. But you know some of them either don’t get it, in which case they’re very stupid people, or they just don’t want to say it. You know because of a couple of them said, “He didn’t call them a currency manipulator.” Well, for two reasons. Number One, he’s not, since my time. You know, very specific formula. You would think it’s like generalities, it’s not. They have — they’ve actually — their currency’s gone up. So it’s a very, very specific formula. And I said, “How badly have they been,” … they said, “Since you got to office they have not manipulated their currency.” That’s Number One, but much more important, they are working with us on North Korea. Now maybe that’ll work out or maybe it won’t. Can you imagine? …
Did he even answer the question? Why did he pause mid-thought to offer her a coke and then just keep on going his thoughts?
In fact- The phrase “Donald Trump is unintelligible” was even a top trending topic on Twitter early Monday ― a reference to the 16 times during the one-on-one interview where whatever the president said was apparently impossible to transcribe.
Here are some of the interview’s most bizarre moments: From Huffington Post (which is definitely liberally leaning)
Shunning reality, Trump said he’s “mostly there” on fulfilling the promises of his first 100 days.
With the 100-day mark looming on April 29, the president has fallen short on every one of the legislative goals he set last year in his “100-day action plan.” Most notably, the Republican health care bill that Trump campaigned extensively for went down in flames. He has also failed to secure funding for the wall he’s hoping to build along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump claimed he’s never supported WikiLeaks, despite having repeatedly said otherwise.
When WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic Party emails during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump brought it up at his rallies at every opportunity. But on Friday, when asked about reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is planning to pursue charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Trump sang a different tune.
“Never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it,” he told the AP. “When Wikileaks came out, all I was just saying is, ‘Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff’… I don’t support or unsupport.”
This is what he said back in October:
Tell that to former Presidents George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, etc. As Newsweek explained last year, the Electoral College may actually have a slight bias toward Republicans, since Democratic voters are more likely to be concentrated in major cities:
Increasingly, Democratic voters live in large urban areas, and are concentrated in several parts of the country. There are more of them, somewhat, but they live in relatively compact geographic areas. This gives Republicans a mild advantage in the electoral college; Republican voters are more spread out, and the Electoral College system potentially over-represents them slightly as a part of the overall population.
He admitted that when he bashed NATO during his presidential campaign, he didn’t actually know what the alliance did. He also erroneously said that “back when they did NATO there was no such thing as terrorism.”
NATO was founded in 1949, but terrorism as a concept has been around for thousands of years. The term itself is rooted in the bloodshed of 18th-century post-revolution France.
Describing a meeting with Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Trump offered the following word salad:
“Well he said, you’ll be the greatest president in the history of, but you know what, I’ll take that also, but that you could be. But he said, will be the greatest president but I would also accept the other. In other words, if you do your job, but I accept that. Then I watched him interviewed and it was like he never even was here. It’s incredible. I watched him interviewed a week later and it’s like he was never in my office. And you can even say that.”
Trump was talking, sort of, about an encounter he had with Cummings in March. According to Trump, the Maryland Democrat told him he’d be one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history. According to Cummings, that’s not exactly how it went down.
He claimed the U.S.-Mexico border wall is “not going to be that expensive.”
Trump’s own estimate of the wall’s cost has dramatically shifted in the nearly two years since he first proposed it. Sometimes it’s $4 billion, sometimes it’s $12 billion. In his interview with the AP, Trump said “I think I’ll do it for $10 billion or less.” But experts, including in a Department of Homeland Security internal report, have suggested the actual cost could be over $20 billion.
SHANGHAI (AP) — On April 6, Ivanka Trump’s company won provisional approval from the Chinese government for three new trademarks, giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world’s second-largest economy. That night, the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, sat next to the president of China and his wife for a steak and Dover sole dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
The scenario underscores how difficult it is for Trump, who has tried to distance herself from the brand that bears her name, to separate business from politics in her new position at the White House.
As the first daughter crafts a political career from her West Wing office, her brand is flourishing, despite boycotts and several stores limiting her merchandise. U.S. imports, almost all of them from China, shot up an estimated 166 percent last year, while sales hit record levels in 2017. The brand, which Trump still owns, says distribution is growing. It has launched new activewear and affordable jewelry lines and is working to expand its global intellectual property footprint. In addition to winning the approvals from China, Ivanka Trump Marks LLC applied for at least nine new trademarks in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Canada and the U.S. after the election.
The commercial currents of the Trump White House are unprecedented in modern American politics, ethics lawyers say. They have created an unfamiliar landscape riven with ethical pitfalls, and forced consumers and retailers to wrestle with the unlikely passions now inspired by Ivanka Trump’s mid-market collection of ruffled blouses, shifts and wedges.
Using the prestige of government service to build a brand is not illegal. But criminal conflict of interest law prohibits federal officials, like Trump and her husband, from participating in government matters that could impact their own financial interest or that of their spouse. Some argue that the more her business broadens its scope, the more it threatens to encroach on the ability of two trusted advisers to deliver credible counsel to the president on core issues like trade, intellectual property, and the value of the Chinese currency.
“Put the business on hold and stop trying to get trademarks while you’re in government,” advised Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush.
To address ethical concerns, Trump has shifted the brand’s assets to a family-run trust valued at more than $50 million and pledged to recuse herself from issues that present conflicts.
“Ivanka will not weigh in on business strategy, marketing issues, or the commercial terms of agreements,” her attorney, Jamie Gorelick, said in a statement. “She has retained authority to direct the trustees to terminate agreements that she determines create a conflict of interest or the appearance of one.”
In a recent interview with CBS News, Trump argued that her business would be doing even better if she hadn’t moved to Washington and placed restrictions on her team to ensure that “any growth is done with extreme caution.”
China, however, remains a nagging concern. “Ivanka has so many China ties and conflicts, yet she and Jared appear deeply involved in China contacts and policy. I would never have allowed it,” said Norman Eisen, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under Barack Obama. “For their own sake, and the country’s, Ivanka and Jared should consider stepping away from China matters.”
Instead, the first daughter and her husband have emerged as prominent interlocutors with China, where they have both had significant business ties. Last year, Kushner pursued hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate investments from Anbang Insurance Group, a financial conglomerate with close ties to the Chinese state. After media reports about the deal, talks were called off.
Publicly, Ivanka has taken a gracious, charming approach toward Beijing. During the Mar-a-Lago meetings, her daughter, 5-year-old Arabella stood in a gilded room and sang a traditional Chinese song, in Mandarin, for China’s president, Xi Jinping. The video, which was lavishly praised by Chinese state media, played over 2.2 million times on China’s popular news portal qq.com.
The week of the summit, 3.4 tons of Ivanka Trump handbags, wallets and blouses arrived in the U.S. from Hong Kong and Shanghai. U.S. imports of her merchandise grew an estimated 40 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Panjiva Inc., which maintains and analyzes global shipping records.
Painter, the former Bush administration lawyer, recommended full recusal from issues related to trade with China. That is likely to be difficult because trade is so deeply embedded in the US-China relationship and has been linked with other matters, like North Korea.
“The danger is that with any discussion with the Chinese, one party or the other may try to bring up trade,” he said. “That’s a slippery slope that may require her or Jared to step out of the room.”
Gorelick, Ivanka Trump’s attorney, said that Ivanka and her husband would steer clear of specific areas that could impact her business, or be seen as conflicts of interest, but are under no legal obligation to step back from huge swaths of policy, like trade with China.
Under the rules, Trump would recuse herself from conversations about duties on clothing imported from China, Gorelick said, but not broad foreign policy.
“In between, you have to assess it case-by-case,” she said.
Trademarks can be signs of corporate ambition, though many countries — such as China, where trademark squatting is rampant — also allow for defensive filings to prevent copycats from using a brand.
Trademarks pose ethical, and possibly legal, implications for government employees because they are granted by foreign states and confer the monopoly right to sell branded product in a particular country — an entitlement that can be enormously valuable. Intellectual property lawyers say trademarks are also a crucial prerequisite for cutting licensing deals, which form the basis of both Ivanka and Donald Trump’s global business strategy.
Today, Ivanka Trump Marks LLC has 16 registered trademarks in China and 32 pending applications, along with a total of four marks granted preliminary approval since the inauguration, according to China’s Trademark Office. Altogether, they cover a wide range of goods and services, including cosmetics, jewelry, leather handbags, luggage, clothes, shoes, retail, spa and beauty services. There is no sign the recent approvals were particularly swift. China’s Trademark Office did not respond to a request for comment.
Globally, the company has more than 180 pending and registered trademarks in countries including Canada, India, Japan, Israel, Mexico, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, as well as the U.S. and Europe, public records show. In December, the company applied for five trademarks, covering handbags and wallets in Puerto Rico, and lingerie and other clothes in the U.S. After the inauguration, the company filed four more applications, for branded clothing and shoes in the Philippines, and perfume and other items in Canada.
The G-III Apparel Group Ltd., which makes Ivanka Trump clothes, said net sales for the collection increased by $17.9 million during the year that ended Jan. 31.
The brand itself claims revenues rose 21 percent last year, with early February seeing some of the “best performance ever,” according to a statement by Abigail Klem, president of the Ivanka Trump brand. Because it is privately held, the brand does not have to declare its earnings or where revenues come from. The actual corporate structure of Trump’s retail business remains opaque. Kushner’s financial disclosure form lists two dozen corporate entities that appear directly related to his wife’s brand. Trump herself has yet to file a disclosure.
Data from Lyst, a massive fashion e-commerce platform, indicates some of this growth coincided with specific political events.
The number of Ivanka Trump items sold through Lyst was 46 percent higher the month her father was elected president than in November 2015. Sales spiked 771 percent in February over the same month last year, after White House counselor Kellyanne Conway exhorted Fox viewers to “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff.” Conway was later reprimanded. The bounce appears somewhat sustained. March sales on Lyst were up 262 percent over the same period last year.
“You can’t separate Ivanka from her role in life and from her business,” said Allen Adamson, founder of BrandSimpleConsulting. “Her celebrity status is now not only being fueled by her wealth and her family connection, but by her huge role in the White House. All that buzz is hardwired to her products.” That, he added, is a competitive advantage other brands just can’t match — though it does come with risk.
Things could easily cut the other way for the first daughter. Ashley King, 28 of Calabasas, California, bought Ivanka Trump black flats and a cardigan several years ago. But King, who voted for Hillary Clinton, said she believes Trump’s role in the White House represents a conflict of interest.
“This is bothering me more and more,” she said. As for the Ivanka Trump items in her closet, she said, “I will be donating them.”
Online:
Daily change in Ivanka Trump’s orders on Lyst – https://w.graphiq.com/w/4VDhSHfGfQh
Monthly change in Ivanka Trump’s orders on Lsyt – https://w.graphiq.com/w/in9MnNw1FAN
The Ivanka Trump Collection Quarterly US Imports – https://w.graphiq.com/w/fCOZGxSvnTL
AP reporter Catherine Lucey in Washington, researcher Fu Ting in Shanghai, and reporters Danica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Teresa Cerojano in Manila and Elaine Kurtenbach in Tokyo contributed to this report.
A timeline provided by the AP
July 20, 2016: Ivanka Trump forms four new companies in Delaware to handle licensing contracts for baby products and costume jewelry.
July 21, 2016: Donald Trump accepts Republican nomination for president.
July 22, 2016: “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech,” @IvankaTrump tweets, along with a link to her collection’s $138 blush sheath dress at Macy’s online.
Sept. 29, 2016: Her company announces two new licensing agreements, for affordable fashion jewelry and baby accessories.
Nov. 8, 2016: Donald Trump wins the election. Sales of Ivanka merchandise on Lyst.com, a large e-commerce platform, bump 46 percent higher for the month.
Nov. 13, 2016: Ivanka Trump appears on “60 Minutes” to discuss her father’s electoral win. Her jewelry company emails a “style alert” to reporters noting that she wore one of her “favorite” bangles, a $10,800 bracelet from her own collection, on the show. Ensuing criticism prompts the brand to apologize.
Dec. 4, 2016: The New York Times reports that Ivanka Trump sat in on a meeting with her father and the prime minister of Japan, as her company negotiated a licensing deal with a firm the Japanese government owned a large stake in. The deal was put on hold, according to Abigail Klem, who now runs Ivanka Trump’s brand.
Dec. 27, 2016: Ivanka Trump Marks LLC applies for five new trademarks covering purses, wallets and other leather goods in Puerto Rico, and clothing, including swimsuits and lingerie in the U.S., public records show.
Jan. 11, 2017: Ivanka Trump announces she will take a “formal leave of absence” from executive positions at the Trump Organization and her lifestyle brand.
Jan. 20, 2017: Donald Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States.
Feb. 8, 2017: Ivanka’s company applies for two more clothing trademarks in the Philippines, where it already holds three marks, according to the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines.
Feb. 9, 2017: Speaking on the morning show “Fox and Friends,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway encourages viewers to, “go buy Ivanka’s stuff,” boasting about giving the brand “a free commercial.” It apparently worked, sparking a 771 percent surge in the brand’s sales that month on Lyst.com over Feb. 2016. The White House later “counseled” Conway for inappropriately promoting the brand.
Feb. 13, 2017: Trump meets with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House.
Feb. 20, 2017: Ivanka Trump Marks LLC wins preliminary approval for a trademark covering branded leather handbags in China, where the company has 52 pending or registered trademarks listed in the government trademark database.
Feb. 22, 2017: Ivanka Trump Marks LLC applies for another trademark, covering perfume, among other things, in Canada, where it holds 22 pending or registered marks, according to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office.
March 1, 2017: Ivanka Trump Marks LLC applies for another new trademark in the Philippines, covering clothes and shoes.
March 3, 2017: Ivanka Trump is photographed disembarking from Air Force One in a stripe asymmetrical skirt from her own collection, available on Lyst.com for $45.
March 29, 2017: Ivanka Trump joins her father’s administration as an unpaid employee.
April 6, 2017: Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, sit next to Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan, at a state dinner at Mar-a-Lago. That same day, China grants her company preliminary approval for three trademarks that confer monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world’s second-largest economy.
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