On Friday evening, June 22nd, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party of seven others were asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, without being served. The owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, politely ejected Sanders after restaurant staff expressed discomfort at serving the premiere spokesperson for the Trump administration.
Two Trump-related stories came into focus in mid-June, just as the President celebrated his 72nd birthday. On the day of, June 14th, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood gave Trump a rather unusual present, charging his charitable organization, the Trump Foundation, with state and federal charities law violations extending over a decade.
Meanwhile, controversy mounted over the Justice Department’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration, which has been the cause of children being separated from their parents and held in detention. The debate came to a crescendo over the Father’s Day weekend,
On Monday June 4th, 2018, a much-anticipated ruling came down from the US Supreme Court. By a 7-2 majority, the justices upheld the right of a Colorado baker to refuse services to a gay couple, based in his religious beliefs. The case centered on a 2012 incident when David Mullins and Charlie Craig approached Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, and asked him to bake a cake for their wedding.
At 2:45 AM on May 29, Roseanne Barr, star of the eponymous reboot of the classic ‘90s sitcom, tweeted: “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj”. The “VJ” in question referred to Valerie Jarrett, an African American former senior advisor to Barack Obama, and the Tweet generated an immediate controversy as racist. Barr tweeted an apology a few hours later and deleted the post, but at 1:55 PM, ABC announced that her show had been cancelled, labelling the tweet “abhorrent.”
On Tuesday, May 22, 2018, Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams became the first female African American to win a major party nomination for Governor, defeating opponent Stacey Evans in what became known as the “battle of the Staceys”. If she wins in November, she will be the first black female governor in the US.
There are two principal sources to which Trump Resisters look for relief from the malaise, corruption and chaos which is the current administration: Special Counsel Robert Mueller, leading the FBI investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential campaign; and lawyer Michael Avenatti, representing adult film star Stormy Daniels, with two civil lawsuits against the president. The two men could not be more different, but both present significant dangers to the completion of the Trump presidency.
