The Twentieth Amendment to the US Constitution establishes the beginnings of both presidential and congressional terms. For the Congress, initial assembly of the body is mandated for noon on 3 January in odd-numbered years. So we can easily cast a chart for the incoming 116th Congress, which may prove to be one of the most consequential in American history, holding as it does the fate of the current President in its hands.
On August 14th 2018 former “Apprentice” bete noire and White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman released “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House”, her tell-all expose of nearly a year as Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison. Say that ten times fast. It’s a lot of words to identify a position that was difficult to define, but seems to have been related to her prior work with the Trump Campaign as Director of African-American Outreach.
With his background in real estate, Donald J. Trump is doubtless aware of the concept of a “balloon payment”, a one-time last-minute huge increase in disbursement before a contract term expires. If the President’s outrageous remarks at the breakfast with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on July 11th, and his subsequent trashing of British Prime Minister Theresa May in a tabloid interview on July 12th, didn’t constitute just such a payment immediately before his annual performance review with his boss Vladimir Putin, then I don’t know what would.
The White House announced Thursday evening, March 8th that President Donald Trump had agreed to meet face to face for talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, tentatively in May 2018. The decision, apparently made on the spur of the moment without resort to advisors or experts, will, if adhered to, lead to the first personal meeting of an American President and a North Korean leader, since that state’s establishment in 1948.
Donald Trump will be 71 on June 14th, but his Solar Return actually falls a day earlier, at 2:39 PM EDT on 13 June 2017. It’s not at all unusual for the Sun to return to its birth degree a day earlier or later than the official birthday, but what is unusual is having other points exactly conjunct the Sun at the time of its return.
So what’s behind all the drama about the crowd size for Trump’s inauguration? With the newly-minted president claiming it to be the largest ever, estimating it at “a million, a million and a half” (which in itself is a pretty broad range for an estimate), but the Parks Service suggesting it was closer to 250,000, a tempest in a teapot exploded over the new administration’s first weekend.
